Duran Duran

Chic. That's the watchword of this sumptuous, dazzling album, which thirty years to the day after its release still stands as a symbol of ostentatious yet never tacky luxury, of elegance, of sensuality.

Chic as in the name of the band that, more than any other, shaped the sound of the five Birmingham dandies: raised on a diet of David Bowie and Roxy Music, they landed in London right in the middle of the post-punk explosion and were dazzled, on their way to the Blitz Club, by the sequins of the emerging New Romantic style; but it was radio, and the omnipresent disco splendour of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, that showed them the way out of club subculture and towards worldwide success.

It's late 1983. Duran Duran dominate the magazine covers: the ones followed by chart addicts, the ones chased by gearheads obsessed with virtuosity on this or that instrument, the ones read by teenagers forever in love with whichever idol of the moment. The fashion magazines, the ones "for men"; not to mention radio and TV. A full-blown media invasion.

What happened? "Seven And The Ragged Tiger", their third album, has just come out: straight to number one on the charts. Collective hysteria for Simon Le Bon's band is raging, but to understand why we need to take a step back, to mid-May 1982, when the previous album, "Rio", debuted on the charts at a "mere" number four. That's the album which, despite never reaching the top spot, built the Duran Duran myth; above all, it's the album that marks the point of no return away from punk cynicism and into the worldly, dazzling Eighties.

Video forged the radio stars

The early singles hadn't really hit the mark. "My Own Way", released in late 1981 on the wave of "Girls On Film"'s success, failed to crack the Top Ten despite its brisk disco pace, appearances on Top of the Pops, and the hypnotic video shot shortly after by fast-cut wizard Russell Mulcahy. It would be re-recorded for the album's release, slowed down, beefed up and brought closer to the sonic depth of the other tracks.

Next up was "Hungry Like The Wolf". Here the sound is the energetic, lavish one that defines the album (the single came out right before its official launch): a blazing, full-bodied guitar, a booming yet composed drum sound, a frothy shimmer of arpeggiator lines springing from the keyboards. And John Taylor's iconic bass: deep, round, restless, it's a muscle that tenses and relaxes, marking out the track's rhythms, tensions and moments of ecstasy. The video, however, misses the mark badly: faced with all that elegance, the best Mulcahy could come up with was a love-and-action skit set in Sri Lanka, a dubious cross between Indiana Jones and an exotic b-movie that nonetheless pushed the single to number two in the United States and kept it on the UK charts for eleven weeks, while giving Duran Duran a wildly farcical image.

Things change with "Save A Prayer". Sri Lanka remains, the pseudo-colonial look remains, but the mood is entirely different: now it's sunset light that dominates, and the atmosphere turns pensive; the shadows, the temples and the furnishings of bygone eras become bait for nostalgia. The ballad won't get past number two in the charts, but it will become a timeless classic. Nick Rhodes' watery keyboards and their flute-like call; the placidly syncopated bassline, never so melodic and never so prominent; the masterful interplay of space and rim hits architected by Roger Taylor for the verse; Simon Le Bon's absorbed delivery, backed by the band's heartfelt harmonies; Andy Taylor's guitar, silent for most of the track but marking its emotional peak with a sinuous solo – these are the brushstrokes that paint an immortal state of mind, a sweet and subtle melancholy perhaps never portrayed with such elegance before.

It's the final single, though, the title track, that becomes the symbol of Duran Duran and of an entire musical era. Sailboats, à la page outfits, Caribbean seas, smiling pin-ups and jet-set star poses: the shots look like cuts from a high-end design magazine. Champagne. "Rio" – video and music alike – is the embodiment of the sunniest, most enviable worldliness. That luxury which rampant monetarism was starting to make accessible to a few parvenus while denying it to everyone else, "Rio" turned into a waking dream for all.

Of punk resentment, not even a trace. Nothing nocturnal, stark or abrupt emanates from the triumphant, guitar-and-drum-filled sound; there's no anger at all, only confidence and sensuality in handsome Simon Le Bon's light-crooner register (read: "smooth operator"). Everything about the track is radiant and lush: the arpeggiator sparkles of Nick Rhodes are, as is the providential sax solo (courtesy of session man Andy Hamilton) that marks the song's climax. So are the drum patterns, decisive, rich and driving; and the lyrics, as lush as the beaches on which they picture the dancing body of a diva finally within reach. Above all, so is the riot of double and triple melodies sustaining every moment of the song: bass and voice on the verse, voice and guitar on the chorus, guitar, voice and sax on the finale.

