Original subtitles

CHEERING

Duran Duran is a pop group for young people with a lot of energy.

# Her name is Rio she don't need to understand

# And I might find her if I'm looking like I can. #

We were in a period of time

where everything we touched seemed to be turning to gold.

It's a bright, colourful outburst.

# Because I've got my own way

# I can find my own way. #

We all knew there was something special happening.

It is pure, pure fantastic pop.

It's just a record that has legs and lasting value

and it captures a moment in time.

# I can't stop myself It's a new religion

# I've something to see. #

Rio's a good record. It's a really good record.

A BLEEP killer second album.

# In touch with the ground

# I'm on the hunt, I'm after you. #

The roadside is littered with careers of one-hit wonder artists

that could never follow up

and didn't really understand how to write hit songs.

And Duran Duran did.

# Don't say a prayer for me now

# Save it till the morning after

# No, don't say a prayer for me now

# Save it till the morning after. #

Every home should have one.

See, this sound at the beginning... Was complete experimentation.

And I'd been fiddling around with the grand piano at AIR Studios

and I actually opened up the top of it

and I was fiddling with the strings.

What I actually did was that I got some metal rods

and I threw them onto the strings of the piano

and they bounced around and made this strange noise.

And it wasn't quite what I was looking for,

but there was something interesting about it

and I said to Colin Thurston, "Can we reverse that tape?"

Because at that time, we were just discovering things like tape loops

and reversing and slowing things down and speeding things up.

And, er, he said, "Sure." And we reversed the sound

and what we got was the very intro of Rio.

SCREAMING

That was really the beginning of the song, that groove.

Roger started playing a groove with that.

And we sort of built the song around that line,

so we started to think in terms of chords.

# Moving on the floor now, babe you're a bird of paradise

# Cherry ice cream smile I suppose it's very nice

# With a step to your left and a flick to the right

# You catch that mirror way out west... #

The inspiration for me as a bass player

was Bernard Edwards, the player with Chic.

And a lot of his lines really caught my ear.

And that was what made me want to play bass.

It was a very syncopated style, which was something new to me,

especially as I'd sort of being playing in punk rock bands,

So Rio was like, er...just all of those ideas

that I had about syncopation.

And then when we get to the chorus, it's still like a...

# Oh, Rio, Rio dance across the Rio Grande. #

Andy's guitars.

It's a hell of a guitar sound, actually.

Andy always used to use Marshalls.

But he was quite experimental with his pedals at that time, too,

so I'm sure it was chorused and flanged and delayed a little.

# But then I'm sure that you know it's just for you

One, two, three, four!

# Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand. #

Yeah. Simon's voice,

when he harmonises with himself,

becomes so thick and lush.

I mean, I've rarely heard other people's voices blend

so well with themselves.

And, er...he's got a very unusual sense of harmony.

That's one of the things I brought to Duran Duran. I brought harmonies

from my choirboy training.

I was able to identify notes that would...

You know, I always felt that music's like...

Sometimes the music or the melody, the main melody's like a pole.

And you can take a run at it at speed and grab onto it

and you can swing around it.

And you can fly off in a different direction.

And that's how I think about harmonies.

# Did she nearly run you down

# At the end of the drive the lawmen arrive

# You make me feel alive

# Alive, alive

# I'll take my chance because luck is on my side or something

# I know what you're thinking I'll tell you something

# I know what you're thinking. #

When we were done touring, um...

the Rio album, we all took a vacation together.

And it was kind of one of those...

It was like a scene from Help!

You know, where the Beatles all get out of the car

and they all go into four separate doors,

but actually, it's all one house that they're living in.

And we all took a vacation together. We went to Antigua. Four of us.

Andy didn't come. We all went, we took our girlfriends

and we all took beach houses together.

So every morning, we'd come out with our towels, "Morning!"

"Morning!" Very Monty Python.

And, um...and then we got a phone call, "Guys, don't leave.

"We're coming out with Russell and a crew

"and we're going to make a video. Andy's coming."

# Her name is Rio she don't need to understand. #

It's a very iconic image,

that we're wearing these Antony Price suits on a yacht.

