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Please, Please Tell Me Now (Música)
La historia de la icónica banda de los 80, Duran Duran, uno de los grupos de más éxito comercial, con más de 100 millones de discos vendidos.
En Please, Please Tell Me Now, el reconocido biógrafo de rock Stephen Davis cuenta la historia de Duran Duran. Su apariencia de niños buenos les convirtió en estrellas, pero fue su brillante maestría musical lo que los llevó a una serie de éxitos número uno. A finales de la década habían vendido 60 millones de álbumes; a día de hoy, más de 100 millones.
Davis remonta sus raíces al austero malestar británico de la década de los 70. Guapos, británicos y jóvenes, Duran Duran fueron quienes encabezaron el concierto Live Aid y la banda se movía en los círculos más Nick Rhodes (teclista) se hizo cercano a Andy Warhol y a la princesa Diana y John Taylor (bajista) salió con la chica mala por excelencia, Amanda De Cadanet. Con éxitos atemporales como «Hungry Like the Wolf», «Girls on film», «Save A Prayer» o el tema más vendido de James Bond, «A View To a Kill».
Con entrevistas exclusivas con la banda y fotos nunca antes publicadas de sus archivos personales, este libro ofrece el relato definitivo de una de las bandas más importantes en la historia de la música.
En Please, Please Tell Me Now, el reconocido biógrafo de rock Stephen Davis cuenta la historia de Duran Duran. Su apariencia de niños buenos les convirtió en estrellas, pero fue su brillante maestría musical lo que los llevó a una serie de éxitos número uno. A finales de la década habían vendido 60 millones de álbumes; a día de hoy, más de 100 millones.
Davis remonta sus raíces al austero malestar británico de la década de los 70. Guapos, británicos y jóvenes, Duran Duran fueron quienes encabezaron el concierto Live Aid y la banda se movía en los círculos más Nick Rhodes (teclista) se hizo cercano a Andy Warhol y a la princesa Diana y John Taylor (bajista) salió con la chica mala por excelencia, Amanda De Cadanet. Con éxitos atemporales como «Hungry Like the Wolf», «Girls on film», «Save A Prayer» o el tema más vendido de James Bond, «A View To a Kill».
Con entrevistas exclusivas con la banda y fotos nunca antes publicadas de sus archivos personales, este libro ofrece el relato definitivo de una de las bandas más importantes en la historia de la música.
474 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 29, 2021
49 people are currently reading
1537 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Davis
248 books128 followersStephen Davis is is a rock journalist and biographer, having written numerous bestsellers on rock bands, including the smash hit Hammer of the Gods. He lives in Boston.
Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
September 30, 2023
My thanks to Hachette books, Stephen Davis and Netgalley. This book gets all the stars! I loved it. Duran Duran has always been in my top favorite band's of all time. Usually when I read a book like this, I spend a lot of time watching old videos and listening to the music. I didn't need to this time. Because Duran isn't a band that I ever stopped listening to. I am a huge fan of their music. But, I'll admit that I'm not a super fan. I've never known anything about their lives. But, I always had a favorite. So, I wanted to know why he disappeared. My favorite was Roger Taylor, the drummer! Extremely hot, and quiet and reserved! I loved that! Also, I've always had a thing for drummers. I ended up marrying one! I liked hearing these stories. Are they watered down? Yes, I believe so. But for someone like me who doesn't need the dirt, and just the basics then this will do. I'd recommend this book to someone like me who is a huge fan of the music, but slightly interested in slices of the musicians life. For die hards? No. I guarantee they could write a book that would put this to shame! They be crazy like that!
July 21, 2021
"There's nothing worse than an authentic biography of anyone."
I interviewed Duran Duran bass guitarist John Taylor late last year for Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me website, and while our conversation yielded plenty of great stuff, the "authentic biography" quote is the one I keep coming back to. We were talking about his excellent 2012 memoir In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran and whether he'd been influenced by other rock bios. Taylor mentioned Albert Goldman, who'd already written popular accounts of the lives of Elvis Presley and Lenny Bruce before publishing The Lives of John Lennon in 1988. All three of Goldman's subjects were dead by the time he got around to them, unable to directly answer to past transgressions that might cast their legacies in an unflattering light. It was the scandalous Lennon bio that stuck with Taylor...
"I remember reading that book, and it became apparent that if you put anyone’s life – yours, mine, any of us – under that kind of microscope, they’re going sound like wankers. There is no one who can come under that kind of scrutiny that is going to come out looking good. It’s the humanity that exists in all those many, many, many days between the contributions to the cool songs or whatever where they treat their gardeners like shit, or they’re unfaithful to their wives, or they get drunk and spit in the face of the doorman at the Troubadour. And you’re reading it like, Oh my god, he’s a wanker! I don’t want to read that! Now I know we’re all wankers!”
