Duran Duran performed with Bastille and Nile Rodgers & CHIC at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Thursday, June 15. Below, Gordon Lamb shares a live review while Mike White shares photographs.
I’m not embarrassed at all to say I spent the first hour of this show outside the arena in order to save my ears from being polluted by London’s Bastille because, for one thing, they’re about as pedestrian as a crosswalk and, for another, there’s no reason for a headliner like Duran Duran to take them out on tour except out of pure good will. But good will alone doesn’t make it worth my time. That said, there was every reason for our heroes from Birmingham, England to take Nile Rodgers & CHIC out on the road.
The unfathomably prolific and successful songwriter, producer and performer worked very closely with Duran Duran during a solid chunk of the band’s mid-1980s heyday. His list of hits is so foundational to what we think of as pop music that it’s no surprise when people accuse him of playing covers when, indeed, they are hit records he wrote, co-wrote or produced. As he led his current lineup of CHIC through a taut and entertaining 13-song set—albeit with many songs performed in either a truncated or medley style—he essentially walked the whole crowd down a memory lane populated with road signs saying “I made that!” These included Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” and “Material Girl,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out,” David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and “Modern Love,” as well as his own Chic’s smash hits “Le Freak,” “Everybody Dance” and “I Want Your Love.” This list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s pretty dang close. As always, Rodgers was engaging, warm and welcoming.
When Duran Duran hit the stage they opened with a film of the group as space travelers who land, then walk down a deserted street. Then they appeared on the actual stage in a line across the drum riser.
Honestly, it was Duran Duran’s most U2 moment ever and initially set up the show as a much more serious undertaking than it wound up being.
While entirely entertaining and friendly, lead singer Simon Le Bon was decidedly less chatty than I anticipated. Also, the entire band was quite a bit more casual in terms of onstage presence and outfits than I’d ever seen them before. The sole exception was keyboardist Nick Rhodes and his fancy striped suit. Additionally, with the exception of the band’s video screens, of which there were not many, they could have fit the entire band and all its gear into the Georgia Theatre. Having seen the group a few times before across four decades, this was easily the most “back to the garage” version of the band I’d ever encountered. It just made it all the clearer that Duran Duran, who was always derided by naysayers as a keyboard band, is actually quite largely guitar-driven.
They opened with the deep cut “Night Boat” from their 1981 self-titled debut album, and from there, they plowed headlong into a powerhouse set of hits with only a couple of misses. Namely, the major miss was performing their cover of Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines” which featured on their album of covers Thank You from 1995. It was unnecessary then and nearly unlistenable now. The other side step was one that really wasn’t. The band played “Anniversary” from its latest album, 2021’s Future Past, which is ostensibly the album this tour is supporting. Thing is, though, it really seemed like almost no one in the crowd even knew there was a recent album. Le Bon said, “If you haven’t got it, get it!”
No doubt, though, it was great to see them pack the State Farm Arena (capacity roughly 17,000) after playing smaller venues for the past several years. It was almost as if both COVID and the past 30 years never happened. But they did. And both the band and the crowd knew what they wanted.
To this end, Duran Duran smashed through major crowd pleasers “Hungry Like The Wolf,” “Is There Something I Should Know?,” “Careless Memories,” “Planet Earth,” “The Reflex,” “Ordinary World”—which Le Bon dedicated, in a sweet but kind of on-the-nose way, to the people of Ukraine—“Girls On Film,” “Save A Prayer” and “Rio.”
In a move which could not have possibly signified more the comfort Duran Duran has found as now-elder statesmen with nothing to prove, when the band returned to the stage for its two-song encore (the previously mentioned “Save A Prayer” and “Rio”) both bassist John Taylor and Le Bon were wearing personalized Atlanta Hawks jerseys. This was a heretofore unimaginable choice for both these men who rose to fame clutching their stylishness with both hands.
The band’s musicianship has never wavered and this show was no exception. Everything was nailed down and it was really cool to see drummer Roger Taylor had rejoined the group. The sole member of the group’s best known and classic lineup no longer onboard was guitarist Andy Taylor, but longtime Duran Duran collaborator Dom Brown handled that role with ease.
The whole show was oddly life-affirming, but also felt oddly contemporary even while existing nearly solely as a vehicle for old songs. But that’s the thing: Duran Duran, a 100-million-record selling band, that—at least in the United Sates—hasn’t been able to fog the mirror of pop culture sensibility for at least the past 30 years—has a catalog that hasn’t just aged gracefully, it’s aged grandly. These songs are more standards than oldies, at least for a particular slice of their audience. The confidence and pride the band still exudes for their work was infectious this night.
While they sing on their 1984 hit “Wild Boys,” which they also played this night, that those boys in particular “never lose it,” the fact is, wild boys do eventually lose it. There’s practically an endless stream of old punk and hardcore bands out there trolling around the nation, going through the motions, and getting to bed at a reasonable time. Don’t tell me they haven’t lost it.
Duran Duran, though, never has.
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