It's like, what a great juxtaposition of style!

But we thought we were actually filming in London

and Antony fitted us up with all these suits.

Last minute, it got changed to Antigua,

so the outfits turn up, that's the only clothes we have.

Nick loved all the pale colours because he wore light make-up

and had very light hair, he could get away with all these

sort of pale, sugared-almond colours and silk suits and things.

And obviously, it all worked with the Caribbean thing of the video.

It was quite tropical looking in a way and I was always a bit tropical.

Suddenly, it was bang, straight in there, style, fashion,

statement, articulated.

# Do-do-do-do-do-do. #

Nobody used to go on exotic holidays and go on yachts in 1982.

It wasn't achievable. It wasn't possible.

So it was real vision of the future.

And really anticipated, I think,

what was to come, the kind of whole celebrity culture really.

# I've seen you on the beach and I've seen you on TV. #

What they were showing to Britain was, you know, this newer world.

Very cleverly, in my view, showing it.

Punk was fantastic to photograph because it was very graphic

and black and white, really, for me.

I mean, virtually all my punk pictures are black and white film.

And with Duran Duran, it's going from black and white to colour.

And the country and the population was going from black and white.

The black and white of the recession, the unemployment

and then the Falklands war and they were preparing to bring

the colour back into everything.

And I think that was the contrast.

In as much as the Sex Pistols drag you back to a sense

and a moment in time, Duran Duran do, too.

Our instinct as teenagers that wanted it to be great,

wanted our life to be good,

and also wanted to put some brightness into

other people's lives, was to try and make something between us

that really excited us, that made us happy.

Simon's looks were very poetic and very beautiful and very optimistic.

And that's one of the things, I think, that changed in the '80s.

It suddenly became very optimistic.

# Save a prayer till the morning after

# Save a prayer till the morning after

# Save a prayer till the morning after

# Save a prayer till the morning after. #

I met John when I was 10 years old. He was 12.

He literally lived around the corner from me.

And so we used to hang out all the time.

We were both single kids, no brothers or sisters.

So we really became like brothers. And went everywhere together.

We were friends for a few years

before the idea of actually making music together came to us.

He went to art college and I was just finishing up at high school.

And he was already in a band.

So I was actually a little jealous of this.

And the band were quite interesting. They were called Dada.

And as soon as that fell apart, we got together and I said,

"OK, I can leave school, let's do this properly. Let's form a band."

By this point, we'd got the bit between our teeth

and Roger was the next guy we met.

I walked in and, er...John just kind of picked up the bass

and we just started kind of jamming along.

And immediately gelled.

John and Nick appeared with a little cassette

and we put it on the big sound system.

Ah, the Berrows! We first met them when we went to the Rum Runner.

John and I had isolated it as the coolest place in town

and so we wanted to play a show there.

And they got involved in the management side.

And Paul was really the creative side,

Michael more on the business side.

It was time to obviously develop and mature the band

and they needed help to do that.

There were only three of them really who were committed at the time.

It took us about six months.

Lots of auditioning, some false starts.

And then finally, Simon came bouncing in one day.

So I started singing this melody and they were very excited by it.

And we realised right then and there that we had something,

we had a good combination musically,

that we could do something good together.

And he opened up this book of lyrics

and it already had The Chauffeur in there

and a song called Sound of Thunder.

I think Planet Earth was probably in there.

Andy came down from Newcastle, Whitley Bay.

He had a lot of knowledge of the fretboard.

He could play a lot of chords, which Nick or I couldn't play.

So he brought a lot of expertise.

It was a bit like an explosion when the five of us came together.

We were all very serious, we were all looking for something new

and we all knew this was exactly what we wanted to do.

# Only came outside to watch the night fall with the rain

# I heard you making patterns rhyme. #

I just got the call, he said,

"I'm the manager of this band called Duran Duran

"and they're causing a bit of a stir in Birmingham

"and I really think you should come and see them."

And first of all, I was a bit dubious because I thought,

"Can't be anything going on in Birmingham.

