And I'll elaborate more on that in a minute..
Putting my iTunes on random caused it to stop on a Duran Duran song. I love Duran Duran. Granted, I am not the superfan I was when I was 13 years old, but I still love their music. I've only seen them in concert once as a teenager(which was my first concert, BTW) They have toured several times since and stopped in San Diego-once they played at a casino here in San Diego and what stopped me was the price. $95(and that was BEFORE the service charge!). Yeah..no.
But let's go back to 1983-1984 when I was at the height of my Duraniedom. I discovered Duran Duran back in 1983. They were quasi well known having toured with several major bands of the day(including Blondie). I discovered their music, and for a time,Duran Duran were all I really cared about.
Like a lot of Duran Duran fans, I had posters all over the wallsk-well in my case it wasn't walls it was glass closet doors. And when I say that they were covered, I really do mean covered. Any time I could get something for free or cheap(I didn't get a lot of allowance so would have to save up for quite a long time to get the latest 12 inch or pin or magazine)sometimes the local record store I went to when I was a kid would give me stuff for free because they had a lot of them, which was nice(I remember a HUGE poster that had pride of place.)
In order to fund my Duranie..habit.I would actually save my school lunch money.Talk about making a difficult choice..lunch, or being able to get a new pin? Well, it wasn't like the food at my jr. high school cafeteria was great anyways(it was downright awful!), so... O hai low blood sugar. LOL.
Several of the radio stations in Southern California LOVED Duran Duran and would play the new Duran Duran song before anyone else.They would announce when they were going to play it the night before, and I would bring my radio to school.Then, right before they were going to play the song, I would ask to be excused to go to the bathroom and listen to it there. Amazingly,I never got caught-and I'm sure if my teachers had found out,they wouldn't have been happy about it. They were NOT Duran Duran fans, and blamed poor schoolwork on me being too much of a Duranie, which I recognise is totally true now..but at the time I was having such a fun time doing it I could have cared less.
One of the few people who "got it" was the school speech therapist. She had been a Beatles fan back in the day-still was at the time I knew her, so she knew what it was to be a FAN. I wish I could say that my classmates were Duran Duran fans but they weren't.(that's the "not a great year" part of the subject line.)
Duranie style was unique: Fedoras(and yes, I had one, and wore it to school-where I was compared with someone..not John Taylor(Duran Duran's bass player) like I had intended, though) so I never did it again!) jazz shoes, dyed blonde bangs(because John Taylor had them), Duran Duran shirts(obviously) and denim jackets covered with Duran Duran buttons.(don't ask why it was a Duranie thing..it just was. LOL)
I remember that when we went to England in the summer of 1984,the *one* thing I wanted to do was go to Birmingham, where they were from. We drove by the outskirts.That had to be good enough. I did get a couple of Duran Duran pins and a couple of shirts so that made up for it-and then when we were on the plane coming home I started talking to a girl from Texas who had been to England with a church group, so we got to compare notes somewhat, and that was a lot of fun :)
Back in the days when MTV actually played music videos,they had a handful of videos..that they played over and over and over..and Duran Duran's videos were always in there at LEAST once an hour. I can't even tell you how much I procrastinated and put off doing homework whilst waiting for a Duran Duran video to come on. Also, we got a VCR(which, in those days was an extravagance as was our Mac computer- one of the original beige boxy Macs) so I would tape hours and hours of MTV.
There was Sing Blue Silver, a tour movie, with Duran Duran on tour and interacting with press and fans and having to do interviews(there are several points in Sing Blue Silver where you can tell that they would rather be doing *anything* but being interviewed!)and As The Lights Go Down which is mostly a concert movie with a little bit of story thrown in.)At the time As The Lights Go Down aired on Cinemax, we had Cinemax for free for some reason and they never turned it off. The night it aired happened to be the night that I went to my church youth group/prep for Confirmation. That conflict(among other things) is what lead to me dropping out of the youth group and basically saying I was an atheist for a number of years. I'm still a pretty infrequent church goer :P
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