Tag Archives: Planet Earth

➤ Duran reveal secrets behind their songs

Posted on 3 Apr 2021 | Leave a comment
Duran Duran, Simon Le Bon, pop music, anniversary, live concerts, Radio2,

Primed for action in 2021: Roger, John, Simon and Nick

10 APRIL UPDATE: Tonight’s Duran show is cancelled due
to radio schedule changes. We’re not sure but it should
go ahead next Saturday 17th as planned.

40
YEARS
ON

❚ THIS WEEK AND NEXT Duran Duran talk in depth to super-fan Claudia Winkleman about their biggest hits and best-loved tracks, to celebrate 40 years together as a band. Each member of the group reveals secrets about the songs and Simon Le Bon gives a rare insight behind the lyrics that he has penned. The guys take us through their catalogue along with chat from Mark Ronson, Nile Rodgers and more. Tune into BBC Radio 2 on Saturday 10 April at 9pm and again Saturday 17th for another hour’s worth.

Duran Duran was formed in Birmingham by keyboardist Nick Rhodes and bassist John Taylor in 1978 and in 1980 happily joined the New Romantic Scene. The group have sold over 100 million records and have had over 14 singles in the UK Top 10. They recently dropped a tribute cover of David Bowie’s Five Years with Mike Garson on piano, none of them looking a day over whateva.

LIVE SHOWS THIS AUTUMN

➢ Duran Duran’s show at Scarborough Open Air Theatre has been rescheduled to Friday 17 September 2021. Original tickets remain valid for the new date and final tickets are on sale now.

➢ Duran Duran’s show at the Isle of Wight Festival has now been rescheduled to Sunday 19 September 2021. Tickets are on sale now. All existing tickets will remain valid for September so please keep hold of them. If you cannot make the new dates please contact your ticket provider for a refund.

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s: Celebrating 40 years since Duran’s debut single Planet Earth hit the charts

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Posted in 40th anniversary, BBC, Concert, interviews, live music, Pop music

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1980 ➤ When Duran Duran put Brummie Romantics on the map

Posted on 2 Feb 2021 | Leave a comment
Duran Duran, New Romantics

Duran Duran in 1980: Birmingham’s fluffiest New Romantics

40
YEARS
ON

◼ 40 YEARS AGO TODAY the Birmingham club-band Duran Duran released their debut single Planet Earth, less than two months after signing to EMI. It charted in mid-March, peaked at No 12, and bagged the band a spot on Top of the Pops, Britain’s premier music TV show. They were the first New Romantic band from outside London to make good, and the writer Steve Jansen claims that “inside of three short years, Duran were officially the biggest band on the planet”.

He celebrated Duran’s birthpangs with a thorough survey of their origins titled Switch It On! – Planet Earth & The Launch of Duran Duran, on the blog gimmeawristband.com which though sadly defunct today, is preserved at the Wayback Machine. As a shorter alternative, Shapersofthe80s documented a few key excerpts from his epic account, where Jansen talked to all the key players involved during the run-up to the band’s chart debut. They are published here with his permission…

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
Read Steve Jansen on how other people’s faith put
the Brummies into the charts

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
1980, How Duran Duran’s road to stardom began
in the Studio 54 of Birmingham

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Posted in Blitz Kids, Clubbing, dance music, History, interviews, New Romantics, Pop charts, Swinging 80s, videos, Youth culture

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➤ Duran rock NASA’s Rocket Garden, feet firmly on Planet Earth

Posted on 19 Jul 2019 | Leave a comment
Kennedy Space Centre, NASA, Apollo 50th gala, Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran,

Cape Canaveral concert: Duran Duran celebrating the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969, accompanied by a 300 drone art performance by Studio Drift. (Getty)

◼ WHO ELSE BUT DURAN DURAN – whose debut hit in 1981 was titled Planet Earth – could the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida have chosen to celebrate the 50th anniversary of man’s journey to the Moon in Apollo 11 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on its surface? On Tuesday the Rocket Garden at NASA’s primary launch centre at Cape Canaveral saw Duran Duran climaxing the Apollo 50th gala day of special events with a headline concert backed by a 16-piece orchestra and 12-voice choir, plus 300 Intel Shooting Star drones flying in formation overhead.

