Lifetime Achievement awards, Grammy Awards, composing the title song for a James Bond Film, Sexiest Man Alive nods, and having sold more than 100 million records worldwide over the span of their career – it’s hard to find an area of achievement that Duran Duran hasn’t touched.
The founding members — singer Simon Le Bon, drummer Roger Taylor, keybord player Nick Rhodes and bass player John Taylor — continue to tour and record. Duran Duran released the album “Paper Gods” in 2015. It plays Friday, Sept. 13, at Harveys Outdoor Area at Lake Tahoe.
The band took the electronics-based new wave music emerging in early 1980s Britain, and ran with it in a direction that their peers would find hard to follow. At its peak, Duran Duran combined art pop, an air of good looks and slick fashion, high-end video production, and a polished sound that would find appeal in dance clubs, mainstream radio and a new medium called MTV. It turned this combination into the perfect loudspeaker for songs like “Hungry Like The Wolf,” “Rio,” “New Moon On Monday” and “Wild Boys” – all still undeniably catchy now more than 25 years later.
Duran Duran was an exercise in marketing gone right – with teen magazine looks, a video banned from MTV for its eroticism (“Girls On Film,”) which only created more interest in the group, and music so full of non-threatening lyrics and pulsating hooks that the band rode the wave to a position at the top of the charts in several countries.
And while the touring would wear down some members and lead to personnel changes, later iterations would release the songs “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone,” maintaining their position as a force across worldwide airwaves.
In the early 2000’s, Duran Duran reunited its classic lineup, and the core continues touring to this day. On Friday, Sept. 13, the band will bring it’s glistening new wave pop to Lake Tahoe’s evening twilight. The band also is currently recording a new album, so look to hear a couple brand new songs among all the others that give you flashbacks of a much more colorful, hairspray-doused era.
— Shaun Astor
- Duran Duran appears at Harvey’s Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena on Friday, Sept. 13.
