Not only one of the best Duran Duran songs, All She Wants Is could well be one of their most sonically adventurous. By focusing on the girl’s unspecified needs, the oscillating funk rhythm starts off alluringly, erupts noisily, before the song reaches its febrile closure. The song’s lyrics are fairly oblique, apparently about an aimless girl in clubland who has it all but is unsure of what she wants next (“What do you care?/What do you dare?/What does your heart say now?”). Kept on his toes by hyperactive hi-hats, guitarist Warren Cuccurullo squares off against a series of orgasmic yelps with jarring guitar solos which are as angular and dissonant as any post-punk experimentalist’s. The robotic funk of Duran Duran’s 1988 single All She Wants Is continued the electronic dance fusion on the band’s fifth album, Big Thing, and reached No.9 in the UK. As a distinguished work of assuredness and maturity, the song deserves to be dug out and reappraised. Despite only reaching No.22 in the UK, Skin Trade certainly stands as one of the best Duran Duran songs – its cool-headed rhythm combined with its immaculate blasts of brass from The Borneo Horns truly sets it apart. “We put it out and it bombed, pretty much,” he remembers. Written as a lyrical exposé examining sexual exploitation and female prostitution, and inspired by a Dylan Thomas book, at the time Nick Rhodes sincerely felt Skin Trade was “the best thing we’ve ever written”.Įxpecting it to do even better than their previous single, Rhodes was in for a disappointment. I Want Your Love hit No.4 in the US, proving the band still had enough commercial appeal to reach the Top 10.Īgain showing the influence of Prince, Simon Le Bon gave his best falsetto to Skin Trade, the second single taken from Duran Duran’s 1987 album, Notorious. Despite Duran Duran’s former standing as New Romantics, the song is anything but lovelorn, as Le Bon tells the listener he simply isn’t interested in romance (“I don’t want your love to bring me down”).īy mixing the burgeoning sounds of Chicago house and European dance music with Prince’s funk-pop formula, it’s clear Duran Duran were trying to stay ahead of the musical curve – and the gamble seemed to pay off. With house music striking out in all the late 80s clubs, Duran Duran turned their hand to techno-inspired dance-pop on I Don’t Want Your Love, a 1989 single with a tinge of funk bursting into Eddie Van Halen-esque soloing courtesy of Chester Kamen on guitar. A true enigma among their work, Careless Memories suggests a different path Duran Duran rarely took: one of gloomy post-punk ambience and Robert Smith-esque lyricism (“Fear hangs a plane of gun smoke drifting in our room”). Scraping into the UK Top 40, it’s a fascinating and underrated track that more than deserves mention as one of the best Duran Duran songs – Nick Rhodes’ whirling sequencer pattern and Roger Taylor’s trance-inducing beat showcases the band’s potential to be dark and mysterious. A true crowd-pleaser.Īrguably closer to the morbid post-punk of The Cure than the Day-Glo pop of Kajagoogoo, the downbeat, pulsating Careless Memories was the second single taken from Duran Duran’s debut album in 1981. Speaking about the song, guitarist Andy Taylor said, “That’s one of the things that drives us – melodic songs that people can relate to has always been our thing.” Lovingly crafted for their ageing fanbase, it’s remarkable to hear how little Simon Le Bon’s voice had changed – despite being in the pop game for 20 years at the time, he’d lost none of his passion and sounded like he hadn’t aged a day. An energetic dose of 80s pop nostalgia with an uplifting, anthemic chorus, it quickly took its place among the best Duran Duran songs. Chosen as the album’s lead single, (Reach Up For The) Sunrise was a total blast from the past in more ways than one. In 2001, the “classic” five-piece Duran Duran line-up reunited for the first time since 1985 and recorded the band’s 11th album, Astronaut. Revealing why the synth-pop band are icons above and beyond the new wave era, here are our 20 best Duran Duran songs. Churning out dozens of chart successes across their 40-year career, they built upon a legacy of iconic music videos that dominated MTV and took the US by storm. Far from being a manufactured boy band, the talents of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, and the three Taylors (Andy, John and Roger) proved they had the songwriting abilities to match their good looks. Since the early 80s, Duran Duran have been one of the UK’s greatest bands who once stood at the forefront of the new wave revolution. From New Romantic trailblazers to elder statesmen of pop, the best Duran Duran songs established them as icons that defined the 80s.
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