Wild Boys on the Plains – Duran Duran’s 1980s revival gets the job done

Duran Duran, Festival d’été de Québec, 15 juillet 2016, Scène Bell des plaines d’Abraham. Crédit photo: Renaud Philippe

By Michael Bourguignon

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but it ain’t all that bad after all, judging by Friday night’s Festival de Québec headliners, British vid-pop pioneers Duran Duran.

Long gone are the days when schoolgirls scrawled “I Love Simon” and even “Simon Loves Me” on their pencil cases – being of a certain age, I clearly remember seeing and questioning the plausibility of the latter declaration, but never, ever out loud. Simon lust was a serious disorder of the 1980s that one treated with cynical disrespect at one’s own peril.

For the paying public on the Plains of Abraham on Friday night, warmed up by earlier appearances by Neil Finn of Crowded House and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, it was a solid night of time travel back to those infamous days of oversized shoulder pads, gravity-defying haircuts, pastels and bouncy pop music.

Duran Duran wisely left the retro look behind, with Le Bon taking the stage in white jeans, black t-shirt and black and white leather jacket, focusing instead on quenching the thirst for musical memories and managing to look fairly dignified while doing so.

Le Bon and his cohorts were perhaps less wise in their choice of opening numbers, as they launched into the more recently penned and virtually unknown Paper Gods before falling back on easily recognizable, emblematic and singalong-friendly ‘80s hits such as Wild Boys, Hungry Like the Wolf and Rio.

It made for a bit of an awkward start, in all honesty, which is unfortunate because it seemed to set the tone for an evening that, well, did the job well enough, but never quite reached the heights one might rightfully expect from a band that virtually owned an entire decade.

Le Bon still has enough of a voice to carry off some of the biggest hits of the 1980s, and he did so with cocky confidence and a cheeky attitude that he maintained during the tunes and in his between-song banter, up until the end of the night when he introduced Save a Prayer with a sincere homage to the victims of the previous day’s deadly attack in Nice, France.

Music unites us all, he told the crowd, and Duran Duran did its best to prove it all night long.

Sure enough, the band’s music still stands up with enough grace and conviction to keep the crowds satiated, which was the saving grace of a yeoman’s performance that never went so far as to dazzle.

The aforementioned Rio was reserved for the encore, by which time the band had pretty much run the course of everything it had likely set out to do for the night, which seems to have been to deliver all the expected hits, interspersed with a few album tracks, keep everyone dancing and then call it a night.

Where the show faltered the most was in the visual aspect, which could either be an oversight or to the band’s credit if the intent was to let the music speak for itself. After all, Duran Duran was one of the darlings of the dawn of music videos, a promotional medium that was before its time but whose time perhaps has come and gone. Aside from some flashes of the front cover of Rio on the big screen at the end of the concert, a nod to Roger Moore as James Bond during the film track A View to a Kill, there really wasn’t much to capture the eye or the imagination.

Trouble was, the music was just OK, as the band did nothing to breathe new life into the old standards, nor inject any real energy into the performance, beyond the self-congratulatory back-slapping ritual Le Bon and Taylor shared as they exited stage left after taking their bows.

That said, it was a reasonable facsimile of how you or your pimply-faced younger sister experienced the 1980s, minus the hairspray. It’s just that the wolf was left still a little hungry at the end of the night.

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300 SHOWS – 10 STAGES – 11 DAYS OF MUSIC
July 7 to 17, 2016

For the complete festival schedule, visit www.infofestival.com