❏ Star names from the worlds of music and cinema joined hundreds of graduates from the University of Bedfordshire at ceremonies today in Luton. Duran Duran keyboard player Nick Rhodes, music producer Peter Asher and film producer Katy Haber were among those being honoured during graduation week at St Mary’s Church. Each received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree.
Nick Rhodes is being recognised for his contribution to the music industry as a songwriter, performer and producer. Katy Haber, who starred in films such as The Getaway and Cross of Iron and co-produced sci-fi classic Blade Runner, is recognised for her outstanding career in the film industry. Producer Peter Asher is being recognised for his distinguished career in the music industry, working with global stars such as Cher and Neil Diamond.
+++ ❚ SPONSORSHIP, EH? Why fork out your own money to make a pop video when you’re a penniless 80s retro band and you can persuade an international luxury brand to pay for it? In return for a few words of gratitude of course. So before we get to see the real thing, here is the 12th tease trailer, yes 12th, posted today, for Duran Duran’s next video. The first eleven can be viewed on DD’s YouTube channel.
This one is the “making of” version, and do not view it unless you’re braced for a hair-raising and shameless suck-up to their wonderful sponsor by all four members of the film-it-grab-it-and-run Rio gang. They are seen on location at London’s Savoy Hotel (B&B from £455 per night) shooting the archetypal DD lush-life single, Girl Panic! (Musically, the stand-out track on the album, more’s the pity.)
The Birmingham-born and high-school educated former nightclub disc jockey turned keyboardist Nick Rhodes whispers seductively from behind a cut-crystal glass curtain: “We teamed up with Swarovski who have provided some fantastic elements, crystals, for us in the video. You really do need to try to work with people who fit the aesthetic of what you’re trying to do, and with Swarovski, er, I think they, er, [he did pause, twice, let’s hope for ironic effect, though we cannot be sure] they represent quality, glamour and glitz and shiny things.” Yes, Nick did say shiny things. And yes again, dear reader, the key word there was aesthetic, with its very scholarly diphthong. As we discover, “Hey, this is only rock’n’roll” — the final words of the real video — is nearer the OTT mark.
Models ARE Duran Duran (No, not really, it’s just make-believe) ... Cindy Crawford, Helen Christensen, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova and Yasmin Le Bon play Duran Duran for a photoshoot in the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK
Guitarist John Taylor adds his tuppenceworth of product plug for the Austrian gemstones-to-home-decor-to-optics-to-luminous-road-markings brand, yes, road markings, whose energy-intensive glass grinding processes take advantage of hydroelectricity in the local mountains: “That connection has brought a beauty to the look of the video that we wouldn’t have had without them.” And yes, everything from guitar straps to hand mikes were vajazzled with Austrian glitzy bits — 700 on the singer’s microphone alone, we are told.
Off-screen Rhodes spoke about the project from New York, where the band have just completed a six-week US tour: “Harpers UK had approached us about collaborating with the magazine on something really special when the new album came out. I’d had this crazy idea for a video for the song Girl Panic! that looked fantastic on paper — to recreate a day-in-the-life of the band, with five of the world’s greatest supermodels playing all of us. The magazine loved the idea of doing a cover shoot within the video itself.” (Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana play Harper’s guest fashion editors for the day, during a photoshoot scene which will form a 22-page cover story for the December issue. Yes, 22!)
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Giving their services free are the supermodels: Naomi Campbell IS lead singer Simon Le Bon, Cindy Crawford IS bassist John Taylor, blonde Eva Herzigova IS blond keyboardist Nick Rhodes, Helena Christensen IS drummer Roger Taylor, while Yasmin Le Bon does a droll turn as “the anonymous guitarist”. (Only joking about the free bit.) Directed by Jonas (Telephone) Åkerlund, Girl Panic! will have its world premiere at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year Awards 2011 at Claridge’s Hotel on Monday, and is released next day online at Vevo.
Wags at YouTube commented today: “It could be a Duran Duran commercial brought to us by Swarovski” … or “This Swarvoski commercial is brought to you by Duran Duran.”
❏ Wikipedia footnote: “Swarovski is also product-placed in the 2011 J-Lo promo video for the single On The Floor.” Eat your heart out, J-Lo.