"It's all happening in London."

So Betty came up and it was like a state visit.

Because Birmingham didn't have...

It wasn't very well represented in the national music media.

I was just blown away by their self-confidence and enthusiasm

and just their complete assurance of what they were doing.

They were just so confident about who they were, what they wanted,

where they wanted to go with the whole Duran Duran project.

When we started out, we had a master plan

and we thought it was going to work. All of them were just so...

Roger was always a little bit quieter than the others,

but the others, they were all trying to get a word in.

Andy, John, Simon, Nick, Roger, when did you learn an instrument?

I learnt to use my instrument...

LAUGHTER

..when I was five, actually.

But it was plastic at the time.

LAUGHTER But I got a real one when I was 11.

I was what you'd call a late developer.

I didn't pick up mine until I was about 16.

I was born with my instrument

and it just got used again and again and again.

I started playing with mine when I was, um...17.

Um... Roger's still a virgin.

Roger needs two hands for his!

LAUGHTER

You think, "OK, this is what we're going to do."

You put the blinkers on and you go.

# There's no sign of life

# Voices, another sound. #

I think it was about 18-20 months they were around rehearsing.

We knew when we got together in the room

and started writing songs together that we had something special.

There's something in the chemistry of us

that was able to come up with more and more and more music.

# See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight

# Heads turning as the lights flashing out it's so bright

# Then walk right out to the four line track

# There's a camera rolling on her back

# On her back. #

Girls On Film did really well.

I think that got us to number five or something.

It did even better than Planet Earth.

When we went in to do the first album,

not only did that album go relatively smoothly,

but it also allowed them to draw upon some of that work

for the second album, which enabled Rio to go relatively smoothly.

We had a lot of material that we hadn't recorded.

An awful lot of material.

The first album, Duran Duran, had two hits on it.

We had three singles released.

We were signed by a record company.

We'd been on tour with Hazel O'Connor and we'd gone to America

and we were causing a big stir, so we knew something was really brewing.

It was bubbling up.

It was really the most exciting thing that ever happened to us.

And so the energy that's in the Rio album very much came from that

first trip to America.

That's the great thing about listening to this,

you can hear all the different influences there and ideas

and somehow, it all comes together and sounds like a whole.

Because you've got the very funky bass and drums, very dark guitars,

quite dark keyboards, optimistic vocals, but it all kind of works.

It all just kind of gels and hangs together somehow.

Duran was really a rock band with synths.

It wasn't a synth band with a couple of musicians,

it was a real rock band.

We were a product of our times.

Synthesizers were becoming more important to popular music,

but there was, as yet, very few records

that were entirely synthesizer-based.

There was Kraftwerk, you know.

Depeche Mode were just about to come along.

So there were going to be...

Synth pop was about to happen.

Techno was about to happen.

But we were coming out of punk, we were coming out of a tradition

that was all about guitars and drums.

I think the rhythm on this was influenced by, um...

a song called Stay, David Bowie.

I think it was on Station to Station and it was all that kind of...

Very syncopated bass playing.

BASS GUITAR PLAYS

FOUR-NOTE GUITAR RIFF

That runs all the way through, this guitar.

Kind of Dave Gilmour, I think.

Quite Floyd-ish.

It's a very unusual track.

It's got this kind of pumping, funky rhythm section.

And that's a classic Nick Rhodes sound right there, that...

kind of phased strings.

# You can take him if you're fast

# Didn't I say...? #

There's so many vocals going on.

# I get along fine with them friends of mine...#

Those two voices in New Religion, you've got the kind of rhythmic...

# Got to take the pay from the saints and sinners in the regulation hats and scarves and things

# Walking in formation down the lane they carry their... #

And then you've got the...

# Don't know why this evil bothers me...#

And it's singing about... "Don't know why this evil,"

is singing about this other voice.

It's like, why have I got this in my head?

Why is this stuff going on?

