Duran Duran

The band that most surely have come closest to being The Beatles of their day, since (like The Beatles) they were a blonde five piece from Birmingham . . . er. Their image of being a teeny bopper band whose fans were all under 10 did not stop their meteoric rise to stardom.

Formed in Birmingham, England, in 1978 by Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Stephen Duffy and clarinet player, Simon Colley, Duran Duran took their name from cult space movie Barbarella. 

The following year, Andy Wickett and Roger Taylor replaced Duffy (who went on to a briefly successful solo career as Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy) and Colley respectively, while Simon Le Bon finally entered the fray as frontman in spring 1980. 

After a UK tour supporting Hazel O'Connor, the band was snapped up by EMI initiating their manicured career in early 1981 with Planet Earth. The toast of the London cognoscenti, the extravagantly coiffured (and even more outlandishly attired) poseurs hit the Top 10 as the scene that perpetrated one of the worst fashion crimes in history (legwarmers) stepped up a gear. 

Later that summer, an eponymous debut album and follow-up single, Girls On Film, confirmed the bands synth powered pretensions with lashings of attitude and mascara. Riding in on the floppy fringe of the New Romantic zeitgeist, the album made the UK top three and, with the help of heavy MTV rotation for the Hungry Like The Wolf  video, eventually the US Top Ten.  The latter track was a transatlantic top five and previewed the follow-up set, Rio (1982).  

By this point the bands fan base had grown from an arty clique to hordes of screaming girlies, ensuring massive success for Save A Prayer and the whining Is There Something I Should Know?. Although the latter track wasn't included on the album, it did give the band their first UK Number 1.  With continuing support from MTV in the US, Duran Duran were also churning out ever more flamboyant videos to keep the Yanks happy.  

A vague concept affair, Seven And The Ragged Tiger (1983) came in for a bit of a critical pasting, although the hits continued apace with the dodgy Union Of The Snake and transatlantic Number 1 The Reflex (a quintessential 80s effort complete with stuttering vocals, and a video famous for its water-coming-out-of-the-screen trickery - brilliant!). 

The Zenith of their bombastic heyday came with Wild Boys, a classic slice of white nouveau funk with added rhythmic oomph courtesy of Nile Rogers. The single made Number 2 in Britain and America, preceding the universally panned live effort Arena (1984). 

A James Bond theme tune, View To A Kill, (another US Number 1) nicely rounded off the first chapter in the bands career as the various members took time out to indulge themselves in solo projects. The less said about Arcadia the better, while the marginally more entertaining Power Station (with Robert Palmer) released an eponymous album (1985) of sterile funk rock, hitting the UK Top 10 with Some Like It Hot and a cover of the T Rex tune Get It On.

Duran Duran eventually returned in late 1986 (minus Andy and Roger) with Notorious (1986), narrowly missing the top of the American charts. On the Notorious tour of 1987, fans got a first glimpse of Warren Cuccurullo, a New York-based guitarist who filled in for Andy. But the bubble had burst and none of the next three albums shifted too many copies and the critics' knives were out - Big Thing (1989) and Liberty (1990) became increasingly less interesting . . . 

Despite the relative success of the single Ordinary World, Duran Duran's next album, Duran Duran - also known as The Wedding Album (bedecked as it was with wedding photos of the band members' parents) - saw a brief glimmer of hope, before the ill-advised covers album Thank You in 1994. 

John Taylor left the band in 1997 to form his own record label, leaving the band as a three-piece. More video scandal followed in 1997 for the single Electric Barbarella from the album Medazzaland. The video showed the band buying a robot maid who works for them around the house, serving drinks and cleaning up - before her batteries run low and she wrecks the place. MTV pulled it, saying it was in bad taste and sexually explicit. The band edited the video, adding cursors and poking fun at cybersex sites, but nobody cared. 

Another greatest hits album (Greatest) was released, but everyone already had Decade (1990), and nobody liked any of the songs released after then anyway. The end.