Duran Duran, ‘Ordinary World’: A proper Top Of The Pops

Duran Duran
‘Ordinary World’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
#6 on January 31, 1993

Folks, we’re getting close to 100 issues of This Week In The 90s! Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you’ve found some of it interesting.

Also, I realise you may have some unanswered questions. Questions like, “Why do you care so much about old Top 40s?” and “You’re Irish, so why do you talk about the UK Top 40?” and “Why do these emails keep getting longer? Don’t you have any other hobbies?”

To answer those in reverse order:

• No, I work, sleep, and do this

• I’m sorry! If you want to volunteer to be my editor, please get in touch!

• Many reasons, one of which is the answer to your first question…

• Because of Top Of The Pops

I’m a child of the late 70s, which means that my mushy brain started taking things in around 1981, which happened to be a golden age for Top Of The Pops.

My siblings were teenagers around this time, which meant that TOTP was appointment viewing in our house. Our whole family, including my parents, crowded around the TV on Thursday nights, laughing at the lipsyncing and arguing about who would be this week’s Number One.

One of my formative memories is of feeling a bit scared by the gloomy video for “Vienna” by Ultravox. When the funny and unthreatening Joe Dolce held them off the Number One spot, it felt reassuring, as if a brave knight had slain a terrifying dragon.

Came in from a rainy Thursday

A quick explainer for Americans and people under 35:

Top Of The Pops was a half-hour weekly show, broadcast by BBC and carried in here Ireland by RTE. The show featured a countdown of the UK Top 40, with live performances* of some of the songs. Whoever was Number One got to close the show, which was a big honour.

(* Live performances were usually lipsynced. If the artist wasn’t available, they showed the video. If no video were available, they played the song over a sexy interpretative dance.)

TOTP first aired on January 1st, 1964, featuring The Rolling Stones. who appeared live, and The Beatles, who did not, and it was hosted by Jimmy Saville, who was later unmasked as a monstrous paedophile.

Truly, this show had everything.

People like me could drone on for hours about the cultural impact of Top Of The Pops, but I think it’s all neatly summarised in that one “Starman” performance where Bowie pointed down the camera and turned all of Britain’s teenagers bisexual:

Top Of The Pops hit the rocks in the late 70s, thanks to a mix of poor creative leadership and issues with the BBC musicians union. On top of that, the thriving post-punk scene was happening outside of the Top 40, which meant that Britain’s most exciting bands weren’t even eligible to appear on the show.

At the start of the 1980s, two things happened.

First, a strike forced TOTP forced off-air for the first time in almost 20 years. New producer Michael Hurll grabbed this opportunity to reboot the show, pumping it full of snappy, youthful energy.

Second, post-punk evolved into something more mainstream. Manifesto-driven art projects like The Human League decided that the only way to defeat capitalism was to fill the charts with songs that lampshaded the artificial nature of consumerist pop culture. Songs like “Don’t You Want Me Baby” were intended as a kind of Red Pill that would snap you out of the Matrix.

(Spoiler alert: capitalism somehow survived Phil Oakey.)

Punk energy + pop sensibility = the greatest moment in British chart music since Beatlemania. A Cambrian explosion of classic pop songs, each combining classic melodies, futuristic synths, and wry lyrics. An absolute golden age of catchy bops.

And where did all of these pop pioneers launch their new projects? Top of the Pops.

Where is the life that I recognize?

Duran Duran were kind of a big deal in my house, given that my sister was a teenager and Duran Duran were five very good-looking boys.

Lucky for her, they played TOTP nine times between 1981 and 1984. Their first performance saw them dressed in full New Romantic glam while Tony Blackburn introduced them as “Durran Durran”. Their last live performance of that streak saw them return as global rock stars, doing an epic prduction of “Wild Boys”.

Did I see all of these performances? Almost definitely. My family never missed an episode back then.

Duran Duran didn’t play TOTP in 1985, although BBC did play the clip for their smash hit Bond theme, “A View To A Kill”. In 1986, they came back to perform “Notorious”, which would be their last TOTP appearance of the 80s.

Did I see this last performance? It’s harder to say. TOTP stopped becoming a regular family event in my house by now. Time had passed and, one by one, my siblings had aged out of the show’s target demographic.

Something similar happened to Duran Duran’s fans. While Duran Duran were not quite a boyband, their career trajectory was certainly boyband-esque. The atomic energy of a million teenage crushes had catapulted them to stardom. But teenagers grow up, crushes cool down, and everything that rises must someday fall.

In 1990, “Serious” became the first Duran Duran single to miss out on the UK Top 40, peaking at Number 48. They were not mentioned on that week’s Top Of The Pops, where the Number One song was “Ice Ice Baby”.

Fear today, forgot tomorrow

Lots happened in the early 90s.

John Taylor married 19-year-old Amanda de Cadenet. Top Of The Pops went through a disastrous reboot and viewing figures suffered a mortal wound. I became a teenager. It was a wild time for everyone.

Rave, Grunge and Hip-Hop had taken over the world, so the last thing anyone wanted was a new Duran Duran record. This was a bit of a blow for Duran Duran, who had just recorded a new record. Like many of their 80s peers, the band couldn’t get arrested in the 90s. The media ignored them, the label disowned them, and the band looked like they’d reached the end of the road.

But manager Tommy Manzi was not prepared to let Duran Duran die. In one final throw of the dice, he leaked advance copies of the new single to some radio stations in Florida. A few obliging DJs gave it a spin…

…and the audience went bananas.

I will learn to survive

Let’s give Durran Durran the credit they deserve.

First, “Ordinary World” is a really good song. Not their best song, and maybe not even the best song on this album (“Come Undone” is terrific), but a fine tune and perfectly judged for that cultural moment.

But they didn’t just update their sound for the 90s. “Ordinary World” actually predicts a lot of what’s going to happen next in music, especially the kind of radio-friendly alt-pop acts like Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox 20. These guys are not followers, but leaders.

“Ordinary World” got a Stateside release in late 92 and went rocketing to Number One in the Billboard charts.

It peaked at Number 6 in the UK, but transformed the band’s reputation. Duran Duran (aka The Wedding Album) was a smash hit, and “Ordinary World” scooped the next Ivor Novello award. As had happened with ABBA the previous year, the band got a long-overdue reappraisal, and the cultural consensus from “embarrassing floppy-haired poseurs” to “fine songwriters with a strong back catalogue.”

Wouldn’t it be great to stop here and say that Duran Duran lived happily ever after? Sadly, the 90s had some rocky moments ahead, including their 1997 breakup and that horrifying cover of “White Lines”.

Things also went downhill for Top Of The Pops. The show was now locked in a terminal decline, and by 1999 it was surviving almost entirely on goodwill.

But that’s all ahead of us. For now, let’s pretend that it’s January 1993 again. It’s around 7pm on a Thursday. You’re in the living room with the whole family, everyone’s just had dinner and now you all have a nice cup of tea. Someone puts the telly on, and Top Of The Pops has started. All new music tonight; some okay, some awful.

Then your mum says, “oh is that Duran Duran?” And you feel a deep glow of contentment, because you’re all together and the fire is lighting and Duran Duran are on Top Of The Pops, and it’s been a while since you’ve had such a profound feeling of being at home, and you can tell that Simon le Bon feels at home too.

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