Duran Duran / The Wedding album and Thank You – reviewed

What happens when the band that defined the 1980s start the 90s as a flop?

By 1990 Duran Duran were in serious trouble. “Back they come, like glandular fever” wrote NME, “popping up just when you thought you’d got rid of them… how do they survive? By unloading albums into the gullible corners of the globe.” That year’s Liberty, one of those aforementioned albums, was supposed to carry them into a new decade but ended up, according to Smash Hits, sounding “exactly like a crap Robert Palmer”. It debuted at number eight in the UK and promptly vanished. Its lead single couldn’t crack the top 20. Its follow-up, ‘Serious’, missed the top 40 entirely, the first Duran Duran single ever to do so. They didn’t tour it. Plans for further videos were scrapped. The narkier corners of the press, never especially kind to Duran Duran even at the height of their fame, apparently settled on a nickname, “Done Done.” (I can’t track down the origin for that quote; Classic Pop says it’s true, though, and that’s good enough for me) “Liberty”, said Melody Maker at the time “is not D’ran’s finest hour”, and even the most devoted D’raniac would struggle to mount a passionate defence. A reasonable reader would not be blamed for expecting the decline to continue. Duran Duran were, indeed, Done Done. The 1990s were going to swallow them whole. There was no more story to tell.

And yet. Exhibits A and B: The Wedding Album and Thank You, both arriving on vinyl this month, reissued as 2LP sets for the first time since their original (and extremely limited) vinyl pressings, documenting a band at its most fascinating: pulling off an extraordinary comeback, then squandering the gains almost immediately. Together they tell the story of Duran Duran’s 90s, in all its complicated, frustrating glory.

The sessions for The Wedding Album began in early 1991 at Privacy Studio; actually the living room of guitarist Warren Cuccurullo’s house in Battersea. A band that had once recorded in Montserrat and the south of France and popped to Sri Lanka to make a few videos were now in a terraced house with an Akai 12-track and a drum machine balanced on the coffee table. EMI, spooked by the failure of Liberty, had changed the terms: rather than lavish upfront advances, the label released funding incrementally, reviewing the band’s progress month by month. For the first time in their career, Duran Duran were being tightly A&R’d. As Nick Rhodes later put it, “we were down to the four of us again” and they “really had to concentrate all of our efforts on the songwriting.”

It worked. The Wedding Album, which like The White Album is technically self-titled (‘The Right Album’, as John Taylor joked at the time), is almost recklessly diverse: the rave stomp of ‘Drowning Man’ alongside a Brazilian duet with Milton Nascimento, a Velvet Underground cover, a seven-minute protest song about the Happy Land fire, and some of the most emotionally direct pop Simon Le Bon had ever written. Cuccurullo, finally given full creative partnership after years as a hired gun, drove the sessions with a discipline the band had previously lacked. The rule was that every song had to stand up played by four people in a room.

The results are uneven, as you’d expect from a record this restless, but the highs are genuinely high. ‘Too Much Information’ is a sharp, self-aware piece of MTV-age commentary that could have been a bigger hit than it was. ‘Come Undone’ is perhaps the most seductive thing the band ever recorded, a slow-building, densely layered track that Le Bon wrote for his wife Yasmin, added so late in the process that Taylor, to his lasting regret, didn’t even get back from LA in time to play bass on it. The seven-minute ‘Sin of the City’, Taylor’s account of the Happy Land fire, is an unexpectedly brutal piece (“89 dead, 89 dead, 89 dead, 89 dead”) from a band not known for political songwriting. Even the odder corners work: the ‘Femme Fatale’ cover has a grand, echoey beauty to it, and ‘Shotgun’, a brief, spiky interlude named as a retort to a journalist who’d called Taylor’s wedding a shotgun affair, gives the sequencing a jolt of personality. It is not a record that plays it safe. What holds it together is the songwriting discipline that Cuccurullo imposed and the sense, audible throughout, that these four people had something to prove and knew it might be their last chance to prove it. No hiding behind production. Songcraft first, everything else second.

Which is how you end up with ‘Ordinary World’.

