The belligerent, black North Sea crashes with a grim rhythm in the opposite side of the main road to Brighton’s Grand Hotel. Its force, however, fails utterly to drown out the piercing squeals and squawks of the 30 or so Duran Duran fans gathered by the main entrance of the somewhat inaptly named Regency building.

It seems that every time a chambermaid adjusts a curtain in one of the front-facing bedrooms, this gaggle of girls is given cause to erupt with audible hysteria; it is noticable, also, that the chant “We want Quran Duran” has a rather ugly poetic meter4jjpt is hardly pleasing to the ear.

No wonder the group’s singer, Simon Le Bon, with whom I am partaking of afternoon tea in tlj|||ugubriously lit maroon cocktail lounge, mought that he was going to flip out the other day, during one of the Northern dates on this British Duran Duran tour: the screaming, he confides, suddenly seemed even more awful than such other characteristic Duran Duran stress situations as the need to have to talk to three different Japanese interviewers two hours before a show.

Simofl|pd been in the group’s dressingroom, chatting with their guitarist, Andy Taylor, when the wee gels outside turned

up the old vocal cords to full volume. “1 suddenly thought, This is driving me completely craz^i. Yes, it’s happened: all 1 want to do is be able to walk around and be totally unrecognized all the time—let me out of here!’ Suddenly I realized I had to pull myself together, because if I’d carried on thinking like that I really would have gone crazy. I had |o.rationalize it to myself: I said, ‘This is wfiM you’re getting paid for! It’s a choice you’ve made: go on, admit feyou enjoy it really.’ ...But I could have ^flipped out altogether.”

Outside the hotel pandemonium breaks out once more, this time motivated by a genuine cause for excitement: John Taylor, the group’s bass-player and foundermember, who draws even more screams than the? singer when his perfect cheekbones flash onto the giant video-screen during live performances, is arriving at the hotel. Suddenly it dawns on me thdf, though the comparisons with the Beatles that are made within Duran Duran’s record company are not only crassly stupid but also most

uninventive, there really is such a phenomenon as Duran Duran-mania.

In fact, I’d first had some inkling that this existed last summer. Strolling one afternoon through London’s West End I’d encountered similar hysteria outside the Dominion Theatre, where the group was due to perform that night before an audience that included Fpi$ce Charles and Princess Diana.

In teriwof widespread coverage in the Fleet Street tabloids, it had immeasurably been to the group’s advantage that Princess Diana had been quoted that Duran Duran was her favorite group. No doubt this had helped sMBt their then most recent single, “Is There Something I Should Know,” a song whose structure recalled middle-period Beatles compositions, into the charts in the number one position. However, even before this royal sanction, the group’s second LP, Rio, had sold a million copies on the U.K., a huge figure.

Of course, an inevitable backlasflsliad been created by this modern equivalent of royal patronage, chaps of Republic inclinations voicing their disapproval with as much self-righteousness as the fellows in the opposite camp.

“I don’t think anyone in the group is actively j a^ti-Royalist,” admits its singer, “though I certainly don’t believe in the Divine Right Of Kings! I just don’t think you should take them too seriously, that’s all. But when you’re told that you’re Princess Diana’s favorite group, it would be pretty dumb to reply, ‘No, we’re not!’...But there are other people who like us.”

Such controversy?? along with the fan mlMa. has tended to obscure the fact that Duran Duran are an exceptionally good group. 1 note that their recent LP, their third, Seven And The Ragged Tiger, has received a solid critical drubbing. However, very few people these days feel secure about what they’re meant to like: Duran Duran, with this Royal approval and deliberately glamorous image (which has dil^ays been a part of rock ’n’ roll, so wnat’s the big deal...), is such an obvious target for putdowns that they should almost automatically

be given the benefit of the doubt. The fact is that Seven And The Ragged Tiger is an excellent record, full of songs that are inventive, simple, and cleverly contagious—just like their source material, David Bowie and Roxy Music, filtered through the rhythms of Chic: the energy level and dynamics of the album makes it some of the best rock music that’s around. Moreover, as a Jive act the group is stunning, sheer enjoyment.

Unfortunately, the somewhat ponderous Simon Le Bon is no great shakes as a spokesman for such energetic, communicative music. After a time you feel that what seems likAeserved stand-offishness may actually be a fear of putting his foot in it.

