The story of Duran Duran

Birmingham beginnings

Duran Duran began in Birmingham in 1978 with two childhood friends. Nick Rhodes, born Nicholas Bates, was the only child of a couple who ran a toy shop, and he left school at sixteen. His friend Nigel John Taylor played guitar, and Taylor brought along an art school friend, Stephen Duffy, to sing. The three of them made their first recordings on a cassette machine above the Bates family toy shop. They had kicked around names like Arcadia and Industry, but on the twentieth of October 1978 the BBC showed the science fiction film Barbarella. The villain is a scientist called Doctor Durand Durand, and the very next day they had their name.[1] [2]

The first gig came on the fifth of April 1979 at Birmingham Polytechnic. It did not last. Stephen Duffy left in June 1979, convinced the band would never make it, and a clarinet and bass player called Simon Colley went too. Rhodes and Taylor kept going. They brought in a singer, Andy Wickett, and a drummer, Roger Taylor, a quiet lad from Castle Bromwich who had taught himself by drumming along to records. John Taylor had fallen for the funk of Chic, so he swapped his guitar for a bass. That autumn this lineup recorded a demo that included an early version of Girls on Film, co-written by Wickett.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Singers and guitarists came and went, and in early 1980 the band found a home at the Rum Runner, a club on Broad Street that had been remodelled after a trip to Studio 54 in New York. The owners, brothers Paul and Michael Berrow, became their managers and gave them rehearsal space and jobs. Roger collected glasses, John worked the door as a bouncer, and Nick played records as the club DJ. In April 1980 a guitarist named Andy Taylor answered an advert in Melody Maker and took the train down from the North East. He had spent years playing working men's clubs and air force bases, and he brought a harder rock edge.[1] [2] [3]

The last piece arrived in May 1980. A barmaid at the Rum Runner, Fiona Kemp, recommended her ex boyfriend, a drama student at Birmingham University called Simon Le Bon. He had sung in a church choir as a boy and had recently worked on a kibbutz in Israel. He arrived with a notebook full of poems, and one of them, Sound of Thunder, fitted an instrumental the band already had. He agreed to try it for the summer. On the sixteenth of July 1980 the classic lineup played its first show at the Rum Runner: Le Bon, Rhodes, and three unrelated Taylors named John, Roger and Andy.[1] [2] [3]

Planet Earth and Girls on Film

Things moved fast. Touring as support to Hazel O'Connor in the autumn of 1980, Duran Duran sparked a bidding war between EMI and Phonogram. They signed with EMI in December, partly out of loyalty to the label of the Beatles. For producer they chose Colin Thurston, who had engineered David Bowie's Heroes and produced the Human League. Their first single, Planet Earth, came out on the second of February 1981. It reached number twelve in Britain and got them onto Top of the Pops, and in Australia it went to number eight. The lyric even name checked the New Romantic scene they were being lumped in with, though Rhodes said the line was meant with irony.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut album, simply called Duran Duran, was released in June 1981 and climbed to number three in Britain. The single that really broke them was Girls on Film, released on the thirteenth of July. Its video, made by Godley and Creme, featured topless models, mud wrestling and pillow fights. The managers had asked for something scandalous, aimed at nightclubs with video screens and at pay television, and a heavily cut version went to the brand new MTV. The song reached number five. John Taylor later said that within months the crowds changed from New Romantic lookalikes to rooms full of screaming girls.[1] [2] [3]

Their first British tour of 1981 ran straight into a summer of riots. They played Birmingham the day after the Handsworth riots, as cities including Toxteth and Moss Side burned over unemployment and racial tension. Later that year they made their first club tour of the United States. By the end of 1981 a new single, the disco flavoured My Own Way, had reached number fourteen, and the band were already writing their second album. Rhodes admitted later it was the only time they had sat down and said they had to write a hit single, and he did not enjoy it.[1] [2]

Rio and the conquest of America

Rio was recorded at George Martin's AIR Studios in London in early 1982, again with Colin Thurston. Paul and Linda McCartney were working next door and would drop by to say good night. The band played with sounds: the title track opens with metal rods dropped onto a grand piano's strings, played backwards, and The Chauffeur features cracking ice and a lit cigarette. Hungry Like the Wolf was written and recorded in one Saturday at EMI's basement studio, inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. The giggle at the start is Nick Rhodes' girlfriend of the time. Rio came out on the tenth of May 1982 and reached number two in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

