Song Analysis #58: Duran Duran – Proposition (part 2)

Tags

1986, analysis, Duran Duran, duranduran, Notorious, Proposition

NB: This is part 2 of my song analysis of ‘Proposition’ from Duran Duran’s fourth album ‘Notorious’, released in 1986. I’ve decided to post this now, 2 days before the band perform at the Kennedy Space Center Tuesday night, 16 July 2019 (previewed on TGTF through here), as part of the festivities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I recommend reading part 1 through here before diving into part 2 below.

Title: ‘Proposition’
Where to find it: ‘Notorious’, (1986, EMI/Capitol)
Performed by: Duran Duran
Words by: Simon Le Bon

Verse 1
“Bring back that child,” she said.
“Spare me the price of freedom.
Cold is my baby’s head,
blown by the wind of reason.
Even the rage behind
cries out to see
we’re still standing
under the closing edge,
pay for the crime of feeling.”

Prechorus 1
When all your pride is dead,
you must be scared instead.

Chorus
A quiet word is my proposition,
a promise made of a fierce day.
A body bleeds for this coalition,
without surrender if you stay.

Verse 2
“Show me my youth,” she cried,
wasted for desolation.
Hold up the sacrifice,
pull down your institution.
Resting while anger flies,
question’s the same.
who’s deciding?
After the clouds have lain,
shame on your generation.”

Prechorus 2
When all your guilt lies dead,
you must be scared instead.

Chorus
A quiet word is my proposition,
a promise made of a fierce day.
A body bleeds for this coalition,
without surrender if you stay.

Instrumental bridge

Prechorus 3
When all your pain lies dead,
you must be scared instead.

Chorus 2X
A quiet word is my proposition,
a promise made of a fierce day.
A body bleeds for this coalition,
without surrender if you stay.

Proposition…
Proposition…

Quite simply at the time when they hit it big in the early ‘80s, there wasn’t another band like Duran Duran. They were the complete package: they were five gorgeous, trend-setting English boys whose music was neither punk, pop, or funk. Simon’s job was to provide the words that would overlay the sonic landscapes that the four others had already come up with in the studio. I’ve always been amazed by writers who do this, as it isn’t easy trying to fit lyrics onto an already established melody. It requires you to massage syllables, either by cutting them or adding more, so they’ll fit what you’ve been given. If you have ever written poetry to fit a certain meter, you know what I’m talking about. When I write poems, I like a formal structure, such as successive iambs arranged in couplets, because then you are assured that the final result will be nice and neat. That doesn’t necessarily happen in the world of pop music.

Further, lyrics in songs are most often telling a story, either complementing the story already told through the music or coming in fresh with a story because there isn’t one in the music just yet. In the early days of Duran Duran, there was a lot of color and flavor from Andy Taylor’s guitar lines and bursts and John Taylor’s bass lines. Still, it fell on Simon to write words that would connect the songs with their audience. For sure, his lyrics over the years have garnered more than a few head scratches. Let’s revisit some of his gems from 1980-1986, some possibly familiar, some not so much:

Am I alone, or is the river alive? (‘Night Boat’)

Don’t say you’re easy on me, you’re about as easy as a nuclear war. (‘Is There Something I Should Know?’)

Funny, it’s just like a scene out of Voltaire, twisting out of sight. (‘Last Chance on a Stairway’)

And if the fires burn out, there’s only fire to blame. (‘Hold Back the Rain’)

I’m on a ride and I wanna get off, but they won’t slow down the roundabout. (‘The Reflex’)

Show me your secret and tell me your name, catch me with your fizzy smile. (‘I Take the Dice’)

Would someone please explain the reason for this strange behavior? (‘Skin Trade’)

Use your lipstick line, to color fear and loathing with a pink disguise. (‘Meet El Presidente’)

Simon was one of the first lyricists I had encountered who taught me it was okay to be oblique with the words you chose.

