Duranalysis: New Moon on Monday

Vive la Révolution! It’s time to discuss Duran Duran’s “New Moon on Monday” video!

This is a great song, and maybe half of a great video. The video, which was directed by Brian Grant and released in 1984, has a fun premise and a cool look… but, yeesh, it’s riddled with mortifying, cringe-inducing, cheeseball moments that almost bring the whole production -- nay, the whole Duran Duran empire -- to its knees.

The video is set in some indeterminate European country in some indeterminate point in time (the cars say 1940s, the hair and clothes say 1980s), which is occupied by hostile soldiers in natty caps, snazzy jackets, and shiny knee boots. As the video opens, Simon sits in a near-empty theater and watches actors rehearse a play. A leggy brunette, who is played by Patricia Barzyk, Miss France, 1980, observes him for a moment. She beckons one of the soldiers over and has a whispered conference with him.


The soldier approaches Simon and demands to see his papers, which Simon produces without a fuss. There’s an emblem on Simon’s collar, something that looks like a “Z” with two lines through it. It’s the symbol of la resistance! Simon is the leader of a secret rebellion! To the barricades!


After being dismissed by the soldier, Simon trails Miss France out of the theater. Upon receiving a sultry nod from her, he hops on the back of her motorcycle.

Miss France is wearing a leather skirt and leggings while driving a motorcycle. Brave lady.

They zip through the cobblestone streets of quaint village. There are clear signs of unrest: In the shadows, someone gets beaten by soldiers, while other soldiers force a man to scrub a spray-painted resistance logo off of a wall. A rebellion is brewing! The revolution will be televised, and everyone will have fantastic hair!


Somewhere in the village, Roger looks furtively about, then gets into a car and drives away. Kind of an unnecessary scene, but poor Roger tends to get overlooked a lot, so I can’t possibly begrudge him a scrap of screen time.

Next, we’re introduced to the world’s most ineffectual and glamorous weapons smugglers. Nick and John haul wooden crates labeled “EXPLOSIVES” out of a cellar and load them into the back of a horse-drawn carriage. Egad. While there’s a cheap thrill in watching these two lovely lilies of the field engaging in a bit of hard labor, relying on them to pull this off without blowing themselves to glittery bits sounds like a bad idea.


Here’s a question: If lives depended upon it, which Duran would you trust to deliver explosives to resistance fighters? My vote goes to Roger, though that’s mostly by default: Simon would cheerfully gab to everyone within earshot about his top-secret mission, John would be distracted by girls and/or sparkly objects and forget about the task at hand, Andy would get his nose out of joint about something and storm off in a huff, and Nick would flick lit cigarettes at his volatile cargo, just to see if anything interesting/fun would happen.

In an abandoned factory, Andy, who apparently showed up on set straight from the auditions for Newsies, operates an old-timey printing press and churns out flyers emblazoned with the resistance logo. Roger joins him. They marvel at Andy’s handiwork.


They get stopped at a makeshift checkpoint by a cluster of soldiers, all of whom tower over them. (Note: It is not difficult to tower over Roger and Andy.) The soldiers harass them a bit and scope them out from head to toe, then eventually let them pass.


The whole gang assembles at a small tavern, with Nick and John abandoning their explosives-filled horse-drawn carriage in the street. Heh. Check out the way John and Nick glide into the tavern through the back entrance, one after the other, collars popped, looking shifty and slinky.


Nick, by the way, is sporting a fresh-scrubbed, low-makeup look, paired with relatively conservative hair in something approximating a natural hair color. I’d be concerned about this foray into normalcy, but I rest secure in the knowledge that the mad glory of Nick’s Arcadia image looms just a short year ahead in his future. Remember his Arcadia makeup and hairstyle? Awesome. Insane. Insanely awesome! If the whole Arcadia stage somehow passed you by, do a Google Image search for “Nick Rhodes Arcadia.” Then prepare to be dazzled.


The group has a top-secret strategy meeting in the tavern. All the crusty old locals throw suspicious glances in the direction of the French beauty queen and the quintet of pretty pop stars cluttering up their usual drinking hole.