The videos made Rio. EMI spent a fortune sending the band to Sri Lanka with the Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who shot Hungry Like the Wolf as a kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the jungle, and Save a Prayer among temples and elephants. It was chaotic. Andy Taylor fell into a lagoon, swallowed the water and was later hospitalised with a tropical virus. An elephant heard a recorded mating call and charged downhill with Roger on its back. The Rio video followed in Antigua, the band in pastel suits on a yacht. They spent only three or four hours aboard, but the image defined them for decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

America was slower. Capitol, EMI's American arm, did not know how to sell a New Romantic band, and Rio stalled at number one hundred and twenty two. So Capitol had producer David Kershenbaum remix much of it for American radio, and repackaged the band as a dance act. John Taylor hated it and called it the end of their original idea of an underground club band. Colin Thurston, after a falling out over money, never worked with them again. But MTV put Hungry Like the Wolf into heavy rotation, and the single reached number three in March 1983. The remixed Rio climbed to number six and spent one hundred and twenty nine weeks on the chart.[1] [2]

MTV and Duran Duran grew up together. An MTV executive, Les Garland, called Hungry Like the Wolf the greatest video he had ever seen, at a time when the band were getting almost no radio play. They shot on thirty five millimetre film instead of videotape, and it showed. In the summer of 1983 Rolling Stone counted eighteen British singles in the American top forty at once, a new record, calling it a second British Invasion. Diana, Princess of Wales, said they were her favourite band, and the British press called them the Fab Five. Rhodes remembered a signing in Times Square where police had to seal off the streets.[1] [2] [3]

There was a dark footnote to Hungry Like the Wolf. In May 1983 an Oregon woman named Diane Downs shot her three children on a lonely road and claimed a stranger had done it. Her daughter Cheryl, aged seven, died. Her son Danny was left paralysed and her daughter Christie suffered a disabling stroke. The song was said to be a favourite of Downs, and in her book Small Sacrifices, the author Ann Rule wrote that Christie remembered it playing in the car during the shooting. The song was played to the jury, and Downs mouthed along to it. In 1984 she was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.[1]

The Fab Five at the peak

In March 1983 the stand alone single Is There Something I Should Know went straight in at number one in Britain, their first chart topper there. It was not even the first number one Nick Rhodes had a hand in that year. Kajagoogoo's singer Limahl had been working as a waiter at the Embassy Club in London when he served Rhodes a drink and told him about his band. Rhodes co-produced their debut single Too Shy with Colin Thurston, and it reached number one in January 1983, before any Duran single had. Andy Taylor also became the first member to marry, wedding his partner Tracey that year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On their managers' advice, the band spent a year as tax exiles, starting with a château in Valbonne in the south of France. Nothing had been written in advance, work rarely began before four in the afternoon, and Andy Taylor later called it the start of the megadamage, as his and John's cocaine use accelerated. They moved to AIR Studios on Montserrat, where Rhodes collapsed with an abnormally fast heartbeat and was airlifted to Miami, and then to Sydney to finish. In between they played for Prince Charles and Princess Diana in London and held a charity concert at Villa Park, where Robert Palmer joined them. Rhodes described the album's mood as barely controlled hysteria.[1] [2] [3]

Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out on the twenty first of November 1983. The title, Le Bon explained, meant the five band members and two managers chasing success, the ragged tiger. A live Bengal tiger was flown in from Melbourne for the cover shoot at the State Library of New South Wales. Critics were unkind, but it became their only British number one album. The biggest hit came later. John Taylor heard the INXS single Original Sin, produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic, and wanted Rodgers to remix The Reflex. The labels resisted, but the remix went to number one in both Britain and the United States in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