In what is presumably an effort to underline his star status, the leather-clad Le Bon swings a leg over the side of his armchair. But so lethargic is this effort at swashbuckling cool that I even find myself asking him if he’s tired. No, says Simon, just suffering from a heavy cold, and then proceeds to light a cigarette: not such a wise move, you may think, for a singer with five shows to

play in the next seven days. He even resists my foolproof suggestion that he should fast for the next three days in order to cleanse his body of toxins and thereby cure himself.

Still, you must realize that part of the Princess-Di’s-Favorite-Group shtick was that Simon Le Bon was ordained by Fleet Street as The New Sting: to lumber a lad so is bound to give his soul a good chewing over.

Whatever the cauwts. Simon is extraordinarily defensive: eUfyin our conversation, almost as an ice-breaker, I ask him how crucial in their careers have been their managers, the Berrow brothers, who own Birmingham’s Rumrunner Club in which Duran Duran first regularly played. “It sounds to me,” retorts Simon rather too quickly, “as though you’re saying, ‘How much have you been manufactured by your managers?’ ”

This, as I assure the singer, is far from my intention: I am, however, quite aware of how ambitious are the two Berrows, and I’m intrigued to what extent they inspired the members of the group—in fact, it seems likely that the group and their management mutually fired each .others aspirations.

Yet Duran Duran Was a skillfully conceived package: they presented to EMI Records a marketing strategy that left no room to question how high they were aiming; in turn, EMI has provided the very best promotion, including—wisely—the cost of the expensive videos which throughout the world have indubitably helped the group’s career, and in the Ulg&.A. actually broke Duran Duran througfffhe medium of MTV.

That accepted, the story of the early days of Duran Duran is so archetypal it could almost be a rock ’n’ roll myth. Inspired by the possibilities shown by punk, Birmingham art school student John Taylor gets together with Nick Rhodes, a former school-friend, and they both buy guitars. But they prove incompetents on the instrument, so Taylor swaps to bass and Rhodes turns to synthesizer, ancrthe pair team up with drummer Roger Taylor. Later they’re joined by Geordie guitar-player Andy Taylor: the fact that three unrelated members have the same surname gives the group a useful air of mystery.

Although taken under the collective wing of the Berrow brothers, the j|oup, which names itself after a character iHthe film Barbarella, still lacks a singer: a Rumrunner waitress suggests a former boyfriend, a drama student at Birmingham University; for the audition Simon Le Bon arrives wearing pinkTtgopard-skin pants and clutching a sheafof lyrics: he gets the job, even though his voice at first seems dubious—Simon is on probation for a good year before it is decided he has got the part permanently.

In the autumn of 1980, Paul Berrow sells his house to support the group while they undertake a British tour supporting songstress Hazel O’Connor. His faith reaps rewards: Duran Durand music is heard by most British record companies, and after fierce attempts by Phonogram to outbid thertwEMI sign the act.

TheKgroup is launched on the crest of New Romanticism; clad in frilled shirts and cummerbunds, Duran Duran are sold as the Midlands’ spokesmen for the movement, Birmingham’s answer to Spandau Ballet. Like Spandau, with whom they are unfavorably compared byLondon fashionSitters, Duran Duran quickly dump the style. “Looking back on it now, the New Romantic look is hilarious,” admits Simon. “We definitely manipulated it to our advantage: it got us our feet in the door. We saw it as an opening, and thought, ‘Let’s get in as quickly as we can, and then figure out where to go from there.’

“I don’t think we ever stated to anyone that we were New Romantics and that we were part of a great philosophy about wearing frilly shirts and pretending we were one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. It was purely a fashion thing, and it allowed us to have a consistent image which people could identify with. The idea was to use that to get us established in people’s minds—once we were there, we could change.

“But we dropped it really quickly—we had to, otherwise we would have sunk with it.”

What the group wanted, Simon tells me, loosening up, was “success.” What they envisaged, however, was very different from what they got: “We wanted to be pop stars. I think that we expected success to be much more glamorous than it really is. We saw it in terms of fast cars and fast women: the general public’s image of the rock star syndrome, doing little and being paid a lot of money for it—it looked very attractive.

“But what we’ve actually found is giving us satisfaction are things like successful tours and successful records. And as to the lifestyle...Well, that’s laughable: we just spend our lives on coaches and planes, traveling around from job to job.

“Mind you, I think I would get really bored if I was holed up in some castle in Scotland, totally out of it, taking the Maserati for a spin now and then.