Post-meeting, Roger, Andy and Simon hit the cobblestone streets to secretly distribute Andy’s flyers to the townspeople beneath the noses of the guards. Andy, who’s still working an oddly fetching Oliver Twist look, is doing a crackerjack job of being stealthy and furtive.


Roger’s not bad at it either. Roger has a well-honed gift for flying beneath the radar.


Simon, on the other hand… Simon is passing out flyers while singing at the top of his lungs and shimmying to the beat of the music. Simon is incapable of doing anything in a stealthy and furtive manner.


Night falls. Roger and Andy scurry around madly with a kite, which they fly from the top of a building. The kite, uh, extracts energy from the moon and uses it to zap out an array of electric bolts to serve as a beacon to alert the townspeople to La Révolution.


Yep. Duran Duran has figured out how to harness the power of the moon. And they’re using it to rig up a glorified disco ball. Sounds about right.

Meanwhile, Nick and John distribute their deadly cargo to the townspeople. That’d be John right there, with the red gloves, using an axe to whack apart that crate. You know, the crate with “EXPLOSIVES” emblazoned across it in huge letters.


Oh, John. What are we going to do with you?

Simon waves a flag printed with the resistance logo and rallies the villagers. The soldiers charge into the town square on horseback. Oh, holy hell, they’ve got lightsabers. Why? What is this nitwittery? Between the moon-powered kite-beacon and the lightsaber-wielding soldiers, this video has pretty much gone all to hell in a matter of seconds.


Armed with John and Nick’s explosives -- there’s a notable lack of explosions, so they seem to be nothing more than sparklers and fireworks -- the townspeople and various Durans throng around the soldiers and drive them out of town.


Evil is vanquished! The town is liberated, thanks to a moonbeam-shooting kite and a few sparklers! Everybody starts dancing in celebration!


Yeah, it’s really sort of a dumb video. And it started out so well, too.

There’s still over a minute left in the song, so everybody just keeps dancing.


And dancing.

Hoo boy.

Permit me, if I may, to refer once again to Andy Taylor’s epic memoir, Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran (this is not the first time in these reviews that I’ve brought it up, and I’m sure it won’t be the last). In his section about filming this video, Andy, who never passes up an opportunity to take Nick down a peg, snarks on Nick’s dancing in this scene. Unkind! But pretty much on the money! Nick, under usual circumstances, does not dance. Nick may, if he deems it appropriate, unbend enough to shimmy his elegant shoulders a bit whilst playing his keyboards, while otherwise maintaining his usual glacial and imperious demeanor, but he does not dance. This video ably demonstrates why.

That’s the five-minute version of the video, which is a bit longer than the version that aired on MTV in the 1980s. There’s also an epic seventeen-minute version floating out there, in which Miss France’s role is fleshed out a bit -- she asks Simon to let her in on his plans; Simon suspects her of being an enemy spy, but goes ahead and brings her along anyway, probably because he’s always had a weakness for leggy brunettes.

There’s also a bit of a side plot featuring Roger working in an office in the back of the theater, which seems very plausible; Roger is far and away the Duran most likely to hold down a sensible desk job on the side, just to have something to fall back on in case this whole “world-famous pop icons” lark doesn’t pan out.


Also, the covert meeting at the tavern is much longer (Nick and Andy play handsies with a matchbook until they’re interrupted by soldiers), and it’s followed by a sequence where an elderly tavern patron smuggles Nick and John down into the wine cellar to show them her newfangled personal computer (hence the pretty green glow), which is being used in some (hazy, unspecified) way to aid the resistance.


Really, the extended version might be worth a gander just for that. For reasons I can’t quite peg, everything John and Nick do together in this video fills me with glee. They’re like a dissolute, fabulous Brit-pop version of the Hardy Boys.


Also, I think they might be kind of drunk.


Oh, and Miss France does indeed betray Simon -- she scurries off and tells the soldiers about the planned revolt. Roger and Andy warn Simon about her duplicity in time for him to orchestrate a trap for the soldiers.

