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TEEN HEARTS THROB FOR BRITAIN'S DURAN DURAN
Published: Friday, February 24, 1984
GARY GRAFF
Duran Duran will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at Cobo Arena. The show is sold out. Screaming legions of girls call them by
their first names only and know every birth date, eye color and favorite food. The British press touts them as the Fab Five,
and its American counterparts -- from Rolling Stone to glossy teenybopper magazines -- follow suit.
They're the hottest pop band on radio and video, far more open with personal information than the leading competition for
teen hearts, Michael Jackson. Twenty years ago it was the Beatles; today it's the members of Duran Duran. Good-looking
and young (aged 21-25), the five musicians soak up the fame, but they're not embracing the comparison to the Fab Four.
"AS FOR the Beatles comparisons, we don't like them," says drummer Roger Taylor, 23, from the sitting room of his Los
Angeles hotel suite. "The Beatles were the '60s. We're trying to do something for the '80s, not the '60s.
"People put us down as a teenybopper thing, like the Osmonds," he explains. "It makes me angry when I read reviews and
they say the audience is full of 15-year-old screaming girls. It's really about half guys -- the young girls can make their
screams heard better, that's all, while the guys tend to hang at the back of the hall."
It's gone beyond noisy adulation, however. These girls, and a few guys, jam hotel lobbies and backstage entrances at arenas,
waiting for a glimpse of their heroes -- Roger Taylor, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor and Andy Taylor (none of
the Taylors are related).
The girls also call hotels, posing as reporters, only to giggle hysterically when a Duran answers his phone.
"THEY DO ridiculous things," Taylor says. "We were in a dressing room in Seattle, where there was a table with food and a
long, white tablecloth all the way to the ground. We were in there about a half-hour, just talking, when someone heard some
whispering under the table. We lifted the tablecloth and there were five fans under the table waiting for us.
"We've become almost like prisoners," he says. "Now I wouldn't even think about walking out the front door. We'd get
mobbed." But, he hastens, "We wouldn't swap our audience for the world. The kids' screaming makes it exciting. It would be
very boring if the concerts were all intellectual. I think we've got the best of both worlds; we've got people who listen purely
for the music and the kids who go bonkers."
Until the past year or so, the six-year-old band's American audience was made up mostly of the more passive listeners who
were seduced by the group's self-titled "night music," a marriage of melody and disco-style beats. They danced, but they
didn't scream like the kids in Europe.
IT TOOK MTV, the cable music channel, to expose the group to the lucrative teen audience. By the end of 1982, those
teens were gobbling up copies of Duran Duran's second album, "Rio," which had been released six months before, and
"Hungry Like the Wolf" became a hit single on its third re-release. A re-issue of the first Duran album sold just as well.
But the group was back in Europe by that time, resolved to never return to America after an unsuccessful club tour and an
opening slot for the disintegrating Blondie.
"Nothing was happening while we were (in America)," Taylor says. "We were doing every radio station we could, every
scummy club. We said, 'That's it. We're never coming back.
"The success was totally unbelievable for us," he says. "We sort of watched it from across the channel. It was a bit unreal to
us, because we weren't here to see it." Now it's hard to avoid signs of Duran Duran's invasion. Its third album, "Seven and
the Ragged Tiger," is perched in the top 10, MTV's playlist is crammed with Duran favorites and a fresh raft of posters are
primed for bedroom walls.
"This is the loudest audience in the world," Taylor says. "In Seattle, they sold seats behind the stage, so the fans were all
around us. The first two songs, we could hardly hear ourselves. We said, 'This is it. We're home!' We thought we were over
the top in England; here it's blown our minds."
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