Taylor later admitted to having skimmed but not entirely consumed prior Duran Duran biographies, and it's reasonable to wonder whether he will enlist the same mild curiosity with the recently published Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story. After all, it was written by veteran rock scribe Stephen Davis, perhaps most famous for Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, published in 1985. And according to Davis's own author notes in his latest book, he was brought into the inner circle by Duran Duran's management in 2004 to document their "Fab Five" reunion for a planned official biography. That book never materialized, not by Davis or anyone else. Both John Taylor and former guitarist Andy Taylor have since penned their own memoirs, and it's unclear whether an official biography will ever happen (though if it does, I am available!). Davis turned his attention to Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses, published in 2008. And somewhere down the line, Davis decided to return to those 2004 interviews with members of Duran Duran and turn them into this book. And I don't know whether John Taylor would consider Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story an "authentic biography," but it's difficult to imagine anything worse.
I went into Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story (its title ripped from the chorus of the band's eighth single, "Is There Something I Should Know?", their first U.K. #1) with reasonably high hopes. I've long had a fondness for rock bios, and I'd enjoyed Davis's Led Zeppelin book, as well as Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, and Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones. But it's been more than two decades since those books were published. And as I plunged into Please Please Tell Me Now the experience was so thoroughly dispiriting that I began questioning why I'd liked anything Davis had ever written in the first place. Maybe I was less discerning back then. Maybe I was more forgiving. I wondered about my own tastes, which with nearly all art has ebbed and flowed through the years. There are some authors who've remained personal favorites, films I still revere. And bands, too. And Duran Duran is one of those bands.
A brief intermission: I'd heard Duran Duran before what I've always likened to my personal Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment, but we didn't have cable until maybe 1984 and I'd only caught glimpses of the band's now iconic videos on MTV at friends' houses. On March 19, 1983, Duran Duran were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and fuck it if it sounds corny, but that night changed my life. Instantly I was hooked on their sound, their look. It was thrilling, and in my own ridiculous semi-suburban way I tried to emulate their style. I first saw them in concert at Madison Square Garden one year and two days later, and despite my reticence to accept the long-standing-but-let's-face-it-extremely-corny "Duranie" term for myself, I've been a devotee ever since. I've bought records, cassettes, CDs, video in all available medium, posters, t-shirts, magazines, and books. Lots and lots of books...
Most books about Duran Duran have only loosely qualified as biographies, focusing primarily on photographs or quotes or both. Some of those remain invaluable gateways to the band's early years - The Book of Words (Malcolm Garrett and Kasper de Graaf), Sing Blue Silver (Denis O'Regan), Beautiful Colors: The Posters of Duran Duran, and The Music Between Us: Concert Ads of Duran Duran (both by Andrew Golub) are all essential visual (and sometimes textual) documents to an undeniably visual band.
In addition to the memoirs by John Taylor and Andy Taylor (they're unrelated, which I'm sure you know, and the same goes for drummer Roger Taylor too), there have been others. Garrett and de Graaf collaborated in 1984 on a thin but intriguing volume called Duran Duran: Their Story, which was still mostly photos. That same year the first Duran Duran bio proper was written by Neil Gaiman...yes, that Neil Gaiman (I've never read it, or even seen a copy, but I'll take him at his word that it's lousy).
As far as I know, the first Duran Duran bio published after the '80s was by Steve Malins, an unofficial tome initially called Notorious, but renamed Wild Boys in later editions. Like many fans, I approached the book with great enthusiasm, buoyed by the thrill of the reunited Fab Five touring their reunion album Astronaut (vinyl reissue plz), and...It was a letdown. In a bit of self-righteous bluster, I posted a lengthy review to the official Duran Duran message board in which I detailed numerous factual inaccuracies. I was full of it passing myself off as some sort of authority, and while I don't remember everything I wrote, I'm sure I came off like a dick. And because writers are narcissists (see: me), Malins must have been looking for reactions to his book because he found mine. But curiously, rather than telling me to go fuck myself, he was incredibly gracious for my feedback, and we exchanged a few very nice e-mails. And then he took it a step further and added my name to the acknowledgements of a paperback edition of his book. What a mensch!
I don't expect the same will happen here, though it must be said that Davis's book is also riddled with factual inaccuracies. And it often feels underwritten, like a first draft. Scenes are repeated often as though to hit a specific word count for a manuscript the author has lost interest in but has already blown through the advance.
And it's occasionally peppered with Davis's opinions, sometimes dressed as consensus with no source to back it up: "Duran Duran finished the best album of their career, Rio, in the late winter and spring of 1982. (Some think Rio is the only great album they ever made.)" He calls them a "boy band" throughout the book, a loaded term that implies they were cooked up in a laboratory, a dismissive jibe repeated by fellow old fart journo Paul Morley nearly a decade ago. I asked John Taylor about that last December, and he found it as ridiculous as I did, though he added that he understood why Duran Duran might have been an easy target.