And once again, the whole thing ends with more embarrassing, awkward dancing. Much, much more dancing. Three and a half minutes of dancing, in fact. The dancing goes on for so long that it somehow stops being mortifying and awful and wraps back around into awesomeness. Such is the power of Duran Duran.
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Duranalysis: Union of the Snake

Watching the video for Duran Duran’s “Union of the Snake” is like coming into the middle of some obscure science-fiction film, where you have no earthly idea who the characters are or what they’re supposed to be doing, or even whether the film is any damn good. Still, you keep watching, because the images are intriguing enough to hold your attention, even as the cogs in your brain spin in vain, trying to make coherent sense of it all and coming up with… I don’t know, marshmallow fluff.

Yeah. It’s sort of like that.

While “Union of the Snake” (1983) has all the hallmarks of a Russell Mulcahy video (heavy on plot, plenty of evocative imagery, totally bonkers), it was actually directed by Simon Milne. Apparently, Mulcahy came up with the story concept, but when outside commitments prevented him from directing it, Milne stepped in. And where I write “apparently,” go ahead and read that as “According to Wikipedia” and thus proceed under the assumption that the preceding information may be, as is so often the case with Wikipedia, nothing more than a passel of lies. Example: Just last week, some wag altered Nick Rhodes’s Wikipedia entry to describe him as a “blonde synth princess” from a “planet made entirely of waffles,” which is rubbish; everybody knows Planet Nick is composed of all things shiny and sparkly. Point being, if you’re working on your doctoral thesis on Duran Duran, maybe this blog shouldn’t be cited as a primary reference.

In the opening scenes, John, Roger and Simon trudge across a sandy, barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland (which is also known by the name “Australia”). A green-painted naked guy with spiky green hair and vaguely snakelike prosthetics glued to his face slinks around on all fours, mugging for the camera while dogging the boys across the desert. He’s making no attempt to hide, but either they don’t notice him, or they’re too cool to care. Naked green snake-man. Whatever.


The boys scramble down a sandy bluff and discover a stalled pickup truck with a dead body in the front seat.


I really like John's outfit. Based on the individual components, it should be a mismatched monstrosity -- glossy black button-down shirt, blue striped shawl, shiny silver belt, red leather gloves -- but somehow when it’s all put together, it looks comfortable and stylish and flattering.


That may have more to do with the wearer than the ensemble, actually.

In the distance, Simon spots a mysterious brunette riding a horse. Fair warning: This video is teeming with mysterious brunettes.

While investigating, Roger starts to look woozy, then crumples to the ground in exhaustion. Shortly thereafter, John conks out in the front seat of the truck. It’s all a wee bit abrupt and random. Oh, sure, they’ve been trudging across a sun-baked wasteland, and it’s not hard to imagine they’d be dead on their pretty feet, but they both look as dewy and fresh as English roses. No sweat-drenched hair, no sunburned noses, no icky pit stains.


Night falls. Simon drags Roger into a makeshift shelter and is preparing to haul a still-zonked John out of the truck when he’s accosted by Mysterious Brunette #2. This one is dressed in a sexy red bellhop uniform. Like every woman who’s ever appeared in a Duran Duran video, she looks like she just stepped out of a Nagel painting.


So Simon cheerfully abandons his (unconscious, defenseless) friends and follows the sexy lady to a glass elevator in the middle of the nowhere. The snake-man, by the way, is now hanging out on top of the elevator. Simon? Doesn’t notice, doesn’t care.

There’s a small flock of colorful birds inside the elevator. A quick nod to Barbarella, yes?


Simon and the sexy bellhop take the elevator down into a vast underground structure. They pass by lots of: a) rickety scaffolding, and b) loincloth-clad dancing men. Between this video and “Wild Boys,” this seems to be Duran Duran shorthand for “post-apocalyptic lair.” In fact, in many ways, this video seems like a low-key dress rehearsal for the full-tilt gonzo lunacy of the “Wild Boys” video, which would be released the following year.


A small, white-robed urchin throws open huge double doors and ushers Simon and the sexy bellhop into a spacious temple of some sort, which is filled with nonsensical crap: tents, dressmaker dummies, open umbrellas, more loincloth-clad dancing men, more small urchins in white robes, and, yes, a mime, who’s juggling with a set of gigantic dice.