"Rio" is the crowning achievement of the mastery of the three non-brothers Taylor, perfectly in sync in building a sound where every element is rhythm and melody at once. And it's the track that opens the tracklist of the eponymous album: an immortal masterpiece that it's high time we finally acknowledged as such.

After punk, the light

We were talking about Chic. With the band behind "Rio", Nile Rodgers and co. shared the snobbery of the self-proclaimed "music connoisseurs" of the era: the latter were guilty of making "just dance music"; the former – worse still – were dismissed outright as purveyors of mere "music for teenage girls". The English Eighties, truth be told, teem with worshippers of the Chic style: from Bowie's "Let's Dance" to the ramshackle funk-punk of Gang of Four, from the deliberate plagiarism of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" to Johnny Marr's highly personal jingle-jangle with the Smiths – but no one, quite like Duran Duran, managed to make that generous, meticulous taste so entirely their own, even while operating in territory quite distant from funk/soul.

Indeed, because Duran Duran's musical history has little to do with black music proper. When the group was formed, in 1978, what united its members was a shared passion for David Bowie, Roxy Music, Ultravox, Human League: the pantheon of the most aristocratic and innovative pop, resolutely white, treading the line between ambiguity and old-fashioned romanticism.

Having landed in London to play live what were for now just a handful of demos, they came into contact with the nightlife scene revolving around the "Club for Heroes" nights organised by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan at the Blitz Club. The music was just right: David Bowie and Roxy Music above all, plus Japan, Ultravox, Human League – the entire panorama of New Wave acts they took as their guiding lights. The policy promoted by Strange, who also worked the door at the club, was to let in "only the weird and the wonderful": the dress code was thus very free, but it favoured precisely that sense of ambiguity, cinematic dandyism and romantic decadence that the still-unknown Duran Duran were drawn to.

By the time "Rio" came out, the scene had a name: "New Romantic". And Duran Duran ended up becoming its most prominent exponents, much to the chagrin of Steve Strange (who would accuse them of having copied everything from him) and the band he had founded in the meantime, Visage. Around that very same time, English critic Paul Morley began writing, in the pages of the NME, about "New Pop", hailing Abc's "The Lexicon Of Love" as its triumph and sketching out the traits of the musical era to come: enough with punk, enough with post-punk too; blessed be colour, sophistication, superficiality.

And this is where Nile Rodgers' disco opulence comes into play: the secret of "Rio"'s triumph lies in having ferried New Romantic out of the night and out of decadence, embracing disco's brightness and harnessing it to stage a celebration of life in the sun, in which synth, bass and drums, as much as the elegant clothes, become symbols and tools of happiness, not props for playing at ambiguity.

In the record's grooves we find traces of the whole history behind it. There's the sinuous bass of Japan counterbalancing the silvery arpeggios in the shadowy "Lonely In Your Nightmare"; the acid brashness of Visage's "Fade To Gray" in the thunderous "Hold Back The Rain"; the suburban landscapes of Bowie's "Low" in the dark opening of "New Religion", later dragged – with a formidable change of weather – into a larger-than-life chorus carried by Simon Le Bon's crystalline melody. Bass, guitar and drums say "disco" everywhere you look, but the three Taylors almost never stray into deliberately danceable territory: everything sounds bigger, more dynamic, more epic and momentous. The ideal destination for these tracks is a stadium rock arena, not the dancefloor.

The sound is so big, rich, enveloping – even so puffed-up, dare we say it? – that it brings to mind, far more than the new wave that formed Duran Duran's background and chief inspiration, the ultimately never-forgotten progressive rock. Take the iridescent keyboards of "Last Chance On The Stairway" – any moment will do, but let's head straight for the final coda: the style is the hazy one made possible by the new synths, but the effect? Is it closer to the unsettling atmospheres of post-punk, or to the glorious carpets of moog, mellotron and hammond laid down by Rick Wakeman and his acolytes? And that guitar that wedges itself, blazing, into the foreground? It may be a child of Phil Manzanera, but it sounds an awful lot like Robert Fripp...

Above all, though, what gives substance to the analogy with prog is a simple observation: in all the years between the last embers of classic progressive rock and the release of "Rio", no white musician had built his formula so squarely on the balance of technical dexterity, pop energy and wholesome grandeur. "Rio" marks the return of this approach to music. A very short-lived return, one might say. Fine: all the more reason to consider it a one-of-a-kind album, a masterpiece.

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13/05/2012