‘We look like soft, made-up blokes, but we’re really tough’: Duran Duran on 80s excess, tabloid scrutiny and their Halloween glow-up
In 2022, Duran Duran were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It felt like a big deal, a sweet moment of acknowledgment for the band’s five-decades-long career, the 100m records sold, the string of bulletproof hits: Save a Prayer, Rio, Hungry Like the Wolf, Girls on Film. They were inducted by actor Robert Downey Jr; Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell and Gwen Stefani were on hand to pay heartfelt tribute and, as keyboard player Nick Rhodes points out, “It’s a big national live TV broadcast in America that goes out to millions of people,” so the band booked some warm-up shows. “And it so happened that there was a date that came up in Las Vegas on 31 October,” says Rhodes. “And I looked at everyone and said: ‘Well, we can’t do a normal show. Las Vegas on Halloween – surely that’s the opportunity for a little bit of fun?’”
They worked up a set of suitably themed material, including covers of Billie Eilish’s Bury a Friend and Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. There were, of course, costumes involved, because, as Rhodes drily notes, “When have Duran Duran ever not dressed up?”
He has a point, although not even in their new romantic pomp had Duran Duran dressed up like this. Replete with the unexpected sight of the band’s heart-throb-in-chief, bassist John Taylor, “with silver hair down to my waist, like some kind of Scandinavian orc”, the show proved such a success that Duran Duran’s Halloween gigs have become an annual event – they performed one at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2024 and at Manchester’s Co-op Live in 2025, while this year’s takes place at the O2 in London – and spawned an album, 2023’s Danse Macabre. Guitarist Andy Taylor, who left the band in 2007 and announced he was suffering from stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, returned to play on it, while among its covers lurked a version of the Specials’ Ghost Town, an intriguing choice, given that, back in the early 80s, the Specials’ politically engaged social realism was seen as diametrically opposed to Duran Duran’s nakedly ambitious jet-setting glamour.
“I remember being in a taxi with John after one of our first rehearsals, talking about stuff,” nods frontman Simon Le Bon. “I’d been in a rock band and a punk band before called Dog Days, and I said: ‘But John, what about street credibility?’ And John said: ‘Simon, Duran Duran’s got about as much street credibility as Chanel No 19.’ And, at that point, I thought: ‘OK, I’ll go with that.’”
Along the way, the Halloween shows have got increasingly elaborate (the Manchester gig had pyrotechnics, dancers and fire-eaters), while even Le Bon, who by his own admission is “not a fan of Halloween – I think it’s become just a sort of marketing thing”, can’t be faulted for his enthusiasm for the whole venture.
“At the first one, I was a werewolf, but since then it’s developed. The next one, I was like the ghost of a north Atlantic convoy sea captain. There was a sort of nautical theme which suits me down to the ground.” Readers old enough to remember Duran Duran’s heyday may recall Le Bon’s adventures with his 78ft yacht Drum, which capsized during the 1985 Fastnet race, resulting in the singer being airlifted to safety wearing only his underpants. “Another time I was a kind of cross between Mad Max and a mummy, but I also had this one scene where I was determined to wear antlers, like a druid god. And last time I was sort of aiming for something but it fell a bit short: I was a jellyfish, but it ended up looking like … I was going to say something off RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I’d be flattering myself. This time, I want to do something like Shiva the Destroyer.”
It all points to a certain freedom, a desire to do what you want, regardless of whether it’s considered cool. “The thing is, I don’t give a fuck what people think about me,” offers Le Bon, now 67 and a grandfather – or, as he put it on social media, glamfather – of four. “I’m not talking for the whole band – I’m sure some of them do care – but me, I just do what I do, and that’s all it is.”
It also suggests a sense of self-deprecating humour that Rhodes thinks might have been overlooked after their 1982 album Rio catapulted them to superstardom, when Duran Duran had fair claim to call themselves the biggest band in the world. In fairness, it wasn’t always easy to spot amid the expensive jet-set videos, supermodel girlfriends and Antony Price suits. “I think it was missed by some people,” he says. “But we grew up with Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and all of those amazing 70s British TV shows and so, inevitably, that was part of what we were doing. It doesn’t mean we were going to put it into songs – I guess we weren’t ever going to write The Laughing Gnome – but at the same time, you know, the videos are filled with humour. Watch A View to a Kill or Rio. It’s there.”
Talking to the band’s four members about their heyday is intriguing. It was, all agree, exactly what they’d wanted in the first place. They loved being on Top of the Pops – the video for their recent single Free to Love was a hugely affectionate homage to the show – and clearly relished enjoying themselves in the grandstanding style of the times, palling around New York with Andy Warhol and calling up supermodels’ agents in order to ask their clients to dinner. “Being single was good fun,” smiles Le Bon, when asked what he misses about that era, before his expression changes. “I shouldn’t say that, should I? Being married has been amazing.”
