Last Thursday evening, April 10th, Renny and I went to see Duran Duran at the Araneta Coliseum for the Red Carpet Massacre concert, which comes nineteen years after their last appearance in this part of the world - the Big Thing gig in 1989. When you haven't seen a beloved friend in an agonizingly long time, you'll want to look your best when he comes, and you want to be prepared for any surprises. Renny and I pulled out all the stops and arrived at the Araneta center in full battle gear, glammed up from head to toe, each standing two inches taller in newly-purchased footwear, and each carrying enough hardware for an African safari. Aside from our digital cameras and video-capable phones, we each carried binoculars, the better to see the very pores of the band members' faces. You must already have inferred that I was primarily concerned with John's, but in Renny's case, it was Roger Taylor's pores that were of utmost interest.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when Duran Duran finally took the stage, and from the moment I laid my eyes on John, I kept shrieking like I was falling from a building with a hundred thousand floors. What a hot, hot, hot 47-year old man. I recall hardly anything about what the rest of the several thousand-strong audience did that night; I only know that for most of the show my eyes followed John Taylor as he jogged from one side of the stage to the other, for all the world as if I were watching a Wimbledon tennis match. I am stunned by how good he looks for a man his age, and it's a huge mystery to me why he appears so wrinkled in pictures when he looks hardly over forty in person. My brother says it's botox, but I refuse to think the great Juan had a face full of cow poison that night. All I care to think about is that he was here and he was real.
Like the responsible Duranies that we were, Renny and I never sat down during the show (except once during Ordinary World, immediately following especially strenuous gyrating required by Planet Earth, and even then it was just to catch our breath before standing right up again). Even when most people chose to sit out all the Red Carpet Massacre songs, we remained on our feet, shimmying to Nite Runner and Skin Divers. All the true Duranies gave their all for every song, not the least of whom were the new friends we made that night; Salvador, who gleefully pantomimed the lyrics of The Reflex, and Nancy, who is such a huge Simon fan that she had a poster made to proclaim her undying love ("Simon, I want you more!").
Once in a while I tore my eyes away from the bass man to see what Simon was up to. I especially enjoyed seeing him do his New Religion dance and the opening high kick for The Reflex. I honestly never liked the song, but just for that evening I thought it was brilliant. Can't argue when you've got the entire coliseum singing the refrain. And what about the Wild Boys? I dislike it even more than the Reflex, but as soon as I recognized the drum line, I went properly nuts like everybody else. All Roger Taylor had to do was twirl his drumstick during the song, and Renny and I squealed simultaneously, half a dozen times for half a dozen consecutive twirls, like trained animals in a weird Pavlov experiment. Renny says she can't remember having had the good fortune of witnessing such unprecedented twirling, and maintains that she only remembers seeing him twirl twice. But I'm fairly certain of having seen the aforementioned twirl buffet, so I must conclude that the sensory overload was just too much for Renny's brain, so to protect her from spontaneously bursting into flames (Roger Taylor standing in same country + Renny's raging hormones + tropical summer + gratuitous drumstick twirling = a mysterious coliseum conflagration), it went on a temporary coma until Roger was finished delivering the goods. Thus the Araneta Center was saved from disaster.
The entire Araneta audience practically took over the job of singing Save a Prayer. It got so we couldn't really hear Simon's voice over the microphone anymore; and instead of Duran Duran performing the song for us, we sang it to them. John was appreciative enough to say exactly this after the tumult had died down at last: "Well, that was good. We should come back here more often." You can imagine what a whole lot of yelling that brought on. I thought I was going to pass out from joy. Now I know that musicians are bound to say stuff like that to get the audience going, but if there was even a tiny bit of truth there, I'd be extremely happy to have them back here soon, because I didn't get to close my eyes and isolate the bass line in Girls on Film. And I didn't pay enough attention to Nick. And they didn't sing (sacrilege!) Careless Memories or Is There Something I Should Know! Are they coming back?? Please please tell us now!!!
It's been more than a week since they left, but we're still in Duranie heaven.
