Requiem For A Dream
It is the morning after. Prayers saved, in the hangover hours following another Cherry Lipstick meet-up, we are having the perennial discussion: have the band run out of road?
We, and countless others, perform every conceivable autopsy on Duran Duran while the corpse is still breathing. The debate itself has become a tragic cover version; an edgy original slowly murdered by endless reworks. I am a tragic cover version of myself too, a Drive-By made flesh.
Yet the debate remains one of the few constants holding this fantastical but fragile ecosystem together. Depending on your perspective, fandom divides into two camps: the delighted dreamers and the dissecting doom-mongers. With both gathered on the scariest night of the year, the stage is already set for a theatre of conflict and contradiction.
But let's rewind.
I can't really comment on the pre-show hype, having been determined to avoid setlist spoilers. The giant billboard screens and overhead banners filling the O2 are a commanding presence while sensibly remaining out of reach of certain light-fingered enthusiasts.
We arrive fashionably late to the pre-show gathering in The Dial, where the unexpected joy of hearing Meet El Presidente in the wild competes with, and ultimately loses to, a cacophony of football cheers and bar-stool tactical expertise. Some might say that's no bad thing.
After one of the saddest pizzas I have ever eaten, we swap venues for somewhere more cramped and overstimulating, complete with watery cocktails at premium prices. Having forgotten my Loop earplugs, I take the opportunity to escape and investigate the merch stand.
"Would madam like a Free to Love T-shirt, complete with Free to Love tour dates on the back?"
Umm, no. One new song does not maketh the tour. Especially that one.
"A Duran Duran cap?"
Sorry, Michael. Tonight I'm a Victorian carnival freak or, according to my mother, a whore. Still, I'll keep the cap in mind for the next time I fancy looking like a teenage simpleton.
So far, so portentous.
The globetrotters of the fandom are already installed in the front row, followed by the die-hards operating on smaller family inheritances, followed by the "where shall we go for Halloween?" crowd. Then come the seat-fillers.
Yes, even in A Block.
Unsteady. Puzzled. Bored.
I look around at the wider audience. The vibe is noticeably more conservative than Manchester. Amid the scattered ghouls and fiends are suit jackets and remembrance poppies.
Back on stage, Simon looks like a melting Oscar statuette crossed with a Victorian admiral. John is dressed as his own personal nightmare: the parish priest he phones while off his tits on cocaine in 1984. Nick embraces military hauteur and ghostly pallor as only The Controller can. Rachael and Anna are clad in cropped nun's habits fashioned from glossy vinyl, though Rachael's coloured contacts and hooded veil surely hamper those non-verbal stage exchanges of "What the fuck are you doing?" and "No, over there."
For a band once renowned as pioneers of the video art form, the dancers contribute more narrative and impact than the lazy AI backdrop. The classic horror imagery from Manchester last year is gone. In its place come cartoon eyeballs and dismembered hands, decaying paintings (not Roger's, that's still in the attic), and zombified versions of the band's own videos. The result is distracting rather than immersive.
Friends of Mine is a fantastic opener: assertive, menacing, and obscure enough to satisfy the Duranie lifers.
A View to a Kill follows, a song I usually dread hearing live. Tonight, though, it briefly feels as if I'm hearing it for the first time again. I'm transported back to the thrill of discovering a song that seemed to sing my own soul back to me.
Audience hunger is sated, wolf-style. (I'm always amused that Simon appears to require a written prompt on the set list to remember the obligatory howl, as though, left to his own devices, he might accidentally perform Hungry Like the Wolf as a tribute to victims of some unspecified tragedy, enquire solemnly after levels of hunger in war-torn regions, and then roll straight into Ordinary World.)
As a former saxophone player myself, I marvel at Simon Willescroft's unenviable task of locating enough breathable air amidst rolling acres of dry ice to produce a sound during Union of the Snake. By rights, it should resemble a dying foghorn emerging from dense sea mist. God bless his lungs, it does not.
The first significant hiccup arrives with Danse Macabre, where the band road-test their Halloween concept against the casual fans. Despite the sea of bafflement around us, Cherry Lipstick have a ball singing every unhinged lyric, especially when our seat-filling friends in front sit down in protest, granting us an uninterrupted view of the stage.
"If you don't mind, if you don't mind..."
The band proceed to face down the audience for a solid four and a half minutes. Despite being asked repeatedly, they do, in fact, mind. Quite a lot. After all, Simon is rapping, and 911 Is A Joke flashbacks are a very frightening thing indeed.
Watching Simon repeatedly retreat to the spit bucket pulls on my heartstrings a little. I can't imagine what it's like to perform for 20,000 people covered in gold body paint and trapped inside a metal corset while feeling like shit.
Simon is now the only member of Duran Duran never afforded any meaningful time off, Duran Time notwithstanding. Even during his writer's block in the late nineties, he is still wheeled in front of a microphone to sing somebody else's words. Pet Sematary briefly offers a glimpse of Duran without Simon. It settles an old argument rather decisively. Without him, Duran Duran become a backing band and a queue for the toilets.
The midsection of the show is a rollercoaster: the anticipation of the climb, followed by a precipitous and terrifying fall.
