PASSE DURAN DURAN SERVES UP A VAPID SET AT SUNRISE

Published: Saturday, November 29, 1997
Section: LIFESTYLE
By SEAN PICCOLI Music Writer

British new romantics Duran Duran debuted in the '80s as mere slaves to fashion; they approach the millennium as its victims. Dressing up for a sold-out house, the quintessential hair band managed to blow-dry almost all feeling out of a potentially lively affair. Some 3,900 eager people crowded into Sunrise Musical Theatre on Wednesday night; the five-piece band led by the trio of singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes and guitarist Warren Cuccurullo responded with an empty set of plastic ballads and bloodless dance-rock staples.

Should anybody be surprised? Well, yes. One of the few ``Big '80s'' bands to rebound, Duran Duran surprised some folks with a self-titled 1993 album that yielded two worthy, wuthering-heights ballads: the grandiose Ordinary World and the ethereal Come Undone.

Duran Duran did not entirely dispense with pop-life posturing, but it showed enough craft and emotion to suggest the band had outgrown its pleasantly vapid back catalog, including the old hits Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf. Stripped of its bigness, and separated from the style-without-substance decade that partly explained its popularity, Duran Duran hit the '90s with a chance to prove it could be an actual band.

All that came undone on Wednesday. A poorly paced, pose-encrusted set ill-timed crowd favorites coupled with several lousy songs from a new album, Medazzaland made for an unfashionably spotty evening. The band opened with an instrumental overture that led into Big Bang Generation, a magnificently content-free Medazzaland anthem full of synthesized bluster.

Le Bon sashayed onstage looking the epitome of Beck style double-breasted leather jacket, polyester hug pants and spent the next 80 minutes modeling himself for a crowd dotted with male clothes racks (Le Bon-nabes?). The band claims everyone from Chic to the Sex Pistols as its influences; Le Bon's stunted repartee and rhythm-impaired shimmying more genuinely recalled maudlin crooners Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones.

The band's one attempt at sincerity a dedication of The Morning After to the latest '80s casualty, INXS' suicidally depressed front man Michael Hutchence rang as hollow as one of Puff Daddy's shout-outs to murdered fashion mogul Gianni Versace. Duran Duran seemed to emerge from its cake-walking stupor in time for the encores, playing Ordinary World and Rio with climactic panache saving itself, in other words, for another trite, but reliable runway gesture: the grand exit.

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