A few days ago, I queued ‘Proposition’ on Spotify during work, listening intently to the words for the first time in years. Of course I knew all the words. It was my favorite on ‘Notorious,’ and I had sung along to the lyrics so many times before. I even remembered where in the song to air synth Nick’s chord progressions. I can hear them and see him play them in my mind. Then I came to a terrible realization and wanted to punch myself repeatedly following an ‘aha!’ moment. What on earth? How did I miss this deeper meaning before? It seems so obvious to me now, but there was no way when I was a naive girl raised in a middle class suburb that I would have seen it. Now that I can see what’s inside, the song is more beautiful to me than ever before.

Before a single word is spoken, ‘Proposition’ begins with a series of aggressive keyboard chords, brass notes, and guitar tones. The introduction is a fanfare for the serious nature of what’s come. It seems perfect for the song’s title. I mean, what does the word ‘proposition’ conjure up in your head? For me, it makes me think of business arrangements, often unsavory ones, and putting yourself in situations you’re trying to get out of.

Years ago, I thought verse 1 was describing a woman in the war-torn Eastern Bloc and the difficulties of raising a child in that environment. “Bring back that child,” she said. / “Spare me the price of freedom”: those are the words of a woman who has made a painful decision to keep her child despite the cost of raising said child in a dangerous place. The epiphany I had last week about ‘Proposition’ is this. It’s not about that rough-faced mother in behind the Berlin Wall at all. It’s about the fight for a child who was either going to be given up for adoption or may have been lost in an abortion.

A woman has just given up the baby she just gave birth to and is now having second thoughts about giving the child away. “Cold is my baby’s head / blown by the wind of reason”: the baby is being given up for adoption for “the reason” presumably that the young mother cannot reasonably take care of it. It’s unclear whose rage is noted: is it the rage of her own parents about the child being born out of wedlock, or of the mother being forced to give up her own child? Regardless of who’s rage it is, “we’re still standing / under the closing edge / pay for the crime of feeling.” The “crime of feeling”, doesn’t that get you right in the gut? A ‘close’, the conclusion of a prior agreement, is about to occur, and the feels are gut-wrenching.

Then we go into one of three prechoruses of the song, each of them structured similarly, but there’s one major difference in the first half of each. In prechorus 1, the lyrics are “When all your pride is dead, / you must be scared instead.” Let us go over the other two, as to illustrate the importance of word choice. Prechorus 2 stars, “When all your guilt lies dead.” Prechorus 3 starts, “When all your pain lies dead.” Pride, guilt, pain, these are all clearly terrible emotions. We’ll come back to these, as well as the chorus.

Verse 2 gives more credence to the idea of adoption and abortion. The young mother lost her childlike innocence when she became pregnant. “Show me my youth,” she cried, “wasted for desolation”: her youth is gone but now without her child, she is left desolate. Desolate is an interesting choice to describe a woman, too. When I think of a desolate landscape, I think of a barren desert. Did the young woman have complications during her pregnancy that have left her unable to have any more children? That would make the pain of separation from her child and the forced adoption that much more painful. “Who’s deciding? After the clouds have lain / shame on your generation”: this is an indictment of the woman’s parents and of the decision to put the child up for adoption was out of her hands and made without her consultation.

Let’s now tackle the chorus:
A quiet word is my proposition,
a promise made of a fierce day.
A body bleeds for this coalition,
without surrender if you stay.

“A quiet word is my proposition” and “Without surrender if you stay”: is it possible that the young woman resigned herself to staying in a loveless relationship with the baby’s father in order to keep the baby and prevent the adoption? In political parlance, a coalition is an alliance. If “a body bleeds for this coalition,” meaning her body, does that mean that her heart was bleeding that she was placed in this awful position? Or is it literal, as in she would be bleeding and lose the baby if she was forced to have an abortion?

