The career of Duran Duran's singer has long been eclipsed by that of his wife Yasmin. But he's not jealous, he tells Cassandra Jardine.

WHEN Simon Le Bon married the model Yasmin Parvaneh, in 1985, there was despair  among his teenage fans. The sexiest man in the world, as the leader of Duran Duran was once voted, had finally been snaffled - and by a woman hardly anyone had heard of.

Since then, the couple's fortunes have been reversed. Yasmin is now one of the world's top models, despite having had three daughters - Amber, Saffron and Tallulah - along the way. After each birth, she dieted furiously and returned to work within days, insisting that she and Simon needed the money. For this, she is hailed as a heroine; her husband, meanwhile, is universally derided as a "has-been" who yaks like a "stupid failed rock star".

So it is with some sympathy that I watch Le Bon's tall and gangling figure weave through the fashionable throng at the River Café (his choice). One or two lunchers look up, as if his rosebud lips and heavy jaw are vaguely familiar, but there is no buzz of recognition; no one stares at our table, and there are certainly no requests for autographs. Le Bon looks slightly crestfallen.

He is dressed entirely in tight-fitting black - which may flatter his well-exercised 40-year-old figure, but does little to create a mood of celebration.

Is this Yasmin's choice of garb? Le Bon can't remember - or isn't saying - probably because, just this once, he wants to keep the spotlight on himself. Mostly, he says, his choice of clothes is dictated by economy: "I try to get as many freebies as I can."

Hard times have hit the pop star who blew a pile competing in the 1985 Fastnet yacht race - in which his boat, Drum, overturned - and then the Whitbread. "I got through a lot," says the former patron saint of conspicuous consumption. Since then, his career has capsized, too, but Le Bon remains determinedly buoyant.

Recent years, he admits candidly, have been a "disaster". EMI is now bringing out Duran Duran's Greatest Hits, but only, he claims, in a last ditch attempt to make money out of a band with whom it has ended its contract. "We will do it whether you want it or not," the record company told the three remaining band members. "Do you want to be involved?"

Le Bon leapt at the chance: "I didn't want it to appear as a purely Eighties revival," he explains, "because, right now, everything is happening for the band."

He orders a pile of leaves - "hold the cheese" - grilled fish and just one glass of wine. His restraint is not due to a desire to keep slim for his model wife, he says. No, he is holding back because later he is due to sing with the two remaining members of Duran Duran - Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo.

By the spring they hope to have a new album to promote. Then again, they may not. "We are bloody slow," he says.

And even if the band does manage to make an album, they may not be able to bring it out - they don't have a recording company. "There's the possibility of doing things for ourselves on our own label," he says, uncertainly.

This is, indeed, a low ebb for Duran Duran, who were once, Le Bon reminds me, Diana, Princess of Wales's favourite band, with 13 Top 10 hits and 60 million sales to their credit. He modestly describes their importance to music history as "no more" than that of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and blames their sunken fortunes on the scale of their former popularity.

"When you've been the biggest band in the world, it's hard for a record company to make it work. If you've been that fashionable, there's a backlash and you become really unfashionable."

As he tells it, the history of Duran Duran is as follows: they made it big in the early Eighties because they had good songs such as Hungry Like The Wolf and Girls on Film - the role of make-up and sexy videos in the band's popularity is not something he likes to emphasise (in spite of the gallons of lip gloss with which he once used to adorn himself).

It was not, he says, girls and wild living that caused their sales to dwindle; the real problem was that the music industry pushed them to produce more albums, so the quality dropped.

By the early Nineties, he admits, Duran Duran had "got it all wrong". For a time, they rallied, making a brief come-back with The Wedding Album and the single Ordinary World. Their next two albums, however, were flops, from which the band's reputation has yet to recover.

Le Bon has been left hanging on for grim death to the threads of his fame. Despite his boastfulness and habit of inserting "as I was saying" after every interruption, it is hard not to admire his bullishness. For, after this frank account of Duran Duran's woes, he announces: "You know what? It doesn't matter if we don't have a recording contract. All it needs is one good record and we'll
be back on top."