Equally, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the kind of global fame they enjoyed in the 80s – not to mention the unfailing attentions of their diehard fans, the Durannies – was a lot to take on. “It was a mindfuck, actually,” offers drummer Roger Taylor. “I was sitting in my bedroom teaching myself the drums when I was 16; by the time I was 21 we were playing Madison Square Garden. I wasn’t prepared for it in any way. My dad worked in a car factory; my mum worked on the switchboard at a warehouse. I didn’t have any kind of grounding for great success in my life. Five years into it, I thought: ‘I’m not sure I can live with this level of scrutiny.’ The music press was hounding us, the tabloids were chasing us. It was the first time they really wanted to feature musicians as part of their journalism. The fanbase was 12 to 16 years old and very intense. It was definitely time to step away.”
He departed Duran Duran and upped sticks to Gloucestershire in 1986. To his delight, the minute he left the band, the fans that had camped outside his house disappeared. “God bless them, but it was a bit of a relief. The only people that tracked me down were the Sun, who banged at my door at six in the morning, then wrote this feature with the headline ‘Roger Taylor: The Hermit of Pop’. But it was great not to be bothered and live a quiet, simple life.”
By 1989, the hits had dried up for Duran Duran. “I felt huge anxiety, like water-running-out-of-the-bathtub sort of anxiety,” says Le Bon, who along with Rhodes is Duran Duran’s only constant member since he joined in 1980. They rolled up their sleeves and toughed it out through the band’s lean years, in the company of American guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, the latter a curious character who at one juncture marketed a sex toy modelled on his own penis, but also co-wrote Ordinary World, the 1993 single that briefly returned Duran Duran to the upper echelons of the global charts and remains their biggest streaming hit today. At one juncture, Le Bon wrote a song called Undergoing Treatment that depicted the band “watching others in the news”, while finding themselves “resigned to the mid-price section”. Today, he feels like their wilderness years were the band’s making.
“We survived the cutting of the tall poppies and I think that endeared us to people, in a way,” he says. “It proved we’re tough, actually. We might look like a bunch of soft, made-up middle-class blokes, but actually, we’re really tough.”
Certainly, you can’t miss a distinct shift in perception of Duran Duran since the original quintet reformed in 2001. The bad reviews that plagued them throughout their imperial phase seem to have been consigned to the past. “I remember coming offstage one night and someone saying: ‘The sound of the crowd has changed,’” says bassist John Taylor. “It had dropped an octave from that shrill treble. Clearly, we’d moved on from that audience that Duran Duran used to get, largely female and teenage, which was fine for us, but the kind of audience that gets pooh-poohed. That felt like, ‘OK, we’re on an even pitch now. We can move forward.’ The guys were done hating us.”
If you want evidence of national treasure status, well, they have just been featured on a series of Royal Mail stamps. Everyone from Beck to Brandon Flowers of the Killers to emo band Panic! at the Disco has cited them as an influence. Moreover, they never seem to run out of younger artists to collaborate with: Mark Ronson co-produced 2015’s Paper Gods, Blur’s Graham Coxon turned up on its successor, Future Past, and last summer, Le Bon and John Taylor unexpectedly popped up on stage in Hyde Park with Sabrina Carpenter, belting out Hungry Like the Wolf. Le Bon is hugely enthusiastic about having persuaded the Margate-based band Pigeon to support them on tour, although what the Durannies will make of their “no-wave psychedelic punk” remains to be seen. “We really respect youthful energy. You want to get some of that in the group, some of that in the studio.”
That said, there are aspects of 21st-century music they seem very wary of. Rhodes offers some cautious optimism about AI’s impact on music “if you use it as an artistic tool”, but Le Bon says he recently encountered an AI take on a Duran Duran song, and still seems scarred by the experience: “It was absolutely abominable! It was a horrible tune – the vocal was awful. I can’t remember the title but the cover was a girl standing on a yacht, so no cliches there. I do worry that people might just start getting used to it and accepting it in the same way you would accept really bad school dinners, just because you were hungry and it’s food. It’s shocking.”
Besides, as he points out, there’s no need for an AI Duran Duran, given that the real deal is still extant and intends to remain so. “I think being in the band gives me the impetus and energy and motivation to try to keep myself mentally flexible, physically strong. I purposely run up and down stairs because I don’t want to suddenly go, ‘Oh, I need to move to a bungalow. My knees have gone.’ I can’t change the age I am, but I can act as youthful as I can and I think that makes you last longer. Until I drop dead on stage? Well, it’s not a bad way to go, to be honest with you.”
Duran Duran’s Halloween show is at the O2, London, 31 October as part of their 2026 UK and Europe tour.