The 1984 world tour took them into American stadiums for the first time, with video screens above the stage. Russell Mulcahy filmed it for the concert film Arena and the documentary Sing Blue Silver, and in February they won two of the first Grammy awards for music video. For the one new studio track on the live album, Mulcahy suggested music for a film he hoped to make of William Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys. Roger said the stomping groove came from hearing Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax in a German disco. The video cost over a million pounds, strapped Le Bon to a turning windmill over a pool, and the film was never made.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Wild Boys reached number two on both sides of the Atlantic. That year Roger Taylor married in Naples and Rhodes married Julie Anne Friedman in London, in a pink velvet tuxedo and top hat. Around this time, Rhodes later recalled, Michael Jackson called about working together, and when he put it to the others they simply said no. In November 1984 Le Bon sang the fourth line on Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas, after Paul Young, Boy George and George Michael. By then the five were exhausted, and a planned break was about to change everything.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

1985: two bands, a Bond theme and a capsized yacht

Instead of resting, the band split into two side projects. John and Andy Taylor wanted to rock. With Chic's drummer Tony Thompson and the singer Robert Palmer, they formed the Power Station, named after the New York studio where they recorded, and scored hits with Some Like It Hot and a cover of T. Rex's Get It On. Palmer played live with them only once, on Saturday Night Live, then left to pursue his solo career. Le Bon, Rhodes and Roger Taylor made the lush, moody Arcadia album So Red the Rose, with guests including Sting, Herbie Hancock and David Gilmour. Le Bon later called it the most pretentious album ever made.[1] [2] [3]

The five came back together for one job: the theme for the James Bond film A View to a Kill. John Taylor, a lifelong Bond fan, had approached the producer Cubby Broccoli at a party and, a little drunk, offered him a fiver to let them write one. They worked with the composer John Barry and a sixty piece orchestra. The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on the thirteenth of July 1985, and it is still the only Bond theme to top the American chart. In Britain it spent three weeks at number two, held off by Paul Hardcastle's single Nineteen.[1]

That same day, the thirteenth of July 1985, Duran Duran played Live Aid at John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, in front of ninety thousand people and a vast television audience. During A View to a Kill, Le Bon's voice cracked on a high falsetto note, and the press gleefully called it the bum note heard round the world. He later said it was the most embarrassing moment of his career. Nobody knew it then, but it was the last time the original five would play live together until July 2003. Roger Taylor, speaking years later, still called Live Aid the best event concert there has ever been.[1] [2] [3]

Weeks later Le Bon nearly died. He and the Berrow brothers had bought a maxi yacht called Drum, and in August 1985 it entered the Fastnet Race as one of the favourites. Off the Cornish coast its keel broke away, because a supplier had failed to heat treat the structure holding it, and Drum capsized. Le Bon and other crew were trapped inside the upturned hull for about forty minutes until a Royal Navy helicopter rescued everyone. He had not insured the boat. Undeterred, he raced Drum around the world in the Whitbread race that winter, finishing third on elapsed time, and in December 1985 he married the model Yasmin Parvaneh.[1] [2] [3]

The trio years

After Live Aid the band fell apart. Roger Taylor, worn out, bought a remote farm in Gloucestershire and disappeared, and The Sun called him the hermit of pop. Andy Taylor was in Los Angeles signing a solo deal with MCA while the others expected him back. The band took legal action to get him into the studio. He played on a few tracks to meet his contract, then left for good, later writing that he rang his lawyer and it was over. Andy went on to a US hit with Take It Easy and co-wrote and co-produced Rod Stewart's album Out of Order with members of Chic.[1] [2] [3]

