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DURAN DURAN DEFIES DETRACTORS - WITH DEPTH, DEPTH
Author: By Steve Morse Globe Staff
Date: Thursday, March 15, 1984
In concert at the Worcester Centrum through tonight.
WORCESTER - Duran Duran may yet have the last laugh. In spite of all the sneers that they're just a bunch of stiff-necked
English prima donnas with luck on their side, they put on a friendly and very professional arena show last night.
Their songs crackled with much more clout than on their overly polished records, helping turn the Worcester Centrum into a
high-pitched, high- temperature dance factory.
While the band can rightly be accused of being too frivolous in their Grammy Award-winning videos, they do not deserve the
same complaint in person. On the contrary, they worked hard - scrambling around the stage like well- tuned gymnasts,
spinning and leaping every which way while turning some of their famed disco anthems ("Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Union
of the Snake" in particular) into bona fide rock 'n' roll.
Most of Duran Duran's barb-throwing detractors have never seen them in concert, but suffice it to say the band doesn't fall
into the trite Bay City Rollers status of which they've been accused. Many people in the crowd, in fact, were older than
expected - a tribute to the band's heavy inroads into dance club playlists, not just the Top Forty charts.
The concert did not sell out - tonight's is sold out, but last night's drew 8,500 - though the band was not fazed in the least,
giving the crowd all the spectacle it could handle.
The stage set looked like an urban disco, as glowing circles and radiating mists of pink, blue, yellow and orange lit up an
immaculate white floor. There were also loads of smoke bombs - shades of a heavy rock show - but they were beautifully lit
by criss-crossing colors, producing many gauzy atmospheres that evoked a late-night walk through the moors in a Thomas
Hardy novel.
The blend of personalities on stage was also impressive. Singer Simon LeBon churned along the dance floor like a
combination of the early hip- shaking Elvis Presley and the 1984 Michael Jackson, as he frequently pirouetted and even
pulled off a backward-stepping "moon walk."
Guitarist Andy Taylor, dressed in a flashy red kimono, was equally active, blasting out funk and rock licks while racing to a
rear platform, where he often leaned against bass player John Taylor and induced Richter-scale- breaking screams from the
crowd.
But hysteria aside, Duran Duran showed they have musical depth and not just teen appeal. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes played
some lush, Mike Oldfield-type passages on his computerized Fairlight synthesizer (a $35,000 instrument that shows the band
is plowing some of its profits back into the music, not just into jet-setting), while vocalist LeBon dug deep for some moody
ballads that would not have been out of place in the repertoires of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie.
The meat of the show was still dance music, but the memory that will last is of how broadly appealing this show was. LeBon
even ranged into acoustic guitar, harmonica and recorder, while on the other side was the crunching punk-metal of "Careless
Memory."
It added up to a pretty tasty menu from a band that has been unfairly labeled spineless by many critics in the press. In today's
Calendar, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon talks about the band's philosophy and its roots in British punk rock.
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