There’s a high-backed chair at the far end of the room, like a throne, with a man holding a scepter seated upon it. We never him clearly -- in fact, apart from a blurry glimpse in one long shot, we never see him at all. And hey, there’s Nick! Nick strolls the length of the room and sits across from the man, his back to Simon.


Nick, more waiflike and ethereal than ever, appears to be swaddled in a gigantic tweed Snuggie®, and his hairstyle can only be described as mullet-ish, and yet he still manages to look regal and aloof and impossibly glamorous. Nick is magical.


Nick and the unseen man are deep in earnest discussion about the contents of some scrolls. Since we never see Nick’s conversation partner, it gets a little confusing (really, “it gets a little confusing” is a statement that can be pretty much slotted into any place in any description of any Duran Duran video). The first time (okay, first few times) I watched this, I assumed Our Nick was babbling to himself, which also seemed to make a certain amount of sense. But no, he’s definitely talking to someone, someone who keeps tossing around one of the mime-juggler’s giant dice in a fingerless-gloved hand, and the video is taking pains to make sure we never see who it is.


At one point, Nick glances over his shoulder and spots Simon, who’s looking around the chamber with due caution.

Nick looks down at a stylized… map? drawing?, and grows visibly agitated.


Behind him, Simon becomes alarmed and starts backing up toward the doors. Alarmed at the sight of Nick? Of the map? Of whomever Nick’s chatting with? We’ll never know.

The loincloth-clad men start prowling toward Simon, who, led by one of the urchins, bolts for the exit. Nick rolls up the map and stuffs it inside the unseen man’s scepter, which also functions as a sort of poster tube. Unclear-yet-dramatic things start happening: A nearby candelabra has been extinguished, and flickering lights flash across Nick’s pretty face.

Simon and the urchin make it to the elevator.


The loincloth-clad men in the scaffolding keep leaping into each other’s arms while fighting -- or, really, “fighting” -- in this weird, stylized, balletic manner. You know one staple of 1980s music videos that really hasn’t stood the test of time? Dance-fighting. Big dance-fighting numbers are never a good idea, unless they involve a switchblade-wielding George Chakiris squaring off against Russ Tamblyn. Still, you used to see this sort of thing a lot in music videos -- “Beat It” and “Love is a Battlefield” are the chief offenders, but “Union of the Snake” certainly stumbles into the trap, too. It was fine at the time. Almost thirty years on, it’s a little dorky.


Oh, look, there’s Andy. I have no idea what Andy’s role is in this video. Andy has no idea what his role is in this video. He’s just sort of… hanging out in the scaffolding. At one point, he whisks one of the white-robed urchins out of the way of the dance-fighting loincloth guys, so… that’s sort of a purpose, right? Andy, it must be said, looks like hell: sunglasses on, long hair greased back and winched into a tight ponytail. I don’t think it’s coincidence that in most shots he’s at least partially obscured by the scaffolding. It’s like he decided the best way to rebel against the sophisticated, glamorous, meticulously-groomed, luxuriously-coiffed Duran Duran image was to show up for the video shoot with really bad hair.


Sometimes I doubt Andy’s commitment to Sparkle Motion.


As Simon rises up in the elevator, he passes Mysterious Brunette #3, who wears a sexily tattered dress and poses with colorful birds. She writhes at him in a sexy and mysterious manner. This video might overdo it on the Mysterious Brunette front, actually.


And for some reason we don’t get to see, Simon can’t take the elevator all the way up to the surface. All of a sudden, he’s climbing up through a tangle of plastic exhaust tubes to freedom.

On the surface, Roger and John, who, thankfully, haven’t died of exposure or been eaten by the snake-man while they were out cold, load up the pickup truck with supplies. They see Simon wriggle out of the tubes and collapse in a heap.


While John sticks with the truck, Roger goes to lug Simon to safety. He’s interrupted by a series of pretty pink explosions coming from the underground lair.


Pink rocket trails light up the sky. Mysterious Brunette #1 -- that’s the one on the horse, remember -- rides by.


