On video: Muriel Gray interviews Mick Karn and Peter Murphy as Dalis Car on Channel 4’s weekly music show The Tube in November 1984
❚ CONFIRMATION COMES TODAY of the last musical collaboration by Mick Karn, former bass player with Japan, who died of cancer in January. His longtime associate Debi Zornes announces today at Facebook: “Mick’s final work has yet to be released and is a collaboration with Peter Murphy as Dalis Car 2. The duo were reunited in a studio in Oxford at the end of September last year to begin work and four tracks were completed over the ensuing months — a slow process due to Mick’s declining health. Steve [Jansen] has just finishing mixing the four tracks which will be released as an EP. More news to follow soon, including release date.”
Mick Karn and Peter Murphy: teamed as Dalis Car in 1984
Debi also thanks everyone who sent messages of condolence and support and donations. “They were invaluable in providing support for Mick and his family during those last 7 months. It allowed them to relocate to London to receive better care and be close to friends.”
Murphy said that the recent collaboration was the first time that the musicians had seen each other since the 80s. He wrote of Karn’s last months in his own tribute in January: “Mick’s wry sense of humour, keen creativity and graciousness were there even in the times of most physical distress.”
During 1984, after Karn and Murphy left their hugely successful and innovative bands, Japan and Bauhaus, they collaborated with Paul Lawford on percussion as Dalis Car to record an album, The Waking Hour (left), and a single, The Judgement is the Mirror, viewable at YouTube with other keyboard and bass- driven songs such as His Box.
Peter Murphy, whose iceberg cheekbones and baritone voice came to prominence with the British rock band Bauhaus (1978-83), has been dubbed the Godfather of Goth. Right now he is touring in the US until April 10, and signed to Nettwerk Music Group to release I Spit Roses as an EP on March 22. A new album titled Ninth is expected on June 7.
❚ UNBELIEVABLE! Not one of the nine amateur vidz posted on YouTube of Duran Duran’s pre-tour warm-ups in the US this week captures tunes from the new album — all are oldies, durrrr. No vidz at all have yet been posted from the tour’s opening night in Thackerville, Oklahoma. Though the band played two gigs at the SXSW media festival in Texas and included five tracks from the new album All You Need Is Now, there’s no sign of any of them on video by close of play Friday. Hence the choice of HoraceScope’s performance vid, above, in excellent HD: the lubricious new tune Being Followed was shot in London at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire recording for Radio 2 earlier this month (Dom Brown on guitar).
Update March 20: first US tour vid of a new Duran tune on YT shows Mediterranea at Winstar Casino, Oklahoma, posted by alyciabear72 — http://tinyurl.com/4gvnkmo
Let’s not forget the big 30th anniversary party: next week is the very same in 1981 when Duran’s debut single Planet Earth entered the UK Top 20 where it was to reach No 12. What better way to celebrate than with the next date on their US tour — the much vaunted concert directed by film-maker David Lynch in LA on Wednesday night US time, so all the more reason to catch its live YouTube webcast at 2am UTC Thursday (repeated 8pm for the UK).
As an eye witness at this week’s Stubbs gig at SXSW, Kitty Amsbry of the American fansite Gimmeawristband reports: “Le Bon’s vocals were top-notch, from the highest notes of Ordinary World to the spiteful snarls of Friends of Mine. The band even managed to look cool while calling themselves to a halt, and taking it from the top again on Safe; showing a serious commitment to quality while still remaining playful. [Echoes here of the nervous Hadley and Kemp on the first night of Spandau’s reunion tour.] Yet for that one misstep, each and every other song, old or new, had the unmistakable charge of being right there in the moment.”
Of SXSW, Time Out North America reported: “Impressively—astonishingly, even—the band still looks cool. Besides immaculately fitted black suits, part of the reason for this is that for all their playboy behavior in the 80s, Duran Duran could actually play and write songs… and still can.”
