(#292: 3 December 1983, 1 week)
Track listing: The Reflex/New Moon On
Monday/(I’m Looking For) Cracks In The Pavement/I Take The Dice/Of Crime And
Passion/Union Of The Snake/Shadows On Your Side/Tiger Tiger/The Seventh
Stranger
If 1983 TPL has taught me anything, it is the
old lesson never to take anything for granted. When I wrote about Raiders Of The Pop Charts over four
months ago I gloomily predicted that most of that year’s twenty-one
chart-topping albums would be wretched and/or inexplicable, and since then both
Lena and I have been constantly surprised by how regularly and radically our
expectations have been overturned. Records which were favourites at the time
have turned out to be retrospective disappointments, and a high proportion of
records I would have dismissed at the time have turned out to be surprisingly
rewarding.
So it has proven
to be the case with the third Duran Duran album. The reason why U2’s live
mini-album Under A Blood Red Sky does
not appear directly in this tale is that it finished second behind Seven And The Ragged Tiger (although the
chart positions were reversed in the NME).
What doesn’t come across, however, is the enormous statistical margin by which
Duran were ahead of U2, nor indeed how huge a group they were in late 1983
Britain; note that this album went platinum in its first week of release. Words
like “Durandemonium” were regularly used in newspaper headlines. They were the
biggest thing, if not since the Beatles, then certainly since the Rollers.
And the two
respective constituencies have to be taken into account. U2 were, in late 1983,
a rock band, and very firmly a boys’ band (“Stories For Boys” as they
themselves might put it). Whereas Duran were loved, primarily, by the girls;
and it is for this reason, I would posit, that their critical stock has
remained at a relatively low level, even when two decades’ worth of musicians,
both in Britain and the United States, have declared how important they were to
their own development, how deeply they influenced their own music.
Boys sneered; but
girls listened. I have previously said that Duran could be considered what we
might call a “portal” group; an approachable route by which young listeners
might have their minds opened to the work of the many artists who influenced
the group. How many teenagers got into Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, the
Pistols, Chic, or for that matter into art, or literature, or cinema, because
Duran was their first port of call?
And, for a
while, they pulled it off quite successfully. They moved rapidly from the predominantly
electronic airs of their eponymous debut album to a more settled funk/glam
crossover on Rio; true, the record
may in some ways have been Tin Drum
for beginners, but to accuse Duran of not being Japan is, I think, missing the
point; you become enticed by “Save A Prayer” and, more pressingly, “The Chauffeur,”
and then you progress to things like “Swing”
and “Ghosts,” if, indeed, progression it be.
The title of
their third album was a reference to the five band members and their two
managers, chasing the dragon of success (the “ragged tiger”). At the time of
release, the record was generally ridiculed; as tax exiles, they wrote the
songs in Cannes and recorded them in Montserrat, and then Sydney (the cover
picture was taken on the steps of the State Library of New South Wales, in
Sydney’s Macquarie Street), and the record was regarded as hurriedly assembled cocaine-fuelled
indulgence with inscrutable lyrics, with a general air as if punk had never
happened.
This belief was
perhaps encouraged by Culture Club, who famously, and repeatedly, proclaimed
that Duran were about the things their fans couldn’t have in life, whereas
Culture Club were about the things they could
have. Well, that might be true, but possibly not in the sense they thought; put
against Colour By Numbers – both
album sleeves were designed by Assorted iMaGes, and each plays as a negation of,
or complement to, the other – Seven And
The Ragged Tiger seems to be about things that can’t be had, or reached.
Some of the lyrics may refer to drugs; somebody claimed, with reason, that “Union
Of The Snake” was about oral sex. I’m not going to try to pick the bones of
Simon le Bon’s words here, but it has to be said that whatever they may mean,
he delivers them with at least as much conviction as Boy George delivers his.
The album is not
really New Romantic or New Pop; New Art-Rock may be nearer the mark. But so
much of it is reassured to a degree that belies the accusations of laxity and
indulgence, and whatever you may make of le Bon’s vocal stylings – they are an
acquired taste, but I can’t think of anybody else whose voice would have worked
so well in this context – the musicians
with him are constantly inventive, never settling for the obvious. “The Reflex,”
here in its original form, may be cocaine-fuelled paranoia – “I sold the Renoir
and the TV set” plays like a setting for Trainspotting
written by Bret Easton Ellis – but its funk, with its stops, starts and
ruminations, is noticeably sparkier and more involving than anything Bowie was
essaying at the time, while providing a bridge back to songs like “Rio”;
brooding twilit verses giving way to euphoric sunrises of choruses. Likewise, “Union
Of The Snake,” which shockingly failed to climb beyond number three as a single
(“IS THIS IS THE END OF DURAN DURAN?,” headlines proclaimed), works
surprisingly well in its slowly escalating paranoia, le Bon’s voice reminding
me of a David Sylvian caught midway between “Adolescent Sex” and “Art Of
Parties,” between the glamour and the art – and Andy Hamilton’s growling
soprano sax also helps develop a faintly autumnal mood; it’s “Let’s Dance,” but
far, far better.