Simon staggers to his feet and watches the explosions. He starts to stagger back in the direction of the underground lair, then collapses again.


A lot of people collapse for no particular reason in this video.

Daylight breaks. Simon regains consciousness. The scepter with the map hidden in it, which we last saw in Nick’s possession, is resting beside him. Roger and John have taken off in the pickup truck without him. I’d label them callous bastards, but Simon did leave them behind, unconscious and defenseless, when he went down the rabbit hole.


Mysterious Brunette #1 gallops up again and gives Simon a lift up onto her horse. They trot off together into the horizon.


Okay! That was the whole thing! It’s weird, right? Lots of unanswered questions, starting with “What did I just watch?” and ending with “What the heck was Andy’s problem, anyway?” Don’t get me wrong, I like the video, but it’s a mystery, a single lonely piece in a board game that got sold at a yard sale thirty years ago. And we’ll never know the solution.
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Duranalysis: Night Boat

It’s the great Duran Duran-versus-zombies showdown!

The video for “(Waiting for the) Night Boat” came out in 1982. I just saw it for the first time yesterday. How did this slip beneath my radar for so long? How did I go twenty-nine years not knowing there was a video in which the Duran Duran boys get their pretty asses handed to them by a horde of zombies?

As with so many of Duran Duran’s best videos, “Night Boat” was directed by Russell Mulcahy. It was shot in Antigua simultaneously with their much-celebrated “Rio” video; “Rio,” of course, became a breakout smash hit (and was recently voted The Greatest Music Video Ever by viewers of MTV UK) and kicked the Duran Duran international phenomenon into the highest possible gear, whereas “Night Boat” slipped through the cracks. I won’t say a word against “Rio” -- it’s a bright, splashy, joyous video, and it boosts my spirits every time I see it -- but really, folks, which would you rather see: Duran Duran cavorting on a yacht while competing for the attention of a leggy brunette, or Duran Duran getting ambushed by zombies?

Exactly.

So, “Night Boat”: The boys are vacationing together on a near-deserted Caribbean island. In the dialogue-heavy introductory scenes, Roger and John stroll down toward the water, passing various ramshackle structures. They’re chattering to themselves and thus fail to pay attention to a dangling radio, which is transmitting an urgent mayday about a strange ship in the area.


Simon loiters by the water and watches as a boatman ferries Andy up to the dock. You probably can’t really tell that's Andy in the photo below, any more than you could tell it was Roger in the previous one. Clean copies of this video are hard to find, so my screenshots all kind of suck. Factor in how the boys are dressed in similar beach-appropriate outfits and sport relatively similar hairstyles, and how they seem to spend a lot of time lurking in shadows or standing with their backs to the camera, and I had a terrible time sorting out who was who. I watched this an embarrassing number of times before I felt confident identifying this person as Andy.


Of course, some Durans are easier to peg than others. I see you, Nick! I’d recognize that eyeliner anywhere.


And John was kind enough to wear a cute hat for the first half of the video (before he -- spoiler alert! -- loses it in a zombie attack), which makes it easy to pick him out of the bunch. He’s also about a foot taller than Nick, Andy and Roger, so, y’know, that helps too.


Nick chats with Simon. Nick is being his usual magical-pixie self, i.e. slinky and fetching and faintly terrifying all at once. Simon, on the other hand, is acting a little… off. He mutters, “She should be here soon,” while scanning the coastline, then, as though in a trance, starts reciting Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech from Romeo & Juliet (“She is the fairies' midwife…”).


As Simon babbles on, a shadowy figure scurries in front of a full-length mirror, which is showing Nick’s reflection. Mirror-Nick covers his face as the mirror shatters, though in reality, back on the dock, Nick hasn’t moved.

So that’s weird.

Simon snaps out of his trance and looks up in concern when the mirror breaks. John strolls by and asks him what’s wrong. Visibly unsettled, Simon assures him it’s nothing.

(The creepy atmospheric details in this video -- scuttling crabs, creaking boards, crackling radios -- are first-rate. It’s blindingly clear something terrible is about to happen/is already happening to our boys.)