# Army majors pull a mean cool truth, they're lying in a swimming pool

# Searching for the undeniable truth that a man is just a fool

# Don't know why this evil bothers me Take another chance boy, carry the fight,

# You can take him if you're fast

# So why is he trying to follow me? Didn't I say if you're holding on You'd be laughing at the last

# How many reasons do they need? I get along fine with them friends of mine

# But you have to make a choice

# I might just believe this time You're singing out of tune but the beat's in time

# And it's us who makes the noise... #

They're not obvious pop songs but I think it's probably that,

you know, because they always had that kind of dance,

slightly funky element to their sound.

They managed to marry all these different elements which,

you know, was quite an achievement

because most bands wouldn't really attempt that now.

It's a very unusual sound, Duran,

because if you put it on paper, it shouldn't really work.

John's a great bass groove player, you know,

he really is and the textures Nick added,

the guitar-playing was rock'n'roll, the drumming's, you know,

a really good drummer, solid, solid, so in that,

you've got all this...

desire...

to be funky, to take it off left-field.

Hold Back The Rain.

SONG: Hold Back The Rain

Andy's guitar. It's almost like a...

It's got a slap on it like...

It reminds me of She Was Hot, that Rolling Stones song.

HE PLAYS BASS TRACK

It's these little bass pops in there that are actually overdubbed.

Then I had to learn how to play it live.

There's actually two tracks of bass, Hold Back The Rain, the basic...

HE PLAYS BASS LINE

That's the straightforward and...

HE PLAYS DIFFERENT MELODY

I would overdub that on a separate track.

The other thing about Hold Back The Rain that is somewhat

problematic is the chorus is one of these...

HE PLAYS GALLOPING BASS LINE

That's played with a pick.

I just couldn't do it with my fingers so, again,

it's fine in the studio where you can, "OK, stop,

"let's get the chorus" and then we go back to...

HE PLAYS ORIGINAL BASS LINE

And we can go back to that but like live, it's a bitch.

# And if the stars burn out there's only fire to blame

# Hold back the rain

# No time for worry cos we're on the roam again

# Hold back the rain

# The clouds all scatter and we ride the outside lane

# Hold back the rain

# Not on your own so help me, please

# Hold back the rain... #

The teenage thing, none of us foresaw the teenage thing.

SCREAMING

Get back!

We just thought we were going to be an album band

and we're going to have quite a serious audience

but obviously the music we were making was actually

transcending that and it was reaching a far wider audience.

Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

The first Smash Hits cover that we had was Roger

and Nick, which was really bizarre if you think about it.

And that immediately gives you a sense of...the appeal of the band.

The fact that this all-out pop magazine would take the drummer

and the keyboard player and put them on the front

and I think that was significant because that let everybody

know this is a band of interesting individuals.

When we first went to Australia was when we really noticed it

in a big way because actually Planet Earth had become a number one single

there and we went there and they were just crazy

and we had to get security and we were locked in hotels

and I mean it was sort of funny at the time.

None of us had really had time to grow up into rounded adults.

We were still living at home so it was a very steep climb.

I was in a car with Roger leaving a show one day

and the car was rocked by fans,

they were crawling all over it

and I could see that he absolutely hated it, was quite put off by it.

I think too many of those incidents was too much for him in a way.

Whereas John and Nick sort of lived for all that.

I didn't think the lights were particularly good.

SCREAMING

I remember getting back from our first American tour

and my father still wouldn't let me

watch what I wanted to watch on the television, you know.

HE LAUGHS

Oh, God.

I think with the Rio album,

we had definitely learned some good lessons from the first album.

We were lucky enough to have worked with Colin Thurston,

who was our choice as a producer.

He'd worked with David Bowie and Iggy Pop so for us, this was incredible to

be in the studio with someone who'd made some of our favourite records.

OK, Roger, it's going to be a take.

Well, Colin was a very, very calm hand at the wheel

and you never...

I don't think at any point when I was working with Colin did

I question any of the sounds that he was generating.

I mean he knew exactly how our band needed to sound.

He heard the talent that was in the band, he heard the raw

songwriting, performing talent and he made it modern.

The great thing about Colin was that he really knew how to nurture people.

You get great producers that are, you know,

amazing with the desk and great with the soundscapes but they're

not great with people but Colin was amazing with people and...

