LE BON VIVEURS

The weird thing about Simon Le Bon is how many other people he looks like. Or how many othe rpeople he khas looked like. When, in 1981, "Planet Earth" brought Duran Duran their first top Top Of the Pops appearance, Le Bon resembled an effete Elvis Presely - all doe eyes, puffy lips and puppy fat. Much later, long after the New Romantic scene they namedchecked on that song had gone the way of red braces, black furniture and white soul, Le Bon grew his hair and became chunky rather than chubby. Fleetingly, he brought to mind Jim Morrison. Nowadays, leaner and more creased, he looks remarkably like the film actor Malcolm McDowell. For a man who has spent most of his adult life trying to look more like Andi McDowell, he ha taken this onset of masculinity in stride.

Leading VOX through the labyrinthine and wildly luxurious dressing rooms of LA's Universal Amphitheatre, past a rider of late Roman decadence and a bathtub the size of small swimming pool, Le Bon remains almost heroically camp. We arrive at a room that houses nothing but a vast white leather couch.

"Look at that!" he gasps. "It's so '80s. It's so Dynasty. It's so... me." He flounces over to the sofa and sprawls on it, arranging himself as if he were Ava Gardner. In an age where rock music is simple, no nonsense, rugged, and rock stars are down-to-earth and blokeish, Le Bon seems more exotic than ever. Even dressing down in stubble, jeans and an unflashy leather jacket, he can't help himself. Behind us stands the tiny and unmistakable figure of Nick Rhodes who has never weaned himself off what he once called the addiction of make-up. He gazes beadily at Le Bon."My God, Simon," he demands, "what are you drinking?"

Le Bon is holding a glass full of thick green liquid that looks, smells and indeed tastes as if it's been brewed from pulped lawnmower clippings. "Wheatgrass," he says. Wheatgrass is the only foul thing on Duran Duran's rider. It's there because, although Simon likes a drink and Jesus, can he drink- he's on a perpetual health kick. Wheatgrass serves as his pre-emptive antidote to the rakish life he still enjoys leading. Rhodes himself is carrying a glass of red wine. Much as you'd expect from the quiet, cerebral keyboardist, he doesn't like to over-indulge. He sips at his wine as if deeply concerned about its vintage.

Not for the first time VOX is struck by how much the two remaining founders of Duran Duran still look and behave like Duran Duran. Their contemporaries have either disappeared or split up (Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, Haircut 100), flipped out (Depeche Mode, the precomeback Bunnymen) or changed to the point of being unrecognisable (U2, George Michael). Duran Duran have proved adaptable, shifting with the times long after they ceased to define them, but remaining essentially unchanged. Now-departed

Bassist John Taylor once claimed that Duran Duran were conceived as a cross between the Sex Pistols and Chic, and throughout their chequered history, they've remained true to that notion of themselves.

Of course, if either the Sex Pistols or Chic had survived long enough to make a record as hapless and deluded as 'thank You', Duran's 1995 collection of covers, then neither would be names worth invoking. `Thank You' contained staggeringly inappropriate assaults on Grandmaster Flash's `White Lines', Bob Dylan's `Lay Lady Lay', Sly Stone's `I Wanna take You Higher' and, most shocking of all, a fantastically wacky countrified take on Public Enemy's `9 1 1 Is A Joke'. And yet, in retrospect, it seems tolerable charming even. Which isn't something you can say for Tony Hadley's similar effort last year, or even for David Bowie's `Pin Ups', which probably gave them the idea in the first place. Maybe it's because they don't take themselves completely seriously. Or perhaps it's down to the fact that they do have a huge repertoire of memorable pop songs of their own and even today, as on their new `Medazzaland' album they're capable of turning out numbers that can stand with the best of their back catalogue. The new record sounds a lot like a'90s `Rio'-flashly produced with lots of sharp guitar, dance beats and synth stabs.

"That's definitely the way we saw it," explains Rhodes later. "We felt that when we were choosing tracks to play live, we should go back to the early stuff because it just seems to fit really well with the stuff that's on the new record."

Basically, they can write a tune - that always helps. But Duran Duran have never been that simple. The original Duran DuranLe Bon, Rhodes, and the three unrelated Taylors, John, Andy and Roger- all met in a Birmingham club with the suitably preposterous name of the Rum Runner. The club was seen as a provincial cousin to London's scene-defining Blitz and attracted an odd crowd. Bowie clone Martin Degville (later of the lamentable Sigue Sigue Sputnik) and punk soul boy Kevin Rowland (Dexys Midnight Runners) were among those who gathered to pose while Rhodes played records by Bowie, Kraftwerk and Joy Division standing motionless behind the decks the way he still does behind banks of synths. Rhodes and John Taylor asked Le Bon to join their band, which Rhodes had named after a character from his favourite film, Barbarella.