“As a matter of fact, that rock ’n’ roll martyrdom thing, which thank God seems to have gone out of fashion, also attracted us early on—John, I think, was particularly inclined to that philosophy. It’s an easy attitude: when you turn up for a gig and you’re totally wrecked because you’ve been up all night drinking arid all the rest of it, then it’s so easy to justify yourself by telling anyone who criticizes you that that sort of behavior is what rock ’n’ roll is all about.

“When you’re told that you’re Princess Diana’s favorite group, it would be pretty dumb to reply9 ‘No, we’re notV ’’ —Simon Le Bon

“In fact, if you intend to survive for over a year, it’s something no one can sustain.”

Most of the pitfalls placed in the paths of ambitous young musicians seem to have come Duran Duran’s way. “There’s the very obvious one of drugs, particularly cocaine,” comments Simon Le Bon matter-of-factly. “‘Here, take this, you’ll feel really good when you go onstage,’ which is obviously a huge trap. If you are to survive, it is one that must be avoided. I’ve been through that

one. I’ve never been strung out on anything, but...

“Coke, in fact, is very bad for singers’ throats, but an awful lot do it—I don’t understand why. It strikes me as ridiculous— whenever I’ve done it, my nose has been bunged up for weeks afterwards, a serious problem.

“In the music business, though, it’s so prevalent, because it offers confidence. But, in fact, it’s quite dangerous, because you get heads of companies on it who think they are making great decisions when in actual fact they are behaving like real shits.”

It is Simon Le Bon who is the Duran Duran lyric-writer. His own favorite lyricists include Patti Smith, Jim Morrison and Peter Gabriel. He also likes Dylan’s words, but finds his melodies “a bit suspect,” which seems rather arrogant to me, though possibly I’m not sufficiently disrespectful of my elders.

Simon also seems to damn T.S. Eliot with faint praise when he remarks that he has “a great deal of respect” for the man who is unquestionably the greatest poet of this century. “It was really Eliot’s way of being obscure that made me think my way of being obscure was OK,” Simon continues, with an unseemly lack of humility. “My writing is almost impressionistic, though it is sometimes obscure just for the sake of being obscure, just to be contrary.”

The irony here is that Simon Le Bon is actually a rather good lyricist: Duran Duran’s words are far superior to those of most rock groups. He is capable of much more than the unresolved images that so often pass as rock ’n’ roll poetry; Le Bon can turn a nifty phrase with the same facility that he can sustain a mood throughout a song—that he writes the melodies that emphasize the words helps sustain the feel.

Op the new LP, the song “Cracks In The Pavement” is a fine piece about paranoia.

“ ‘Cracks In The Pavement’ is about that feeling when you go to parties and feel incredibly uncomfortable and unreal. The ‘something on my mind’ chorus lines have a feeling of claustrophobia, of wanting to get out, of paranoia; they explain the feeling more: something is making me itchy, and I don’t know what it is, and I’m trying to put these things in dark passageways in my mind because I’m frightened of them.

“But the words also describe how that feeling of edginess is driving me on further, which is kind of the rock ’n’ roll predicament—something just makes you carry on.

“I do take pride in my lyrics,” he remarks suddenly. “I do take it very seriously. I compare my words to poetry, and question whether they work as a piece of writing, as opposed to something which is going to be sung as a tune.

“People often say, ‘What a brilliant lyric,’ when actually they’re only talking about a brilliant line. John Lennon was one of the few people who wrote consistently good lyrics.”

Simon should try making an album on acid.

“I went to a disco on mushrooms once. Does that count?”

Our consideration of this important philosophical question is interrupted by the arrival of Niqk Rhodes. Though an authoritative figure onstage, Simon Le Bon in person contrasts badly with the bubbly, dedicated Nick Rhodes: the synth player’s energy seems boundless—last year he took time out from Duran Duran to discover and produce Kajagoogoo.

The initial impetus for the Duran Duran songs, which are credited to all the group, usually comes from either Rhodes or John Taylor. For Seven And The Ragged Tiger over 20 tunes were rejected before the group settled on the nine that make up the album. Recorded in Montserrat and Sydney, Australia, the record took six months to make.

Despite the large sales of their first two albums, Nick Rhodes insists he was not at all satisfied with them. “After they were released,” he says, “we felt there was so much wrong. Especially Rio, which was done in a real hurry. I didn’t hear the thing until I was on a plane to Sri Lanka to do the Weedin’ videos. Andy and I had been up all the previous night in the studio finishing it because the record was running so far behind schedule—because qf that I did a rushed edit job on ‘Hold Back The Rain’ that I’ve never forgiven myself for.

“I hate it. I can’t listen to the album because of it.”