I miss him, I really miss him.

He died recently and it was a very sad day for me

because somebody went out of my life that was a very big influence on me.

SONG: "The Chauffeur"

It was actually the last track that we started

recording on the Rio album.

We were running so late that we decided to take on an extra room.

We started work in this other room just to try

and speed things up a little and I said to Simon, "Look, I've

"got an idea, I'd like to make it a little more electronic." Yeah.

Because originally, it had been done with an acoustic guitar. That's right.

And so I started building the track

and the first thing I started with the rhythm box and the sequencer...

OK, that's part of the rhythm box, there should be a bit that says,

"Clap." There you go. Clap.

ELECTRONIC BEAT PLAYS Yeah.

There you go.

So that was the beginning of it and then the sequencer...

KEYBOARD PLAYS

And the sequencer is very similar to the original guitar part, isn't it?

Yeah, very much so, and then Simon would come back in back

and forth and I'd go in and fix some things up on another track

whilst we were in-between.

I was amazed by what you came up with, actually.

It was nothing like I'd ever imagined the song would ever sound like.

# Way down the lane away, living for another day

# The aphids climb up in the drifting haze

# Swim seagull in the sky

# Towards that hollow western isle

# My envied lady holds you fast in her gaze... #

PIANO AND BASS TRACKS PLAY

That's the piano and the bass sync.

That's the piano on its own.

PIANO TRACK PLAYS

HE HUMS MELODY

# Out on the tar plains

# The glides are moving

# All looking for a new place to drive... #

Well, it only really works with the bass, doesn't it? Those notes.

BASS TRACK JOINS IN

Isn't that amazing how...? Works for me. Yeah.

# Sing Blue Silver... #

I wonder, can we the glass breaking?

Would that be on "Noise" as well, do you think? I think so.

Yeah, let's solo it.

Here we go. Ready?

Yeah. Now.

GLASS CLINKING There it is!

It wasn't really glass at all, I shouldn't spoil what it is! No!

It was actually ice being dropped into water that just made

that sound that sounded like glass but, yeah, there you go.

# What glass splinters lie so deep in your mind

# To tear out from your eyes with a word to stiffen brooding lies... #

Finishing Rio...

It marked the end of Duran Duran's innocence.

Because, actually, we came away from that

and Nick will tell you all about what it was like to go down to Sri Lanka

straight out of the mixing studios, he mixed that record with Colin.

At the end of the album, we had a very tight deadline.

We actually had to be on tour in Australia by a certain date

and before then, we had to make some videos.

We were all very interested in video at that point.

It wasn't something that we backed away from cos the band was

always about aesthetics and, you know,

the image of the band was very important.

But the album wasn't quite finished,

there was three or four mixes left to do and some editing so I said,

"Listen, I'm not going anywhere until the album's done,

"you'll have to start doing the video without me and I'll catch up."

Their management in the Barrows, Paul and Mike Barrow,

were very, very ahead of their time in the awareness factor about this.

Paul had had this idea to go onto location.

I think he'd obviously recently seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark

and there was a bit of Apocalypse Now in there as well.

It was such a simple idea but nobody had even thought of that - just

taking your camera out of the room to this amazing country with

all this amazing scenery and shooting a video.

I was a frustrated filmmaker, frustrated feature filmmaker,

I wanted to make movies.

So, no-one would give me money to make anything longer than

four minutes so I went, "OK, I'll make a four-minute-long movie."

# Woman, you want me, give me a sign

# And catch my breathing even closer behind

# Do do do do do do do

# Do do do do do do do do... #

Russell was one of the great music video directors that

emerged from that period as a director that could

see how the result of a great music track combined to interesting,

glamorous visuals with the right artist could create something

that was more than the sum of the parts.

# I'm after you

# Mouth is alive

# Juices like wine

# And I'm hungry like the wolf... #

Simon and I liked it cos we were a bit more adventurous

and we liked travelling and we liked going to slightly weird places

but I don't think Nick liked the idea very much cos

he still liked wearing make-up and stuff so, for him,

going to Sri Lanka and staying in a dodgy,

old hotel somewhere was not something he wanted to do, I don't think.