Le Bon, Rhodes and John Taylor carried on as a trio. Nile Rodgers produced and played guitar, Steve Ferrone played drums, and in September 1986 an American guitarist named Warren Cuccurullo, a former member of Frank Zappa's band and of Missing Persons, was brought in to finish the record. Notorious, released in November 1986, was funkier and more grown up, with songs named after Alfred Hitchcock films. The title track reached number two in America. But the album only reached number sixteen in Britain. The band had also parted with the Berrow brothers, and EMI, in upheaval, seemed to lose interest.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was private grief too. In 1986 Le Bon's close friend David Miles died of a drug overdose. Le Bon would write three songs about him over the next decade: Do You Believe in Shame, Ordinary World and Out of My Mind. Meanwhile John Taylor's drinking and drug use were getting worse. Big Thing in 1988 was experimental, borrowing from house music and rave culture, and gave them I Don't Want Your Love, a number four hit in America, and All She Wants Is, their last British top ten hit of the decade. Cuccurullo and the drummer Sterling Campbell became full members in 1989.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By the end of the eighties synth pop was fading. The Decade compilation sold well, but the 1990 album Liberty faded fast, and Le Bon admitted they had simply not been paying attention. For the first time they did not tour an album, playing only a handful of club dates. Sterling Campbell left early in 1991 and later played with Soul Asylum and David Bowie. Le Bon was a new father, Rhodes was going through a painful divorce, and John Taylor was struggling. On Christmas Eve 1991 Taylor married Amanda de Cadenet, who was nineteen and pregnant with their daughter Atlanta.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Ordinary World comeback

The rescue started in Warren Cuccurullo's living room. He turned his house in Battersea into a studio he called Privacy, and from January 1991 the four of them wrote there without a clock ticking, later joined by producer John Jones. Ordinary World came almost instantly: Rhodes played some chords, Cuccurullo changed them, and within minutes Le Bon had the chorus melody. The lyric was his way of letting go of the grief over David Miles. In May 1992 Le Bon was hurt in a motorcycle accident in Wales, but the album was finished that summer. Then Capitol sat on it, unconvinced anyone wanted Duran Duran any more.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Radio decided. In the summer of 1992 a station in Tampa played Ordinary World early and got a cease and desist letter, so its programme director set up a phone line where fans could hear it, and it logged hundreds of calls a day. When the song reached other stations, DJs reported hundreds of requests on the first day, and Capitol rushed it out on the nineteenth of December 1992. It went to number three in America and six in Britain. The album, known as the Wedding Album because its cover showed the band members' parents' wedding photos, reached the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic.[1] [2]

The follow up, Come Undone, was almost an afterthought, the last track added to the album. Rhodes and Cuccurullo had the music, Le Bon wrote the words for his wife Yasmin, and the singer Tessa Niles added soaring counter vocals. John Taylor was already home in Los Angeles, so it is one of very few songs from his time in the band on which he does not play. It reached number seven in America. The comeback tour was the biggest they had ever done, taking in the Middle East, South Africa and South America, until Le Bon damaged his vocal cords and it stopped for six weeks.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a misstep. The 1995 covers album Thank You tackled Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Costello and Public Enemy, with Roger Taylor briefly returning to drum on two tracks. Lou Reed said their Perfect Day was the best cover anyone had done of one of his songs, and Grandmaster Melle Mel sang on their version of White Lines. Critics were far harsher, and in 2006 Q magazine named it the worst album of all time. Around the same time John Taylor got sober. He sought treatment for alcohol and drug abuse in late 1994 and has stayed sober since, but his marriage to de Cadenet was over by May 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 1997, at the DuranCon fan convention, John Taylor announced he was leaving the band for good. Le Bon, Rhodes and Cuccurullo carried on. Medazzaland, named after the anaesthetic midazolam that Le Bon was given at the dentist, came out in America in 1997, but EMI never released it in Britain. Its single Electric Barbarella was one of the first major label songs sold as a download. In 1998 they played the Princess Diana tribute concert at the request of her family. They left EMI after almost two decades, and Pop Trash on Hollywood Records in 2000 became the lowest selling album of their career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The reunion

In 2000 Le Bon visited John Taylor in Los Angeles with an idea: bring back the original five. Taylor agreed, as long as Roger and Andy came too, and to show he meant it he had a large double D tattooed on his arm. That meant Warren Cuccurullo had to go. He announced his departure in 2001 and played three final contracted shows in Japan that June. At first the parting was friendly, built around a financial settlement, but it turned sour, and he later claimed he had been fired by letter. He stayed on good terms with Rhodes, and their side project TV Mania was finally released in 2013.[1] [2] [3]