After the taster-reviews of the nine tracks released digitally before Christmas, a second wave of reviews is now trickling out, though it’s hard to tell whether the additional numbers being released on the 14-track CD next week have been considered. Verdicts are largely favourable, despite some sniffy reservations over three seemingly dud tunes, praise being directed principally to the same seven tracks, the four standouts being Safe, Too Bad You’re So Beautiful, The Man Who Stole a Leopard and Girl Panic!
all you need is now: excerpts from
verdicts published so far…
➢ The musical DNA of the British group’s early sound is hard to miss — Alex Veiga, Associated Press, syndicated across the US
“The album overflows with Duran Duran’s sonic staples: lush synths layered over driving, dance-floor ready bass lines; disco-inspired percussion, frequently accented with Latin beats; and, the high-flying, moody vocals and harmonies. On the funky Girl Panic! the percussion recalls the group’s classic The Reflex. On the title track, a whirring synth drone builds to a sing-along friendly chorus: And you sway in the moon the way you did when you were younger/And we told everybody all you need is now. The Man Who Stole a Leopard might be the album’s standout cut, somewhat evocative of the band’s dark and sexy classic The Chauffeur.”
➢ Not everything is worth making the journey
— Mikael Wood, LA Times
“It’s hard to know why the band bothered adding five new songs to the superior nine-track version of All You Need Is Now that Duran Duran released through iTunes late last year. But with their sleek keyboard lines, trebly guitar chatter and frontman Simon Le Bon’s swooping vocal melodies, taut neo-New Wave gems like Being Followed and Girl Panic! make a strong argument for the lasting utility of these hitmakers’ original formula.”
➢ Duran Duran embrace middle age — Ed Potton, The Times
“Mark Ronson as producer… understands what they do best — spacious pop songs with a bittersweet undertow. The title track, a thrilling blast of grandstanding choruses and wonky synths, will sit comfortably alongside The Reflex and Save a Prayer. It’s in the lyrics, never previously a Duran forte, that Le Bon and Co cast themselves gamely into the contemporary fray. The likeably eccentric The Man Who Stole a Leopard exudes an acceptance of vanishing youth. ‘You were once running wild,’ Le Bon sings (addressing Yasmin?). Now, however, ‘we’ve both been tamed’. Being Followed appears to curse the intrusion of stalkers and/or CCTV. ‘I’ve done things I don’t ever want you to know,’ Le Bon wails.”
➢ The best Duran Duran album for 18 years
— Tom Hocknell at BBC Music
“They have thankfully stopped seeking credibility, and it suits them. Their calling card here is the garage rock of the title-track (if you can imagine a garage band playing alongside Bentleys), which morphs into a soaring chorus reminiscent of Rio. Scissor Sister Ana Matronic slots perfectly into the disco-flecked Safe, an unashamed return to their original sound. They sound similarly well preserved on the slinky Being Followed, and Girl Panic! also mines their new-wave roots.”
➢ Duran Duran have unearthed their missing mojo
— Dave Simpson, Guardian online
“[Producer] Mark Ronson has sprinkled guests like Kelis and Ana Matronic over his postmodern sheen, but the surprise is the quality of the songwriting. The title track and groove-thrusting Too Bad You’re So Beautiful are once-heard, sing-the-chorus pop stonkers.”
➢ Still hungry after all these years — Adrian Thrills, Daily Mail
“The band’s 13th album is much better than most of us could have anticipated. The nine new songs benefit from a diverse cast of special guests. Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters adds a seductive rap on Safe (In the Heat of the Moment). New York soul diva Kelis impresses on The Man Who Stole A Leopard. But if Mark Ronson’s input provides a creative spark, the most impressive thing is Duran Duran’s return to form as songwriters. The frontman, to his credit, also supplies some wonderful, multi-tracked vocal harmonies, superbly augmented by Rhodes’ clever electronic prompts and the urgent grooves of the rhythm section.”
➢ Nine songs full of the promise and thrill of 1981-83
— Crispin Kott at Pop Matters
“All You Need Is Now isn’t Son of Rio, but it’s the best album Duran Duran has released since then, a collection that manages what their best material always has, blending art with grand gestures and popcraft. It’s nine songs full of the promise and thrill of 1981-83… This is the sound of time stood still, of a feeling of reckless and sophisticated abandon launched decades forward without skipping a beat.”
➢ Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon are incredibly adept pop songwriters — Forest at TRT
“My favourite song so far, Girl Panic!, is the best of all worlds. It’s got that optimistic pomp I’ve always loved about Duran Duran’s brightest tracks, with a chorus that I would love to buy property in. For me, this song is the ultimate cross between Rio and Electric Barbarella.”