I got there completely fried, having not slept for two or three days,

and I arrived in Sri Lanka thinking, "OK, record's done, I'm going

"to take it and play it to everyone else.

"Let's hope they're happy."

I got off, came out from the plane and I was thinking,

"OK, where's the guy with my limo?" So I was looking around

and an Indian guy comes over to me, he says, "Nick." I said, "Yeah.

"Where's the car?" He says, "Oh, it's over here."

So we go out and it's, I mean, blistering heat

and I'm dressed from head to toe in black leather.

"Wow, OK, well, let's get in the car and perhaps there'll be some

"air conditioning." Anyway, it's a flatbed truck.

So, oh, my God.

I said, "Well, how long is it to the hotel?"

expecting him to say 20 minutes.

He said, "Five hours."

Nick is the most urbane member of Duran Duran,

was then and is still now.

The most difficult to get out of the city.

So, we drive for five hours over these dust tracks,

all the way into God knows where in Sri Lanka and we end up there

and, literally, as I arrive, somebody gets my bag

and takes it up to the hotel

and I'm walking down to the beach where they're filming in a

complete daze and an elephant walked past me on the street, I was my own.

I thought I was hallucinating.

It was so much fun doing those.

We worked so hard, we'd get up at 5:00 in the morning

and we'd go to bed at 11:00 at night

and we'd work all day long in-between and we were totally,

totally exhausted by the end of our five days there.

But it kind of worked. It was one of those... This is so crazy.

You know, we've got these guys in eyeliner and crazy-colour hair

and they're on the back of elephants.

It was so bizarre but, you know, it was kind of irresistible.

We came back with three whole videos.

SONG: "Hungry Like The Wolf"

Hungry Like The Wolf was actually written with the Jupiter-8

which is the synthesizer I used for much of the sound on the Rio album.

It was sort of new out around that time, about 1982,

and I completely fell in love with it.

Simon and I, I think,

had been out the night before and we had the most terrible hangover

and, for some reason, were feeling guilty about it

and decided to go and do some work

so we went to EMI Studios at Manchester Square

and we got in quite early and we'd been listening to something in the

car and we got a sort of idea and I started playing with this sound.

It won't sound quite the same I shouldn't think

because it needs effects but...

SYNTHESIZER PLAYS

GUITARS AND DRUMS JOIN

GUITARS AND DRUMS FADE

And Simon had an idea for a lyric and by lunchtime,

when everyone else turned up, we pretty much had the song

and Andy came in and played a killer guitar riff on top of it

and John and Roger thought, "This is easy."

That's pretty hooky already, isn't it there?

And then you've got Andy's angry guitars.

GUITARS FADE IN

It was really Andy that gave the band that real edge and Andy was pretty...

He was from Newcastle so he had this edge to him.

Later, Roger added the Simmons drums

and suddenly it sounded like nothing else we'd ever heard.

It's got these great big fills in which was this amazing new kit,

it was like a hexagonal drum kit.

There was only really two sounds on there. You had this sound...

DRUM FILL PLAYS

There we go which is a really cool...very new sound then.

And it had a really kind of pingy,

disco-y sound as well which nobody used but this was...

One of the drum sounds of the '80s was this drum.

There's a big roll coming up.

DRUM ROLL PLAYS

There we go.

One of Colin's things, we always had a lot of ambience on the record.

You know, we'd record the drums very tightly, as you can hear here...

HE ISOLATES DRUM TRACK

It's a very tight drum sound but then he'd add this...ambience.

There you go, that's with the ambience.

DRUMS PLAY WITH SLIGHT REVERB

And that kind of defined the drum sound for the '80s in a way.

You'd have this kind of gated ambience.

If you listen to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins, it's got this

drum sound that's got this beautiful ambient sound on it

and that was how Colin liked to record,

it was this combination of tightly-recorded stuff

and big ambient mics that gave it that really powerful movement.