Elsewhere on the
record there is nothing that is less than interesting. “New Moon On Monday”
stutters into being with le Bon seemingly trying to be Elvis (“Shake up the
picture, the liquid mixture,” done like the first line of “All Shook Up”) but
then the song infiltrates into existence with its crowd noises, firework
explosions and Nick Rhodes and John Taylor ceaselessly inventive on keyboards
and bass respectively. The rest of side one plays like a more playful third
side of For Your Pleasure; “Cracks In
The Pavement” is angry and determined (“If I had a car I’d drive it INSANE!”
yelps le Bon, perhaps nodding to Bowie or even Bolan); “I Take The Dice” has le
Bon seemingly trying to exorcise the ghost of Sylvian (his protracted “MID-NIIIIIIIIGHT!!”s)
and “Of Crime And Passion” involves harmonic and rhythmic structures which seem
to me to point the way pretty directly to mid-nineties Blur (specifically “Trouble
At The Message Centre,” although I also think of the refrain from “Tracy Jacks,”
“I’d love to stay here and be normal/But then it’s just so overrated,” which
really could be this record’s theme). The chord changes throughout these three
songs are as surprising, joyous and inevitable as Roxy at their best and most
elusive (“The Bogus Man”).
Yet again,
however, it has to be said that these are not happy songs. “Shadows On Your
Side” continues in much the same vein – not so much the Pistols plus Chic, but
New York Dolls nonchalance mixed with Norman Whitfield stoic despair – and when
le Bon proclaims, “You can run, you can dive, you can stand and you can soar,”
he is not particularly urging the listener to be a maker or doer; it is more
the dawning realisation that no matter where or what or who you are, regardless
of how big you might get – you never escape yourself. “Tiger Tiger” is an
instrumental which moves from pointillistic abstraction to a slowly-emergng
majesty, with Hamilton’s saxophone again referring us back to Avalon, or possibly even to “Subterraneans.”
It is strange
how so many of these albums depend on the last song. Rio certainly did – all that tongue-in-cheek glamour culminating in
a desolate, terminal beach, or is it just the spectre of having to grow up? –
and so does Seven; “The Seventh
Stranger,” slow, patient and tragic – just like “Victims” and “Hello” – is one
of the great Duran songs: the chorus line “I’m changing my name just as the sun
goes down” is set against hauntingly, even poignantly affecting descending
chords – John Taylor’s bass playing subtle tribute to Bernard Edwards, or would
that be James Jamerson? – and a multidimensional elegy which does betray the
air of a long, decaying sunset, the end
of something. And for somebody constantly accused of writing deliberately
obfuscatory lyrics, le Bon’s words and message here are remarkably clear; he
wants you to try to understand him and how he is, and why, despite everything,
the love, adulation and success, he might still want to disappear and become
somebody else. He eventually does disappear – this is Duran’s “Taking Islands
In Africa” – and the other four musicians all make a loud, final, slightly
desperate push, perhaps to hang on to life, before Roger Taylor’s rattlesnake
cymbal – the union of the snake - draws a line under the record.
In fact, I found
this song enormously affecting – in hindsight, one can see how the teenage
Albarn and Coxon might have been inspired to start on the road which culminated
in “He Thought Of Cars” and “Yuko And Hiro,” although I couldn’t stop thinking
of “Under The Westway”; again, an ending.
And so we approach the end of this most puzzling of years, with just one album
left to consider, and it is clear that the first wave of New Pop has culminated,
or climaxed, and is now dying, or solidifying into something else, something
older; but also clear that nothing, but nothing,
can be taken for granted. Seven And The
Ragged Tiger is a remarkably inventive and ambitious record – oh, did I
mention “Decades” in relation to “The Seventh Stranger”? If not, I ought to
have done – from a group who, it seems to me, have been hated for entirely the
wrong reasons, and who are, perhaps out of all the artists who have had number
one albums this year, the act most in need of drastic re-evaluation. Ask Mark
Ronson and his record collection how important a season autumn can be.
Next: the end is
the beginning.