I want to revisit those three emotions in the prechoruses: pride, guilt, and pain. Regardless of the outcome for the woman, the prechoruses ensure a clear message: once you lie down and resign yourself to what has happened, e.g., “When all your pain lies dead,” that means you are no longer feeling anything. You are numb. You are dead inside. But why? Simon thinks, “you must be scared instead.” Too scared to admit the pride, guilt, and pain of this heart-wrenching situation. You’ve given up. I don’t think the word choice of ‘dead’ is a coincidence, lending further credence to the possible connection to abortion.

It might be a stretch to connect the two, but given the tumultuous time in Duran Duran with Andy and Roger leaving, I’m wondering if this song was an allegory written by Simon to reflect the desire to keep everyone together. He (and John and Nick?) cared too much and was holding on the emotional baggage, yet he knew, ultimately, that they were never going to keep Duran Duran the five-piece together.

Duran Duran were bleeding but when they came out of the other side of ‘Notorious’, they’d birthed a new lineup, and a fresh new era. Like the face of ‘Proposition’, the young woman who had given up her child, she had plenty of fight left in her. So did Duran Duran. And a global nation of Duranies is grateful.

Sadly, no video for this perfect song, so you’ll have to make do with a stream. Don’t let that stop you from discovering (or rediscovering) this ’80s gem.

Song Analysis #58: Duran Duran – Proposition (part 1)

Tags

1986, analysis, Duran Duran, duranduran, Essay, Notorious, Proposition

NB: This and the one that follows are specially timed posts, as Duran Duran will be performing at a special late night show at the Kennedy Space Center this coming Tuesday night as part of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing celebrations (preview on TGTF here). It is just about killing me that I cannot attend, not only because I am a Duranie, but because NASA and Duran Duran have a special connection for me.

My father worked at NASA Goddard for most of his career as a physicist, and he was well aware of my Duran obsession when I was in college. A few months before I graduated, he asked me what I wanted for a graduation present. Most other kids would have asked for a car or money. I asked for a trip to Japan to see Duran Duran play, and he took me to Tokyo to do just that. My father passed 15 years ago and while he is no longer here physically, my bet is that he’ll be at the show in spirit because he knows how much they mean to me. He’ll probably be doing his silly made up dance that he would always trot out when I was home on the weekends and I was blasting one of their tunes in the house.

I am currently taking stock of past experiences and relationships while I am putting together the stories and chapters that will eventually lead to my compilation of a memoir. Over 5 years ago, I did an analysis of a Duran Duran song from their 1993 self-titled LP that everyone knows colloquially as “The Wedding Album” so to not confuse it with their actual debut album, also self-titled. The song I had chosen at the time was ‘None of the Above’, which I used to play at very high volume in my dorm room. It was one of my personal psych up songs, something I would use to give myself confidence, as when I was young, confidence was in very short supply.

I have been thinking about Duran Duran in the last month. Somehow it had passed me by, or perhaps somewhere along the way I had forgotten that John Taylor had written an autobiography in 2012. Back in May, I devoured it in an evening, and my thoughts on the book are on yet another one of my blogs over here. Like many fans over the years, John was my favorite. I was 19, the internet was here, and you could lose yourself online in ‘80s photos and pretend you were there when the adorable John Taylor in his early 20s was making girls cry around the world. Unfortunately, at the time I became a fan of the band in 1999, John was no longer part of the band. Although I quickly and easily became a fan of his solo work, I needed to choose another favorite band member. I settled on his best friend Nick Rhodes. Who doesn’t love a dapper, brainy musician with a mischievous sense of humor?

for 5 years 2 decades ago, these were the two most important men in my life

Over the last 2 weeks, I came to the realization that although I had been a Duran obsessive in the early 2000s, I have been giving their singer and lyricist Simon Le Bon short shrift all these years. I had been looking at the band and their contributions as a whole and when I wasn’t, I would focus on John’s bass playing – simply incredible (most bass players speak of ‘Rio’ but check out with ‘Last Chance on a Stairway’ – !!!) – or Nick’s keyboard stabs and arpeggios because I had played piano for years. I guess it never occurred to me to focus on Simon because well, being the lead singer, it seemed like he wasn’t exactly starving for attention, right? The post that follows in an hour hopes to address and make up for my egregious oversight all these years.

