114. Duran Duran

The O2 Arena

8 December 2015

The town I grew up in was once a jewel of the East Sussex coast, a lively fishing port with a high street that thrummed with Saturday shoppers, a marina glinting with yachts and the sunburnt ambition of middle-class boat owners in pastel jumpers striding from their Jags, all topped off with a beach that was sandy enough to justify candy floss and an amusement arcade. The ferry from Dieppe would offload streams of French tourists in Renaults, who’d spill onto the promenade and fill the town with the smell of Gauloises and duty-free perfume. It felt like a real place back then, a little hub with a pulse.

Then came the slow, civic murder. The council paved over the high street, shut the beach on some health and safety whim, and, most fatally, built the bypass. And just like that, the cars from Dieppe started to do exactly that: bypass. The day-trippers stopped tripping, and the increasingly unemployed townies started tripping on something else. The high street shuttered shop by shop. The amusements fell silent. The town became a ghost with a Sainsburys.

But rewind to the early Eighties, before the decline, and it was a sun-soaked playground. Aged eleven, I had the run of the place. My bike was a passport, and I’d pedal unsupervised down to the recreation ground or the breakwater, building ramps out of driftwood and charging into the sea like a small bespectacled Viking. I wasn’t flush, but I wasn’t wanting. In the summer months, I blew every coin I had on blue raspberry Slush Puppies, tossing money at the cashier like I was in a rap video.

Then, something shifted, me and my best mate discovered music. Suddenly, all spare funds had to be reallocated, budgets had to be made. In summer, I had a Slush Puppy addiction to feed, but in winter, I was rich. Instead of the beach café with its bags of pink floss and plastic buckets, I started heading for Woolworths.

That was the new temple, and I vividly remember the moment I bought my first record there. It was an act of pure individual expression, aside from French bangers that we would light in the recreation park and run away like tiny terrified Basque separatists, and a pen that showed a lady’s boobs when held upside down that I illicitly purchased from a tabac in Dieppe, this was my first ever purchase of a thing for myself, based on nothing more than seeing the video on Top of the Pops the week before. It was “Planet Earth” by Duran Duran, a band that, for a brief moment, would come to define my casual wardrobe choices. It was my first record. I still have it.

So, when Duran Duran announced a show at the O2 Arena, decades later, it wasn’t a decision it was a pilgrimage and of course, I was going with my oldest friend. How could I not? This was about more than music. It was a loop closing. A box being ticked that had been on the checklist since 1981.

Support was provided by Seal, whose set reminded us both that we knew far less of his back catalogue than we thought. But then the lights dipped, the big screen flared, and there they were. The Durans. Older, sure, but still in fine form. People dismiss them as pop fluff, and then you see them live and remember that pop fluff like this can shift tectonic plates. Because behind Simon Le Bon’s strangulated singing, this band had one of the tightest rhythm sections in the business: John and Roger Taylor. Funky as hell. Locked in like twin metronomes with groove in their bones.

Nile Rodgers appeared for “White Lines,” and even the godfather of funk himself looked like he was trying to keep up. It was slick, joyous, and full of enough neon nostalgia to make two grown men misty-eyed.

Then came the emotional gut punch. Just weeks earlier, the Bataclan massacre had shaken the live music world to its core. And when they lit up the arena with phone torches for a hushed, heartfelt rendition of “Save a Prayer”, dedicated to the victims, there wasn’t a dry eye around us. A sea of little lights, like fireflies in the dark, each one waving gently in shared grief and defiance. It was a reminder of what live music can do. It connects, consoles, unites.

Lindsay Lohan even turned up for the encore to duet on “Rio.” I’m not sure anyone expected that, but it added a surreal cherry on a very nostalgic cake. The song boomed through the rafters like it had been waiting forty years for this moment.

And as we filed out, I found myself thinking not just about the music, but about time. About how this band had bookended my life, from that first 7-inch bought in Woolworths, to this colossal, cinematic night at the O2. And about how lucky I was to have shared both of those moments with the same friend.