Punk was at the end of its very short tether, and had split into two distinct and mutually hostile camps. There were the bands like GBH and The Exploited who based their whole existence on the chorus of `White Riot' by The Clash. Then there were the peacock punks, born of the Malcolm McLaren/ Vivienne Westwood art school tendency, who favoured androgynous looks and despised the boorish machismo of the developing Oi! faction. It was as if everyone had woken up from the punk party with a terrible hangover and couldn't quite make up their minds what to do with the next decade. Simultaneously there were revivals of mod, skinhead, ska, heavy metal and soul. The club scene was so disparate that walking from one venue to another was like going to another city.

The peacock punks were engaged in a dubious and, with hindsight, laughable flirtation with Nazi imagery, while the old bands seemed to be taking on Nazism wholesale.

"It was a very weird time," remembers Le Bon, "and I don't think anybody but us had a clue what was going on. For instance the Nazi thing came out of a fascination with Christopher Isherwood's Berlin and the fact that Bowie was living there. I think it was harmless, but it did all get very silly. Factory Records were using fascist and futurist graphics, you had Hazel O'Connor goose-stepping around and then The Skids put out their album `Days In Europa' which had a Nazi Olympic poster as a cover. Which no one would get away with now."

Within a year of Margaret Thatcher coming to power, the peacock punks, later known as the Blitz Kids and finally the New Romantics a phrase coined by Robert Elms - had won out. People who only a year or so earlier, under an austere Labour government, had been dressing in a parodically proletarian fashion- ripped jeans, working boots, beaten-up leather jackets -were all trying to look like befringed public schoolboys. Thatcher's era of conspicuous consumption was yet to arrive, but the New Romantics were acting like it already had. Whether shopping at Boy or at Oxfam, they were buying clothes in which to go to clubs and knock back Buck's Fizz.

"I read the phrase `New Romantic' in the NME and I really liked it, so I put it in `Planet Earth'," says Le Bon. "I never intended it to be a name for a movement. Stili, as names go I can think of worse. But we were never Thatcherites. We spent virtually the whole of the '80s out of Britain, touring.

We didn't have time to think about British politics. We were hardly ever there. But I understand it. More than anything it comes from the ‘Rio’ video-the yacht, the cocktails, the Caribbean sunshine."

"The funny thing," says Rhodes, "is that it looked like we were having a great time, but it was appalling. There wasn't one of us who didn't lose our lunch on that shoot."

Like their songs, Duran's videos, whether good or bad, are usually memorable. `Wild Boys' had Le Bon somewhat implausibly decked out as Mad Max and strapped by midgets to a giant wheel, which ducked his head into an artificial lake on each revolution. In `Hungry Like The Wolf' he stalked Asian jungles like Indiana Jones looking for an aftershow party, while the rest of the band scoured the city for him to the bemusement of the locals. And in the video to `A View To A Kill', Duran's excellent Bond theme, he actually became James Bond, and did it so convincingly that you feel this is the movie role he covets most of all.

You're absolutely right," Le Bon cheerfully admits. "It was the closest I was ever going to get to playing James Bond and I wasn't about to miss out on that opportunity, He had the works - the girls, the guns, the gadgets, the cars. He got to do everything. I used to read the Bond books as a kid, and I thought they were really sexy. I always wanted to be Bond."

But then that was always the thing about being a New Romantic. Before any of them were ever stars, they behaved as if they already were. And when stardom did arrive, Duran Duran in particular embraced it not so much with glee as with downright lust. Even today, Le Bon's first words to VOX as he extends his hand are: "Aren't you pleased to meet a real-life member of Duran Duran?"

You could never accuse him of being down to earth, but neither is he remotely stuck-up. Nor for that matter are Rhodes or long-time guitarist Warren Cuccurullo. When Warren steps elegantly out of the Mondrian Hotel he notices the forecourt sparkling in the light rain.

"Reminds me of my drug days," he says, staring at the sidewalk. "I used to live next door to here, in this dingy little basement apartment. I was always high, I spent my days sleeping and having sex. Me and my girlfriend were into golden showers; we used to spend all our time pissing on each other but we couldn't afford a rubber sheet. So we just used to turn the damn mattress over. My landlady thought I was great 'til I moved out and she got to smell the place...

It’s one hell of a way to introduce yourself. But it's very Duran - the openness, the anecdotes and the laid-back charm that clashes with the content. VOX looks shocked; Le Bon looks amused and unshocked.

