On October 27, 1958, Simon Le Bon was born. Le Bon is a member of Duran Duran, the British pop band that became an early star of MTV in the 1980s.
Le Bon wasn’t there from the very beginning of Duran Duran. The group was founded by bassist John Taylor and keyboardist Nick Rhodes in 1978 and went through a few membership changes in its early years. But by mid-1980, the classic lineup was in place. Taylor and Rhodes were joined by Le Bon on lead vocals, guitarist Andy Taylor, and drummer Roger Taylor. (None of the band’s three Taylors are related to one another.)
The band’s first album, Duran Duran was released in 1981. It got the most attention for the video that accompanied the song “Girls on Film,” in which attractive topless women took part in pillow fights and mud wrestling. The video was intended for dance clubs and pay-cable channels, but an edited version became popular at MTV.
Video was a huge part of Duran Duran’s early success. The music video was still a new format, and at a time when many were bands were shooting cheap videotape footage on the band performing on stage, Duran Duran was hiring film directors and traveling to exotic locations to film mini-movies with actual plots; they filmed their videos on 33mm film, which made them look even more glossy and expensive.
In the early 1980s, MTV wasn’t yet available in all parts of the United States, and the band’s earliest success on American radio, tracked almost perfectly with the expansion of MTV; if a city had MTV, the local radio station would be bombarded with requests for Duran Duran. The MTV success turned the band into teen idols; at their peak, you couldn’t look at a newsstand without seeing one of their faces on a teen magazine.
The band’s American record label, Capitol, didn’t really know how to market Duran Duran at first. They tried to push them as part of the “new romantic” movement, but that hadn’t yet quite caught on here as well as it had in England. Their 1982 album Rio didn’t sell very well at first, but once Capitol realized that dance mixes of the songs were doing well in clubs, they remixed much of the album and re-released it, now pushing it as a dance album. That worked; the album climbed to #6, and “Hungry Like the Wolf” became the group’s first big American hit.
With that success, Capitol issued a re-release of Duran Duran, and the newly added single “Is There Something I Should Know” climbed into the top five. The 1983 album Seven and the Ragged Tiger generated three more top ten singles, including Duran Duran’s first #1 hit, “The Reflex.”
In 1984, the band continued to take advantage of the music video craze, releasing a video album that collected their music videos to date. They won two Grammy Awards for that project, in the first year that the Grammys rewarded videos. The album won the award for Best Music Video, Long Form, and the video single “Girls on Film”/”Hungry Like the Wolf” was named Best Music Video, Short Form.
After their 1984 global tour, documented on the live album Arena, Duran Duran briefly split for a pair of side projects. Le Bon, Rhodes, and Roger Taylor formed the trio Arcadia, which released one album and scored one hit single, “Election Day.” John Taylor and Andy Taylor teamed up with singer Robert Palmer and drummer Tony Thompson to form Power Station, a rock band with a bit of a funk edge, and they did even better, landing in the top ten with “Some Like It Hot” and a cover of T Rex’s “Get It On (Bang a Gong).”
Duran Duran reunited in 1985 to record the theme for the James Bond movie A View to a Kill; it’s still the only Bond theme song to reach #1 on the American charts.
Andy Taylor and Roger Taylor left the band in 1986, and the remaining three members brought in friends and session musicians to record the album Notorious. The album and the title single both did well, but the band’s teenage fans were starting to grow up, and as the band’s music matured, their following wasn’t quite as intense as it had once been.
Duran Duran tried to broaden its musical style and escape its teen idol image on the 1988 album Big Thing. The sound focused more on bass and synthesizers, and elements of house music were added to the sound. The band’s new guitarist, Warren Cuccurullo, first appeared on this album, and was officially made a member of the band near the end of the Big Thing tour, as was drummer Sterling Campbell.
The new quintet recorded Liberty in 1990. The album was something of a disappointment, both commercially and critically, and Campbell left the band in 1991. They rebounded with 1993’s Duran Duran, which (to avoid confusion with the 1981 Duran Duran) quickly became known as “The Wedding Album” because the cover featured photos from the weddings of the band members’ parents. The album put Duran Duran back into the top five of the pop charts with the single “Ordinary World.”
In 1996, John Taylor reunited Power Station for a second album, though he had to leave the project before the album was finished because of personal issues. In 1997, he left Duran Duran, which was once again down to a trio (Le Bon, Rhodes, and Cuccurullo).
The band struggled for the next decade to find an audience. Their 1997 album Medazzaland wasn’t even released in the UK, and 2000’s Pop Trash didn’t make much of an impression, either.
In 2001, Le Bon and Rhodes announced that all three of the Taylors would be returning for a reunion of the classic Duran Duran lineup. The group spent much of 2001 and 2002 writing new material. They had a hard time finding a record label willing to take a chance on their comeback, so they went on tour in 2003 and 2004 to demonstrate that there was still an audience excited to hear Duran Duran.
They released Astronaut in 2004. Pop radio was still not interested, but “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise” was a hit in dance clubs. Duran Duran recorded a version of John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” in 2006 for an Amnesty International project, and there were reports that a new album, tentatively titled Reportage, was nearly complete.
But in late 2006, Andy Taylor left the group for the second time, and the Reportage project was abandoned. Dominic Brown joined as Duran Duran’s new guitarist, and the band began work from scratch on a new album. They reached out to younger collaborators; Timbaland and Justin Timberlake co-wrote and produced some of the songs on 2007’s Red Carpet Massacre.
In 2010, Duran Duran contributed “Boys Keep Swinging” to a David Bowie tribute album, and brought in Mark Ronson to produce their album All You Need Is Now, which got the best critical response they’d seen in years. The tour was plagued with bad luck. Much of the European tour had to be canceled or rescheduled when Le Bon developed laryngitis, and part of the North American leg was canceled when Rhodes developed a viral infection.
Duran Duran’s most recent album, 2015’s Paper Gods, received a more strong critical reaction and became their first album to reach the top ten in the US since the “wedding album” in 1993. In mid-2019, they announced that a new album was in the works, with Ronson and Giorgio Moroder among the producers. They were hoping for a mid-2020 release but announced in March that the album would be delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.