Arcadia: So Red The Rose C/D

ten cuidado!

'The Promise' is the best track on the album for me, of course.

The video for the Flame is always worth watching again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oenc1E4hJsE

I vastly prefer this to anything The Power Station ever did, too. I think Le Bon and Rhodes shoulda just carried on with Arcadia rather than continuing with Duran Duran.

I still love the Arcadia album. Probably the first album I ever had any 'deep' listening experience. Headphones on all the time, dissecting every sound. Exploring the names in the credits to understand what they contributed. Probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite Duran related release.

Oh yeah, I completely agree that the album is a good headphones experience. For me, there are several things that separate Duran Duran from an obviously lesser act like, say, Spandau Ballet. To begin with, Duran Duran obviously had better musical "chops" (for want of a better term) in comparison to Spandau - while John Taylor was definitely not a Bernard Edwards or a Mick Karn, he had enough about him to come up with some superb playing; most notably the bassline to 'Rio', but something like 'Lonely In Your Nightmare' and 'Tiger Tiger' showed he could at least provide some decent playing on the fretless. The Arcadia stuff (and also some Duran Duran stuff) show that Nick Rhodes and some of the other band members could make a better fist of Japan-like atmospherics than other bands that attempted the same. Andy Taylor, also, was a much better guitarist than most give him credit for. While it's known that the members of Japan weren't as keen on Duran Duran as they were of them, the fact that they struck up a working relationship, friendship and mutual respect from various members of Chic says it all, whereas it would have been hard to imagine Marvin Gaye going for Spandau, who were an incredibly ropey New Romantic band at best and an even worse pop-soul act. Duran Duran had stronger songs, better production and their "artier" experiments at least sounded like they were created by a bunch of people who enjoyed that sort of music. For all their success, the partying and their desire for world domination, I think there's a honesty about what Duran Duran were doing musically - they were genuinely making the music that they wanted to make. With Spandau, there always seemed to be something cynical about pretty much everything they did, 'True' included. Gary Kemp can talk endlessly until he's blue in the face about how Spandau Ballet were a bunch of working class lads trying to make something of themselves, but I always think that with Spandau, it was a case of style over substance and cynically so, whereas Duran Duran seemed to care about their music.

Okay, so Tony Hadley may have been a technically superior vocalist to Simon Le Bon, who has been guilty of some truly awful vocal performances from time to time, but I'd sooner take Le Bon's technically imperfect voice over a guy who oversings everything and hams it up at every opportunity, particularly when those lyrics he's given to sing are some of the most garbled nonsense of the era. That's not to say that Le Bon's lyrics are poetry - fucking hell, god no. But when Hadley is trying to inject faux-soul and passion into some of Kemp's lyrics, particularly pre-Barricades, the combination of the lyric and the way that the lyric is dramatically sung is incredibly laugh-out-loud funny for all the wrong reasons.

At this point, I can find a lot of positive things to say about quite a lot of acts from the synthpop/New Romantic, but Spandau - save one or two tracks - will always eternally remain a woeful band as far as I'm concerned.

That's not to say that Le Bon's lyrics are poetry - fucking hell, god no

I don't think I agree with this appraisal of Le Bon lyrics, which I hear a lot... he is a master of couplets, and in a song like, for example, Election Day, he has transcended his Duran Duran pace of a handful per song and just fires them at you one after the other. The whole song rarely hangs together but it really is top shelf cocaine nonsense. Focus on lines instead of verses!

Focusing on lines instead of verses is exactly how I suspect Le Bon put a lyric together! :D

https://www.superdeluxeedition.com/interview/35-today-the-making-of-arcadias-so-red-the-rose-in-their-own-words/?fbclid=IwAR0G0AKMVCaReTf33u8YCO68hEUWMdwtcMbOLr8YM9fBgUw9oZql_oNaPeQ

Excellent! Thanks for the link.

Yeah that was fun. Not sure I ever realized that the sick rhythm guitar on the instrumental cut of Election Day was Carlos Alomar but it makes sense. I loved them calling him “Mr. Alomar.”

Wow! No idea Andy Mackay even remembers playing on it, let alone liking his contributions.