He has an affability that makes his celebrity status look easy and natural. It's as if, knowing he was born to stardom, he feels he has nothing to prove. Paradoxically, this makes him very easy to get along with. At a freeway hypermarket, while returning from a San Diego show to LA, we stop for some lagers. Perusing the huge glass fridge, VOX suddenly notices Le Bon's reflection in the fridge door. "Don't get American beer, get Beck's or something," he says, stroking his chin.

The other late-night shoppers are all muttering: "Is that Simon Le Bon? That is Simon fucking Le Bon."

We cart the beer up to the counter, where a kid of no more than 17 tells us it's now too late to buy alcohol. "Are you Simon Le Bon?" asks the kid. "Will that help?" asks Simon.

The kid shakes his head and Simon just shrugs, like that's cool, That’s OK. The kid immediately relaxes.

"You're my favourite band."

He probably wasn't even born when Duran Duran released `Planet Earth'.

"Thanks mate," says Simon.

And, just as the unfamous are completely at ease with him, so he is completely at ease with those who are much bigger stars than he is. The guest list for the LA gig reads like Oscar night-Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, Cindy Crawford, and a host of lesser celebrities - and the aftershow party is pure LA decadence. It seems you have to be movie star, a six-foot blonde model or a transvestite to gain entry. How the hell VOX got in is a mystery. The trannies have all come as Madonna, and their main topic of conversation is a song from Duran's first album entitled `Friends Of Mine'. It refers to the prison escape of'70s London villain George Davis, and its chorus, "Georgie Davis is coming out", has the assembled pseudo-Ciccones wondering who brave Georgie might be, and why he's chosen this moment to finally come to terms with his homosexuality.

Le Bon wanders over to VOX: "What was Madonna talking to you about?"

"She wanted to know if George Davis is gay. And then she wanted to know if she could come back to our hotel rooms and pee in our mouths." "What, the big fat tall one with the stubble called Mike?"

"No, the one who actually looks like Madonna." "Oh well, that's not so bad then."

OF ALL the songs Duran played tonight, `Friends Of Mine' is one of the few that harks back to their punk roots. It was performed with an intense kind of savagery that saw Le Bon leaning into the audience as if he might be about to gob on them and Warren Cuccurullo thrashing out three chord white noise. Unlike many American guitarists, and despite his pedigree as a Frank Zappa sidemen, (he joined Zappa at 17 and played on the legendary `Joe's Garage' album) he has no time for self indulgent, fiddly histrionics. He makes Steve Jones look like Eddie Van Halen. The song comes at the tail end of a set that includes the old (`Hungry Like The Wolf , `Planet Earth', `Girls On Film~, the recent ("Ordinary World", "Come Undone" and the yet to be released ("Electric Barbarella", "Big Bang Generation". The biggest roar of the night comes when Simon fellates his fingers, if such a thing is possible (Simon certainly makes it look so). By the end of the show the stage is covered in a carnival debris of knickers, bras and T-shirts.

America, unlike Britain, has never quite forgotten Duran Duran. Their last, eponymously titled album, now three years old, contained the Number One single `Ordinary World', a track that read like a love song but was in fact written about a friend of Le Bon's who died of a heroin overdose. Played live, the anguish was obvious.

Now one and all at the party are claiming that it's the best gig they've seen in their lives and, even allowing for habitual showbiz exaggeration, they do have a point. Film stars, models, male Madonnas and an unexplained contingent of US marines-everyone's blown away.

Of all the band's celebrity mates, the name most conspicuous by its absence is that of Michael Hutchence. It's a scarce few days since his body was discovered in a Sydney hotel room. He and Le Bon were longtime drinking buddies and fellow hellraisers. On the new album there's a song called `Michael, You've Got A Lot To Answer For', recorded before Hutchence's death, and, despite the accusatory tone of the title, it's a fond tribute to the pair's many nights on the tiles together"

"He was tremendous fun, a lovely, gentle man, but he had this way of just getting you into trouble," says Le Bon. I'd go out with him and he had this way of making the maddest things happen. I won't play that song any more live. I doubt we ever will." The news arrived two-thirds of the way through Duran Duran's American tour, and the topic is the only thing that seems to unsettle Le Bon at all. Asking about it is like suddenly slapping a happy child. He looks nervous and appalled.

