The crowd all love pulling dolly by the hair

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

30/08/81 : Duran Duran - Duran Duran

Well, this is a pleasant surprise that's popped out of nowhere - I've not noticed it in the charts until this week. I remember liking it, but I think I've only ever listened to it a couple of times and certainly not in many years, so it will be interesting to see how history has treated it.

It opens up with "Girls On Film" which, with its great camera clicking intro, really isn't a poor way to start - and then follows that up with "Planet Earth". Which are obviously the two quality tracks on the album, but there's more variety and the quality doesn't dip as much across the rest of the album as you might expect. It obviously owes several debts to artists who were around at the end of the 70s, but it's also the 80s very much announcing they were here - yes, it's no Rio, but it's an interesting first step on their journey which I enjoyed reminding myself about. 

We're at #3 in the charts this week on their 11th week of a decent 45 week run, with this being as high as it ever got - it also had runs of 20, 29, 17 and 5 weeks in '82/'83 when Rio took things to another level so it's managed 119 weeks in the chart in total over the years. The rest of the top five were ELO, Cliff Richard, Randy Crawford and (wait for it) the Official BBC Album of the Royal Wedding (I wonder how many people listen to that these days?) - which is quite a strange mix. The highest new entry was The Comsat Angels (all the way down at #66) who I don't remember, but they were a British post-punk group who are recognised as influencers of bands such as Interpol and Editors, so I'd probably quite like them. They also apparently played two gigs in Iceland in '82 which must have been a rare occurance because their sound then strongly influenced the Reykjavik music scene!

Wikipedia has a decent amount on the album (244 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their debut album. Apparently Simon Le Bon really struggled to sing in the studio (even though they'd been performing live for several months) and there was talk of replacing him - I imagine things would have turned out very differently if they'd gone down that route. There's a load of credit given to Colin Thurston the producer - he started off engineering Bowie's Heroes and Iggy Pop's Lust for Life (along with Tony Visconti) but caught Nick Rhodes's eye when he did The Human League's debut album. 

Critically, the contemporary reviews were mixed, with only Sounds being particularly positive about it - even Smash Hits were rude about it! But they soon changed their tune - as has pretty much everyone by now because hindsight is a wonderful thing. Commercially, it did pretty well globally driven by the success of the singles - they leaned heavily into producing the accompanying videos. The "Girls On Film" video was pretty damn controversial at the time because of the sexual imagery (unsurprisingly, it looks pretty tame these days) but they lucked out because MTV had just started up and needed to generate some controversy, so they just played the video no-one else would - et voila! The album got to #9 in Australia, #3 in Sweden and #1 in Portugal - it wasn't released in the US until '83 and only made some of the minor charts, but still sold a million copies over there.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to pay out a fiver to get a decent copy of this, which is quite a lot for an album which was very popular - I suspect quite a few of them have been worn out over the years (and possibly weren't exactly well looked after either). If you really want to splash out then you have to look to the Canadian '83 reissue for £350 or the Japanese '08 reissue for £400 - I imagined signed versions go for quite a bit more and found one that went for £647 in '21. This is never going to be anyone's favourite album of theirs (the internet is pretty much unanimous on that) but I often think it's more enjoyable for a band to come out with a decent debut album and then show growth from there - and that's certainly what we've got here.

06/09/81 - Interesting enough