Arena

Product Information

Do I really care that wild boys never lose it, never chose this way, never close your eyes but always shine? Duran Duran’s arrangements were always interesting, always thoughtful – it took real planning and even architecture, if you will, to construct the sounds they did. I get a similar feeling from a late song like All You Need Is Now – the section where Le Bon sings ‘And you sway in the moon the way you did when you were younger’ still takes me to a rare place of bittersweet emotion, even if the overall production already feels dated.

Personally, I like the track list far better than the greatest hits compilation Decade they released, well, at the end of the decade. The concert film Arena (An Absurd Notion) on long form VHS was quickly followed by The Making of Arena.

I have no idea what it means to “save a prayer ‘till the morning after”, but I don’t really care because the melody pulls me in regardless. Then one day many years later I looked up the All Music Guide review by that busy guy Mr Erlewine and was surprised to find he had awarded a mere two stars out of five.

When a vocalist can sing lines like “you say you’re easy honey/but you’re about as easy as a nuclear war” and I am willing to look the other way, well, I’d say you must have a pretty talented vocalist.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Two further live cuts from the 1984 world tour were released as B-sides to singles in 1984: " New Religion (Live in LA)" on the North American single for " The Reflex" and the live " Cracks in the Pavement (1984)" on " The Wild Boys". It wasn’t the last time I snuck her into a concert actually – I took her to listen to Bob Dylan outside a different venue a couple of years later, and once security took down the barricades before the encore we slipped in to see His Bobness sing “All Along the Watchtower” (big mistake taking her to this one – a Bob Dylan concert is not something a pre-teen girl finds impressive, she kept begging to go home. There are few things as quintessentially American as thinking you are better than most of your fellow Americans, most of whom are thinking the same thing about you.

Although I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by this one, any list of “The 50 Greatest Live Albums Ever” that is thoughtful enough to include Wings Over America and Pulse and The Song Remains the Same along with a couple of live Queen albums is all right by me, even if for some inexplicable reason it has not only Kiss Not-Very-Live but also Kiss Not-Very-Live II. But then when you have a countryful of people taught almost from the moment of conception that they are part of the specialest, most amazingest, most freedom-and-democracy lovingest God-blessed sun-kissed country from sea to shining sea there ever was or ever will be, well, frankly, that is going to do some really weird things to your national psyche. Some people think that means it lacks the atmosphere of a live album, but I beg to differ, it just means I don’t have to hear a bunch of idiots whistling while I am listening to the music.

By that time Duran Duran’s star was on the wane – side projects were going on by that time, three of the members had already released the greatest album Duran Duran never recorded with Arcadia’s So Red the Rose, a personal favorite of mine I plan on reviewing someday. So unlike a lot of live albums up to that point, you aren’t really missing anything in the live versions compared to their studio counterparts, the band thoughtfully made sure to include all the bleeps and bloops and unexpected sound effects that were always popping out of nowhere on Duran Duran records, and they even included that marvelous pan flute solo at the end of “The Chauffeur”. Simon Le Not Bono’s vocals were a lot less stilted and staid on this release compared to his vocals on the studio versions – his vocals have more life, they feel more natural and organic, I can actually hardly stand to hear the studio versions in comparison as far as the vocals go. I mean really, the guy puts an incredible amount of emotion into the most incredibly meaningless lyrics you could ever hope to hear. I also just read this one, “ The Greatest Prog Guitarists: An Essential Top 25 Countdown” (and slots 1-10 really should have been Robert Fripp) .

It was meant to be a teaser for a full-length feature film of the same name, based on the 1971 novel The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead by William S. Duran Duran was always a triumph of style over substance really, a whole lot of nothing wrapped up in spectacular packaging with a giant glittering bow.The album was eventually re-issued on 1 June 2004 and included two bonus tracks " Girls on Film" and " Rio". Notorious” would be a disappointment in about every way imaginable, and they were completely left behind by the rest of the music world by the time the 80s slouched to its hair band denouement.