For all music lovers and especially Duran Duran fans, I just thought I'd post this article I read in last Sunday's Observer Review.

Even if you don't like Duran Duran, I thought it spoke to all music lovers and evokes all the feelings I get - but never can quite describe - when it comes to Prince.

Anyway, for those who read it, enjoy...



Once more with feeling

An enraptured 13-year-old schoolgirl called Andrea Ashworth saw Duran Duran play in concert in Manchester. A thirtysomething woman discovered that their magic was still there in Los Angeles

Sunday March 20, 2005
The Observer

Twenty years ago, in Manchester in the early 1980s, I pasted a poster of Duran Duran on the ceiling above my bunkbed so I could gaze at my own constellation of stars. Every morning and every night, I looked at Simon and I looked at John, I looked at Roger and Andy and Nick. Could there ever come a time when I didn't want, didn't need, to look and look at those faces?
Now the face I love belongs to Mark, who's an academic here in Los Angeles, where we arrived last summer, after studying and teaching at the universities of Oxford and Princeton. I live on a lush green hill above Sunset Boulevard, in a house full of windows, surrounded by bougainvillea and orange trees. In the morning, I listen to Bach or Telemann or some other, otherworldly music that sets off stories inside me without involving words. I am, oddly adult as it seems to me, engaged to be married.

Still, my heart stopped when I saw Duran Duran were coming to play in LA.

My sisters and I grew up in a house shaken as much by loud, soul-swinging music as it was by our parents' shrieking disharmonies. When Mum lowered the needle into its groove, the walls sprang alive with her mood, good or bad - never indifferent, especially after she fell for my second stepfather. A blue-eyed man, fearsomely charming, secretly fresh from prison, he moved into our tiny council house in Manchester in the early Eighties, bringing his own stash of LPs, a massive silver stereo and a history of violent unhappiness that he was destined to play out again, and again and again, under our roof.

My ears were marinated in Motown. Diana Ross, Al Green, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye: a host of electric honey voices hymned the heart and its magic, its breakability, fixability. If Dad's face was bright with the victory of a new bricklaying job or some dodgy deal, Mum might try to keep things shining with the Four Tops or the Drifters, shimmering big, easy hallelujahs all around. Dad's Earth, Wind and Fire or James Brown boiled against the windows when the fridge was bare and he needed more boisterous reminders of good times.

Sometimes, with a yelp of the needle, a record might be swiped off the turntable and smashed against the wall. More often, the still-spinning song would be obliterated by screaming, by the shattering of mugs, ornaments, plates. My parents' fights flew beyond slaps to punches and kicking, then to strangling fists and to knives.

Next day would start bruised and silent, braced for apocalypse. Or, if they had the heart for another fresh start, Mum and Dad would unveil Barry White before dancing together, liquid-limbed and in love, oblivious to broken things.

Against these rhythms, I hatched as a teenager, in a mutiny of hormones, erogenous zones and hips I had not asked for. I was (notwithstanding a few small, discreet refractions) an industriously obedient, peace-keeping kid. But my ears, when they turned 13, rebelled: one moment I loved Gladys Knight and every one of her Pips, deeply, warmly, as if they were uncles and aunts; next, I could barely breathe when I heard them. It wasn't just that the tunes were tainted by my parents' vicious cycle of sweetness and despair. My problem was smaller, but more universal: the old music wasn't fatally soured, it just wasn't mine.

Outside our house was a riot of ra-ra skirts, boggling big jewellery and boomboxes catarrhishly blaring Wham!, the Human League, Madness and countless jumping-bean bands with names like Bananarama and Kajagoogoo. I wore zipper-shaped earrings and felt-tipped my nails black. In my dad's wellies and a ruffly, old lady's shirt, I pranced up and down our grittily un-Romantic street posing as Adam Ant, complete with a Tippexed plaster across my nose.

Even in the sozzle of adolescence, I knew I was lost. I clustered outside the corner shop with everyone else, my lips reeking of butterscotch-scented gloss as I nodded to 'It Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It' or genuinely relished 'Don't You Want Me, Baby?' But then I'd be hollered home and, in spite of chores and the wild jags in Mum and Dad's moods, I'd find my ears relieved, stealing a break from the pale, hiccuppy street music to bathe in the bright black honey of old favourites. I resigned myself, my ears, to a double life.

Then, one day, Hayley Boyle gave me a cassette, labelled in purple pencil: DURAN DURAN.

'I'm not saying anything,' she grinned. 'Just wait and see.'

Hayley was my pop oracle, my earring guru, my partner in blue-hair-gel crime. Hayley was the only person who not only understood but shared my secret crushes on Shakespeare and TS Eliot and Sylvia Plath. Outside my house, Hayley was Life.

Inside my house, the only privacy I could carve was after midnight, if my parents were out on the razz and my little sisters asleep. So, I first listened to the raucous, iconic 'Girls on Film' in the dark, at whisper-volume, the stereo's green pulse lights flickering as I knelt in front of the speaker, pressing first one ear, then the other against its velvet chest, drinking in the susurrations. I couldn't catch many of the words. But lights, camera, and gleaming-bodied action rasped sumptuously out, and 'I sensed the rhythms humming in a frenzy/ All the way down my spine'.

Duran Duran gave Hayley and me a new moon on Monday and an ocean of emotional freedom. They poured out music we could dive into and flounder extravagantly about in, gesturing at great depths, raving, not drowning. The lyrics were polished, arty crosswords, blessedly obscure, so you could ponder them as long - or as little - as you liked. The music was turbulent but buoyant, urging elation and anger, frustration, insouciance, conquest, sometimes all in the same song. It let you write words such as 'chiaruscuro' and 'euphoria', 'epiphany' and 'solar plexus' in your diary; it inspired you to slam that diary shut and dervish about, twanging air guitar, making your hair fly as if there were no tomorrow.

