Somewhere back in the mists of time, long before miserablism became inextricably linked with rock’n’roll, pop stars were chiefly recognizable for having a laugh. Through gorgonzola grins, they implied that this was the life, and conducted themselves accordingly. Excess was freely indulged, and suntans were acquired the natural way – on exotic video shoots. Back in the ’80s, it was easy to look at a pop star and think “Bastard”. It is safe to assume that Duran Duran had more sex at their peak than Radiohead are currently enjoying at theirs.
 
“I should hope so!” says Simon Le Bon, older but no wiser. “That was the whole point in forming a band. Girls. Absolutely gorgeous girls.”

Nick Rhodes - the wryer, wittier Duran – concurs. “We knew we had the music, quality wise, all boxed up, so we began to pay attention to other matters. And sex was, naturally, other matters.”

Acquaintances from Simon Le Bon’s past (he schooled in Pinner, Northwest London) suggest “fast developer” Le Bon didn’t need the sexual, er, leg-up a life in pop provided. Already a hit with the ladies, and such a tragic clotheshorse he would wear jeans spattered in blood from the butchers, he sang with a punk band Dog Days and famously followed Stephen Duffy and (less famously) Andy Wickett into Duran Duran (then comprising Nicholas “Nick Rhodes” Bates, plus John, Andy, and Roger Taylor) while studying drama at Birmingham University. Although faintly porky and blessed with a rather braying singing voice, he was partly responsible for a large splurge of ridiculously catchy pop songs witch meant absolutely nothing at all.

Lurid, indulgent, immediately successful (first single Planet Earth  was a number 12 hit in 1981), Duran Duran took to the ’80s much like one dives into a swimming pool, which they did quite a lot of too. “We were five heterosexual, good-looking men,” says Le Bon. “We competed against each other for the sexiest girls… I won.” Tiring of groupies quickly – groupies were so Spandau Ballet – they turned attentions to the catwalk, and aimed to nab a succession of high profile models. “It was a hilarious time,” chuckles Le Bon. “We had fabulous, much publicized affairs with a sting of obscenely beautiful women.” His eyes mist slightly. “Passionate times.”

And that was when they knew what was going on. In 1982, photographers who visited he band in Sri Lanka, where they were filming the video for Hungry Like The Wolf, were alarmed by how divorced from reality the band had become. Living in individual beach houses on different corners of the island they were dragged together for photo shoots, strung out on cocaine and losing their grip. By the time The Reflex had topped the charts (one of only two UK Number 1s, surprisingly) in May 1984 the I Saw Duran Duran Get High On Drugs and Girls Were Brought Up On Room Service headlines had landed.
Then something vaguely implausible happened. Simon Le Bon inadvertently fell in love. While attempting to end a relationship with a woman he describes as “deeply neurotic” (something to do with his compulsive philandering, perhaps) he was poring over a photographer’s portfolio one day when he came across the “beautiful smiling face” of a model by the name of Yasmin. “I managed to get her number and we spent over an hour on the phone. She told me that she smoked Marlboro Reds and drank Glenfiddich, we arranged to go out on a double date with some friends of mine to the premiere of Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom. So I turned up at her tiny flat the next day with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey, which we drank half of on the way to the cinema.”

In 1985, they walked up the aisle together, Yasmin losing the surname Parvaneh, acquiring Le Bon, and promptly adding the prefix “super” to her job description. A decade and a half later, they remain married, kids in tow, despite regular tabloid claims that Le Bon’s belief in monogamy is purely theoretical. Last summer it was “Yasmin lookalike”, Jane Murphy, 17 years his junior, whom he was spotted deep-throating at London’s Met Bar. More recently, he was seen with model Sophie Dahl, again in a pose that suggested “good friends” wasn’t even the half of it.

“Unless you’re married to a very suspicious partner,” he says, “going out and having a drink with a friend – a female friend – is not a problem. Being seen at a club with someone isn’t a problem. Being seen leaving their house at dawn, however, would be a problem. Fortunately,” he concludes with a fat smile, “I’ve never been in that situation.”

For some peculiar reason, Duran Duran continue to exist today, albeit precariously. If it’s all the same, they say, they’d rather not be lumped in with the current “’80s Revival”, pointing out that while the reunion tours feature bands whose life spanned a near five years maximum, they’ve not only lasted the course, but claim to have shifted at least half their reported 60 million sales in this decade (though this surely must be untrue). Today, Duran Duran total just three members. There’s Le Bon, Rhodes, and long-serving American guitarist and one-time Frank Zappa sideman Warren Cuccurullo. All three unrelated Taylors have long since left the fold, Andy and Roger in 1985 due to disillusionment, and the now Los Angeles-residing John in 1996 for “personal reasons.”

“He’s everything ‘A’ these days,” says Rhodes. “AA, NA, LA…”Rhodes and Le Bon don’t see much of the former Durans, though last month they ran into Roger Taylor at the film premiere for Velvet Goldmine. In gruesome contrast to the drummer’s one-time starring role at such events, Taylor’s wife was being employed as a body painter.

Rhodes and Le Bon are doing better than that, but not much better. Last month’s hits collection, Greatest, suggests there is a credence to Rhodes' claim that “history will prove kind to us”, yet the fact remains that the band are currently without a recording contract for the first time in their career, EMI having dropped them after refusing to release the band’s most recent studio album, Medazzaland, due to a poor showing in America and what the label refers to as subsequent “relationship issues” – all telltale signs of a band whose lights have burned out.