To understand ‘Proposition’ and 1986’s ‘Notorious’ album, you first need to consider the enormous pressure Duran Duran were under. It was a difficult record for Duran Duran to make, to say the least. ‘Notorious’ followed the monumental commercial achievements of ‘Duran Duran,’ ‘Rio,’ and ‘Seven and the Ragged Tiger’, all of which were global successes. But no band can stay on top permanently. It is impossible. If you know anything about the band’s trajectory from when they started with the classic lineup in 1978, then you are aware that from 1979 to 1984, they didn’t really ever slow down.

Everyone wanted a piece of them and when you’re young, hungry, and eager to make it, you make the mistake of thinking you have to say yes to everything. By the time ‘Seven…’ was released, they were all pretty cheesed off of where the fame machine had gotten them. They were run off their feet by contractual agreements, and they couldn’t step outside of the house without getting mobbed. They were not enjoying the hurricane of fame they now found themselves in the center of. Some of the band dealt with it better than others. John’s coping mechanism was drinking a lot and doing a lot of drugs.

I did not know until I read John’s book that it was their managers Paul and Michael Berrow who decided to kick ‘Duran Duran’ and ‘Rio’ producer Colin Thurston to the curb for album #3, not the band. American Alex Sadkin, who had made his name producing Grace Jones and Bob Marley, was given the keys to the studio, along with Ian Little, who had produced earlier UK chart-topping single ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ The band thought that they needed to mix things up for creative reasons and to stay vital in the industry, and ‘Seven…’ certainly moved the needle for them. Most original Duranies I know love the album; I can take it or leave it when I consider against some of their later, less famous albums that I think are infinitely better. I think the best thing about ‘Seven…’ is the back cover art (sorry for the quality, but check out that gorgeous painting):

‘Notorious’ was the first release of the ‘big three’ era of Simon, John, and Nick. Following Live Aid, drummer Roger Taylor left, citing exhaustion. Lead guitarist Andy Taylor was no longer part of Duran Duran but for a much less sympathetic reason: his personal talent being built up by the music industry in Los Angeles, he was persuaded into a solo career, but not before he had strung Simon, John, and Nick along, making them think he would return to them to work on Duran Duran’s fourth album. When they finally realized he wasn’t coming back, there was reasonable anger. To this day, some fans, including myself, have an axe to grind with Andy over this.

Given the internal turmoil in the band, it isn’t surprising that the ‘Notorious’ sessions led to a collection of songs that had a negative bent. If you look hard enough in the lyrics, all of them have sinister connotations. Title track ‘Notorious’ addresses the tabloid rumor mill and takes a side swipe at Andy for good measure (“Who really gives a damn for a flaky bandit?”). ‘Skin Trade’ was Simon’s way of explaining that as humans, we all whore and sell ourselves out, one way or another (the band talk about how it was made here). ‘Winter Marches On’ is a dirge. ‘So Misled’ is obvious, isn’t it? ‘Vertigo (Do the Demolition)’ is a song about drug use and Simon sings, “do the dance, do the demolition / and lose the chance to hear ’cause you don’t listen,” as if something needed to be blown up and destroyed before any real change was to occur. Was Simon being reactionary against the industry who no longer wanted anything to do with Duran Duran, who they now considered washed up after their fans’ initial hysteria? Was he pissed off about what had happened with Andy and Roger? Or was he frustrated that one of his best friends, John Taylor, was losing himself to cocaine? Probably all three.