John wanders off to stroll on the beach, and suddenly night has fallen. He clutches his face as he’s plagued by visions of zombies. By the way, when I say “zombies,” I’m talking about the Afro-Caribbean voodoo-related type that were all the rage in the 1980s, the kind that factored into The Serpent and the Rainbow and appeared randomly in Miami Vice episodes, not the diseased and/or radioactive flesh-devouring sort that are in vogue these days. Nobody’s going to rip open John’s pretty head to feast on his brains. Rest easy.

John lets out a long, anguished wail and drops to his knees, then crawls around on all fours, babbling at some unseen foe to leave him alone.

…And all this happens before the zombie horde set upon him and start ripping off his clothes.




Simon, meanwhile, took the time for a quick wardrobe change and is now striding through the darkness in a cool ankle-length black leather coat. Singing all the while, he pays no attention to the zombies lurking behind the shrubbery and in the trees above his head.


Suddenly, we’re back to daylight again, and Simon is once again on the dock, still reciting Shakespeare. Did we just back up in time? Was the zombie attack all a dream? Who knows? It’s not the most straightforward and linear video ever, but it sure is chock full of awesomeness.

Andy and Nick, who seem freaked out of their adorable heads (I can’t tell if they’ve been legitimately spooked by something we haven’t seen, or if they’re just being hammy), scamper up to a zoned-out Simon and ask him what’s wrong. When he doesn’t answer, they scurry off in a panic.


Just as suddenly, it’s night again. Zombies slither around under the dock. Simon, unsurprisingly, has somehow found himself a leggy brunette (wherever Simon may be, leggy brunettes tend to magically appear), who’s probably the bad-news faerie queen he was awaiting.


When next we see him, he’s standing on the bow of a boat, his long coat flapping in the breeze.


Making chipper, personable, garrulous Simon seem at all sinister and malevolent is sort of an uphill battle, but this video takes a decent stab at it.


Roger update: He’s now lying in a motionless heap on the floor of a cabin while zombies swarm about.


He sits up and looks around in confusion as Nick, whom we last saw scurrying for his life, slinks up behind him and touches his shoulder. Well, this is deucedly odd: Nick is now dressed in spectral white instead of head-to-toe black as before. And his hair is styled differently. And it’s a different color. And I think it might be longer, or maybe just teased out to its full glory. He’s also now in his full-speed-ahead, no-pore-left-uncovered makeup, instead of the toned-down no-muss beach-appropriate version (eyeliner, mascara, lipstick) he’d been sporting earlier. Assuming this is not an especially gnarly continuity error, this probably means the zombies have already gotten to Nick.


On the other hand, I also find it eminently plausible that, in the event of a zombie attack, Nick would take a break from the action to change into his own personal version of warpaint and battle armor, just so he could meet his doom with style and aplomb.

(Key Nick Rhodes quote about this era: “I felt very grown up when I was wearing makeup, thank you very much.” I’m looking at a July 1984 issue of Teen Set magazine right now -- oh, don’t ask -- which lists Nick’s favorite foods as “prawns, steak, strawberries and champagne,” and I think this is the moment where I officially embrace Nick as my new role model/personal spiritual guru. He’s fun.)

Roger hightails it across the island, one step ahead of the zombie horde. He reaches his cabin and locks himself inside, then collapses in exhaustion, just out of reach of the zombies, who keep trying to grab him through the slats in his front door.


Simon’s still on the boat, singing up a storm and partying with zombies, who swarm around him and cavort about the deck.

After the zombie horde disperses, Roger emerges from his cabin, looking bedraggled and sad. He stares out over the water and sees Simon’s boat sailing into the distance.


Through the blurry, grainy video, it’s hard to tell anything for sure (grumble, mutter, complain), but it looks like Nick is on board as well. It’s probably a logical assumption the rest of the boys are there, too.


Wow. Even without the gigantic budget and full production resources of Duran Duran’s later works, that’s pretty much a perfect music video, start to finish: cool, creepy, stylish, awesome. Hard to understand why it fell into obscurity.

(You can view a blurry version of "Night Boat" here. If anyone knows of a crisper copy online, by all means, let me know.)
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