"I knew he had problems with the kids. I knew he had problems with Bob (Geldof). But it never occurred to me he would take his own life. He just didn't seem the type. Now, I guess I know there is no such thing as a type. I suppose the thing that really hurts is that you believe you know someone so well, you believe that they will turn to you if they need help. But people have these secret lives, these inner lives that aren't outwardly visible even to their nearest and dearest. I still haven't spoken to Paula (Yates) about it. I have tried but obviously she's very busy." He shakes his head. "There's a line in the song that asks him to ring me if he's ever in trouble. Princess Diana as well. I didn't know her well, but I did know her. Her death staggered me. It makes you realise how fragile things are." You were her favourite band, weren't you "So she said. I'd like to think so." Following the death of Hutchence came more bad news. Cuccurullo's father, who'd been sick for some time, also died.

"Everyone agrees it's been a great tour, but these things, these bolts out of the blue, they can flatten you if you let them."

THE WILD times with Hutchence were no exception for Le Bon. Throughout the '80s, a decade synonymous with consumption and excess, Simon and the boys consumed to excess everything they could get their hands on. It took its toll. Having given a frazzled interview to Guitar magazine in which he described Le Bon as fat and unable to sing, Andy Taylor was more or less obliged to pack his bags and go.

"It was completely shocking," Le Bon laughs. "Andy and I were the new boys, the last two to join, and neither of us was from Birmingham, so I felt very close to him. Then all of a sudden he's saying all these awful things about me. In his defence he said was misquoted, but that's impossible to believe because not even the most cynical journalist is likely to make that one up. I suppose he thought no one reads Guitar magazine. Except musicians do. "Have you spoken to him since?

"Yes. I mean, he's a lovely guy. He can just be very stupid sometimes and that was a prime example."

And then there was Roger Taylor, Duran's quiet, gentle drummer who left the band just prior to Andy. The band's meteoric rise and the global stardom that suited Le Bon, Rhodes and company so well took its pound of flesh from Roger. In the late '80s he suffered a crashing nervous breakdown.

"It was very difficult for us to deal with. But it kind of seems inevitable looking back. Roger was only ever interested in playing his drums and spending time with his girlfriend; he never cared about the rest of the stuff. In fact he actually actively disliked it all."

Not so long ago, the last of the Taylors, John, the Duranies sexsymbol bassist, left to follow his wife and child to LA.

"We'd have him back in a shot," says Le Bon. "I think it's unlikely, though, that he'll return."Andy and John's departure parenthesised years of cocaine and alcohol abuse. Duran Duran, who’ve never done anything in half measures, went at it like it was going out of fashion.

"It was an excessive time, from every possible point of view," admits Le Bon. "I was never particularly great with girls at school, so when the band took off I just went crazy. I really did shag myself senseless."

Andrew Ridgeley once said that all groupies are looking for is the ultimate autograph. Would you go along with that?

"What a lovely turn of phrase," he laughs. "Yes, I think there is an element of that. It could also be a bit of a power thing as well. Like they get to share in some of the power they invest you with. Anyway I had a bloody marvellous time. Great while it lasted."

What about the drugs?

"Christ," he sighs. "I swore to my lawyer that I'd never talk to anyone about this. So much for promises. It wasn't as bad as you seem to assume and I wasn't as bad as some. I mean I enjoyed myself, but I never actually lost control. I don't think Ibe got a particularly addictive personality, so the coke was there but it wasn't central. And I should add that it was mainly coke." Le Bon claims his marriage to supermodel Yasmin (he says he fell in love with her the moment he saw her picture) was pivotal in changing his ways.

"The notion of responsibility is very important. I became more health-conscious, more aware that my behaviour would have knockon effects. It wasn'tjust about me any more. And it's a growing older thing too. I mean, you can't carry on leading your life like some errant teenager."

Nowadays Wheatgrass, red wine, champagne and beer is as heavy as it gets. Simon cycles, jogs and works out, though there's nothing of the sermonising reformed rock'n' roll animal about him.

"I've never been much good at telling people how to live their lives," he shrugs. "So I don't much enjoy it when people tell me how to lead mine."

Did you ever think when you played `Planet Earth' back in '81 that you'd still be playing it 17 years later?

Le Bon shakes his head.

"Absolutely not. You see, I have never given tomorrow a second's thought. I would say that applies to the rest of the band too. We have very much lived from minute to minute. I think all of us are fiercely aware of the present and only loosely aware of the future...'

Duran Duran still sound like themselves and behave like themselves. In an age that looks to the past to soundtrack the present, Duran look no further than their own history. Going over their back catalogue, seeing them, meeting them, VOX just kept thinking, "Duran Duran are exactly as you expect them to be." Only more so.

The album, Medazzaland' is released at the end of March on Virgin

Click here to go back to the articles page.

Click here to back to the front page.