On most days, ‘Notorious’ is my favorite Duran Duran album. I admire them for taking a bad situation, figuring a way out of it, and coming up with a set of thought-provoking, toe-tapping songs that sounded nothing like their earlier albums. With the richness of the tracks owing to production by Nile Rodgers, the addition of a brash brass section, and their willingness to experiment, it’s the turning point at which I say Duran Duran, now a trio, grew up. Last track ‘Proposition’ was always my favorite.

“Blown by the wind of reason” from ‘Proposition’ was one of my favorite lyrics of Simon’s; I used it as the title of the essay collection page of the Duran Duran fan site I had built on Geocities, working on it late at night at school. (I’m sad to say that I think I didn’t bother to pull the text from my essays on the band before Geocities went bust in 2009. If I have them, they’re on an old 3.5” disk somewhere in my house.) ‘Proposition’ is powerful and catchy at the same time, so what’s not to love? The original Duranies may have hated it, but the band could do no wrong in this era in my eyes. As I entered my 20s, I had drawn up a backstory to the song in my mind, that Simon was singing about Eastern Europe during the Cold War and the sacrifices women made in those desperate times. Remember, the Berlin Wall didn’t fall until 1989, 3 years after ‘Notorious’ was released. Maybe with all the coverage on the atrocities in Kosovo in 1998-1999 on the news had affected my young mind.

Song analysis on deck for 11 AM this morning EDT. Stay tuned…

Song Analysis #28: Duran Duran – None of the Above

Tags

1993, analysis, Duran Duran, duranduran, The Wedding Album, theweddingalbum

Title: ‘None of the Above’
Where to find it: ‘Duran Duran’, known to fans as ‘The Wedding Album’ (1993, EMI/Capitol)
Performed by: Duran Duran
Words by: most likely Simon Le Bon

I am a Duranie and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When the internet revolution hit, I was in prime position to take advantage of it: a friend and I started a Duran Duran fans mailing list and group on eGroups, which was later bought by Yahoo! We wanted to start it because being younger and not having first-hand experience with the mental, massive, early heyday of the band in the early ’80s, we’d been mocked and made fun by Duranies, mostly female and of the entitled variety, who had. They claimed, in their deluded little minds, that there was no way that any of us “youngsters” could ever be as big of fans of the band as they were. I’ve experienced this phenomenon with many a band since, and to those small-minded people, I want to tell them this, for this is what I wish them to realise: do not belittle or minimise the experiences or loyalty of a fan for a band. They may be younger, or live in another country from where the band is from, they may not have as much money as you, what have you, but everyone loves and worships a band who means a lot to them in their own way. They do not deserve to be marginalised under any circumstances. Love for a band has no boundaries.

Through our group, I made several friends that I’m still close to today and I cherish those friendships. I also cherish Duran Duran’s music, which unfortunately gets a ridiculously bad rap in most people’s eyes. Yes, 1984’s ‘Seven and the Ragged Tiger’ wasn’t the apex of Western civilisation, but it meant so much to an awful lot of people. And while Duran Duran’s later work in the ’90s didn’t sell well, there is a hell of a lot of good material in there that some people will never get a chance to listen to, because they’ve already put down the band in their heads. To those people, I recommend 1993’s ‘Duran Duran’, known to us fans as The Wedding Album because the front cover has a photo of each band member’s parents the day they got married. On there, you will find the timeless mega hit ‘Ordinary World’; the infectious ‘Too Much Information’; the incredibly nimble and beautiful ‘Breath After Breath’, starring famed Brazilian musician Milton Nascimento; the fact-based narrative of ‘Sin of the City’, chronicling the real life tragedy of the Happy Land club fire in the Bronx in 1990; the hilariously cheeky yet weirdly erotic ‘UMF’; as well as the song that turned me into a Duran fan initially, ‘Come Undone’.

When I considered a song for Music in Notes to exemplify how important Duran Duran is to my life, I wracked my brain to come up with a song that wasn’t a famous one (think ‘Rio’ or ‘The Reflex’), yet showed off the power of song in a style most people who don’t know much at all about the band wouldn’t associated with them. I hope I have done them justice, as I credit the band for saving my life during my years in university.

