DURAN DURAN DISCOVERING SUCCESS IN THE `ORDINARY WORLD'

Byline: By J.D. Considine THE BALTIMORE SUN

Is success sweeter the second time around? Maybe so, but it isn't any better-organized. And as much as Nick Rhodes and the other members of Duran Duran enjoy being back on top of the charts, they're a bit dismayed to find that things are just as crazy for them now as it was when they rode the first wave of Duranomania a decade ago.

``We'd thought we were better-equipped for it, but it's getting pretty crazy out here,'' says Rhodes from a tour stop in Charlotte, N.C. ``When we looked at it on paper, this tour seemed beautifully routed and relatively ivilized, as these things go.

``But then, of course, when you look at the harsh reality of the number of airplanes and how long some of them actually take, and the fact that you have to work on those days, it suddenly becomes a little more grueling than one would have imagined.' Then, of course, there's the weather. ``This heat is killing us,'' Rhodes groans. ``I actually look forward to thunderstorms.'' Still, he's not complaining. Wouldn't even think of it, to be honest. In part, that's because the most important part of the tour -- the musical end -- has been great for the band. ``I mean, apart from things like the travel and what have you, the shows and the audiences have just been phenomenal so far,'' he says.

But mainly it's because Rhodes knows what it's like not to have hits. Before ``Ordinary World'' charged up the charts earlier this year, Duran Duran hadn't put a single in the Top 40 since 1989. And though the band continued to tour and record, most people -- including the Durannies themselves -- figured the band had long since lost its place in the sun.

``Over the last few years, we'd been soldiering away, and we'd almost become settled in the belief that we'd got a cult following,'' he says. ``And that was the level Duran Duran had been sitting at since about 1988 or something. We sort of locked into that, making our albums and exploring different territories and really being happy with what we were producing.'' Of course, it's worth noting that the band hadn't expected mass-audience acceptance the first time around, either. ``When we started out, really, we came from an art-school background,'' Rhodes says. ``The audiences we were playing to at the beginning of the '80s, even in America, were very much a college cult audience, for want of a better word.

``When we came over here the first time, we were playing all these tiny little clubs. I remember the first gig we ever did in America was Spit Club in Long Island -- I remember most of them pretty clearly. And we suddenly went from that to Madison Square Garden. It was a greater surprise to us than anybody else.''

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