DURAN DURAN, ADAM ANT RELIVE THEIR '80S SUCCESS
Published: Monday, May 22, 1995

GARY GRAFF Free Press Music Writer

If you switch on the radio these days and hear songs by Duran Duran and Adam Ant, it's fair to wonder just what year this is. Both acts enjoyed heydays more than a decade ago, which is long enough to be two or three eras removed from rock 'n' roll's latest cutting edge. Ant grabbed the spotlight during the late '70s and early '80s, as punk gave way to new wave and then to a more visual consciousness -- which allowed Ant and his cohorts to preen in their Victorian finery and war paint.

Duran Duran followed Ant by a couple of years, which proved fortuitous; the group -- no slouch in the fashion department, either -- was perfectly positioned to capitalize on MTV's launch, providing stylish, exotic videos for the fledgling music channel to make hits of "Girls on Film," "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Union of the Snake."

That was then. But now it's as if both acts, which each suffered dry spells in the intervening years, have never been away. Duran Duran's all-covers album "Thank You" is scaling the charts, while the first single, a pumped-up remake of Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines," is a radio fixture. And Ant can be readily heard with his new hit, "Wonderful."

They're not the only ones. During the past two years, as the so-called alternative rock revolution exploded, more radio stations switched to a modern rock format. Other rock stations have pushed aside some of the Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to make room for new favorites such as Pearl Jam, Live and Stone Temple Pilots.

As they did that, they also reached to the past for songs and artists who could provide the same kind of context that old Zeppelin and Rolling Stones songs brought to Aerosmith and Van Halen. Enter Ant, Duran and others who were churning out hits 15 years ago.

"I don't think (the new) stuff exists in a vacuum; you have to have some sense of roots, some sense of where we came from," says disc jockey Greg St. James, a longtime modern rock proponent who does an hour-long "Retro Zone" show at 10 a.m. weekdays on Detroit's WHYT-FM (96.3). "A lot of bands today will tell you that they listened to Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Gang of Four . . . "

Duran Duran singer Simon LeBon says his group finds the retro trend heartening -- and not at all threatening. "I think you had Duran Duran then and Duran Duran now," he says. "Both are good. It's like saying any new Rolling Stones record is in competition with 'Satisfaction,' which is stupid, isn't it?"

And Ant -- whose real name is Stuart Goddard -- forwards the notion that video was responsible for the initial dismissal of their hits. "Maybe people weren't listening to what the music was, and I think the music was particularly good," he says. "Maybe now they're actually hearing the songs instead of seeing them, and so they're just getting their due."

Perhaps. No band suffered for its image more than Duran Duran. Typed as pretty boys and prompting a screaming fan reaction that was compared to Beatlemania -- a formidable gauntlet for any group -- the Duran crew was kissed off by the mid-'80s, languishing until the 1993 hits "Ordinary World" and "Come Undone" made the group, in LeBon's words, "relevant again."

Duran bassist John Taylor says the commercial drought had its effect on the group. "It was quite difficult to come to terms with," he says. "It's obviously reflected in one's home life. It means giving up three of the four cars you've accumulated in the succession of years, giving up two or three properties you accumulated through the '80s boom years."

But neither Taylor nor LeBon embrace the idea that their group has made a comeback. "We came out of being a nostalgia item and became a current item, which was very important for us," LeBon, 36, explains. "But we never stopped working. We released three albums in a row -- we tried and tried and tried again to become current. It wasn't a comeback as far as we were concerned, but as far as people's consciousness, it definitely was a comeback."

A covers album, then, seems an odd way to capitalize on new success. But the Duran members see "Thank You" -- whose broad reach includes songs by Bob Dylan, Public Enemy, Elvis Costello, Sly & the Family Stone and the Doors -- as a musical exercise, as well as a way to avoid the temptation of simply reprising "Ordinary World."

"We really wanted to move into new territory," LeBon says. "For us, doing covers was definitely new territory." The singer reports that reaction from the songs' writers has been overwhelmingly favorable. One exception: Elvis Costello, who has been known to write scathing letters to performers whose covers he doesn't like and who didn't respond to a Duran letter asking what he thought of their rendition of "Watching the Detectives."

"I saw him the other day and said 'Elvis, seeing as you didn't reply to our letter, did you completely hate our version?' LeBon says. "He said 'Uh, well, uh, well, no. It sounds like Duran Duran doing an Elvis Costello song.'

"I don't know if he meant that to be a compliment or a put- down. I don't care, really." Like Duran, Adam Ant lapsed into obscurity after the mid-' 80s. He did enjoy a Top 20 hit in 1990, "Room at the Top," but it didn't crank up the fever that he whipped up a decade earlier with hits such as "Goody Two Shoes" and "Stand and Deliver."

Unlike Duran, Ant wandered a bit from music, taking acting lessons and establishing that end of his career with guest shots on TV's "Northern Exposure" and "Tales From the Crypt." He has also finished two films, "Drop Dead Rock" with Debbie Harry and
"Sailor's Tattoo" with Grace Jones and Martin Kemp, which he expects will be out later this year. "I think you can make sense of both," Ant, 40, says of acting and making music. "I think you can do both, if you focus on one thing at a time. At this point, I'm going to be focusing on music for the bulk of this year."

The result of that focus is "Wonderful," the title of both Ant's new album and single. The music, composed by Ant and longtime collaborator Marco Pirroni and recorded at London's legendary Abbey Road Studios, is lusher and less frenetic than his earlier work. Comparisons to David Bowie are on target.

The title song has spent four weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard magazine's Modern Rock chart.

"We took a very simple, organic sort of approach," explains Ant, who's single and splits his time between homes in London and Los Angeles. "We composed acoustically and then electrified them, which is a pretty different way of doing things for us.

"I'm lucky in a way. I don't rely on favoritism or the retro thing. But when I do bring a record out, people do give it a spin and listen to it. There's no question that it helps to have the history that I do."

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