“Had a hard time with them”: why David Bowie’s first impression of Duran Duran wasn’t great
Every artist has to go through a period of self-belief if they want to get anywhere in life. If there comes a point where even the artists themselves don’t think they are capable of great things, there’s a good chance that they will never get off the ground without being discouraged right out of the gate. David Bowie may have been one of the few who could claim to have nerves of steel when he first debuted, he wasn’t shy about saying when he thought that other bands were talking up themselves a bit too much.
Then again, Bowie was never going to be tagged as someone short on confidence. The amount of gusto that anyone has to dress up as a rock and roll alien and consider themselves a musical god reincarnated on Earth was bound to take over the music industry, but it helped that Bowie was actually able to keep every promise he made to the point where he retired his characters when things began getting dull.
Going through his 1970s run alone, Bowie was always looking to test the waters of what he could get away with, even if it meant getting himself into trouble. While no one should take anything that ‘The Thin White Duke’ ever said to heart, seeing Bowie constantly twisting his persona into different shapes was what practically made him the patron saint of MTV before the channel started playing music videos.
When people started shifting their attention to their televisions, though, the last thing that people expected out of Bowie was to play the straight man. He was still as eccentric as ever on record, but considering the shapes he morphed himself into in his early years, seeing him don a suit and play the pop star during his Let’s Dance was what made him even more enigmatic to those used to Aladdin Sane.
But the entire music world had started to shift towards something else by the time Bowie started making dance hits. This was the era of the boy toys, and as the decade unfolded, no one could have done better than Duran Duran, especially with Simon Le Bon pouting for the camera every time videos for songs like ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and ‘Rio’. When Bowie first laid eyes on them, though, he didn’t think they lived up to their hype.
Since he had been around the block a couple of times, Bowie felt that the new wave stars were far from as important as they thought they were, saying, “I had a hard time with them when I first met them a few years ago. I thought they were really sort of a bit arrogant. But I guess we all go through that. They’ve really got OK over the last year or two. Simon seems to have changed an awful lot.”
But for anyone in Duran Duran, meeting someone like Bowie was bound to have an impact on them, especially if he wasn’t much of a fan of them. The whole reason why tunes like ‘Girls on Film’ could have been created was because of listening to albums like Diamond Dogs first, so if someone like Bowie puts them in their place, it was up to them to either change with the times or fade into the background.
And while everything that Duran Duran has done since their prime hasn’t exactly been spectacular, they have still tried to carry on with the mentality that Bowie set for himself. Anyone can try on their best Ziggy moves in the hopes that they look the part, but it took ‘The Starman’ for them to realise what their priorities should be.