“If I’ve learned anything in 20 years,” sniffs Rhodes. “Medazzaland is the best record we’d ever made. listen to any song from it alongside, say, Bittersweet Symphony or anything by Radiohead or Oasis, and it’ll stand up to any of them. Medazzaland wasn’t not released in this country because it wasn’t good enough, but because of one idiot at the record company.” He quickly corrects himself. “I’m sorry did I say one idiot? I meant a battalion of idiots.”

Greatest, then, is something like a lifeline for Duran Duran. EMI are clearly keen to recoup some of their reputedly considerable outlay (Duran never did come cheap), and the band could certainly do with the exposure. It’s not very dignified, but Le Bon could do with any cash that may come his way. “It’s true,” he insists. “I’d love to take the family on a winter holiday, but can’t afford it.” Perhaps, suggests Q, the wife could chuck a couple of quid into the kitty?
“We’ve a big family,” he says. The Le Bons have three daughters, point-six more than the national average.

Meanwhile, the immediate future is as cloudy as salt water in Drum’s bilge tank. “We’ve been having meetings,” says the singer hopefully, while Rhodes suggests that the band’s tomorrow may well no longer reside with old-hat CDs and the record companies of yesteryear, but at the end of a www postcode. “It’s the future…” he predicts, sounding all Obi Wan Kenobi.
Duran Duran are leaving no marketing stone unturned. In addition to the hits package and a December tour of the nation’s arenas, there is also an anthology of the band’s videos. It’s all a timely reminder that, at their best (even 1993’s “comeback” single, Ordinary World, was pretty good) Duran Duran were rather jolly. Q tells them they were the biggest thing in British pop since Led Zeppelin. They like this a lot, and repeat it to numerous TV and radio people over the following week – taking care to change the tense of our compliment from the past to the present.

“We’ve always craved critical acclaim,” says Le Bon, apparently sincere. “But because out lifestyles were somewhat… colourful, it was decided that there must be something hokey about us, as if we weren’t a serious band at all. Well, we fucking are.”
Pop stars who spend most of their time cavorting with “leggy lovelies” rarely get critical acclaim, probably because they’re getting so much else that’s nice. Frankly, they just don’t need it. Le Bon grins sheepishly, and holds up his hands as if a gun were suddenly drawn.

“True, true, but then it was almost out of our control,” he says. “What were we to do? I’d spent my entire teenage years suffering one unrequited love affair after the other. I was so shy I couldn’t even talk to girls. If I fancied them, I’d follow them home, but I didn’t have the guts to approach them. I was a teenage stalker. The same went for John.  The first time I saw him he was this speccy geek with nicotine-stained fingers, trembling with fear at the prospect of having to meet people. And his name wasn’t even John. It was Nigel. He was a Nigel with glasses, poor sod. I remember staring at his face and slowly realising that he was rather beautiful, exquisite in fact. I mean, this was the best looking guy I’d seen in years, maybe my whole life. Losing his glasses and changing his name to John was the best thing he ever did. He was a man transformed. To see him in action was incredible. He could charm the knickers off anyone.”
Quite.
“You know what it was?” he asks. “It was just front. All front. Easy, really. Look what you do.” He stands up, and affects the pose of a “love god”. “You grab your balls, close your eyes, and swagger up to the woman of your choice and just go, Hi baby. That’s it. It either works or it doesn’t. We were worthy of all these women simply because we had the balls to approach them. There will always be better looking men with bigger dicks and better technique and more money, but they probably never had our front. We did.”

And once the party began, it barely paused for a breath.
“Of course it didn’t,” he says, almost hungrily. “Does it ever for the massively successful? It was a mad time, so it would have been very difficult not to have got carried away with it all, the women, the drinking…” The drugs? “Yes, and the drugs, to a certain extent. But then everyone was using them back then, mostly cocaine. You couldn’t go anywhere without being offered whatever you wanted. I remember being in this stadium in New York watching Blondie. I was sat in this press box, front row, with all these journalists behind me. And this guy beside me knocks me on the arm and hands me a mirror full of cocaine and this steel snorter! It really was that blatant.

“But booze is worse, and it’s legal. When I go to a restaurant I’ll have a bottle of wine, in a bar I’ll drink cocktails, and at home in front of the TV I’ll have a beer. Then suddenly I’ll realise that I’ve not gone without a drink in two years. Fuck! I’m an alcoholic!” He starts laughing loudly. “And it’s virtually impossible to stop. Every time you try to give it up, it’s somebody’s birthday. It’s always somebody’s fucking birthday!”

There is something engagingly immature about Simon Le Bon, a man who turned 40 in October. He idolises Mick Jaggar, not for his music, but his lifestyle and his endless zeal. Whereas Nick Rhodes is keen to complete the next Duran album (called Hallucinating Elvis and featuring – eek! – “reggaeish material”) the singer is busy with far more important matters. He wants to take a course, for example, in the handling of state-of-the-art fireworks, and is currently back in training at the gym because it produces, he claims, a similar effect in the body to heroin, only without the unpleasant side effects.
“He’s still prone to going off on benders,” says Rhodes with a shrug, “which is frustrating when we’ve got work to do. But it’s difficult for him, chiefly because he is Simon Le Bon. Simon loves people, he loves to socialize. It’s what he does.”
During our conversation, Le Bon excuses himself in order to relieve his bladder. Despite clearly marked doors, he enters the Ladies “by mistake”.

“I thought it was communal or something,” he laughs. “But then a woman walked in and gave me a look that immediately told me otherwise. Oops!” And he still got her phone number. Maybe.

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