I remember interviewing them after Rio had come out

when they'd just come back from the really gruelling

two-and-a-half-month tour supporting Blondie in the States

and Canada and they were absolutely exhausted and, obviously,

this was all part of how you broke America.

The band had this very effeminate image in the US at the time.

It was quite tricky selling a New Romantic movement with make-up,

etc to an American audience, especially in the Midwest.

There was always this issue in the US about

whether you needed to remix certain parts of an album

or a single or a song to fit

"the American marketplace, the American club scene"

and I had met a producer called David Kershenbaum.

Well, the first thing that struck me were the chord progressions.

The melody and the chord progressions were different than what was

going on in American music at the time

and it was captured by some really infectious rhythm.

And I had introduced him to, I think,

Paul Barrow with a view that maybe Paul would want to consider him

to help him remixing some parts of the album

so that it would give more of an "American feel"

or an "American mix" to some of that music.

And that's really what we were aiming at,

was getting Simon's voice correctly out in front

but yet surrounding it with the right rhythm elements that would

bring it forward and I was taken by the sound, I thought

it was something that could definitely work.

So, yes, we sold our soul and we remixed the album with David,

who did a very good job.

But then there was this whole new other avenue - MTV.

When we were starting out,

what we wanted to do was bring together the two greatest

cultural forces in America for the baby boomers -

one was rock'n'roll music and the other one was television.

A music channel where they were going to play nothing but videos.

This was a revolution.

Hungry Like The Wolf was picked up by MTV

and it put it into high rotation.

One day, my associate Tom Freston and I,

who was there at the beginning of MTV,

were out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just doing anything we could to

try to find a story about MTV having an impact on record sales.

And Capitol Records could see that in certain towns,

for no apparent reason, Duran was moving stock.

A clerk scratched his head and said,

"Yeah, I'm selling Duran Duran and The Buggles and I don't know why

"because they're not getting played

"but I just sold three boxes in Tulsa and that's a lot of records."

And it almost came down to being as absurd as

on one side of the road where they had cable,

where MTV was being piped in,

on that side of the road were Duran fans

and on the other side of the road where MTV didn't exist or the cable,

there wouldn't be fans.

We developed a great relationship with MTV.

They were hungry for videos at that point

because you had people that wouldn't make videos.

I mean some of the kind of more credible rock people really

backed away from it, they thought it was going to ruin music,

they thought it was the end of music.

# Because you're lonely in your nightmare

# Let me in

# Because there's heat beneath your winter

# Let me in

# And it's silent on your stone field

# Let me in... #

The Sri Lankan experience really pressed it home that actually

what was being made was in effect a film and wasn't just a bunch

of video clips, if you like, for promotional purposes for the singles.

It was something more than that

and so it was therefore a learning experience for the band

as much as it was a great experience for Russell Mulcahy to

actually have the have the budget to indulge in his great ideas.

And we filmed three videos in that seven days

so when we were in a jungle,

we would film a bit of Hungry Like The Wolf

and then we'd do a little bit of Save A Prayer.

# Save it till the morning after

# No, don't say a prayer for me now

# Save it till the morning after

# Save it till the morning after... #

It was a whirlwind, we were there, and particularly for me,

arriving late, just got in, did the videos, we were on a beach,

jumping into the sea, there at the sunset, on an elephant.

Simon and I would drop from a helicopter on top of this

massive mountain which I don't know how I ever did that,

I mean I'd never do that in my life again and then we had to

climb back up into it and flew off, went over a jungle and that was it.

All done.

# Don't say a prayer for me now

# Save it till the morning after

# No, don't say a prayer for me now

# Save it till the morning after

# Save it till the morning after... #

Save A Prayer is still my favourite track on Rio.

I just think it's totally timeless, that song.

I love the melancholy atmosphere of it.

I think Simon singing on that is probably the best I've ever heard him.

# Feel the breeze deep on the inside

# Look you down into your well

# If you can, you'll see the world in all his fire

# Take a chance like all dreamers

# You can't find another way... #

We knew it was an anthem,

we knew that it was and really great anthems, they stand out anyway.

