DURAN DURAN AND THE UTILITY OF FLUFF

Originally appeared in The Puritan. 

I could never buy a record by an ugly group. I just couldn’t.

—John Taylor

A few years back, I conceived and submitted a proposal to the 33 1/3 book series. For those unacquainted with the line, they are short-ish music books, each volume by a unique author and dedicated to discussion of a single influential album. Most are relatively straight-up perusals of critically enshrined records (Let It Be, Harvest) though there have been a few oddball outliers throughout the series’ hundred-plus run (Carl Wilson’s take on Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love, for example). It is safe to say these books tend to cater to a very specific niche.

Every so often, the editors send out a general call for submissions. As a writer and musician who has dabbled in entwining the two forms, I felt I could polish my meagre credentials enough to at least warrant consideration of a pitch. This impulse was also due to timing: I was then a couple of hundred pages into a sprawling, somewhat directionless novel, and was beginning to suspect my heart wasn’t really in it. A 33 1/3 book, by design of limited length and focus, seemed a refreshing shift. I thought it might prove a resuscitating move in my own, frankly, not-so-fiery writing quasi-career.

My first inclination was to write on Frank Sinatra’s 1965 LP September of My Years, the melancholic strains of which I’d been soaking up. I quickly recognized, of course, that deep jazzbos had made entire professions from writing on Sinatra and his body of work, which I knew next to nothing about. To opine with any authority in that realm would require a colossal amount of research.

Focusing instead on my existing well of knowledge—admittedly, wide but shallow—I thought of a band I loved as a kid, probably the first thing I had considered myself a “fan” of, but which had received little in the way of critical appraisal. I whipped off a few prefatory pages, feeling good about this new direction. Here’s one of the opening passages, which for the sake of verisimilitude, I have resisted tinkering with:

In 1983 Diana, Princess of Wales, was the unrivalled focal subject of the British press’s fevered attentions. With her demure, composed public image and youthful energy standing out amid a putrefying monarchy, Diana had, in her wedding to Charles the previous year, achieved iconic status. The relentless press in the U.K. and beyond was naturally voracious for any scoop or insight into the person behind the persona.

So it became headline news when, queried about her favourite music, Diana’s answer demonstrated a contemporary bent unexpected from the palace: Manchester-bred pop group Duran Duran. For a charity concert at the Aston Villa ground at Villa Park, the five-piece band was handpicked by Diana as featured performers and was even invited to meet with the royal couple; in the televised visit in July of that year, the band appears elated by the invitation, even passing along a stylish grey DD logo-adorned sweatshirt to Prince Charles. The concert itself was almost cancelled due to an IRA bomb threat—a plot that would turn out to have been legitimate, only to be thwarted by Sean O’Callaghan, who was working within the Irish Republican Army as an informant for the Irish government. Despite the threat, the concert unfolded successfully and without incident. Duran Duran had been semi-officially anointed the reigning princes of British monarchic pride.

Heavy-handed, yes, and sort of drab. But writing this stuff was a welcome relief after vexing fruitlessly over non-concepts like “emotional truth” in my fiction. Duran Duran were the kind of group that made for a perfect intro to the pop-rock paradigm. They shot expensive videos in Sri Lanka, delivered soaring singalong choruses, but exhibited enough experimentation and artsy-ness to warrant repeat listening, and endless perusal of their cryptic album graphics.

Their 1983 record Seven and the Ragged Tiger is considered by even their fiercest advocates to be a pretty mediocre offering, buoyed by a few moments of distinction. But I was interested in how that particular record, and the context of its production, could be framed as emblematic of a luxuriant postmodern eighties sheen; its release, I might contend, marked an era’s terminus. Again, from my proposal:

1983 was a year of tumult and tension in Great Britain, a moment both of dramatic shifts and hopes of reaffirmed tradition. Deep into the Cold War, the West stared down the Soviet threat; global eradication had become both a source of constant terror and a cartoon. In Britain, the street dissent roused in seasons before had been mostly stifled, and in July, bolstered by victory in the Falklands and a ruptured Labour Party, Thatcher’s Tories bulwarked for another term following a landslide victory. In England, as throughout most of the West, the early eighties was an era that privileged success, or the polish of such a perception. And so was born the age of the New Romantic. These kids were future-leaning and androgynous (yet horny), hearkening back to chaste generations before yet strapping any whim of free love with something shaded in neon, preferably in taut grids. To the average schmoe, the end was nigh; to fashionable young people, this fear meant everything—including punk’s erasure—was a huge yawn. Better to be bored and beautiful than tremble in expectation of nuclear annihilation.

This is about the point at which I began to experience the first real quivers of doubt in this project. Undaunted as I was in slinging zingers about Jamesonian historicity vis-à-vis generational combatoire and “post-Warholian eradication,” writing about S&TRT was turning out to be almost too enjoyable. I worried the whole enterprise was a trifle, or worse, a waste of time—not necessarily my own, or not yet, but that of whoever might eventually read it.

Read the rest here.