This rollercoaster must have been hard on his marriage, but Le Bon is not keen to admit to tensions. "There's never any competition between Yazzi and me about who is in the papers most, or who brings in the most money. It would be absurd to be like that. A lot of people have said: 'Oooh, she's more famous than you - and she's got nicer legs'. We'd be in trouble if she hadn't. She's got nicer everything - that's why I married her.

"With us, it's hard to work out who's earning the most, because neither of us has a steady income. I love the fashion world, it's hilarious and full of people like Kate Moss, who is incredibly funny, but as an industry it is also very forgetful. It's a cliché, but you are only as good as your last picture."

Their marriage is not, he insists, a case of super-successful Yasmin shoring up her has-been husband; they are a mutual support society. "When I have a bad patch, she tells me to get up and do something, not to laze around at home. And she lets me know if I'm looking rough or shouldn't wear that shirt."

In return, he tells her that she is beautiful during those off-patches when, due to pregnancy or illness, she isn't working, "although it's not the same when it comes from me".

From the moment he saw her face in a photographer's portfolio and angled for a date, she has been the focus of his life - so much so that he suggests the children have made little difference to their relationship. He still describes her as one of his "best mates" with whom he likes to go out and have a laugh. Sometimes, they are so riotous that they upset other people "who think we must be laughing at them" - which is what Posh Spice thought during one of their recent outings.

The Le Bons share a love of speed, parties and the good life. His passions are boats and motorbikes; she adores fast cars. She devours caviar; he likes fine wines.

"I could spend a £20 million lottery win with no trouble; and I could get through £1 million just like that. I'd take the family to Barbados on Concorde for a couple of weekends, hire Cliveden for another, take them all to the Amanpuri in Thailand, which costs £1,000 a day. Then I'd buy presents for the children and jewels for Yazzi."

Yet, day to day, he is so aware of the value of money that he often feels "stingy". He speaks with loathing of the extravagance of keeping a taxi waiting for five minutes, and insists that money has never lost the value it held for him during his childhood in Pinner, Middlesex. "We don't even have a nanny, that's how normal we are. We cover for each other. Sometimes Yazzi has to go off
for a week of shows, other times I tour for a few days. We both do the school run - I love reading books on the train - and we're at home in the evenings and weekends."

So are we to dismiss all hints of scandal? Le Bon was recently spotted in a taxi in the early hours with model Sophie Dahl. "Oh, she's an old friend," he hoots. What about Yasmin's recent revelation that scarcely a day passes without a "massive row" between them?

"We do go 'whoof'," he says, "but it passes in 20 minutes."

Yet Le Bon is not totally secure about life with his beautiful Yazzi - at least, not if the lyric of the song he has just finished writing, entitled Someone Else Not Me, is anything to go by. The chorus runs: "The hardest thing is to let go when love is real, like a flower loves a bee, and I know you're meant to give yourself to someone else not me."

This is an odd sentiment for a happily married man to express, I suggest. After some flailing around, he admits that it was inspired by "a real recent experience, but not a divorcing matter". His own mother left his father, a civil servant, after years of rows when Le Bon was still a teenager; perhaps he fears history will repeat itself.

Yasmin is now 33; as a model she is already remarkable for her longevity. What will come next? "I think she might become a student," says Le Bon. "She started modelling so young that she missed out on university. And you know what? I might do the same, study something useful, like oceanography." Le Bon left Birmingham University a year into a drama course, after he was
offered a place in Duran Duran - having turned up for the audition in pink leopard-skin shorts.

And yet, a moment later, he is talking again of his determination to carry on with music, come what may. "I always said I wanted to be doing this when I was 50. I no longer care what other people think. I read all the worst reviews, because in this business you've gotta be able to take it. Then I ask myself: 'Are you going to stop?' And the answer is 'No', because I don't want to lie down and be quiet."

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