Finding a record deal for a reunited eighties band was hard, so they proved themselves on stage. In 2003 two arena shows in Tokyo sold out in minutes, and the reunion dates drew crowds and celebrities. Booked as presenters at the MTV Video Music Awards, they were surprised with a lifetime achievement award. In February 2004 Justin Timberlake presented them with the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. They played five sold out nights at Wembley Arena that spring, and even the British press, long hostile, was kind. Roger Taylor, back from his years away, also took up a DJ residency at London's Met Bar.[1] [2]

With more than thirty five songs in hand, they signed to Epic Records, and Astronaut came out in the autumn of 2004. It reached number three in Britain, their best placing there since Seven and the Ragged Tiger, and the single Reach Up for the Sunrise went to number five, their highest British single since A View to a Kill. In July 2005 they headlined the Live 8 concert in Rome at the Circus Maximus. Le Bon even went back to sea, racing Drum in the 2005 Fastnet race with most of his old crew, until he had to be lifted off by helicopter to make a gig in Japan.[1] [2] [3]

The reunion did not hold. Work on a follow up called Reportage stalled, and in October 2006 the band announced that an unworkable gulf had opened with Andy Taylor and they could no longer function together. Andy's side of the story, told in his 2008 book Wild Boy, pointed to tension with the band's management and to clinical depression linked to the death of his father. The others pointed to his repeated absences. Reportage was shelved. The touring guitarist Dom Brown, who had already stood in for Andy at several shows, took over the guitar and has played with them ever since, though never as an official member.[1] [2] [3]

The long second act

As a four piece they chased a modern sound with the producer Timbaland and Justin Timberlake. Red Carpet Massacre in 2007 was launched with nine shows on Broadway, but it sold poorly. Roger Taylor later said Mark Ronson set them straight, telling them to own their old groove again. Ronson produced All You Need Is Now, released on iTunes in December 2010, and it went to number one on download charts in fifteen countries. They played a Los Angeles show directed by David Lynch, and in July 2012 they represented England at Hyde Park for the London Olympics opening celebration, alongside Snow Patrol, Stereophonics and Paolo Nutini.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Paper Gods arrived in September 2015, with Ronson, Nile Rodgers and Mr Hudson producing and Janelle Monáe singing on the single Pressure Off. It entered the American chart at number ten, their highest debut there in twenty two years. Then came a painful court case. The original five had tried to use American law to reclaim the US rights to songs from their first three albums from their publisher. In December 2016 London's High Court ruled against them. Rhodes said they had signed as unsuspecting teenagers who knew no better, and Le Bon said the ruling left a bitter taste. In July 2018 a Los Angeles therapist, Shereen Hariri, accused Le Bon of groping her at a record store signing in 1995. He firmly denied it, calling the claim simply untrue, and the band's assistant said she had been at the event and it did not happen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Future Past followed in October 2021, made with Giorgio Moroder, Mark Ronson, Erol Alkan and Blur's Graham Coxon on guitar, and it reached number three in Britain. That gave them top five albums in five different decades. In 2022 they headlined the opening ceremony of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games and topped the fan vote for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with nearly nine hundred and thirty five thousand votes. At the induction on the fifth of November 2022, Le Bon read a letter from Andy Taylor. It revealed he had been living for four years with stage four metastatic prostate cancer, incurable though not immediately life threatening.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That letter broke the ice. Andy wrote that there was no bad blood, only love and respect, and in 2023 he and Warren Cuccurullo both played on Danse Macabre, a Halloween album inspired by a show the band played in Las Vegas on Halloween 2022. It mixed covers of Talking Heads, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Billie Eilish with reworked Duran songs and a new track, Black Moonlight, featuring Nile Rodgers. Andy later told The Times that stories of him hating Nick were rubbish. In 2024 Simon Le Bon was made an MBE for services to music and charity, and he appeared as a guest judge on RuPaul's Drag Race UK.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As of 2026 the band are still at it. In 2025 they appeared at Italy's Sanremo festival and created two fragrances with the perfume house Xerjoff, called NeoRio and Black Moonlight, because Rhodes said they could not agree on just one scent. In October 2025 they reworked Shadows on Your Side with new guitar from Andy Taylor. On the twenty third of April 2026 they released Free to Love, a disco single with Nile Rodgers, whose partnership with them began with The Reflex more than four decades ago. They were also announced to headline London's Hyde Park again in July 2026. According to Billboard, they have sold more than one hundred million records.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Duran Duran