New Moon on Monday nearly becomes a Spinal Tap sketch, Simon's frantic costume change playing out behind a token curtain as he scrambles back onstage moments before the chorus. The song's soaring, hands-aloft chorus gets exactly the response you'd expect.
The trouble is that every time the band strike gold, they seem determined not to cash it in. No sooner has New Moon whipped the crowd up than it's followed by the likes of Paint It Black and Supernature, and the momentum promptly evaporates.
Evil Woman is neither Duran, nor youthful, nor frightening, nor even a commercial success. Its milquetoast production seems to require vinyl-clad nuns simulating S&M to lend it even the faintest whiff of subversion. I'm having a distinct "whoa there, it's not 1981 anymore" moment, but it's all done with sufficient humour to avoid outright embarrassment.
My spoiler-dodging is rewarded with the lovely surprise of Winter Marches On, complete with an Only in Dreams lead-in. It's these little fragments that feel like gifts. It will almost certainly be the first and last time I ever hear it live.
"Play the fuckin' double bass, John."
Yet songs like this and Confession in the Afterlife require the listener to travel inward, which is not a journey typically enhanced by the presence of latex-thonged women. The whole thing feels faintly mismatched.
The songs that truly unite the audience are White Lines (not really considered a cover by Duranies), Girls on Film, The Wild Boys and The Reflex.
A fan on ProBoards sums it up perfectly afterwards:
"For me it was great to see something a little bit different from the usual setlist (although all the bookends were still there) but I would still rather see them play their own songs rather than the covers and that's what the vast majority of the crowd are there for too."
Instead, they perform as a tribute act to the dream they have been chasing since their star first started to burn out in 1986.
Fans do not necessarily want greatest hits. But nor do they want a cabaret act built around other people's songs.
It is a show of contradictions. The band lurch from spooky to subversive while skipping over a rich seam of genuinely dark material: Secret Oktober, Out of My Mind, El Diablo, Leopard, Night Boat, Dirty Great Monster. A band once renowned for pioneering the video art form serves up a mix of bastardised, disposable remakes and, in the same breath, physical choreography that adds entirely new dimensions of recall to those very same videos.
The whole production becomes an onstage metaphor for the vinyl revival: part reverential restoration, part fetish object, part exercise in selective memory.
The choreography hugely elevates songs I don't typically enjoy, such as Free to Love and The Wild Boys, the latter magnificently evocative of Russel Mulcahy's video. What becomes increasingly apparent to me, though, is that I am not necessarily chasing something brand new. What I want is something fresh, some small sign of continued growth.
Overall, I have a great show. The audience at large have a good-enough show, though one that intermittently falls flat. Uncharacteristically sober, I am able to notice what is actually happening around me. Once upon a time I'd have been irritated that the row in front of us in A Block sat down for much of the middle section before eventually deciding they were too drunk to make it to the end.
I don't care that they cannot engage. What I care about is that the band deserve more.
They deserve more from their audience, and that means not trying to satisfy 20,000 people with a concept show. There are another 364 days of the year to play Rio in an arena, yet of course it closes the night here too. The celebratory balloons descend like a sack of half-popped popcorn. The half-inflated ones fall early and too fast. It is a fitting final image for a show that never quite finds its pacing or consistency.
In a world that feels increasingly dystopian, something that feels real becomes the fantasy, the escape. Cover versions and AI bastardisations of the familiar do not create that connection. Put it in a theatre that suits its artistic leanings. Slash the production budget. Keep the dancers. Play to the people who will forgive Evil Woman because one tiny thing in the presentation is fresh.
So have they run out of road? Or have we just kept moving on our own?
There are nearly ten years of photos since I got involved with Cherry Lipstick. We all look so much older. Ten years of fun and some really tough times, but ever growing.
And that is the issue.
Duran philosophy espouses eternal youth and glamour. For decades they have specialised in transporting audiences back to younger versions of themselves. The difficulty comes when the distance becomes visible.
The divorces happened. The illnesses happened. The deaths happened. Jobs were left, lives rebuilt, identities reshaped. Through most of that journey, there was still new music arriving alongside the old. There was growth on both sides of the relationship.
That grief-and-growth curve had a soundtrack.
And now, because we are growing and the band are not, there is no soundtrack.
The big life events keep happening. World events have us volleying between shock and awe, and numbness. All this time, we are still listening to Hungry Like the Wolf as if it is, at best, 2004.
Perhaps the scariest thing for many fans this Halloween is wondering who they will be when the spell of fandom breaks.
Later, in a bar, A Matter of Feeling starts playing. I close my eyes and sing at the top of my voice.
Another bar later, I'm dancing joyously to Give It All Up.
No expensive ticket.
No setlist politics.
No disappointment.
I am my own show.
And even as the band's show is winding down, mine must go on.
Terrific piece that sadly compounds my ever diminishing FOMO as the band continues to ignore the Southern Hemisphere. The awful single, the reprehensible AI slop backdrop, the covers. This is it now? After FP, after everything? To treat their own legacy with such disregard. My frustration turns to sadness. Sigh.
All power to you Ruth. You still had a wonderful night (as indeed I would have too). The show DOES go on.