Simon Le Bon on new music, unexpected young fans and Charli XCX

Ahead of his concerts in Cork and Dublin this summer, Simon Le Bon chats to Noel Baker about new music, playing the 80s favourites - and his unexpected new fans  

Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran performing on the main stage during day three of the Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally, Co Laois. Picture: Niall Carson/PA

Simon Le Bon had an unusual visitor last Christmas Day, and no, it wasn’t Santa.

The 66-year-old singer and longtime member of Duran Duran laughs as he recalls being in a pinnie apron, sort-of helping with the perpetually delayed Christmas lunch, when he received a knock on the door at his home in southeast London. The visitor was a fourth grade schoolgirl from Texas, Ava Myers, accompanied by her mum, and in London for the festive season; except, she had been instructed – jokingly, one assumes – by her teacher back in the US to “find Duran Duran”.

“Funnily enough, when you’ve got a lot of people around, it sort of almost feels normal to have somebody knocking on your door and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve just come over from Texas to say hi’,” Le Bon says with a vaguely disbelieving chuckle. 

“What was surprising about it is that the little girl was, I think, seven or eight years old, right? And that was one of the things that made it so kind of outstanding. I mean, we’ve been going for a long time, and the average sort of Duran Duran punter may be a little older than seven or eight years old, but this was quite surprising.”

The accompanying photo, snapped on the porch as Le Bon’s extended family milled around inside, shows pop star and mini-fan wreathed in festive smiles, but that had nothing on the reaction from Ava’s teacher back in America. 

Once she learned of the encounter, as quoted in local media, Miriam Osborne confessed that she may not have been able to remain as composed as her student. Or as she put it: “Oh my God, I would have just DIED!”

Le Bon admits that while he doesn’t actually encourage people to call around to his home, “this had just demanded a little bit more Christmas spirit”. Maybe the unusual nature of the visit also says something about the enduring appeal of the band and the continuing passion – maybe bordering on obsessiveness – of the Duranies who still follow the group to this day.

Simon Le Bon. Picture: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Those fans will have ample opportunity to see the group – Le Bon, alongside stalwarts Nick Rhodes, Roger Taylor and John Taylor – when they go on tour later this year, taking in dates in Dublin and Cork along the way, supported by special guests Nile Rodgers and Chic. 

To hear Le Bon talk about the mechanics of being in a band for this long, still touring and recording, it’s clear that for him it is not just a case of going through the motions.

“The main reason why we go back in to to make new albums is so we’ve got something new to play when we go out on tour,” he explains. 

“We don’t want to just play the old stuff. I think our relationship with the music, with those songs, would change. It’s always exciting when we’re putting together the repertoire for the next tour to see ‘oh, should we try doing that number? We haven’t done that for 15 years. Is it worth bringing that one up?’ It’s really exciting, that part of the job.”

To this end, the band recently launched its own perfume and the Duran Duran website is a potpourri of cultural happenings. It also helps when alongside any new material you have a back catalogue of memorable songs that people still adore — including, one imagines, by people who in years gone by may have professed to hate them and their New Romantic peers. 

Simon Le Bon: ‘We made work fun and it wasn’t always like that.’

Duran Duran were formed in 1978 with Le Bon joining in 1980, and their rise to chart-topping fame was swift. The hits, the eye liner, the all-pervading sense that they were as likely to be on Concorde quaffing champagne as in a studio — it all made for a heady mix that in some ways may have overshadowed the pop genius of the songs, propelled by John Taylor’s white funk bass lines, Le Bon’s vocals and an undeniable sense of youthful, dandyish swagger.

“We had so much fun,” he says of the early peak years in the 80s, which they helped to define with bangers like Rio and Girls On Film. 

“And we made work fun. It wasn’t always like that. There was times, you know, when you go off on a year and a half tour and and you’re 14, 15 months deep into it, and every town starts to look the same, and all you see, all you can remember, is the inside of hotel lobbies and airplanes and busses and stuff like that. Then the mental fatigue can set in, and it’s difficult, but we still really try and enjoy the opportunities that going out on the road present to us. So with touring, working in the studio, it’s creative, it’s fun. The writing a new song is one of the most exciting things that anybody could do. So we’re very much a half glass full kind of bunch of people, and you need to be like that to be in this band.”