Nick Rhodes and John Taylor. The two childhood friends from the Birmingham suburbs founded Duran Duran in 1978 and gave it its name. John switched from guitar to bass after falling for Chic. He left the band in 1997 and moved to America, but he came back for the 2001 reunion. In 2006 the pair released Only After Dark, a compilation of their favourite records from the Rum Runner playlist.[1] [2] [3]

Simon Le Bon and Yasmin Le Bon. Le Bon saw the model Yasmin Parvaneh in a magazine and phoned her agency to track her down. They married on the twenty seventh of December 1985 at the register office in her hometown of Oxford. Yasmin had two miscarriages, and the couple went on to have three daughters. Le Bon wrote the lyrics of Come Undone for her, and in 2011 she played him in the Girl Panic video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Taylor and Amanda de Cadenet. Taylor married the British television presenter Amanda de Cadenet on Christmas Eve 1991, when she was nineteen and pregnant with their daughter Atlanta. They moved to Los Angeles, partly to escape the British tabloids. The marriage declined just as the Wedding Album brought the band back, and they separated in May 1995. His divorce also forced him out of the Power Station reunion.[1] [2] [3]

John Taylor and Gela Nash-Taylor. Taylor met Gela Nash, co-founder of the fashion label Juicy Couture, in 1996, after his first marriage ended and he had got sober. They married in Las Vegas on the twenty seventh of March 1999. They live mainly in Los Angeles and in 2005 bought South Wraxall Manor in England, and in 2013 Taylor became an American citizen.[1]

Duran Duran and Paul and Michael Berrow. The Berrow brothers remodelled their father's Rum Runner club after a visit to Studio 54, then took on Duran Duran as the house band, paying them to work as doormen, DJs and bar staff. They steered the band's scandalous videos and tax exile year and co-owned Le Bon's yacht Drum. The band dismissed them by 1986, reportedly over money, yet Andy Taylor still thanked them as the original believers in 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers. The Chic guitarist was a hero to John Taylor. Rodgers' remix of The Reflex gave the band their first American number one in 1984. He produced The Wild Boys, co-produced Notorious and played guitar on it after Andy Taylor left, and worked on Astronaut, Paper Gods and Black Moonlight. Their partnership was still going in 2026 with the single Free to Love.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Duran Duran and Russell Mulcahy. The Australian director made eleven videos for the band, starting with Planet Earth, and shot the Sri Lanka and Antigua videos that turned them into MTV stars. He filmed the 1984 tour for Arena, and it was his idea for a William Burroughs film that led to The Wild Boys. Mulcahy went on to direct the film Highlander. He said of the band that they were young and brave, as was he.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo. The Brooklyn guitarist joined as a hired hand in 1986 and became the band's driving force in the lean early nineties, offering his home studio where Ordinary World was born. With Rhodes he ran the side project TV Mania, whose songs fed into Medazzaland and Pop Trash. He was pushed out for the 2001 reunion and felt badly treated, but he stayed friendly with Rhodes and was inducted into the Hall of Fame with the band.[1] [2] [3]

Simon Le Bon and Andy Taylor. The guitarist left twice, in 1986 and 2006, and the second exit came with public disagreement over why. Yet it was Le Bon who read Andy's letter at the 2022 Hall of Fame ceremony, revealing his cancer. Backstage Le Bon called the news devastating and said they loved Andy dearly. Andy later called the singer a classy guy and returned to play on Danse Macabre.[1] [2] [3]

Nick Rhodes and Stephen Duffy. Duffy was the band's first singer and left in 1979, convinced it would not succeed. He later had a hit as Stephen Tin Tin Duffy with Kiss Me, and co-wrote for Robbie Williams. In 1999 he found a tape of their earliest Duran songs, bumped into Rhodes, and the two re-recorded them without changing a lyric, releasing the album Dark Circles as the Devils.[1] [2]