Performing before the Saturn 1B launch vehicle and a platoon of iconic space rockets, Duran were watched by all the surviving astronauts who have walked on the Moon since 1969, plus an audience who had paid $300 a ticket to support the Aldrin Family Foundation. Obviously the British band kicked off with The Universe Alone, followed by a selection of their space-themed hits including Planet Earth, New Moon On Monday, Anyone Out There, Astronaut, and Ordinary World. The Brummie boys capped their 90-minute show with their biggest hit Rio.

Keyboardist Nick Rhodes, who had watched the Moon-landing on TV as a seven-year-old, said: “It was surreal and awe-inspiring. Science-fiction unfolding before us, opening our minds to what mankind was capable of achieving.”

Kennedy Space Centre, NASA, Apollo 50th gala, Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran,

Duran Duran at Cape Canaveral: playing their space-themed hits to honour the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon launch. (Getty)


❏ KSC setlist – The Universe Alone, Planet Earth/Space Oddity, Anyone Out There, Astronaut, Ordinary World, (Reach Up for the) Sunrise, Walking on the Moon (Police cover), Wild Boys, Hungry Like the Wolf, Come Undone, Notorious, Pressure Off, White Lines (Don’t Do It) (Grandmaster Melle Mel cover), Girls on Film, Save a Prayer, View to a Kill, Rio.


➢ More pictures at Duran’s own website

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2015 ➤ Pitch now to make a video for Duran’s slinky come-back party single

Posted on 25 Jun 2015 | Leave a comment
Pressure Off, Paper Gods, Duran Duran, album, video,UK tour, US tour

Duran reignited for 2015: Roger Taylor drums, John Taylor bass, Nick Rhodes keyboards, Simon Le Bon vocals. (Photograph by Stephanie Pistel)

◼ FILM-MAKERS AND CREATIVE TYPES, Duran Duran are talking to you! Deadline for pitching your treatment to make a new lyric video is Sunday 28 June. When they threw out a free-for-all invitation in 2011, dozens of brilliant music videos resulted from people adapting classic Duran tracks. Now DD are trying something similar for their single Pressure Off, the first from a new album, in another video collaboration with Genero TV – click now to apply.

In September, after a gap of nearly five years, the former house band of the Brummie Rum Runner club’s New Romantic scene launch a new studio album – Paper Gods, their 14th. As part of a recording deal with Warner Bros Records, the album starts the next chapter in the Duran story, and features a host of A-list collaborators who include Nile Rodgers, Mark Ronson, Mr Hudson, Janelle Monáe, John Frusciante, Kiesza and Davide Ross.

➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
2011, Ten killer videos made as tributes
to Duran’s return to creativity

Duran Duran,Pressure Off, Janelle Monae,pop music

Pressure Off features Janelle Monáe

“We found a whole new level of inspiration on this album,” says the band’s keyboardist and aesthetic overlord, Nick Rhodes. “We were talking the other day about artists that have been around for a long time – our contemporaries and some older ones, and there’s only a handful of the latter now, still out there playing shows. And we were saying, ‘What albums did they make this far down the line that we own?’ And that was a difficult one.”

DD seem convinced that this album will be one of the most visceral and daring of their career. A senior editor at Yahoo Music has already given Pressure Off a rave review, saying: “The sexy, slinky, all-around groovy party track is the legendary group’s best single in years. . . The remix-ready cut sounds fresh and modern, even as it traffics in D2’s tried-and-true signature sounds: super-Chic chickenscratch guitars, thick ’n’ gooey basslines, sassy soul-sister backup vocals, irresistibly effervescent chants.” Listen now at YouTube and you decide (no prizes for linking the cocktail of images with DD classic hits). Pre-order Duran Duran’s Paper Gods on iTunes and get an instant download of Pressure Off.

➢ Duran Duran 2015 tour dates at their own website – The four-man Duran line-up is set to headline at Bestival, in the UK, in September, and a trickle of European tour dates kicked off this week in Barcelona and The Hague, following up with the US and UK before climaxing in December.

➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
1981, Birth of Duran’s Planet Earth — when other people’s faith put the Brummies into the charts

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1981 ➤ The day Duran’s fortunes really took flight

Posted on 5 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

❚ 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.”

Duran Duran, Simon Le Bon, Rum Runner, 1980, New Romantics,Planet Earth, video

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, Duran Duran, Rum Runner, video, 1980, Planet Earth

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

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