It is, unarguably, the last great Duran Duran single. There’s also a case to be made that it’s one of the best things they’d ever do. Le Bon wrote the lyrics about his close friend David Miles who died in 1986. He’d addressed the loss before, obliquely, on Big Thing’s ‘Do You Believe in Shame?’, and would return to it again on the maligned Medazzaland’s ‘Out of My Mind.’ But ‘Ordinary World’ was the one where he stopped hiding behind imagery and simply said what he meant. Helped hugely by a mesmerisingly simple descending guitar figure from Cuccurullo, it is a song about grief that doesn’t dress grief up as anything else. It’s genuinely devastating, and it connected with everyone that heard it. Well, almost … “I was never a fan of the song, particularly,” wrote John Taylor in his memoir, “it had no bassline to speak of, didn’t rock or groove – but everyone who heard it fell in love with it.” It was enough to convince EMI that Duran Duran were a going proposition, unlocking more money for the album and investing heavily in the promotion.

It started working for them almost immediately. Capitol, the band’s US label, leaked it to a handful of Florida radio stations in late 1992 to gauge interest. A station in Tampa got a cease and desist for playing it early, so the programme director set up a phone line where listeners could hear it on demand leading, apparently, to hundreds of calls a day. The label rush-released the single in December, months ahead of the album. It reached number three in the US and number six in the UK, placing the definitive 80s pop band in a chart that included such specifically 90s records as ‘No Limits’ by 2Unlimited, Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Start Choppin’’ and The Prodigy’s ‘Outta Space’. It won the Ivor Novello for most performed song of the year. Le Bon sang it with Pavarotti at a War Child benefit. None of this was supposed to happen to Duran Duran in the 90s. Grunge was king. Rave was changing culture. Suede and Blur were laying the groundwork for Britpop. Radio One was beginning to close its doors to heritage pop acts. And yet nobody, not even the band’s most committed detractors, could pretend ‘Ordinary World’ wasn’t, well, extraordinary.

Armed with a single that was, in spite of all known laws of physics, both copper-bottomed and solid gold, the album campaign had more than a chance of success.

Duran Duran aka The Wedding Album entered at number four in February 1993, beaten only by East 17’s Walthamstow, Annie Lennox’s Diva and R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, but dropped out of the top ten the following week. That’s a familiar story; the fans turn up straight away and then interest levels off. But when a second single, ‘Come Undone’, confirmed the comeback wasn’t a fluke, the album climbed back into the top five and stayed there for a month. It wouldn’t drop out of the Top 40 until June: the chart behaviour of a record winning converts one at a time. In America, ‘Come Undone’ made number seven, meaning Duran Duran had scored two top ten singles from the same album for the first time since Seven and the Ragged Tiger in 1983. A third single, ‘Too Much Information’, stalled at 35, and the campaign tailed off sooner than it should have, but the job was done. Duran Duran were back. All they had to do was keep it going.

They didn’t.

Now, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a covers album. Lots of bands have done them. They’re fun. But they’re something you do when you’re already at the top and looking for an easy win or a distraction. Bowie’s Pin Ups, Ferry’s These Foolish Things. Lennon’s Rock & Roll. Nice stop-gap projects for artists with nothing to lose. They’re not a dice you roll when you’re vulnerable. True, Duran had just pulled off one of the most impressive comebacks in music. They had proved they could still write brilliant songs. They had momentum, but it needed consolidating, ideally quickly but, if nothing else, solidly. The next album was perhaps the most important of their career. If it failed, it would take the band down with it. They needed to prove The Wedding Album wasn’t a fluke.

Instead they released Thank You, a record of other people’s material that, however affectionately intended, essentially told the world that the ideas had dried up.