First, the words:

Chorus (intro version with just vocals)
I am I myself alone,
I realise I never need to use no-one
When it comes down to my soul,
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

Verse 1
There was a time I was so afraid
Of everything people around me said
That I wanted to hide my face in the shadows

Verse 2
There was a time on a bed of nails
I was dreaming a plan I thought could not fail
But no power under the sun could pull it together

Pre-chorus
I can’t take this attitude
Got to show now I got to move on
God knows where I’m going to
It’s a lonely burning question

Chorus
I am I myself alone
Realise I never need to use no-one
Money, power, holy roads,
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

Verse 3
If there’s a time that we ever see
The nature of life in reality
Then I want to be there
To kick at the answer

Pre-chorus
I can’t take this attitude
Got to show now I got to move on
God knows where I’m going to
It’s a lonely burning question

Chorus (modified, extended version)
I am I myself alone
Realize I never need to use no-one
Money, power, holy roads,
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

I am I myself alone
Realise I never need to use no-one
When it comes down to my soul
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

Bridge with spoken word

Chorus
I am I myself alone
Realise I never need to use no-one
Money, power, holy road,
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

I am I myself alone
Realise I never need to use no-one
When it comes down to my soul
Freedom puts my faith in none of the above

Outro
None of the above
My faith in none of the above
None of the above
I stand by none of the above
None of the above
I stand by none of the above

Now, the analysis:

People seem to forget – or maybe they refuse to acknowledge – that Duran Duran could be a very funky band. My favourite album of theirs changes from day to day, and one of my all-time favourites is not ‘Rio’ with its famous Patrick Nagel painting on its cover but ‘Notorious’, which marked the start of the band’s association with producer Nile Rodgers, more famously known as the lead guitarist of Chic. It’s just one example of stuff he did prior to working with Daft Punk that wasn’t rubbish. ‘None of the Above’ is indeed funky and proves everyone who thinks Duran Duran is merely a “pop band”, but far more interesting is how the band decided to go in an agnostic / atheist direction for the lyrics.

Sartre once famously quipped, “L’enfer, c’est les autres”, or “hell is other people”. I think I can relate to this a bit. When I was in my late teens, I was an angry little thing. I don’t think I was necessary mad or angry at certain other people, I just wasn’t happy with the cards life had dealt me, and I became terribly envious of anyone healthy who could do whatever they wanted with their lives. That was not my life, nor has it ever been. I had to give up my dream of being a singer and musician; I knew there was no way on god’s green earth that a girl with issues of terrible fatigue could ever cope with the demands of going out on the road as touring musician.

I’d gotten to the point where I was just sick of being sick, a common thread that runs through the minds of each and every person who copes with a chronic illness. In some ways, I feel like my childhood was robbed from me, from no fault of my own, and it’s been hard coming to terms with that. Even these days when I’m in a pretty good place physically, when I feel great and my body isn’t acting up, I still question the existence of a benevolent, all knowing god. I used to wonder aloud, “why the hell was I given all these terrible things to deal with, why is my body so messed up, why have I been hospitalised so many times, when so-and-so person I know doesn’t have anything wrong with them and she can do whatever she wants?”

I changed my mind slightly when my father died, I think for my own sanity: I had to believe that there was a heaven and an afterlife, because I wanted to believe and expect that one day I would see him again. He was the man in my life who had always supported me in whatever I wanted to do, and that there was something more to life than what I was living here on earth. Two years later, I was hospitalised for 2 weeks with a terrible prognosis and thought I was dying; when I was finally discharged, I came out scared but okay, immediately going out to buy a cross to wear on my neck. I wear this cross now not so much for religious reasons, but because I didn’t know how else to “thank”, and whose decision it was for giving me the chance to live again. I do think I’ve had too many close calls and there must be some reason, some purpose for my life on earth for me to be “saved” so many times. But as for the existence of a god, who knows for sure really, right?

