What does the Duran Duran song ‘Ordinary World’ actually mean?
I saw Duran Duran in Hyde Park in 2022 with a friend of mine. Before they took to the stage, she said, “I don’t think I know many of their songs”, to which I replied, “You’ll know about 75% of them”.
Wouldn’t you know it, throughout the night I stood by as she sang along to the likes of ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’, ‘Girls on Film’ and ‘Notorious’. It was a great night, one where people young and old throughout the field were singing along, dancing, and revelling in the hit machine that was Duran Duran. The number of great songs that the band are responsible for is truly unbelievable, as it seemed that for a while, they were incapable of writing a song that was anything other than a chart-topper.
The whole show was one of upbeat tunes, those that required drinks and dancing. However, there was a more succinct moment during the gig, as the Ukrainian flag was shown across the big screen and the band performed the song ‘Ordinary World’. This is one of Duran Duran’s slower numbers, and it made for an incredibly harrowing moment on this night. However, what is the song actually about?
‘Ordinary World’ was released following a slightly more subdued period for the band. The hits had taken a temporary knee, and people weren’t listening to a lot of the new music that was being put out. It seemed this change in pace was exactly what audiences were looking for, as listeners found themselves with headphones on, swaying side to side to the sweet lyrics that had been penned by Simon Le Bon.
It turns out that Le Bon was really wearing his heart on his sleeve when he wrote this track. Music can often be a source of comfort, both for those who listen to it and those who write it, and Le Bon leaned on it when he started writing ‘Ordinary World’. He was able to tap into a personal grief which resonated with everyone, as he sang about missing his friend David Miles, whom he lost to a drug overdose in 1986, in the hopes that the world one day will resemble normality even without his friend by his side.
Le Bon was generally pretty happy with the way the song came out, although some of his vocal inflexions made him cringe when he heard them back. It wasn’t until he was doing a rendition of it with Luciano Pavarotti that he realised the way he sang “suffering and greed”, sounded strange. Pavarotti performed the track in the same way Le Bon did, and he didn’t like how it came across. “Oh, fuck! And that [phrasing] was my idea,” he lamented, “That sounded terrible, and it was my idea”.
Regardless of questionable wording, the song is a beautiful acknowledgement of loss, and the looking forward to a time without such polarising and devastating feelings applies well to the war in Ukraine (hence the flag the band projected). It shows how much music can change to apply to different circumstances, remain moving beyond its written context, and that’s when you know someone has written something special.