Like “Is There Something I Should Know,” Seven And The Ragged Tiger was produced by Alex Sadkin, who in the past has worked with artists as diverse as KC And The Sunshine Band, Bob Marley, Grace Jones and the Thompson Twins. In fact, it was his work with that last group, for whom Rhodes has nothing but admiration, that brought Sadkin to Duran Duran’s attention.

“Alex has a nice bite to his production, and nice bite to his sound,” enthuses Simon Le Bon. “His work on ‘Is There Something

I Should Know’ spoke for itself, and we wanted to continue with that team: finding that combination came at a good time for us, when we really needed to change direction and open up our perspectives.”

“For Seven And The Ragged Tiger, ” Nick

“Looking back on it now, the New Romantic took is hilarious —Simon Le Bon

continues, “we had the time and money to spend on getting the record exactly as we wanted it to be. And we were determined not to let it get away in a state we weren’t happy with: in the last minute of the last hour of being in the studio I was still fiddling with an EQ button; the final mix was done

half an hour before Alex Sadkin was due to leave Australia.

“It was incredibly hard work, but I’m very proud of it. We haven’t just tried to reproduce the success of our last two albums. It isn’t a collection of blatantly popular pop songs. We’ve tried to stretch ourselves into another area, and it took us a long time to develop to the point of this record.

“We make albums first and foremost for ourselves. I’m sure that some of the songs we scrapped could have been bigger singles hits than some of the other numbers on the album. But artistically we just weren’t satisfied with them.”

Both Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon claim to be bemused by the tendency over the past 12 months for English groups to steer themselves in a Middle Of The Road direction. “Culture Club have always been MOR,” remarks the singer, “but I was very surprised when Spandau Ballet did ‘True’ —I thought ‘Chant Number One’ was much more the area they should have pursued.”

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“Things are so MOR,” assesses Nick Rhodes, “because it’s much less taxing music for audiences to cope with, and consequently acts get far higher sales. Let’s face it, Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ sounds very much like ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ which was a massive hit that was very acceptable to the general public.

“I think that the tragedy is that a lot of people are after money before art.”

Which is exactly the criticism so often leveled at Duran Duran.

“Which,” replies Nick Rhodes, “is the one that really upsets me much, much more than any of the others. Because of the amount of time and trouble that I personally spend on every last second of an echo machine, or every last digit of a synth sound, or on a mix. Or the amount of effort that we put into our live shows, and into our videos, just to make them as perfect as we can.

“I hate people trying to make the criticism that we put money before art. There’s no point in us doing it unless we’re happy with it. And that’s the major reason we all do it, and why Seven And The Ragged Tiger did take so long, and why we didn’t churn out another one as quickly as we could so we didn’t have a huge studio bill.”

After he has delivered this quite impassioned statement of philosophy, Nick Rhodes somehow gets onto the subject of politics. What is curious, however, is that he and Simon will only discuss nuclear and political issues when the recorder is turned off. Surely this is the wrong attitude: most musicians won’t even begin to deliver their social conscience raps until they are certain that the tape is running—it often seems almost a Pavlovian reaction.

Perhaps these Duran Duran fellows worry such chatter may affect their popularity in America. Nick Rhodes, for example, demonstrates an extremely healthy paranoid disposition when it comes to Reaganite matters: Reagan is never going to withdraw Cruise missiles from Europe, he claims to have learned, because the U.S. President did a deal with the American arms manufacturers in order to ensure his election.

Simon Le Bon seems to even fear such talk may affect their lifespans. “Hey, even talking about Northern Ireland can be dangerous,” he warns in what seems a rather unduly worried manner.

But we know there is a measure of calculation in most Duran Duran matters; who knows, perhaps 1985 is the year they have ticked off as the one in which to reveal their radical natures. However, when they are so busy concealing interesting aspects of themselves they can hardly come across as whole human beings—so to that extent the group lays itself wide open to any negative criticism.

For the record, Nick Rhodes doesn’t really want to say anything much more controversial than that, “Duran Duran’s primary aim is to please ourselves artistically, and to entertain people. We are a positive band that want to entertain. We’re not going to change the world, but we will make various statements that we want to from time to time on various subjects.”

As befits the group’s lyricist, Simon Le Bon is able to sum up even more concisely the raison d’etre for Duran Duran: “We reflect optimism. We represent people who say, ‘Sod the government, we’re going to do something for ourselves in our own way.’ We’re in touch with our best points, and we operate like a self-contained commando team, and we can go out and make a success on our own.

“That’s what we represent.”