+++ ❚ DURAN DURAN WOW NEW YORK covering Frankie’s Relax at their sold-out show at Madison Square Garden last night, in a 20th anniversary celebration for radio stars Scott & Todd of 95.5 WPLJ. Girl Panic! remains the stand-out single from the album All You Need Is Now.
+++ ❚ DURAN ARE ELECTRIC in the first fan vid to hit YouTube at 2am Seattle time. A student at SHS High called Kristy was testing her new cell phone at the Everett WA gig and caught this blazing first-night performance of their 1984 smash, Wild Boys — with a halfway break-out for Relax!, the Frankie Goes To Hollywood hit from 1983. And Simon Le Bon sounds back on fine form after suffering dramatic vocal problems that enforced a four-month break in the All You Need Is Now world tour, halfway through its North America leg.
John Taylor at the Everett Comcast Arena, grabbed from video by kristy34a at YouTube
In yesterday’s Spinner.com interview, SLB said: “I did go to a vocal coach but I didn’t find that that was really the right thing for me. It was a voice therapist that really helped me. I’ve got a very individual style of singing. Coaches tend to have an idea in their mind of the right way to do it, and I don’t think that necessarily is the case.”
In another interview, for the Seattle Herald, bassist John Taylor promised America a “sparkling new multimedia spectacle with screens synchronized to the music”. Thanks go to Kristy for two more vids in HD, below.
❏ Seattle set-list: Before The Rain/ All You Need Is Now/ Hungry Like The Wolf/ A View To A Kill/ Blame The Machines/ Come Undone/ Safe/ Notorious/ Other People’s Lives/ Leave A Light On/ Tiger Tiger/ The Reflex/ Ordinary World/ The Man Who Stole A Leopard/ Planet Earth/ Sunrise/ Wild Boys/ Relax/ (Encore) Girl Panic!/ Girls On Film
+++ ❏ CATCH-UP: Shapersofthe80s wraps up Duran’s 2010-11 comeback with links to the Unstaged online concert March 23 at the Mayan theatre, Los Angeles, plus vital links and video interviews
❏ CATCH-UP: 30 years ago the 80s supergroup’s debut single Planet Earth peaked at No 12 in the UK chart
❏ CATCH-UP: Shapersofthe80s tells how Duran’s road to stardom began in the Studio 54 of Birmingham, UK, in 1980
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❏ Duran Duran play Girl Panic! live at the Coachella music & arts festival, April 17, 2011
❏ Girl Panic! directed for Genaro.tv by Alan Hughes, a professional graphic designer in the UK
❚ ON FRIDAY DURAN DURAN resume their North American tour, which was interrupted in May by Simon Le Bon’s vocal problems. From Sept 23 in Everett, WA, they weave their way to Atlantic City on Oct 29.
❏ Duran Duran’s live version of The Man Who Stole A Leopard ft. Kelis, directed by David Lynch for Unstaged, Mar 23, 2011
❏ Elegant French production of The Man Who… directed by Jethro Massey, with Faith Anne Gosselin, Sorrel & Massimiliano, Mocchia Di Coggiola
❏ Animation of The Man Who… by a production group in Second Life dedicated to use machinima as a medium for telling stories. Producer, Rafale Kamachi
❏ The Man Who… recast as PG-rated kitchen-sink psycho-drama from Russia: scripted, directed, edited by Nina Urmanova. (Some gratuitious bloodshed.)
❏ Mediterranea uploaded by garibaldino2 in Italy
❏ Blame The Machines set to an immaculate print of the 60s sci-fi movie Barbarella (with glimpses of the crazed scientist Dr Durand-Durand who prompted the band’s name at the keyboard of his orgasmatron in which Jane Fonda is being pleasured). Uploaded by MrChuckChapman in the USA
❏ Winning version of Blame The Machines for Genaro.tv directed by Sebastian Mihailescu, currently studying at the Caragiale National Academy of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography in Bucharest, Romania
❏ Winning Russian animation of Being Followed for Genaro.tv directed by Aleksey Khruslov of Kakadu Collapse
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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
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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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