❚ ANY FAN OF DURAN DURAN remembers the very first photographs of the band in 1980 as they finalised their line-up which was to win a recording contract by year’s end and secure their first chart hit with Planet Earth. The five musicians were young and handsome and while they emerged as lucky leaders of the New Romantic music and fashion movement based on Birmingham’s Rum Runner nightclub, so local teenager Paul Edmond learned the skills of photography by capturing their frilly shirts. These Pose Age outfits took inspiration from Jane Kahn and Patti Bell’s futurist boutique, but in those DIY days before stylists had been invented, it fell to Paul to inject a sense of cool nonchalance into his images of the budding pop stars as they too practised how best to look a camera in the eye.
Four decades later, after selling 100 million records, winning umpteen music awards, and being welcomed into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Duran themselves revel in releasing new material and reworking the old, their latest album being Danse Macabre. How appropriate then that the photographic archive of Paul Edmond – which embraces a wider world of youth culture than only that of Duran – is being published this spring. A trio of books filling 200 A4 pages has been initiated by his sister Maggie K de Monde, herself an all-round song-writer and performer. Nick Rhodes makes a contribution. Advance orders for the £90 package are being invited by APS Books of Yorkshire, with delivery expected in June.
Tragically, Paul himself cannot share this poignant moment because he was killed in a road accident in 2015. He and I became great friends working on the monthly magazine New Sounds New Styles in 1981, for which he took an arresting cover picture of Jane Farrimond and the flamboyant Martin Degville, a pair of Brummie style leaders who both ended up in the band Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 1980, Out of the blue,
Duran’s first gig pictured at the Rum Runner
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
1981, Birth of Duran’s Planet Earth
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 1981,
New Sounds New Styles: Will it all be over by next week?
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 