"I think we were products of our own experience...I’ve never considered that we contrived any of our positions. They felt entirely authentic to me. But I guess I could see somebody outside of that thinking it, particularly as we did make it quite quickly.”
Some mistakes are merely typos that should have been caught by Davis or his editor: On p. 26, "This turned into a residency for Dada that lasted a few weeks in May 1968." Davis meant 1978 here: In May 1968 John Taylor was not qute nine years old, possibly precocious, but still too young to be playing around Birmingham in an art school band.
Elsewhere, Stuart Sutcliffe's last name was misspelled. Sure, he'd died before the Fab Four became a global phenomenon, but he was a Beatle once and getting it right would have been as simple as giving enough of a shit to look it up.
A May 1982 weeklong visit to Antigua by four of Duran Duran - minus Andy - is described in detail over a paragraph, as is the decision to keep them there at the end of the trip to film a video for the "Rio" single. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter, Davis claims "Andy arrived in Antigua a day after the rest of the band," an error that bends time itself.
And somehow, Davis, his editor(s) at Hachette, nobody caught the curious claim that Duran Duran recorded "Pressure Off" with Janelle Monae and Nile Rodgers for both All You Need is Now (2010) and Paper Gods (2015).
There are also bizarre turns of phrase: "...when Duran Duran came out, the audience looked to the band like monkeys in the jungle after the bananas had fermented."/"...and quickly began to assert himself as the band's new pair of balls, replacing Duran Duran's original testicles..." Oy vey.
Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story understandably leans heavily on the years prior to the band's fracture in the mid-'80s, with the year 1985 arriving on page 251 of 336. I get that. It's possible Davis assumed - perhaps even correctly - that many readers would be most interested in Duran Duran's meteoric ascent and less engaged by what followed. Or it could be he just ran out of steam.
I wanted to love this. Really I did. But Davis repeatedly failed to capture the energy and excitement of Duran Duran. The great Duran Duran biography remains unwritten.
I interviewed Duran Duran bass guitarist John Taylor late last year for Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me website, and while our conversation yielded plenty of great stuff, the "authentic biography" quote is the one I keep coming back to. We were talking about his excellent 2012 memoir In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran and whether he'd been influenced by other rock bios. Taylor mentioned Albert Goldman, who'd already written popular accounts of the lives of Elvis Presley and Lenny Bruce before publishing The Lives of John Lennon in 1988. All three of Goldman's subjects were dead by the time he got around to them, unable to directly answer to past transgressions that might cast their legacies in an unflattering light. It was the scandalous Lennon bio that stuck with Taylor...
"I remember reading that book, and it became apparent that if you put anyone’s life – yours, mine, any of us – under that kind of microscope, they’re going sound like wankers. There is no one who can come under that kind of scrutiny that is going to come out looking good. It’s the humanity that exists in all those many, many, many days between the contributions to the cool songs or whatever where they treat their gardeners like shit, or they’re unfaithful to their wives, or they get drunk and spit in the face of the doorman at the Troubadour. And you’re reading it like, Oh my god, he’s a wanker! I don’t want to read that! Now I know we’re all wankers!”
Taylor later admitted to having skimmed but not entirely consumed prior Duran Duran biographies, and it's reasonable to wonder whether he will enlist the same mild curiosity with the recently published Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story. After all, it was written by veteran rock scribe Stephen Davis, perhaps most famous for Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, published in 1985. And according to Davis's own author notes in his latest book, he was brought into the inner circle by Duran Duran's management in 2004 to document their "Fab Five" reunion for a planned official biography. That book never materialized, not by Davis or anyone else. Both John Taylor and former guitarist Andy Taylor have since penned their own memoirs, and it's unclear whether an official biography will ever happen (though if it does, I am available!). Davis turned his attention to Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses, published in 2008. And somewhere down the line, Davis decided to return to those 2004 interviews with members of Duran Duran and turn them into this book. And I don't know whether John Taylor would consider Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story an "authentic biography," but it's difficult to imagine anything worse.
I went into Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story (its title ripped from the chorus of the band's eighth single, "Is There Something I Should Know?", their first U.K. #1) with reasonably high hopes. I've long had a fondness for rock bios, and I'd enjoyed Davis's Led Zeppelin book, as well as Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, and Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones. But it's been more than two decades since those books were published. And as I plunged into Please Please Tell Me Now the experience was so thoroughly dispiriting that I began questioning why I'd liked anything Davis had ever written in the first place. Maybe I was less discerning back then. Maybe I was more forgiving. I wondered about my own tastes, which with nearly all art has ebbed and flowed through the years. There are some authors who've remained personal favorites, films I still revere. And bands, too. And Duran Duran is one of those bands.
