Duran Duran biography
Only after it was re-released in the US in November, with heavy promotion as a dance album, did Rio begin to climb the American charts six months after its European success. MTV placed "Hungry Like The Wolf" and several other Duran Duran videos into heavy rotation, pushing it and "Rio" into the top twenty on the US charts in early 1983. The seduction ballad "Save A Prayer" also did well. "The band was a natural for music television," noted Rolling Stone magazine. "They may be the first rock group to ride in on a video wave." In the end, the album peaked at number 6 in the US and remained on the charts there for 129 weeks - almost two and a half years. In 2003 Rio was listed at number 65 in the NME 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time.
1983-1985: The "Fab Five"
The band began 1983 by playing the MTV New Year's Eve Rock 'n' Roll Ball with "Hungry Like The Wolf" still climbing the charts in the US, and the American reissue of the "Rio" single to follow in March. To satisfy America's appetite for their music, Also in 1983, keyboardist Nick Rhodes produced the UK number 1 and US number 5 hit "Too Shy" for the English band Kajagoogoo and Andy Taylor became the first member of Duran Duran to get married. The band's main pop rivals were now Culture Club and Wham!. But Duran Duran's explosive popularity easily surpassed these competing bands globally.
The band spent the next year as tax exiles, writing songs at a chateau in France where The Tube with Jools Holland filmed a documentary with the band in May 1983 before they flew to Montserrat and then Sydney to record and mix their third album. During the summer, they returned to the UK to perform two concerts, the first on 20 July in front of the Prince and Princess of Wales at the Dominion Theatre, and 3 days later played a charity concert at Aston Villa's home ground. The band were under pressure to follow up the success of Rio and the recording process took over six months as different band members went through bouts of perfectionism and insecurity. A newly decadent lifestyle and substance abuse issues added complications. In the documentary film Extraordinary World, filmed a decade later, Rhodes described the effect on their sound as "barely controlled hysteria, scratching beneath the surface".
The new album, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, included the late 1983 hit "Union of the Snake" (with the soprano sax solo by Andy Hamilton). Following "Hungry Like the Wolf", "Rio", "Save A Prayer" and "Is There Something I Should Know", Duran Duran had had five US. Top Twenty hits from three different albums in a single year. The band made music headlines by deciding to release the "Union of the Snake" video to MTV a full week before the single was released to radio at a time when the industry feared video really might kill the radio star. They followed up with "New Moon on Monday", which reached Number 9 in the UK. Their next single "The Reflex", taken from Seven and the Ragged Tiger and given a significant remix overhaul by Nile Rodgers of Chic fame, became their first number one hit in the United States. "The Reflex" was also their second and final UK number one and was successful in numerous other countries around the world.
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