Video of the week: Wild Boys

I can't believe I've been writing this feature since January and not managed to talk about Duran Duran's videos yet. Here's where I make amends.

Many people think of Duran Duran's promo clips as the epitome of wasteful 80s shallowness. And, to be fair, that's not an unfair conclusion. The band jetted off to Antigua and Sri Lanka, hired massive yachts, made girls strip and sprayed countless litres of hairspray directly at the ozone layer.

But the videos do have a few saving graces. They are eye-catching, full of personality, snappily edited, and as often as not, tongue-in-cheek. The video for "Hungry like The Wolf" was so cinematic, in fact, that Duran Duran became one of the first acts to be broken by MTV.

Wild Boys came a few years later and, perhaps, marks the point where they began to lose the plot. It was crazily expensive, and ditched their jet-setting fashion model look in favour of a dystopian fantasy world full of S&M fetishists and disembodied heads. Luckily, the band hadn't quite disappeared up their own arses by this point, so they play their parts with panache, not pomposity.

For director Russell Malachy the video was supposed to be a calling card. He wanted to make a full-length feature based on the frankly freaky 1971 novel "The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead" by celebrity junkie William S. Burroughs - and this was a mini-version of that film, produced in an attempt to raise funds.

Simon Le Bon wrote the song based on what little he knew of Burroughs' book (he certainly hadn't bothered reading it) and the video was filmed at the 007 stage in Pinewood studios.

What impresses me most about the whole endeavour is how Malachy managed to get the band to go along with his vision. You can picture the scene:

Malachy: "So, Andy, we're going to suspend you from the roof, where you'll fight off flying gargoyles with your guitar. And Simon, you'll be thrown off a spinning windmill into a swimming pool full of piranhas."
The Duran: " ... "

As you can tell, the video is brilliantly ridiculous. Absolutely potty in the way only 1980s pop promos can be. It won the 1985 Brit Award for Best Video, and is probably the only deserving winner of that prize in the ceremony's history (they abandoned the category in 2001 after Robbie Williams won it three years in a row.)

Here it is:

PS That windmill nearly killed Simon Le Bon when it broke down with his head submersed in the water. If he had died, Duran Duran would be thought of as one of the UK's seminal pop acts, instead of a dreadful joke. Makes you think, doesn't it?

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