A brief intermission: I'd heard Duran Duran before what I've always likened to my personal Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment, but we didn't have cable until maybe 1984 and I'd only caught glimpses of the band's now iconic videos on MTV at friends' houses. On March 19, 1983, Duran Duran were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and fuck it if it sounds corny, but that night changed my life. Instantly I was hooked on their sound, their look. It was thrilling, and in my own ridiculous semi-suburban way I tried to emulate their style. I first saw them in concert at Madison Square Garden one year and two days later, and despite my reticence to accept the long-standing-but-let's-face-it-extremely-corny "Duranie" term for myself, I've been a devotee ever since. I've bought records, cassettes, CDs, video in all available medium, posters, t-shirts, magazines, and books. Lots and lots of books...
Most books about Duran Duran have only loosely qualified as biographies, focusing primarily on photographs or quotes or both. Some of those remain invaluable gateways to the band's early years - The Book of Words (Malcolm Garrett and Kasper de Graaf), Sing Blue Silver (Denis O'Regan), Beautiful Colors: The Posters of Duran Duran, and The Music Between Us: Concert Ads of Duran Duran (both by Andrew Golub) are all essential visual (and sometimes textual) documents to an undeniably visual band.
In addition to the memoirs by John Taylor and Andy Taylor (they're unrelated, which I'm sure you know, and the same goes for drummer Roger Taylor too), there have been others. Garrett and de Graaf collaborated in 1984 on a thin but intriguing volume called Duran Duran: Their Story, which was still mostly photos. That same year the first Duran Duran bio proper was written by Neil Gaiman...yes, that Neil Gaiman (I've never read it, or even seen a copy, but I'll take him at his word that it's lousy).
As far as I know, the first Duran Duran bio published after the '80s was by Steve Malins, an unofficial tome initially called Notorious, but renamed Wild Boys in later editions. Like many fans, I approached the book with great enthusiasm, buoyed by the thrill of the reunited Fab Five touring their reunion album Astronaut (vinyl reissue plz), and...It was a letdown. In a bit of self-righteous bluster, I posted a lengthy review to the official Duran Duran message board in which I detailed numerous factual inaccuracies. I was full of it passing myself off as some sort of authority, and while I don't remember everything I wrote, I'm sure I came off like a dick. And because writers are narcissists (see: me), Malins must have been looking for reactions to his book because he found mine. But curiously, rather than telling me to go fuck myself, he was incredibly gracious for my feedback, and we exchanged a few very nice e-mails. And then he took it a step further and added my name to the acknowledgements of a paperback edition of his book. What a mensch!
I don't expect the same will happen here, though it must be said that Davis's book is also riddled with factual inaccuracies. And it often feels underwritten, like a first draft. Scenes are repeated often as though to hit a specific word count for a manuscript the author has lost interest in but has already blown through the advance.
And it's occasionally peppered with Davis's opinions, sometimes dressed as consensus with no source to back it up: "Duran Duran finished the best album of their career, Rio, in the late winter and spring of 1982. (Some think Rio is the only great album they ever made.)" He calls them a "boy band" throughout the book, a loaded term that implies they were cooked up in a laboratory, a dismissive jibe repeated by fellow old fart journo Paul Morley nearly a decade ago. I asked John Taylor about that last December, and he found it as ridiculous as I did, though he added that he understood why Duran Duran might have been an easy target.
"I think we were products of our own experience...I’ve never considered that we contrived any of our positions. They felt entirely authentic to me. But I guess I could see somebody outside of that thinking it, particularly as we did make it quite quickly.”
Some mistakes are merely typos that should have been caught by Davis or his editor: On p. 26, "This turned into a residency for Dada that lasted a few weeks in May 1968." Davis meant 1978 here: In May 1968 John Taylor was not qute nine years old, possibly precocious, but still too young to be playing around Birmingham in an art school band.
Elsewhere, Stuart Sutcliffe's last name was misspelled. Sure, he'd died before the Fab Four became a global phenomenon, but he was a Beatle once and getting it right would have been as simple as giving enough of a shit to look it up.
A May 1982 weeklong visit to Antigua by four of Duran Duran - minus Andy - is described in detail over a paragraph, as is the decision to keep them there at the end of the trip to film a video for the "Rio" single. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter, Davis claims "Andy arrived in Antigua a day after the rest of the band," an error that bends time itself.
And somehow, Davis, his editor(s) at Hachette, nobody caught the curious claim that Duran Duran recorded "Pressure Off" with Janelle Monae and Nile Rodgers for both All You Need is Now (2010) and Paper Gods (2015).
There are also bizarre turns of phrase: "...when Duran Duran came out, the audience looked to the band like monkeys in the jungle after the bananas had fermented."/"...and quickly began to assert himself as the band's new pair of balls, replacing Duran Duran's original testicles..." Oy vey.
Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story understandably leans heavily on the years prior to the band's fracture in the mid-'80s, with the year 1985 arriving on page 251 of 336. I get that. It's possible Davis assumed - perhaps even correctly - that many readers would be most interested in Duran Duran's meteoric ascent and less engaged by what followed. Or it could be he just ran out of steam.
I wanted to love this. Really I did. But Davis repeatedly failed to capture the energy and excitement of Duran Duran. The great Duran Duran biography remains unwritten.
September 2, 2021
Completely trashy and in desperate need of editing and fact checking. However, it was luxurious way to spend a birthday.
July 3, 2021
I’m not as well versed as some Duran Duran fans on their history, but even I found fault with this book. It was poorly researched by the author with some obvious inaccuracies. Among them:
The author spelled Duranie “Durannie” multiple times, while both are used, the former is used more frequently by fans and even the band’s social media.
The author wrote that Paul and Linda McCartney came and said goodnight to the band while they were recording a demo at AIR Studios sometime in 1980. If you read factually correct books and interviews with the band about the recording of Rio, it was during its recording.
The author wrote that Andy and John mimed the sax solos in Rio, if you watch the video, it's obvious that it's Nick and John, not Andy.
The author seems to not hide his disdain for most of the band members, discussing more about their drinking and drugs, sexual prowess, losing their trousers, and how much makeup they wore than anything particularly informative about what they contributed to the band. Andy is the only one who seems to come out relatively unscathed, he also somehow gets four chapters dedicated to his backstory, prior to joining the band, in Part 2.
Less than 25% of the book is dedicated to the band’s over 35-year career post-Live Aid, where Warren comes off as the savior of the band and every creative idea was his. There are better written, better researched, and more informative books, articles, and blogs about this band. Read those instead.
The author spelled Duranie “Durannie” multiple times, while both are used, the former is used more frequently by fans and even the band’s social media.
The author wrote that Paul and Linda McCartney came and said goodnight to the band while they were recording a demo at AIR Studios sometime in 1980. If you read factually correct books and interviews with the band about the recording of Rio, it was during its recording.
The author wrote that Andy and John mimed the sax solos in Rio, if you watch the video, it's obvious that it's Nick and John, not Andy.
The author seems to not hide his disdain for most of the band members, discussing more about their drinking and drugs, sexual prowess, losing their trousers, and how much makeup they wore than anything particularly informative about what they contributed to the band. Andy is the only one who seems to come out relatively unscathed, he also somehow gets four chapters dedicated to his backstory, prior to joining the band, in Part 2.
Less than 25% of the book is dedicated to the band’s over 35-year career post-Live Aid, where Warren comes off as the savior of the band and every creative idea was his. There are better written, better researched, and more informative books, articles, and blogs about this band. Read those instead.
April 21, 2022
I am what you call a Duranie. Without shame, I LOVE this band. The early chapters here are rehashed information from other books I've read. The author, apparently, did extensive interviews with the band and, in the early chapters, he uses direct quotes from those interviews. This gets a bit annoying as the chapter preceeding it contains all of the information in the subsequent chapter - just told in different perspectives.
Luckily, I stuck with it. This is fairly extensive. Once the band is formed, they pretty quickly begin to fall apart. John Taylor's drug use is alluded to way more than in his memoir In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran. This also highlights the band's monetary woes. It seems they toured relenlessly in the early aughts to make money.
One thing that bugged me is the author indicated once that someone was gay and another time that someone was black. Why?
This sent me down a rabbit hole looking up songs and time traveling back to junior high.
The end of this one felt rushed, but it took us all the way up to 2020.
This is one of my favorites off their new album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0j9i...
Luckily, I stuck with it. This is fairly extensive. Once the band is formed, they pretty quickly begin to fall apart. John Taylor's drug use is alluded to way more than in his memoir In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran. This also highlights the band's monetary woes. It seems they toured relenlessly in the early aughts to make money.
One thing that bugged me is the author indicated once that someone was gay and another time that someone was black. Why?
This sent me down a rabbit hole looking up songs and time traveling back to junior high.
The end of this one felt rushed, but it took us all the way up to 2020.
This is one of my favorites off their new album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0j9i...
July 9, 2021
Grammar and factual errors abound. How much would it have cost to hire an editor?
June 18, 2021
I have been a fan of Duran Duran since I was a teenager-they were one of the first concerts I went to and loved!!
This book is a kind of behind the scenes as to how the band came to be and how the songs and albums were created, as well as bits and pieces of the lives of each of the band members. Do I think that there’s a lot more to the story? Definitely. This was very tame, and for such a population band, there had to be a lot more wild stuff in their past. That being said, it was fascinating to read and I’m sure any die hard fan will enjoy it.
Thanks to Hachette Books and Netgalley for this Arc in exchange for my review.