The brilliance of Duran Duran’s ‘None of the Above’ is the universal application of its lyrics. Everyone, no matter what your life situation, has been put in circumstances where you feel like you’ve been forsaken, whether it be by your parents, your family, your friends, or even God. Morrissey has touched on this theme quite a few times in his writing, more specifically about how being brought up Catholic made him come out of his childhood with Catholic guilt. Interestingly enough, this Catholic guilt “phenomenon” is something he shares with Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, who has discussed on occasion his difficulty with the guilt and how drug use “helped” him to reduce inhibitions when sleeping with groupies while on tour. So in essence, the Catholic guilt forced him into a corner with drugs, and the drugs won. John was quite a junkie for many years and all us Duranies are so thankful he was able to become sober and come out on the other side in one piece. He’s still with us. Their good friend Michael Hutchence of INXS wasn’t so lucky, and Simon Le Bon seems to have predicted their tragic loss in the haunting ‘Michael You’ve Got a Lot to Answer For’ on 1997’s ‘Medazzaland’ (another one of my favourite Duran albums).

Going back to Sartre’s quote, ‘None of the Above’ questions the importance of people in our lives in addition to religion. The lines “I am I myself alone, I realise I never need to use no-one” are both showing incredible independence. It’s no wonder I used to play this song very loudly before I left my dorm room, headed out to take a midterm. It was the personal, musical pep talk I needed in a life at school that was lived, outside of class anyway, alone. But the follow-up lines are also tinged with sadness: “When it comes down to my soul / freedom puts my faith in none of the above.” It was John Donne who wrote, “no man is an island”, yet in this song, Simon Le Bon wants us not only to believe, but to champion that man (or woman) who can do it all without any outside support or interference, human or divine.

Freedom, Le Bon says, is the key that we all need to be able go out there, alone, and be a success. This freedom could be from religious ideals forced upon you as a child that no longer ring true when you grow to be an adult and have adult experiences. It could be freedom from societal or parental standards that served as impenetrable shackles while we were children that no longer have bearing on our lives now that we are grown. Just as it could equally represent the freedom from the friends we used to think were well meaning in their advice but we’ve now learned to steer clear of, for everything we used to think about them has now been turned on its head and we are no longer in agreement.

When I first heard the song, I was playing it on a used copy of ‘The Wedding Album’ I’d bought cheaply from the CD exchange on the main drag near uni. Even as the tune crackled and the CD would skip, I felt the confidence, the cocky attitude of this song. I’m not an extrovert. I’m just not. I wasn’t born as one, and I’ll never be one. This song gave the 19-year old version of me through the words “can’t take this attitude / got to show now I got to move on” the hope that it was possible to not only survive but thrive without having to lean on anyone else.

My mother, ever the pessimist, used to have this saying when I was growing up, “there is no-one you can count on in this life but yourself.” I always hated it when she said that. It made me all the more hard-headed to find the best of friends and the best of lovers. But I am learning, slowly, that as many friends that I have and people I know in this country, in Britain, and in others, there are some that aren’t really looking out for me the way I look out for them. I had my own moments of being forsaken in 2013, and they weren’t at all pleasant. ‘None of the Above’ reminds me not that I have to be a cold, hard, unyielding beast of a person to survive life. That, I believe, was the take home message Le Bon wanted to give to the public because Duran Duran were going through a rough period in their professional lives and had felt forsaken by the same industry who had championed them through their hugely profitable years in the ’80s. No, when I listen to ‘None of the Above’, I am reminded of my teenage self, the girl that felt the world was against her. I am no longer that girl. I am a much different woman now, a woman who is still learning from life and experience but can go out there with maybe not 100% confidence in myself (seriously, who has that kind of confidence?) but with enough to know I’m worth something great to this world. Thank you, Duran Duran.

Lastly, the song, a stream of the song from the album (there was never a promo video made for this song, as it was never released on its own as a single).