When Duran Duran came to the Apollo in 1982, Hayley's parents queued in the rainy dawn to buy a ticket for her. And one for me. 'Me?' I blushed a full-body blush. Nearly £10 it cost. My mum often didn't have enough cash for my bus fare to school.

My dad, when I told him about the gift, gave me a wallop for 'going begging'. 'It's not like that,' I cried, which got me another wallop, sound enough to spell the end of the story.

But this time my mother put her foot down. 'Once in a lifetime': that was the clause she invoked.

Our night to remember was the fifth of November. Bonfires crackled all over Manchester and fireworks screamed, scrabbling colour across the frosted night sky. Hayley and I forced down marmalade on toast, to make our mums happy, before taking febrile baths, then, practically speechless, we tackled the trembling question of hair.

Even my dad was impressed by the finished product. Unwillingly ethereal in the butterflyish white dress Mum had made for me from curtain lining, I had Robin Hood boots and 10-ton chandeliearrings to keep me from floating away. Hayley was drop-dead cool in tight white trousers and a grey shirt with a black leather tie, a four-row studded belt slung across her balletic hips. Our faces were gorgeously sarcophagused in eyeliner and lipstick. We were ready to catch that mirror way out west. We knew we were something special, and we looked like the best.

'Hungry Like the Wolf', 'Last Chance on the Stairway', 'Lonely in Your Nightmare', 'O, Rio, Rio'. Ultimately, 'Save a Prayer', which made mudslides of our make-up. Overwhelmed by a conspiracy of pubescent susceptibility and mesmerising melodies - electronically spiced to offset the warbling raw, ever-so-human tonsils of Simon le Bon - we let our faces dissolve into the night. Spotlights skated over the audience and everyone screamed.

I went deaf - not with noise, but the agonisingly delicious suspicion that Simon or John, or Roger, who controlled the band's heartbeat through his drums, might, might, might see me in my white dress, which lit up, along with my guts and heart, like a candle.

When it was time for me to go to the gig here in Los Angeles, my house was a sartorial Pompeii, strewn with silk tops and sequin thingummies and stilettos, when it was time for me to go to the gig. In the end, before dashing out the door, marmalade on toast in hand, I yanked off the last glittering thing I had yanked on, then sighed into a white T-shirt and jeans, with clunky workman boots for ballast.

Underground, backstage, Simon le Bon asked, 'Are you Andrea?'

I didn't know how to answer - not everyday tongue-tied, but existentially thrown. Only when my voice quavered out too light, I realised I was, yes, of course, Andrea. But not me, Andrea, now. Andrea - Andy - the 13-year-old. Standing there, gawky as ever, more real than Andrea the thirtysomething. No wonder it had been so hard to decide what to wear. No wonder a silhouette-altering zit had alighted on my face that day and stilettos had seemed preposterous. I had been revving up to meet not just Duran Duran but my young, dream-riddled self.

In spite of their decades and pretty entourages of wives and daughters, the band bounced around like teenagers too. Before heading to thicken the paint on their faces, they chatted away, less ladykilling blokes than teasing pals.

'Got to warm up,' John Taylor murmured, picking up his bass.

'Me too,' I said, fiddling with bits of make-up.

'Oh, yeah?' He raised an eyebrow. 'What instrument do you play?'

'Eyelash curlers,' I laughed, at once lighthearted and clammy with vestigial, adolescent thrill.

After letting me clash Roger's cymbals and mock-riff on Andy's blonde, ivory-faced guitar, the band gave me a last blast of hugs and squeezes, enjoying the fizz of shared excitement, laughing, joking, swigging espresso, before hustling out in their sharp-cut suits to embrace the lights.

It was a synthesised kind of celestial concert, in spite of bewildering interludes when, between aching classics like 'Save a Prayer' and 'Sing Blue Silver', plus the profoundly shallow yet eternally gut-twanging 'Girls on Film', the band played tracks from their new album, Astronaut. Lost in music, in those gaps, I stopped bopping and stood there, a tourist, frozen in time and nostalgia, while all the diehard Duran Duraniacs went on dancing, their bones adapted to the new tunes.

The stadium was crammed with females, faithfully, gloriously turned out. But attended, now, by boyfriends and husbands. Also, offspring. Huddled in front of me was a small person who turned out be an 11-year-old, bored into a slump. To his left stood a large, balding man in a brown lumberjack shirt. To his right, a woman in a blue-flowered dress. Both were wearing large, thickish glasses and huge, love-reservoir grins, which I glimpsed each time they let up boogeying to kiss over the head of the bemused child, their son.

Suddenly, I felt dizzy with the years and miles I had - we all had - travelled to get here, to this night. 'Rio' was crescendoing for the finale, but I had to stop leaping about and press my hand across my midriff. Solar plexus, euphoria, epiphany, chiaruscuro. I sat down, feeling haunted, not by nasty-fisted ghosts, but tenderness. Tenderness towards my teenaged self, effervescent against all odds. Towards my early, real-life idol, Hayley. Towards my brave, infectiously music-mad Mum. And towards bands like Duran Duran, striking chords and poses that help people find themselves a bit. And help them forget themselves when they need to, too.

· Andrea Ashworth is the author of Once in a House on Fire.


Link: http://observer.guardian....28,00.html

Nice article, thanx for running that. I've seen Duran in concert twice. Once in in 84 and again a few years ago at The Roxy.

You're welcome, blackguitaristz.

I saw them last year in Manchester, UK, and my my mates and I were very impressed. Much better than I thought they'd be.