And then these guitars, these...

GUITARS PLAY CHORD PROGRESSION

So beautiful, there's a lot of chorus on them but that's

the body of the song, that's what supports the melody throughout.

The bass...is recorded over two tracks.

I've been playing this live recently

and I've been using a sort of chorus pedal to give me

this sound which is what I thought it was but it's actually two tracks

which gives that sort of phased effect, almost like a fretless.

It's four synths.

And there's four guitars.

It's a nice mixture of techno and organic and it's that warmth,

it's warm but it's new at the same time which is nice.

The most important line in it is the one about

"some people call it a one-night stand

"but we can call it paradise."

This idea of let's not think about what it means,

let's not think about tomorrow, just think about now, you know,

that's the only thing that matters.

# Some people call it a one-night stand

# But we can call it paradise

# Don't say a prayer for me now... #

That feeling that now is the important time,

it kind of slightly got over the sort of rumpled sheets aspect of it and

concentrated on the philosophy idea a bit more and I'm really glad

it did that because that's really what was in my mind at the time.

You just don't expect the frontman of a style band, which is

not to dismiss them, that's like dismissing Roxy Music, you can't.

You just don't expect them to go deep into themselves

and occasionally, Le Bon did, he had that ability to do that.

It's only one drum take.

HE PLAYS DRUM TRACK

In those days, you could play the song for five minutes,

if you made a mistake at the end then it's, "Oh, no, I've got to go

"and do it again" so you'd have to go and re-record the whole drum track.

And we used to make 12" versions as well which were like

ten minutes long and they were all played live.

You know, you couldn't cut it up on the computer

and make loops as you do now.

It's like, "OK, Roger, this is a ten-minute version of the song.

"Start now." And ten minutes later, I'd still be playing it.

# Save it till the morning after... #

Andy's lead comes in so we have...

HE ISOLATES LEAD GUITAR TRACK

Which is actually the closest we ever got to a sort of anthemic rock thing.

It's a nice mixture of old and new.

This thing called a "bender..."

HE MODULATES NOTE

So, the melody on Save A Prayer goes...

HE PLAYS MELODY

It's just one of those parts that every time he plays it,

you've got to smile, you know, it's just one of those magic

moments on stage, it's not lost its specialness.

SONG: "Save A Prayer"

And it's just very gentle, it's quite romantic

but it's also bittersweet and it's quite sad

and I quite like that quality about it

and I just think that was kind of so unexpected of them at the time.

It's quite a sensual album. All the grooves move along the right beat.

It feels comfortable, it feels natural,

there's nothing that really sounds over-rushed.

And these combinations of their own individual images,

their own way of dressing, looking, the styling that went on,

these wonderful videos, coupled together with this wonderful music.

How could you not be happy

when you were listening to Duran Duran's music?

# One, two, three, four

# Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand

# Just like that river twists across the dusty land... #

I'm glad they've come to be seen as a proper band because the temptation

would always be to diss it cos they were such pop dollies, you know.

The point is that there was a severe group intelligence behind that.

Clear as day, they were smart guys, they are smart guys.

Where they were all coming from was correct - art, style,

fashion, deep knowledge of music.

Anything that is classic is because it is enduring.

In other words, it's timeless, and Rio, today,

is just as fresh as it was the day I first heard it.

It was just one of those amazing periods of time, probably we'll

never touch again, where everything just seemed to be perfect.

I think that's a combination of a band that is at the top

of its game, that is just having so much fun, playing every day.

It is playing more than it ever thought it would play

and an engineer-producer who just knows exactly what to do,

knows exactly how to channel what he's hearing.

I was so excited by the fact that we'd made this record.

We just hit the right nerve.

Sometimes, you know, you can try and overthink things

and guess at what it is the public would like to hear and do

something that you feel is right on the pulse and miss it by a mile.

Other times, if you just do what you like and what comes naturally,

you've hit that nerve.

SONG: "Rio"

# Do do do do do do do

# Do do do do, ahhhhhh

# Whoa, wow. #

Hey, there she goes again!

SONG ENDS

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

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