Monday, September 15, 2014

Duran on Film!

On September 2 (the 50th birthday of Keanu Reeves, which, due to the smashing text I received, became my birthday too, yeah), I had the following text exchange with My Dear Friend Nikki:

NIKKI: Are you around say about 7:30 on September 10th?
ME: Lord willing and the police permitting!*
NIKKI: We are going!
ME: Where???
NIKKI: Chelsea cinemas on 23rd
ME: To see what?
NIKKI:
DURAN DURAN!!!!!

ME: WHOA!!!!!**
ME: SWEET!!!!!
ME: We should probs get tix in advance, if we can.
NIKKI: Yeah babe.
NIKKI: The music's between us!***
ME: Reach up, gurl!!!***
ME: Did u buy or shall I?
NIKKI: I already bought em
ME: Yay! what do I owe you?
NIKKI: Your presence. That is all I require. :-)
ME: Aw! I went all swoony just then. ;-)
NIKKI: Aw shucks...Go on...
ME: <3

*I can't take any credit for that, as it's one of the bizarre sayings of my people.
**That was absolutely unrelated to the aforementioned birthday boy.

So she and I, like, TOTALLY went to see this last week. I admit to feeling a bit of trepidation, wondering just what the fuck David Lynch would do to my Wild Boys. What he did was simply superimpose sometimes freaky images over concert footage from their performance at the Mayan Theatre in L.A., back in 2011. On the bright side, 4/5 Duranies were in concert together (ANDY! WHERE ARE YOU, ANDY?! THEY NEEEEEEEEEED YOU ANDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!). On the weird side, David Lynch.

Now, don't all you Lynchers get your crimson crotch-less knickers in a twist; I like Twin Peaks, and its damn good coffee, as much as the next gal. But there's no denying the man's vision is...hmmm...more surreal than Dali on angel dust (and how's THAT for a yardstick?). (Mind you, I've no idea whether Dali did the stuff or not. I'm just sayin'.)

Case in point: the shit Lynch put up over the lads as they performed the 2004 single off the Astronaut album, (Reach Up For the) Sunrise. It was the year I'd gone from a difficult job to the one I'm still at now. For me, that the boys released this fucking rocking and inspirational tune the summer in which I started the new gig revved me up in ways I can't coherently express. My Dear Friend Nikki has this song wake her up every morning, it's so friggin awesome to move one's booty to. (The bits in our text exchange with the three asterisks are lyrics from the song, except for the "gurl" part.) I can even get over the fact that, in chord structure, it follows the format of verse in minor/chorus in major that The Reflect and Electric Barbarella, and probs plenty of other Duran tunes use, I heart it so much. And here's Lynch, throwing up, of all things, a motherfucking Barbie-doll type thing, in the "nude," black circles with the letter "D" covering her tits.

WTF?

I'll admit, I LOLed the first time I saw that, which was when the chorus first played. A bunch of us in the (disappointingly small) audience did. Then it repeated and I decided I had to break out my phone so I could capture this shit. And guess what? The first image I caught was:


Count 'em, y'all—that's TWO dollies dancing over John Taylor's gaunt, I-really-need-to-gain-a-bit-of-weight face. But two dolls weren't enough for Lynch—oh, no:


Nick Rhodes got THREE o' them bitches all up in his grill! But that didn't quite satisfy Lynch, because they rapidly multiplied until:


Simon LeBon was overrun by a horde of the ungodly things, all reaching up for the motherfucking sunrise. Or his soul. Couldn't be certain, because soon after it was like a Barbie apocalypse and I may have fainted.

Now, if this shit had happened during, say, Girls on Film or, even more fittingly, Girl Panic, there'd have been some logic to it. But what the fuck am I thinking, expecting logic from the director in question?

ANYWAY, the music was pretty fucking fabulous (their dramatically slow intro into A View To A Kill, from which lyrics I derived the title of my book, THAT FATAL KISS, had My Dear Friend Nikki and me in raptures). In fact, it irked me to see only a few folks so much as bobbing their heads to the tunes, much less dance in their seats, as I did. It's like they were just Lynch fans, there to see his work, which is possibly the most surreal concept of the entire night.

I've been trying to find a video of this bit online and the best I could turn up was but a mere snippet. Instead, I decided to embed live concert footage which successfully conveys why My Dear Friend Nikki and I heart the tune so very much.






3 comments:

  1. I had no idea you were such a D2 fan! I thought for sure those dollies were during Girls on Film. I've never been a David Lynch fan. I saw Blue Velvet which was just too weird for my liking, and I never saw Twin Peaks although after I moved to WA I heard some of it was filmed in North Bend.

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  2. Ok WTF - David Lynch's Eraserhead was one of the most disturbing things I have seen - hate to imagine what he would do to Duran - mind you Blue Velvet was good...

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  3. Oh, man, did I ever LMAO whilst reading this! My older sister is a HUGE fan of DD *me, exposed by association* and would be all a flutter over that gig *minus the creepy double D dolls, which makes me think Lynch wasn't all together lucid during this production*.

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