For a band possibly unfairly redolent of an image of eighties ‘me first’ capitalism, Duran Duran have always split the proceeds equally among themselves and the writing process. On the band’s last album, Future Past, Le Bon says the various members simply showed up at the studio with zero material, awaiting the spark of inspiration and spontaneity which duly followed. That album was co-produced by contemporary dance music producer extraordinaire Erol Alkan and also featured a number of appearances by Blur guitarist Graham Coxon.

Yet despite the success of these collaborations, Le Bon says: “I’m not particularly good at collaborations, because I’m always thinking, I’ve always got my head down and I’m sort of focusing on the melody and the lyrics, which is a very demanding part of the songwriting process.” 

That said, he admits he would have liked to have collaborated with Brandi Carlile, who has instead written with Elton John. 

“I’m fascinated by Charlie XCX,” he continues. “She’s just really exciting. I like what she’s doing. I think she’s done it on her own terms. She’s not become a generic popstar.”

Simon Le Bon: 'I’m fascinated by Charlie XCX.' Picture: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

And then a curveball — Australian polymaths King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who can switch from the ear worm pop of Kepler 22-b to entire albums of thrash metal, although for Le Bon, the appeal is in their Music for Iran album.

“We always want to make the thing different, which means we probably are missing out on making a mode our own,” he said. “But we like to play with different modes. That’s the fun part.”

It seems strange to consider, especially considering the pomp of their early years and the mega events like the Live Aid show at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia in 1985, that Le Bon has in the past revealed how nervous he used to be when performing in his younger days. Rest assured, he’s over it now.

“Totally, absolutely, 100% and it’s not age, it’s just experience,” he explains. “I just know that what terrified me when I first started, which would have been forgetting lyrics, getting the melody wrong, hitting a bum note — all those things are things that the audience actually love and appreciate and would rather you did than didn’t do. When you look at it like that, you think I’m an idiot for having being terrified of those kind of things happening in the first place. And of course, there’s that whole thing about sticking your head above the parapet and actually being the focus of attention; that, in itself, used to make me nervous. And I think one of the reasons I kind of aimed at being a front man or a stage performer at all was because I have that fear, and I’ve always wanted to overcome it.”

This sanguine approach means he’s also at peace with the writing process and the incorporated element of rejection. 

“I’ve come in with songs that I’ve written on the guitar and sometimes they get used, and other times they get completely kind of trodden on by the rest of the band,” he says. “You’ve got to get over yourself. You’re in a band, and you want to be around for a long time, you’ve got to get over yourself. You’ve got to honestly have a good, hard think about what’s important: Is it your ego, or is it the survival and the success of the band? And it’s always the band.”

Simon Le Bon: 'I have that fear, and I’ve always wanted to overcome it.' 

And yet, arguably, the superstar band is an endangered species in the upper echelons of today’s music universe. Dave Fanning said as much in a recent interview with this paper. Le Bon hosts his own show on US-based Sirius XM and while he can see that bands are less likely to push through as in previous decades, that doesn’t mean the music isn’t as vital as it always was.

“I’m hearing fantastic music — that’s all I care about,” he says. “I don’t really care if you’re as big as Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, that that’s not really of any consequence to me, and it’s not of any consequence to these artists either. They’re doing it because they love the music and they’re making great music.

“I think life and culture change, and there are plenty of things that people did 200 years ago that you could look back on and go, are we missing out because we’re not doing that? And I think you have to just have faith in the fact that humanity has the spirit, that that level of attention in humanity will always find something good.”

And that’s the hope for the upcoming shows in Dublin and Cork and elsewhere, with Le Bon eulogising about the “spectacular” audiences at Irish gigs. Yet it must be revealed that while he has participated in round-the-world sailing races, the rigours of touring means he won’t be yachting his way into Crosshaven or Dun Laoghaire. He will be on the ocean wave later in the year though, as he’ll be heading down to St Tropez — well, obviously — in the autumn.

“Sailing is not just about being on the water in a boat,” he says, “it’s about all the other people you get to hang out with.”

And, sometimes, even on Christmas Day, they simply rock up at your front door.

• Duran Duran play Dublin’s Malahide Castle on June 30 and Cork’s Musgrave Park on July 1