When Duran Duran first hit the charts, MTV had just launched and the band were quick to exploit the potential of music videos. It was widely received as a return to form after the disappointment of 2007’s Red Carpet Massacre and a nod to their earlier hits like Planet Earth and Rio. The band’s 13th album All You Need is Now was released earlier this year. We write music and get to play it to people, it’s not a bad way to make a living.” It can feel a little bit like groundhog day, but you just have to accept it, it’s part of what we do and God, we’re lucky to be doing it. “When you’re on tour, you get on a plane, go to a hotel, if you’re lucky get a chance to read a book and then you’re on stage. It’s more intensive schedule than they ever had in the early days when the band made sure there was ample window set aside for hedonism, not that Le Bon’s complaining. With a UK tour on the horizon, they’ve been playing five shows a week. It’s best that way, otherwise I’d look at the schedule and start to panic that we’re taking too much on.” I don’t need to know where we’ve been or where we are going to be next week, I just need someone to tell me where I need to be right now. “When I’m on tour, I operate on a need to know basis. He looks considerable younger than 52 and admits that just as he did in the 1980s when the band were at the height of their fame he prefers to live very much in the present. When we speak, Le Bon is midway through a gruelling world tour. While some bands from the era reappear every so often to run through the old hits, Duran Duran have kept on recording and aside from the occasional break and parting company with guitarist Andy Taylor, it’s the same line-up which was plastered on many a teenage girl’s bedroom wall all those years ago. That was back in 1981, but 30 years on, little, aside from the fashion and a noticeable reduction of eye make-up, has changed. The childhood friends had formed Duran Duran a few years earlier and with Le Bon as their frontman they quickly emerged as poster boys for the New Romantic movement. He was just 21 years old when he was introduced by an ex-girlfriend to John Taylor and Nick Rhodes in a Birmingham nightclub.

“It’s so still, absolutely nothing is happening, I don’t like that, it makes me nervous.” Le Bon, Duran Duran’s charismatic frontman, has rarely had much down time since he made his screen debut in a Persil washing powder, at the age of five.īy the time he was out of his teens, he had sung in the church choir, auditioned for a punk band, starred in several West End theatre productions and had just finished a spell working on a kibbutz. It’s quiet, not even the slightest breeze is blowing and the atmosphere doesn’t suit him much.

Three decades on, singer Simon Le Bon tells Sarah Freeman why he has no regrets. IN the 1980s, Duran Duran unashamedly indulged in every excess.

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