The ‘death’ of the band has been much discussed over the past couple of months, with statistics showing that it’s now solo artists who dominate the upper echelons of the sales and streaming charts (not to mention the lion’s share of the cultural conversation).
In an interview on the Brydon & podcast, Duran Duran lead singer Simon Le Bon has been having his say, and he agrees that the finest period for the ‘band’ as a concept may well be in the past.
“I think we came very much towards the end of bands,” he argues. “You’ve still got bands going now, but I think the golden era… somebody said to me - it was a Japanese record executive, very, very high up - he said, ‘Simon, Duran Duran are the last of the great British R&B bands.’ ‘R&B?’ I said. He said ‘yes, you know what I mean - like, Beatles, Rolling Stones,’ and just being put in the same category as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones is enough for me.”
Le Bon points to the fact that, in the ‘80s, when Duran Duran were at their peak, “there could be a ‘number one band in the world’, and for about five minutes it was us.”
“Now, could you say who’s the top band in the world?” he wonders. “The artist who’s got the most attention at the moment is probably Taylor Swift. Coldplay are up there, but they’ve been going… they’re Coldplaying themselves out, aren’t they?”
Asked by host Rob Brydon to clarify what he means by that, Le Bon says: “I’m not quite sure what I do mean by that. I saw Coldplay’s performance at Glastonbury and it was magnificent… they embrace their audience in a way that I don’t think any other band does.”
Ultimately, though, Le Bon stands by his original statement about the “golden era” being over: “Compare now to then - you get these flashes of attention that get attached to artists, and then they disappear forever. That’s what the achievement is for us: it’s managing to stay around.”
Various attempts have been made to explain why bands are less popular than they once were, but the changing technology and economics of the music industry have surely played a part. It’s now easy and affordable for an artist to create full productions at home - why bother to recruit a drummer, guitarist, bass player and keyboard player if you can record all of these parts yourself? - and with streaming services paying a relative pittance, splitting what little money can be made from royalties between multiple band members doesn’t sound particularly appealing.
Touring costs have also risen, and it stands to reason that the fewer people there are on stage, the more money there is for each of them.
Even when there was big money to be made from being in a band, though, there were disagreements, and Le Bon puts Duran Duran’s longevity down to the fact that they’ve always “split everything equally” (as have Coldplay, funnily enough).
“We split the proceeds,” he confirms. “There’s no Lennon and McCartney in this group. Because we figured out very early on that that’s the way to keep a band together.”
