Duran Duran: Middle Class Heroes

Simon Le Bon Wears Blue Underpants

We had almost reached our destination, the massive, modern National Exhibition Centre outside Birmingham, England, when it happened. Simon Le Bon sneezed. And he kachooed with such force that he popped off the buttons that were holding up his black, silver-studded trousers.

Given the circumstances, this could only be viewed as a major catastrophe. After all, this was the Simon Le Bon. The man who, even though his voice didn’t break until he was seventeen, is now the lead singer for Duran Duran, one of the most popular bands in the world. The man who, even though he was never very popular with girls in school and didn’t have his first real girlfriend until the age of fifteen or sixteen, is now one of pop music’s biggest sex symbols, his picture adorning the bedroom walls of countless little girls. And there he was, standing in the aisle of the band’s plush tour bus, with his pants — the very pants he intended to wear onstage that night—popped open at the waist. Gad.

If Duran Duran were like most other rock bands, Simon simply could have changed trousers at the arena. But as they toured their native country just before Christmas, Duran Duran weren’t just any old rock group. They were a rock group on a real roll: Their third and latest album, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, had already reached Number One in the U.K., while in America it had sold more than a million copies within a couple of weeks of its release. And because of that popularity, the group had taken to dressing for their shows at their hotel and dashing in and out of their concert halls, thereby avoiding the mayhem that can result from hordes of prepubescent girls straining to get a glimpse of the band members, or an autograph, or even a piece of their clothing. A button, perhaps.

As a result, it was imperative that something be done about Simon’s pants. Quickly. So as the bus roared closer and closer to the arena, the twenty-five-year-old Le Bon — he swears it’s his real name, claiming Huguenot ancestors who moved to England in the fifteenth century (never mind that the Huguenots only date back to sixteenth-century France) — peeled off his trousers and handed them over to the band’s two Australian wardrobe women.

As the seamstresses set about sewing on some new buttons, I pondered the situation: an honest-to-God teen idol standing right there in front of me, wearing only a vest, a T-shirt and a pair of underpants. Blue underpants, mind you. It was not, frankly, a particularly awe-inspiring sight. Le Bon, you see, is no John Travolta when it comes to physiques. Not a slob, just slightly chubby legs, a little bit of a gut.

But, then, Simon’s problem used to be worse. A while back, it’s said, his fellow band members had taken to referring to him as “Lardo.” Still, he wasn’t too pleased about the pants, and even a positive review of one of Duran Duran’s concerts earlier in the week, shown to him by the group’s publicist, failed to boost Le Bon’s spirits. “The picture,” Simon snorted, “makes me look like Porky Pig.”

With perfect timing, the wardrobe women finished their work just as the coach wheeled its way up to the arena’s backstage entrance. Inside the hall, as a full house of 11,500 teens and preteens waited for their heroes, four young boys on the main floor were basking in their own few minutes of celebrity. Immaculately decked out as Duran Duran carbon copies, the boys signed autographs and posed for pictures with the Durannies, as the band’s fans have come to be called in England. So thrilled were the girls that they didn’t refer to these young men by their own names but by the names of the real band members: “Simon!” “John!” “Nick!” After all, if you can’t have the real thing….

When the lights went down, the crowd, of course, went nuts. It was the kind of scene that’s been played over and over again in pop music, from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to the Beatles to Rick Springfield. Girls crying. Girls fainting. Girls screaming. At times, the audience created such a din that even if one could hear the band’s music, it was impossible to concentrate on it. Not that it probably mattered to a good portion of the crowd. As Andy Taylor, Duran Duran’s twenty-two-year-old guitarist, somewhat glumly pointed out a few days later, “It’s been said that we could probably go up onstage and fart and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Not that Duran Duran did that. Inspired by their own childhood idols—Queen, David Bowie, Roxy Music — these guys believe in putting on a show. And on this British tour, they were putting on their flashiest show yet: extra musicians (a percussionist, a sax player, two backup singers), tons of lights, six Roman columns across the back of the stage. Sure, its grandness smacked of pretentiousness, the extra musicians seemed to serve little purpose, and Le Bon’s tortured singing and klutzy dancing were at times an embarrassment.

But Duran Duran delivered all a fan could have asked for in the way of music: an hour-and-a-half-long set, replete with the group’s numerous hit singles, like “Rio,” “Planet Earth,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Girls on Film,” “Is There Something I Should Know?” and their latest smash, “Union of the Snake.” Still, the highlight of the show had nothing to do with those songs. It had to do with Simon, who, midway through the set, suddenly stopped dancing and raced over to the side of the stage for assistance. The pants had popped again.

Boys on Film

“It’s funny,” mused Andy Taylor, “but a year ago this time, we couldn’t have sold eggs in America.”

Taylor was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bedroom in the three-story house he shares with his wife, Tracie Wilson Taylor, his brother, and one of Tracie’s brothers. Situated in a residential section of Wolverhampton, a city with a population of about a quarter-million located about a half-hour’s drive from the center of Birmingham, the house looks like the kind of place any upper-middle-class professional would own: furniture that might have been bought at Conran’s; good, though not extravagant, stereo equipment; a video machine.