This book is a kind of behind the scenes as to how the band came to be and how the songs and albums were created, as well as bits and pieces of the lives of each of the band members. Do I think that there’s a lot more to the story? Definitely. This was very tame, and for such a population band, there had to be a lot more wild stuff in their past. That being said, it was fascinating to read and I’m sure any die hard fan will enjoy it.
Thanks to Hachette Books and Netgalley for this Arc in exchange for my review.
July 17, 2021
I thought this was a horrible book. I am a huge Duran Duran fan and I was really hoping to love this book. I felt that the author was extremely biased and put his own opinions and thoughts in the book. It was poorly written, repetitive, very choppy, disconnected from chapter to chapter and extremely disappointing. I would like to apologize to Duran Duran fans and to the boys in the band for this very poorly written history of one of the most influential bands of my life.
As I was reading this book, it felt like a teacher asked a class of 8th graders to write an essay on Duran Duran and then took all the essays and put them together to create this terrible book. So sad...
As I was reading this book, it felt like a teacher asked a class of 8th graders to write an essay on Duran Duran and then took all the essays and put them together to create this terrible book. So sad...
December 19, 2021
Really insightful if you have been a Duran Duran fan for 4 decades like me. While I read it I went through all their old albums and videos taking myself through my own history.
February 25, 2022
I'm going to have to finish it, obviously, but this book is so riddled with errors and poor style in the first few chapters; Boob Moog invented the Mellotron? Come on, man. If this book was written before the internet, it might be excusable, but google will fact check that nonsense for you.
This is trash, worse than the Chris Isaak biography that is also full of inaccuracies.
This is trash, worse than the Chris Isaak biography that is also full of inaccuracies.
September 19, 2021
Reveling in the dark side, filled with inaccuracies, and meandering. Doesn’t even have a good picture section.
March 22, 2022
I enjoyed this, but its main weakness is that probably 75 percent of the book covers the period from 1980 to 1985. Of course, this is the portion of Duran Duran's lifespan that is the most publicized, but the 37 years and 11 studio albums since get cursory treatment. Still, it was nice recounting their New Wave roots.
July 22, 2021
I enjoyed this, it was nostalgic and reminded me why I have always loved Duran Duran. But I must say it is Duranies not Durranies.
March 13, 2022
Started strong then the fact checking went by the way side. Getting song titles wrong is really lazy along with just regurgitating old interviews. Incorrect facts, incorrect spelling of people’s names, toward the end of the book you could tell he wanted to finish as there was an error every other page. Maybe he needs a refresher on how to use Google. If you want to read this just let me know, I’ll give you my copy which I got used so at least he’s not getting royalties from me. That’s how much I hate this book.
December 3, 2022
Are you a hardcore Duran fan? Then steer clear of this. You’ll be familiar with all the stories the author has pasted and copied into this book. He admits he didn’t like the band and knew nothing about them before his publisher asked him to write this, and it shows.
April 23, 2023
Entertaining, though I can’t see it appealing to non-fans. Also: sloppy editing. Author mentions a point and then five pages later, he mentions the same point again, as if for the first time. Happens a lot throughout.
November 14, 2021
A funny thing happened this year: Duran Duran released a new album...and I didn't like it.
Naturally, I blamed myself. DD has always tried to be on the cusp of where pop music was going, so my unease about the record (exemption: Ivorian Doll) meant that I was just getting old and grouchy, right?
Time for an intervention.
Reading this book took me back to my own 80s childhood, 90s adolescence and new adulthood, and 2000s reinvention/ transformation. Reliving the "good old days" -- which were often not good for either me OR the band -- helped me reframe a lot of things. Songs were memory touchpoints from the best and worst parts of my life, and seeing those years from the perspective of the musicians who got me through all the highs and lows was like getting closure, definitively closing the door on the past.
"But LAF," you night argue, "was the BOOK any good? Should it be in my collection?"
Of course, silly. I just spent several paragraphs in deep introspection, and that's going to be true for every Gen Xer in your community. If you walk into a random public space and say "Duran Duran," half the folks present will squeal or get whiplash. Possibly both. This book captures an era that was special for a lot of people, from "Girls on Film" on up to "Pressure Off," and all but the smallest public libraries should have it.
As for me, well....I still don't like Future Past, but I'm at peace with it. Recommended for fortysomething Duranies, their teen children who want to understand their deal, and bemused Gen Z kids doing book reports on the late 1900s. And we can all just pretend that "The Universe Alone" is the official end of canon.
Naturally, I blamed myself. DD has always tried to be on the cusp of where pop music was going, so my unease about the record (exemption: Ivorian Doll) meant that I was just getting old and grouchy, right?
Time for an intervention.