➢ A success on many levels — Möhammad Choudhery at Consequence of Sound
“Certainly a commendable effort if for no reason other than it’s the band’s most relevant and listenable record in almost two decades. And though it’s not quite Rio 2.0, Duran Duran’s 13th album does possess many of the qualities that put the synth-pop legends on the map in the first place.”
+++ +++ “I’m going to stick my neck out and say that we were the best live British band of the Eighties. Spandau Ballet’s records are an important part of the evolution of British pop music, and I’m enormously proud of them. We were part of the golden age of pop. We were a gang who made records.” — Gary Kemp on Spandau Ballet in their heyday +++ +++ ➢ Read today’s bold interview with Spandau’s songwriter Gary Kemp in the Mail on Sunday … In the zoot-suited shadows of Le Beat Route club, student journalist Dylan Jones — today the editor of GQ magazine — watched Kemp shoot the video that would launch Spandau Ballet to stardom. Thirty years later, they meet again
Jones writes:
Kemp’s band was more than just timely – the music they made was genuinely groundbreaking. No, the critics were not kind, painting them as dim, inner-city mannequins, yet their songs resonated with a generation of young men and women who were determined to explore social mobility in much the same way that their parents did in the 60s. Their most important record from this early period was Chant No 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On), a song that mirrored Ghost Town by the Specials.
“Chant No 1 was all about urban paranoia,” says Kemp. “I wanted to make a Soho film-noir song, something that was evocative of an urban experience. Dark shadows, dark corners. A fear of living on the edge in an urban environment as a young man. The early 80s were rough for most people, and I wanted to reflect that in the song. It’s a very dark track and one that mirrored the economic plight of the time.”
❚ HAPPY 30th ANNIVERSARY to Planet Earth. On March 5, 1981, Duran Duran made their first appearance on the nationwide TV show Top of the Pops, a vital consequence of their debut single hitting the UK Top 40. Along with Spandau Ballet and Visage, Duran were the third British band to confirm the gathering force of the New Romantic movement, and TV’s pop flagship was to showcase a rush of new bands as springtime blossomed. Duran’s strongly contemporary electronic style is attributed to producer Colin Thurston, who had co-engineered David Bowie’s “Heroes”, and on his death in 2007 John Taylor paid tribute to Thurston as “a major catalyst for the 80s sound” which he was to reinforce on the band’s first album. “Without Colin’s depth of vision, we would never have become the band we became.”
Simon Le Bon: live on video at the Rum Runner in 1980
In the Planet Earth video mix above we see original footage of DD performing in 1980 at the Rum Runner, home of Birmingham’s then underground New Romantic scene.
The futuristic and stylish official video, shot later in a studio by director Russell Mulcahy, has been spliced in, all overdubbed with the audio track recorded at EMI’s Manchester Square studio with lyrics refreshed opportunistically to include the line Like some New Romantic looking for the TV sound (available as the Manchester Square Demo on the debut Duran Duran album remastered in 2010). One of Duran’s earliest songs, Late Bar, completed the B-side of the single released on Feb 2, 1981. An alternative arrangement of Planet Earth was also released on a 12-inch extended remix as what DD called a “night version” for the dancefloor. The single spent 14 weeks in the chart, peaking at No 12 in late March.
Among comments at YouTube, Jeremy Thirlby, musician and school friend of Nick Rhodes, points out that the dancers we see during the filming at the club were “drafted in actors” because for some reason “most regulars were excluded”! Unknown to everyone at Birmingham’s Rum Runner the very week when Duran were being filmed in July 1980, London’s ITV station was to air its 20th Century Box documentary about the Blitz club house band, Spandau Ballet. Bang! This was the starting gun that signalled the record-industry race to sign up the first of the New Romantic bands.
New Romantics in full fig at the Rum Runner in July 1980: note the tell-tale moves in the Planet Earth video, such as the Ballet sway at 1:20, crucial handpasses at 2:18 and Pierrot’s wonky head at 3:06
The Beatles’ beat look, 1960: honed in Hamburg by photographer Astrid Kirchherr who took this picture when guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe was in the lineup
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MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
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❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2026
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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During 1984, after Karn and Murphy left their hugely successful and innovative bands, Japan and Bauhaus, they collaborated with Paul Lawford on percussion as Dalis Car to record an album, The Waking Hour (left), and a single, The Judgement is the Mirror, viewable at YouTube with other keyboard and bass- driven songs such as His Box.
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