Duran Duran Reflect on 1980s Excess, Media Scrutiny as Band Embarks on Halloween-Themed Revival

LONDON, 12 OCTOBER 2026 —

They spent their heyday on yachts, then rolled up their sleeves in the wilderness years. Ahead of a Halloween show at the O2, pop’s great survivors explain their staying power I n 2022, Duran Duran were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

They were inducted by actor Robert Downey Jr; Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell and Gwen Stefani were on hand to pay heartfelt tribute and, as keyboard player Nick Rhodes points out, “It’s a big national live TV broadcast in America that goes out to millions of people,” so the band booked some warm-up shows. “And it so happened that there was a date that came up in Las Vegas on 31 October,” says Rhodes.

“And I looked at everyone and said: ‘Well, we can’t do a normal show. Las Vegas on Halloween – surely that’s the opportunity for a little bit of fun?’” They worked up a set of suitably themed material, including covers of Billie Eilish’s Bury a Friend and Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer.

There were, of course, costumes involved, because, as Rhodes drily notes, “When have Duran Duran ever not dressed up?” He has a point, although not even in their new romantic pomp had Duran Duran dressed up like this.

Replete with the unexpected sight of the band’s heart-throb-in-chief, bassist John Taylor, “with silver hair down to my waist, like some kind of Scandinavian orc”, the show proved such a success that Duran Duran’s Halloween gigs have become an annual event – they performed one at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2024 and at Manchester’s Co-op Live in 2025, while this year’s takes place at the O2 in London – and spawned an album, 2023’s Danse Macabre.

Guitarist Andy Taylor, who left the band in 2007 and announced he was suffering from stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, returned to play on it, while among its covers lurked a version of the Specials’ Ghost Town, an intriguing choice, given that, back in the early 80s, the Specials’ politically engaged social realism was seen as diametrically opposed to Duran Duran’s nakedly ambitious jet-setting glamour.

“I remember being in a taxi with John after one of our first rehearsals, talking about stuff,” nods frontman Simon Le Bon.

“I’d been in a rock band and a punk band before called Dog Days, and I said: ‘But John, what about street credibility?’ And John said: ‘Simon, Duran Duran’s got about as much street credibility as Chanel No 19.’ And, at that point, I thought: ‘OK, I’ll go with that.’” Along the way, the Halloween shows have got increasingly elaborate (the Manchester gig had pyrotechnics, dancers and fire-eaters), while even Le Bon, who by his own admission is “not a fan of Halloween – I think it’s become just a sort of marketing thing”, can’t be faulted for his enthusiasm for the whole venture.

“At the first one, I was a werewolf, but since then it’s developed. The next one, I was like the ghost of a north Atlantic convoy sea captain.

There was a sort of nautical theme which suits me down to the ground.” Readers old enough to remember Duran Duran’s heyday may recall Le Bon’s adventures with his 78ft yacht Drum, which capsized during the 1985 Fastnet race, resulting in the singer being airlifted to safety wearing only his underpants.

“Another time I was a kind of cross between Mad Max and a mummy, but I also had this one scene where I was determined to wear antlers, like a druid god. And last time I was sort of aiming for something but it fell a bit short: I was a jellyfish, but it ended up looking like … I was going to say something off RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I’d be flattering myself.

This time, I want to do something like Shiva the Destroyer.” It all points to a certain freedom, a desire to do what you want, regardless of whether it’s considered cool. “The thing is, I don’t give a fuck what people think about me,” offers Le Bon, now 67 and a grandfather – or, as he put it on social media, glamfather – of four.

“I’m not talking for the whole band – I’m sure some of them do care – but me, I just do what I do, and that’s all it is.” It also suggests a sense of self-deprecating humour that Rhodes thinks might have been overlooked after their 1982 album Rio catapulted them to superstardom, when Duran Duran had fair claim to call themselves the biggest band in the world.

In fairness, it wasn’t always easy to spot amid the expensive jet-set videos, supermodel girlfriends and Antony Price suits. “I think it was missed by some people,” he says. “But we grew up with Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and all of those amazing 70s British TV shows and so, inevitably, that was part of what we were doing.

It doesn’t mean we were going to put it into songs – I guess we weren’t ever going to write The Laughing Gnome – but at the same time, you know, the videos are filled with humour. Watch A View to a Kill or Rio. It’s there.” Talking to the band’s four members about their heyday is intriguing. It was, all agree, exactly what they’d wanted in the first place.

They loved being on Top of the Pops – the video for their recent single Free to Love was a hugely affectionate homage to the show – and clearly relished enjoying themselves in the grandstanding style of the times, palling around New York with Andy Warhol and calling up supermodels’ agents in order to ask their clients to dinner.