Duran Duran on Punk, Fashion, Sacred Choral Music from the Renaissance—and Their Brilliant New Album

I mean: videos, to name maybe the most obvious of these zeitgeist-defining things.

SIMON: We just came at this incredible time when all these roads crossed at the same place and we were at this junction—it was musical, it was fashion, it was the technology of the video—

Yes, okay: Everybody else had the technology of the video—but they weren’t hiring people who wanted to shoot them on film and who had feature film credentials, as you guys did. Is there something about that that you saw early on as having potential?

ROGER: One of our managers actually wanted to be a film director, and being the manager of Duran Duran was kind of a stepping stone or a rehearsal for him—he wanted to make these epic movies.

NICK: We were as close as he was going to get. [laughter]

SIMON: The first single [“Planet Earth”] was a hit in our home country and Australia. And nobody wanted to go to Australia to promote this single, so somebody said, “Maybe you should make a video.” And we were like, “What’s that?” And we rolled up to a studio in North London one day really having no idea what we were going to do. Russell McKay, the director, was one of the four guys who invented the visual language of that time.

JOHN: And the next time around with him, we filmed the “Rio” video in Sri Lanka.

NICK: We were like an SAS SWAT team: We could almost parachute into somewhere, get in, do our thing, get out—

JOHN: It was hugely significant, though: I think before Sri Lanka we were still kind of a club band: We looked like a club band, we thought like a club band, and people sort of thought of us like that. But we came out of that and got to Australia, where people had seen the video, and we were stars.

SIMON: It was the plastic pants.

Is there any way to quantify how famous you were at the height of Duran Duran?

SIMON: On our second trip to New York, there was a place near Times Square where you used to buy videos, called Video Shack, where we did an in-store appearance. Thousands of people showed up—they had to block the streets, and they had to get police on horseback to control the crowds. That’s how crazy it was.