The Halloweeners of New York City, Simon Le Bon recalls, were more barewolf than werewolf. “There was quite a naked thing going on,” he says. “There were quite a few people wearing very little at all, just a pair of horns and a bit of fluff.”
Such were the too-much-skin-crawling terrors that greeted Duran Duran in October 2024, when they brought their now notorious Halloween show to NYC’s Madison Square Garden. “That was a real spectacular moment,” says keyboardist Nick Rhodes, “because we brought dancers in and an army of drag queens, and it was just really fun. It was like Duran meets Rocky Horror.”
Forty-five years into a career as one of pop’s biggest and most enduring boybands — and days before they headline Hyde Park for a British Summer Time show alongside Scissor Sisters and Chic — it’s wonderfully heartening to find Duran Duran still extolling the carefree joy of pop life. In 2023 they released Danse Macabre, an album featuring ghoulish remakes of old material and covers of spooky favourites like The Specials’ Ghost Town and Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. Last year this skeleton crew of undead pirates, evil druids, zombie punks and crow kings descended on Manchester for their dose of diabolic disco and this year they’re bringing the fun to London, with a Halloween show at the O2 at the end of a UK arena tour. “The last one in Manchester was so uplifting and bonkers,” says Rhodes, “we all thought, ‘let’s do another one’.”
The whole Halloween idea, Rhodes explains, began as a throwaway suggestion for a warm-up show in Las Vegas ahead of their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance in 2023. “There were a couple of dates available just when we needed them, and one of them happened to be on Halloween,” he says. “I just smiled and thought about the idea of how Halloween in Las Vegas seemed so beautifully preposterous in the first place. So I suggested to everyone, why don’t we do some of our songs that are vaguely in that theme, things like Wild Boys and Hungry Like the Wolf, that we could create some new, slightly creepier videos for?”
The concept morphed into a full be-costumed spooktacular. After all, Duran Duran have never been a band allergic to the dressing-up box.
“I don’t think Duran Duran were ever going to be a band to wear jeans and T-shirts on stage”
“We grew up with a lot of stylish musical movements,” says Rhodes. “Glam rock, punk rock, disco all had their own unique styles. I don’t think Duran Duran were ever going to be a band to wear jeans and T-shirts on stage. It was always about presentation and fun. Very much part of what we always try to do is lift people’s spirits.” Pun intended. Le Bon’s only concern is avoiding the Halloween cliches. “I don’t really want to go down the werewolves, zombies and vampires route,” he says, “but it’s always fun dressing up in this band.”
This year, the show comes accompanied by a new album, Free to Love: Hot Star Remixes. It’s a collection of remakes of Free to Love, a single the band released in April, by the likes of Trixie Matel, Horse Meat Disco and DJ White Shadow. The original funk-pop song stemmed from a Nile Rodgers riff left over from the Danse Macabre sessions. “We had this little riff,” Le Bon explains. “It’s got this very simple, could-be-played-on-a-thumb-piano kind of vibe to it. I was a little daunted when it was suggested we bring it up to a Duran Duran song standard because it was so tiny, it was such a small little box. Sometimes, if you’re a melody writer, it can seem like a prison cell, a little piece of music. But it’s a Nile Rodgers riff, it’s got incredible value just because of that, to us.”
The video for the song features the band teleported back to a recreation of a 1980s Top of the Pops performance, in all its gold jacket and shoulder-padded glory. “We came of age as a band doing Top of the Pops and we were very, very sad when it was taken off the air,” says Simon. “Nothing’s ever really come along to replace it. So we thought if we ever want to do it again we’re gonna have to recreate it ourselves, and this seemed like a great song to do it on because it’s got a disco vibe to it. My only complaint was the stage was too big. When you did Top of the Pops it felt like you’d crammed the whole band on a tea chest.”
“We’ve still got our passion for music”
Somewhere within Le Bon, he claims, still lurks that hungry young wild boy. “Well, I’m still getting on stage and shaking the tail feathers,” he says. “Ben Stokes just retired from international cricket and I listened to him saying he couldn’t keep going and I thought, ‘Have I ever felt like that?’ Actually maybe I have felt like that, but I tried to work through it and succeeded.” He admits to regular periods when he’s questioned his passion for performance. “You just have to decide, ‘Do I still love doing this?’ And actually, I still do. We’ve still got our passion for music. I still get the same thrill that I did when I was a teenager listening to something new and exciting.”
One less welcome offshoot of Duran Duran’s immense 1980s success — with more than 100 million albums sold — was the band’s reputation as the epitome of A-list jet-set pop stardom. Was that tiring to maintain? “No,” Le Bon insists. “It becomes expensive to maintain, I’m sure that could be tiring. I never felt that it was a reputation that had to be upheld — ‘Oh we only stay in the finest hotels, you know.’ We always put the music first and the rest of it just came along for the ride to be honest. We went down to the south of France, we were photographed at the Cannes film festival and we got offered boats to go out on rides on, and then I got a boat and all that stuff, and I think the interest of the media was more about our lifestyle than our music. Loads of people make music, but here are these guys on yachts and sat in fast cars with women and all that stuff. We were perfect subject matter.”
In fact, Duran Duran’s survival through post-1980s career dips, splits and departures — solidified in an enduring and successful reunion since 2001 — is largely down to a distinct lack of pop star ego among their ranks. Besides Rhodes and Le Bon, the line-up features original members John Taylor and Roger Taylor, along with guitarist Dom Brown.
“People seem almost amazed that we’re actually all friends, and we are”
They all pull their weight: Rhodes does the visuals, John the setlists and so on. “We work as a unit, like a SWAT team,” Rhodes says. “People seem almost amazed that we’re actually all friends, and we are.” He recalls some advice that Mick Jagger gave him in the 1980s. “He said, ‘Nick, you’ve really got to stick together, that’s how you stay around for a long time.’ It seems like stating the obvious, but the truth is you have to work hard at staying together.”
“What makes it strongest of all is that we’ve made ourselves equal,” adds Le Bon. “There’s no person who gets paid a huge amount for the songwriting and the rest of the people don’t. We split everything equally and we have equal power within the band. There’s no leader of the band. We’re a co-operative really.”
Le Bon’s everyman outlook extends to the UK’s endless political horrorshow. “There seems to be a lot of internal power struggle,” he says, “I just want them to get on with it. They need to do their job properly. They’re not ruling us, they’re supposed to be looking after us, and I’m worried that that’s not at the top of their agenda.”
And, having heard an “awful” AI version of a Duran song being passed off online as the real thing, he’s all for the artists fighting back against “scraping”, too. “The whole point of art is that it’s a communication between human beings,” he says. “It seems a contradiction in terms to say that AI can create art. It doesn’t have ideas, it just mimics.”
As they emerge from what they have dubbed their “dark period”, Duran intend to keep foiling Claude and friends by staying unpredictable. “We currently have something in the pipeline,” Rhodes reveals. “There’ll be a fair amount of instrumental music within it as well as songs.” Hungry like the Wolfgang? Who knows — the modern Duran are pop’s greatest tale of the unexpected…
Duran Duran’s Danse Macabre show is at the O2 on Saturday, October 31. Tickets on sale on July 10 from 10am