Reading this book took me back to my own 80s childhood, 90s adolescence and new adulthood, and 2000s reinvention/ transformation. Reliving the "good old days" -- which were often not good for either me OR the band -- helped me reframe a lot of things. Songs were memory touchpoints from the best and worst parts of my life, and seeing those years from the perspective of the musicians who got me through all the highs and lows was like getting closure, definitively closing the door on the past.
"But LAF," you night argue, "was the BOOK any good? Should it be in my collection?"
Of course, silly. I just spent several paragraphs in deep introspection, and that's going to be true for every Gen Xer in your community. If you walk into a random public space and say "Duran Duran," half the folks present will squeal or get whiplash. Possibly both. This book captures an era that was special for a lot of people, from "Girls on Film" on up to "Pressure Off," and all but the smallest public libraries should have it.
As for me, well....I still don't like Future Past, but I'm at peace with it. Recommended for fortysomething Duranies, their teen children who want to understand their deal, and bemused Gen Z kids doing book reports on the late 1900s. And we can all just pretend that "The Universe Alone" is the official end of canon.
August 4, 2022
A disclaimer: I'm not a huge Duran Duran fan. I know their hit songs & enjoy their music videos. That was the extent of my knowledge of them before this book. I thought there must be so much more to their career after their recent induction into the Rock Hall. I was left feeling lukewarm about them even after this book. Their whole image speaks of decadence, and indeed, they were known as a yachts & models type of band. An image that they "tried" to break away from, but yet embraced throughout their now 40 years as a group. I always find it strange how quickly, or HOW these famous musicians find themselves having financial troubles. This was a trouble that the various members of this band were stricken with over the years; hence one of the reasons they're still touring and making albums of cover songs.
I found it humorous how many references to how good-looking the members of this band were/are. It made me wonder how much input the band members had into the book. Like John Taylor saying, "you need more references to how attracted Andy Warhol was to me." I did find it interesting how many art world & music world connections Duran Duran had at the height of their career. The book also inspired me to watch one of the most amusing music videos of the 80s for the song they did for the James Bond movie: A View to a Kill. They shut down the Eiffel Tower for one day to film this video. Worth it.
I think this book is wasted on a casual fan, but true fans will find a lot to like with all of the behind-the-scenes dishing & details of the band members relationships.
I found it humorous how many references to how good-looking the members of this band were/are. It made me wonder how much input the band members had into the book. Like John Taylor saying, "you need more references to how attracted Andy Warhol was to me." I did find it interesting how many art world & music world connections Duran Duran had at the height of their career. The book also inspired me to watch one of the most amusing music videos of the 80s for the song they did for the James Bond movie: A View to a Kill. They shut down the Eiffel Tower for one day to film this video. Worth it.
I think this book is wasted on a casual fan, but true fans will find a lot to like with all of the behind-the-scenes dishing & details of the band members relationships.
May 6, 2021
This "biography" is based on interviews the author did with the band members in 2004, along with other resources he found to fill in the blanks and the next 17 years. This shows in the detailed accounts for the beginning of the band's career and the patchy information after the interview. With that said, the author did a nice job of building the profile of the band members. He begins the book with the movie that gave the band its name, and background of the founding members, Nick and John. He moves the story along until he gets to the next band member and then goes back in time to fill in his background.
Duran Duran went from five young men (college age when they broke through) to mega superstars so quickly just reading about it will give you whiplash. While this isn't a tell-all, it does dig into drug use and womanizing by some, if not all, band members, and it shows how that, along with mega fame and the resulting mega egos, led to the band's breakup after its third album. It also gives a sense of the utter insanity of the demands on them as they travel and perform. Very little downtime, constant pressure to produce more, conflicting musical direction, and poor early management choices (they were all about 20 years old and didn't know better) destroyed friendships and marriages and the band itself.
I was in junior high school when Duran Duran burst on the scene. As a thirteen year-old in the US, I was ignorant of the drug use, hard partying, and bad press they got on occasion. It's hard to read about the problems and lifestyles of childhood idols, but this is an excellent reminder that the celebrities we admire are real people with real struggles and hopes and dreams. In this case, there were five young men who loved music but were unprepared in every way for success. As a society, we demand a lot from talented individuals - whether they are musicians or actors or athletes - expecting them to give us their time and attention and to mold themselves into who we want them to be, instead of us admiring the gifts they share and letting them live their lives.
Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of the book. My opinion is my own.
Duran Duran went from five young men (college age when they broke through) to mega superstars so quickly just reading about it will give you whiplash. While this isn't a tell-all, it does dig into drug use and womanizing by some, if not all, band members, and it shows how that, along with mega fame and the resulting mega egos, led to the band's breakup after its third album. It also gives a sense of the utter insanity of the demands on them as they travel and perform. Very little downtime, constant pressure to produce more, conflicting musical direction, and poor early management choices (they were all about 20 years old and didn't know better) destroyed friendships and marriages and the band itself.