Duran Duran and Mark Ronson. The producer played a reworked set of their hits with them in Paris in 2008, and Le Bon sang on Ronson's own Record Collection. Ronson then produced All You Need Is Now, and Roger Taylor credits him with telling them to stop running from their own sound. He returned for Paper Gods and Future Past.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Duran Duran and Diana, Princess of Wales. Princess Diana named Duran Duran her favourite band, and in July 1983 they played a Prince's Trust concert in front of her and Prince Charles. A photo of Diana with three band members made the next day's papers. In 1998 the band played the concert held in her memory at her family's request, and in 2007 they appeared at the Concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Duran Duran

• Before he was Nick Rhodes, the keyboardist briefly used the stage name Dior Bates. Born Nicholas Bates, he performed as Dior Bates in 1979. He settled on Nick Rhodes on the spot when a journalist asked his name in the band's first official interview, and never looked back.[1]
• Duran Duran's first recordings were made on a cassette machine above a Birmingham toy shop. Nick Rhodes' parents owned a toy shop, and he, John Taylor and Stephen Duffy taped their first songs in the flat above it in the late seventies.[1]
• At the Rum Runner, John Taylor worked as a bouncer and Roger Taylor collected glasses. The club's owners gave the young band jobs between rehearsals. Andy Taylor cooked and did maintenance, and Nick Rhodes was the club DJ.[1]
• The Rum Runner club where Duran Duran began is now a Wetherspoons pub. The Broad Street club was demolished in 1987, and a Wetherspoons called the Soloman Cutler was later built on the site.[1]
• At six years old, Simon Le Bon passed a screen test for a Persil washing powder advert. Long before music, Le Bon sang in a church choir and trained as an actor. His childhood screen test for the detergent advert was successful.[1]
• The laugh at the start of Hungry Like the Wolf belongs to Nick Rhodes' girlfriend of the time. Her name was Cheryl, and she also recorded the moans heard in the song's fade out. The track was written and demoed in a single Saturday.[1] [2]
• The wordless do do line in Hungry Like the Wolf borrows its melody from Gordon Lightfoot. The melody echoes the instrumental of Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind. Le Bon said the chorus of Save a Prayer drew on the same song.[1] [2]
• The eerie opening of Rio was made by dropping metal rods onto a piano and reversing the tape. Rhodes dropped the rods onto the strings of AIR Studios' grand piano and flipped the recording backwards to create the sound that starts the title track.[1] [2]
• None of the three Taylors play on The Chauffeur, the closing track of Rio. Rhodes built it with a tape operator in a side room, using synthesisers and the sound of cracking ice. Le Bon added words inspired by his kibbutz stay and played ocarina.[1]
• The woman on the Rio cover was painted by Patrick Nagel, discovered in Playboy. Co-manager Paul Berrow spotted Nagel's work in the magazine. In 2024 it emerged the painting was based on a Vogue France photo of the model Marcie Hunt.[1]
• The band stole the original Rio painting from their own manager's office. It hung in Paul Berrow's office at the Rum Runner until the band took it on the way to Top of the Pops. Members then took turns hanging it at home.[1]
• The Seven in Seven and the Ragged Tiger means the five band members plus their two managers. Le Bon said the ragged tiger was success, and the title meant seven people running after it. Nick Rhodes disliked it and said it sounded like a children's book.[1] [2]
• Nick Rhodes collapsed in Montserrat in 1983 and was airlifted to hospital in Miami. During the troubled sessions for their third album at AIR Studios, Rhodes suffered paroxysmal tachycardia, an abnormally fast heartbeat.[1]
• A live Bengal tiger was flown from Melbourne for the Seven and the Ragged Tiger cover shoot. The shoot at the State Library of New South Wales reportedly cost over sixty five thousand pounds. A plan to film the tiger in Kashmir was vetoed.[1]
• Union of the Snake was built on the unusual bass drum pattern of David Bowie's Let's Dance. Producer Ian Little said the pattern seems to repeat every two bars but actually runs for eight. Roger Taylor learned it, and John added the bass riff.[1] [2]
• The Wild Boys video cost more than one million pounds, a record sum at the time. It filled the huge 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios with a pyramid, a windmill over a pool, a robotic face and early computer graphics. It won British Video of the Year.[1]