Some of it works. ‘Perfect Day’, admittedly a difficult song to mess up if you don’t bugger about with it too much, is lovely: a dreamy, well-produced take on Lou Reed, who himself called it the best cover ever done of one of his songs, though he probably only said that to annoy David Bowie. ‘White Lines’, their serviceably funky take on Grandmaster Melle Mel, remains a fixture of Duran’s live set three decades later. Bob Dylan apparently said their ‘Lay Lady Lay’ beat his original “by a country mile”, which is high, if inaccurate, praise. Hendrix doing ‘All Along the Watch Tower’ this is not (for what it’s worth, I can’t find a source for this quote beyond a Duran wiki, so a pinch of salt might be in order). Still, if the original artists were largely on board, the critics were not. The awful coddy dub of the already slightly coddy ‘Watching the Detectives’, the bewildering stab at Public Enemy’s ‘911 Is a Joke’ (“if not true to the song,” said NME, “it is at least true to the latter part of the title”), which should have been stopped at conception and never spoken of again: it all felt a very long way from a band coming off a hit album that had been bursting with ideas. “For God’s sake”, said Melody Maker’s Michael Bonner, “can’t someone hire a Dutch doctor and have these fuckers put to sleep?”

In 2006 Q voted it the worst album of all time. That’s… harsh. I’m not even sure it’s the worst Duran Duran album. There’s occasional wins here. They do a good job of turning Sly Stone’s ‘I Wanna Take You Higher’ into Achtung-era U2 by way of the drum intro from Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘I Am One’. But that “worst album ever” tag isn’t entirely unearned. Simon Le Bon singing about how the emergency services neglected his hood and let his neighbours die, stripped of all the context, is probably reason enough to never let anyone play it ever again. It reached number 12 in the UK and 19 in the US, numbers that sound respectable until you consider what The Wedding Album had achieved, and where the momentum had been pointing.

It killed their relationship with their label. Thank You was the last studio album Duran Duran released on EMI in the UK and put Duran into the wilderness in almost every way. EMI, having watched the cautiously funded follow-up Medazzaland underperform overseas declined to release it in the UK at all and dissolved the contract. Nearly two decades together, finished. Taylor, increasingly frustrated, joined the Neurotic Outsiders with members of Guns N’ Roses and the Sex Pistols, a side project about as far from Duran Duran as it’s possible to get. By January 1997 he’d left the band entirely. The Wedding Album had hinted that Duran could ride out the new decade with some relevance, reinventing and deepening their appeal, becoming a different version of themselves that could chime with a new era, as Queen had done with the 70s and 80s. U2 had pulled it off. Why couldn’t Duran Duran? In the end, though, that new decade swallowed them after all. Their time as a relevant 90s band was unmercifully brief.

These new 2LP sets at least correct one old injustice. Both albums were originally squeezed onto single LPs, which, at 63 and 54 minutes respectively, cannot have sounded good. Spread across two discs they will finally have room to breathe. They’re both well produced records with plenty of sonic appeal, so fans of the material can at least enjoy it fully. There are, however, no bonus tracks and no new remasters. These are straight reissues: the records as they were, on better vinyl, in better packaging.

The Wedding Album deserves the revisit. It remains one of the genuine surprises of 90s pop, an album that shouldn’t have worked by a band nobody expected it from, anchored by a single that has long since passed into something more permanent. ‘Ordinary World’ is the kind of song that stops you mid-sentence when it comes on in a room. It earns its place.

Thank You is a harder sell, and always was. It isn’t, despite Q’s claims, the worst album ever made. It has some good bits, and you do have to admire the sheer nerve of it. Mileage will vary. Still, between them, these two records are the story of Duran Duran in the 90s: the resurrection and the misstep, the last great chapter and the unfortunate ending.

There is, however, one last note to make. The Wedding Album, ‘Ordinary World’ and, to an extent, ‘White Lines’ did end up future-proofing the band, to some degree. Had they sputtered out after Liberty any future reunion would probably have been, like old rivals Spandau Ballet, only ever in the context of an oldies act. Frozen forever in the video to ‘Rio’, and unacceptable in any other form. Those early 90s wins gave them creative wiggle room in the future and a broader scope in the public mind, allowing for new albums that get respectable notices, a fanbase that remains devoted and engaged and tour venues that remained suitably massive. They’re still a going concern rather than a pure nostalgia act specifically because of those successes.

Not bad for a band the decade was supposed to have killed.

Review by Marc Burrows. The Wedding Album and Thank You are out now on vinyl (and CD).