I was in junior high school when Duran Duran burst on the scene. As a thirteen year-old in the US, I was ignorant of the drug use, hard partying, and bad press they got on occasion. It's hard to read about the problems and lifestyles of childhood idols, but this is an excellent reminder that the celebrities we admire are real people with real struggles and hopes and dreams. In this case, there were five young men who loved music but were unprepared in every way for success. As a society, we demand a lot from talented individuals - whether they are musicians or actors or athletes - expecting them to give us their time and attention and to mold themselves into who we want them to be, instead of us admiring the gifts they share and letting them live their lives.
Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of the book. My opinion is my own.
July 11, 2021
Of course I read this. Devoured it. Someday, though, I’d like to read a book on the guys that *begins* at the end of the original Fab Five and goes into as much detail on the years after as most do on the MTV era. I will say that I was surprised to learn that WMMS was one of the band’s big champions — I lived in Cleveland during the Seven and the Ragged Tiger era, and just assumed that everyone was playing that much Duran. (Couple of annoying errors: WMMS is referred to as WMMR at one point; and “Pressure Off” is lumped in with AYNIN rather than Paper Gods, but, whatever.) Worth a fan’s time.
September 24, 2021
I really liked the early part of the book that covered 1978-1981. I knew the stories of Andy Taylor and Simon Le Avon joining the band, it’s basically cannon if you are a fan. But the years before Andy Taylor answered an ad in Melody Maker, I knew nothing about. Later on I felt like the author relied too heavily on John Taylor and Andy Taylor’s autobiographies. It’s been awhile since I’d read both, but recognized the stories. Also the quote from Yasmin about Damon’s balls came from the documentary Models Close Up and was tacked onto the end of a chapter just because the quote is flamboyant.
September 23, 2021
I thought I was going to go 3.5 and round up, but the end of the book was very fractured and made it tougher to finish, so I'm calling it 3.25 and rounding down.
I understand that biographies of a long career can be difficult when it comes to maintaining narrative momentum, but paragraphs were more like sentences about different things strung together. The earlier part of the book was much more enjoyable. I liked Duran Duran's Rio album back in the day and other singles from subsequent albums, but I was never an obsessive. This was definitely an interesting look at a band that was one of the biggest of the early 80s.
I understand that biographies of a long career can be difficult when it comes to maintaining narrative momentum, but paragraphs were more like sentences about different things strung together. The earlier part of the book was much more enjoyable. I liked Duran Duran's Rio album back in the day and other singles from subsequent albums, but I was never an obsessive. This was definitely an interesting look at a band that was one of the biggest of the early 80s.
June 17, 2021
I'm an 80's kid and a huge Duran Duran fan. This book was just what I needed.
It's an autobiography of the band from it's beginnings in Birmingham to July 2020 when the band was scheduled to play in Hyde Park though Covid changed those plans.
It gives you the insight into the relationships between the band members, the troubled times and the triumphs.
I highly recommend this to anyone who lived through the 80's.
It's an autobiography of the band from it's beginnings in Birmingham to July 2020 when the band was scheduled to play in Hyde Park though Covid changed those plans.
It gives you the insight into the relationships between the band members, the troubled times and the triumphs.
I highly recommend this to anyone who lived through the 80's.
September 14, 2021
3.5 stars. I enjoyed it, but the book wasn't quite as well written as I had hoped. It kind of fell apart near the end - but I guess the author had less source material by that point in the story. Still...
January 25, 2022
3 1/2 stars. An extensive record of the Fab Five’s story, but a bit dry if you’re not a fan. This group was part of the soundtrack of my childhood.
March 30, 2022
I have been a Duran Duran fan since 7 and the Ragged Tiger so I was really excited to read this book. I’ve read other music and celebrity biographies, and what seemed to be missing from this one is a feeling that the author was a fan or even enthusiastic about about the group. It just has a negative feel to it, there is more than one mention of Rio being their biggest album and not so much about why they still maintain a strong fan base and give good concerts despite changes in lineups and uneven albums. So interesting, yes, but I think a lot was missed and that there is a lot more to say about the band.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 24, 2022
Päris hea ülevaade Durani ajaloost ja karjäärist. Kohutavalt palju trükivigasid.
May 10, 2021
I have been a fan of Duran Duran since I was about 12, so I was excited to read this. Unfortunately disappointed, the book was repetitive and so detailed that it kept losing me. I was hoping for some dirt and gossip and really didn’t find it. It was just ok for me. Thanks to Netgalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.
September 4, 2021
Fun to remember the 1980s and my memories of Duran Duran. Detroit mentioned three times! Fun quick read finished in a day.
April 22, 2025
A thorough, entertaining and dishy account of Duran Duran's inception, meteoric rise, and development up to the present day. The book offered many insights into the inner workings of the record industry, the drivers of pop music success, and the corrosive effects of fame. Thoroughly enjoyable read.
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