Two new Duran Duran re-issues take us back to the nineties

The mid-Nineties were a strange time for the artists formerly known as Peak Eighties, yacht-going dandies in Antony Price suits.

A decade after crashing straight onto Top of the Pops with New Romantic-defining first single ‘Planet Earth’ and their debut self-titled album (1981), Duran Duran entered the new era a depleted force. In the wake of Andy Taylor (guitar) and Roger Taylor (drums) quitting in the months after the band’s appearance at the Philadelphia leg of 1985’s Live Aid concert, there were only three original members still standing: singer Simon Le Bon, keyboard player Nick Rhodes and bassist John Taylor. Sixth album Liberty (1990) came and went with nothing-to-see-here alacrity. The musicians’ private lives were in some turmoil.

But then, with American guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, a member of the line-up since 1989, taking a more active role, the band slowly got on the front foot once more. The result: this pair of albums, fascinating in different ways, re-released this week in sparkling new editions. In a nod to the band’s career-long interest in art and design, Duran Duran (1993) – the second self-titled record that’s better known as The Wedding Album (due to the sleeve featuring marriage photographs of the members’ parents) – and Thank You (1995) are available in deluxe new vinyl and CD packaging, with the music itself benefiting from audio remastering.

The Wedding Album might also be better known as The One with ‘Ordinary World’. The dreamy but soaring synthpop ballad, blessed with one of Le Bon’s best ever vocals, was a chart hit all over the world, and won the band an Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Work. With over half a billion streams on Spotify alone, it’s their most-streamed song, narrowly besting talismanic early banger ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’.

‘Ordinary World' still sounds terrific now, as does the album’s other big song, ‘Come Undone’, the production and beats leaning into the then-voguish trip-hop vibe. Some album-only cuts retain age-defying freshness, too, notably ‘Too Much Information’, which opens the 13-song set with punchy, crunchy INXS-esque rock’n’roll, and the house-y ‘Drowning Man’. It all speaks of a rebooted band brimming with renewed confidence and swagger…

…which might go some way to explaining Thank You. Released two years later, it is, as the title would have it, the band’s offering of gratitude to those artists who’d inspired them. And while it’s hard to divine Year Zero hip-hop’s influence on the Brit electronic pioneers, Duran Duran’s cover of Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel’s ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’ is riotously good fun, that feeling definitely helped by contributions from the track’s originators. But as for the other hip-hop cover, of Public Enemy’s ‘911 Is a Joke’, reinvented as a Beck-style blues jam with Le Bon rapping over the top: no thank you.

Their furiously funky take on Sly Stone’s ‘I Wanna Take You Higher’ is more successful, as is their moody, art-electronica recasting of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’. But Elvis Costello’s ‘Watching the Detectives’ done reggae-style; Bob Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’ done DD synthpop style; and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Thank You’ done like unleaded Zeppelin all collapse uncomfortably somewhere between heartfelt homage and wince-inducing cringe.

Three decades on, though, Thank You stands up better than we might expect for the album voted in 2006 the worst of all time by music magazine Q. With the benefit of snark-free hindsight it sounds less like Duran Duran’s bonkers shark-jumping moment than an out-there curio from a crucial, lane-shifting phase in their career.

Certainly it didn’t hurt them in the long run. Later this month Duran Duran release a scorchingly funky new single, ‘Free to Love’, recorded with old mate Nile Rodgers, and this summer they’re headlining a night at BST Hyde Park in London. These still-got-it veterans’ lounge-act cover of The Doors’ ‘Crystal Ship’ likely won’t appear in the set list, but ‘Ordinary World’ will be right up there.