• John Taylor won the Bond theme job by drunkenly offering producer Cubby Broccoli a fiver. At a party he asked Broccoli if he could write a theme tune for five pounds. The first writing meeting with John Barry reportedly ended with everyone drunk.[1]
• A View to a Kill was kept off the UK number one spot by Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen. It sat at number two for three weeks in 1985, while in America it became the only Bond theme ever to reach number one.[1]
• Simon Le Bon had not insured Drum when it capsized in the 1985 Fastnet Race. The yacht lost its keel because a supplier had not heat treated the fitting. In 1988, under new owners, Drum collided with a Royal Navy submarine off Kintyre.[1]
• Kajagoogoo's Too Shy, produced by Nick Rhodes, reached number one before any Duran Duran single. Singer Limahl was a waiter at London's Embassy Club when he served Rhodes a drink and pitched his band. Rhodes co-produced the hit with Colin Thurston.[1] [2]
• Several Notorious songs were named after Alfred Hitchcock films. Notorious and Vertigo take their titles from Hitchcock, and Hold Me was originally called Rope.[1]
• Medazzaland is named after midazolam, a sedative Simon Le Bon was given during dental surgery. The 1997 album was released in North America and Japan but shelved in Britain, where it only appeared officially in 2021.[1]
• Electric Barbarella was touted as the first song by a major label artist sold as a download. The 1997 single's title nods to Barbarella, the film that gave the band its name. Its robot video had to be censored for MTV.[1] [2]
• The Pop Trash cover shows a rhinestone covered car that belonged to Liberace. The artwork for the 2000 album was created by Andrew Day. Its single Someone Else Not Me had the first video made entirely in Flash animation.[1]
• The Wedding Album's band portraits came from a London student union photo booth. Instead of an expensive shoot, the band went to one of London's last black and white photo booths with pocket change. The strips were first shown publicly in 2013.[1]
• Q magazine named Duran Duran's covers album Thank You the worst album of all time in 2006. Yet Lou Reed said their version of Perfect Day was the best cover anyone had done of one of his songs.[1] [2]
• Author Neil Gaiman wrote a book about Duran Duran in 1984. Before his fame as a novelist, Gaiman wrote Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five, published by Proteus.[1]
• Nick Rhodes voiced a Canadian bomber pilot in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. The 1999 film cameo was voice only. Rhodes has also exhibited photography and published a book of abstract photos, Interference, in 1984.[1]
• Roger Taylor's first dream was to keep goal for Aston Villa. His father took him to every home match. He finally played Villa Park in 1983, as Duran Duran's drummer at a charity concert.[1]
• After quitting in 1985, Roger Taylor was nicknamed the hermit of pop by The Sun. He retreated to a remote farm in Gloucestershire. The newspaper tracked him down and gave his disappearance a full page.[1]
• Warren Cuccurullo knew every guitar part in Frank Zappa's catalogue as a teenager. That impressed Zappa, who hired him for his road band in 1979. Cuccurullo is name checked four times on Zappa's Joe's Garage.[1]
• In the Girl Panic video, supermodels play the members of Duran Duran. Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Eva Herzigova, Helena Christensen and Yasmin Le Bon took the band's roles in the 2011 video directed by Jonas Åkerlund.[1] [2]
• In 2008 Duran Duran played the first rock concert ever held inside the Louvre. The fundraising show under I. M. Pei's glass pyramid helped restore a Louis XV drawing room.[1]
• John Taylor was so short sighted as a boy that he wore very thick glasses. He also painted model soldiers for wargaming. Joining the band, he swapped glasses for contact lenses, dropped the name Nigel, and took up eyeliner.[1]
• Some early pressings of an Is There Something I Should Know single featured unauthorised Star Wars samples. The alternate mix of the B side Faith in This Colour used dialogue from the film, and those pressings were withdrawn over copyright concerns.[1]
• Duran Duran got a writing credit on 5 Seconds of Summer's 2015 song Hey Everybody. The Australian band's track contains elements of Hungry Like the Wolf, so the Duran members share the songwriting credit.[1]
• Danse Macabre grew out of a single Halloween show in Las Vegas in 2022. After playing on Halloween night, the band made a whole album of covers and reworked songs. Rhodes said it came together faster than anything since their debut.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.