There are many, many ways that pop-culture fans have discovered shapeshifting rocker/actor Michael Des Barres over the decades. Some may know him from his big-screen debut at age 17 in the 1967 Sidney Poitier film To Sir, With Love; or as the frontman of the Deep Purple- and Led Zeppelin-associated bands Silverhead and Detective; or as the co-writer of Animotion’s 1983 hit “Obsession”; or as the longtime host of the Little Steven’s Underground Garage morning show on SiriusXM; or as iconic MacGyver villain Murdoc; or for his many other television appearances on shows like Roseanne, Seinfeld, Melrose Place, Northern Exposure, Frasier, and Nip/Tuck.

But if you’re one of the Gen X kids among the estimated 1.9 billion people (nearly 40 percent of the world population at the time) who watched the global Live Aid concert broadcast 40 years ago, on July 13, 1985, then you might best know Des Barres as the lead singer of the Power Station.

Live Aid was, incredibly, only Des Barres’s second public appearance with the Duran Duran-spinoff supergroup — as an extremely last-minute replacement, after original frontman Robert Palmer unceremoniously bowed out. And the Power Station were part of an absolutely stacked Philadelphia bill that included everyone from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and the surviving Zeppelin members; to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; to Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood; to comeback queen Tina Turner and rising pop princess Madonna.

And yet, it seems Des Barres was the only performer at JFK Stadium who wasn’t nervous that day.

“I’d been in many, many movies. I’d done 120 hours of television by that time. So, getting nervous is not something I do,” chuckles Des Barres, who was a decade older than the Power Station’s John and Andy Taylor, and (definitely unlike John and Andy) had already been clean and sober for four years when Live Aid took place. Des Barres’s young bandmates, however, were “very nervous and very frightened about what could happen,” he recalls.

The surprise success of the Power Station’s self-titled debut album (a success so surprising, in fact, that Palmer, whose only U.S. performance with the group was on Saturday Night Live, quickly decided that it was more of a commitment than he’d bargained for) had impressed all the rockist snobs who’d once wrongly dismissed the Taylors’ main band, Duran Duran, as mere pretty-boy teen-pop. And so, Live Aid, which was set to be followed by an international Power Station tour, was a massive opportunity. “They had prayed for something like this — and now it’s happening, but Palmer has split. It was not cool, really, to do that to them,” says Des Barres. “I mean, God bless him, but a week away from a six-month tour — and he quits? That’s kind of heavy.”

So, how exactly did Des Barres end up at Live Aid, playing right after Neil Young, in front of a live Philly audience of 100,000 people and a TV audience about 20,000 times that size?

“I was with Don Johnson — in Miami, of course — and we were just gallivanting around. We were doing a record together, me and him,” recalls Des Barres, who was longtime pals with the Miami Vice star and later used that connection to land the Power Station a cameo on an October 1985 episode on the slick NBC cop drama. “And I get a call: ‘Come to New York!’”

At first, the talent agent on the other end of the line, Wayne Forte, would only tell Des Barres that he represented a mystery band in desperate need of a new lead singer. But eventually Forte revealed that the meeting in New York City would be with John and Andy Taylor, who’d been impressed by Des Barres’s stage presence when another supergroup that Des Barres had fronted — Chequered Past, featuring the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and several members of Blondie — had opened for Duran Duran the year before. “It was like saying Rudolf Nureyev wanted to dance with me,” Des Barres laughingly says of the out-of-the-blue offer.

Des Barres took a whirlwind flight to meet with John and the Power Station’s drummer, Tony Thompson of Chic, in New York, where they were “looking very nervous, because this was millions of dollars at stake.” He recalls that John was actually holding a list of other possible replacement frontmen. “I look down and I read all these names… I won’t tell you who!” he chuckles, although it’s known that before Robert Palmer originally signed on, other singers that were considered included Mick Jagger, Billy Idol, and the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler. But regardless, after the New York meeting, Des Barres moved to the top of John’s list, and he was then flown to London that same night, to meet with Andy.

“I hadn’t slept for 24 hours,” Des Barres recalls. “There was a limo waiting for me at Heathrow Airport. I went to the studio. Five hours, I waited, exhausted. And Andy shows up with two bodyguards, big guys, and he says, ‘Go in and sing something.’” Des Barres, who’d been part of Britain’s early-‘70s glam scene, got in the studio booth and banged out the first verse and chorus of T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong” (the Power Station’s cover, released as “Get It On,” had just cracked the top 10 in America). Andy’s reaction was to just say, “Let’s go shopping,” and the two took off to Vivienne Westwood’s store for the rest of the afternoon. Des Barres got the job.

Michael Des Barres looks out into the crowd during the Power Station’s opening Live Aid number. (photo: YouTube)

For a moment, though, it seemed like Des Barres’s Power Station stint was going to be the shortest listing on his illustrious résumé, when, after returning to the U.S. via the Concorde, he got a call from his manager, informing him that Palmer had decided to do Live Aid after all. But the very next day, Palmer changed his mind again, this time for good, because “young girls were not his audience. It’s as simple as that. He did not want to play to young, teenage [Duran Duran fans],” shrugs Des Barres. “Meanwhile, me? I’m in a bikini and eyeliner.” Des Barres was officially back in the band.

And so, after just three days of rehearsals and one warm-up gig at New York City’s 1,500-capacity Ritz club, the Des Barres-fronted Power Station, introduced by Don Johnson, played Live Aid, performing without a net and literally without any teleprompters. Not everything went smoothly. Andy’s amplifier blew up right before their set, and notorious concert promoter Bill Graham was being “an asshole up there … shouting at us all. I was laughing my ass off, thinking, ‘Can it get any weirder?’” Des Barres also recalls being the target of “a lot of anger from young men” in the JFK Stadium crowd, who were apparently upset that Palmer was a no-show. “One guy, I’m out onstage and this bucket of water is literally like in slow motion, coming towards me. I was going to be splashed in front of 2 billion people. I dodged it, and it went all over John Taylor,” he laughs.

It was also a risk that of the only two songs the Power Station played at Live Aid, they opened with a deep cut of sorts, the non-single “Murderess.” Des Barres says that decision was made to showcase Andy’s little-known and under-appreciated guitar chops. “It’s an Andy song. I thought it was a great song. He was so talented, but he was a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player, and I think that’s why he left [Duran Duran],” Des Barres explains. “He wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll, and they’re not a rock ‘n’ roll band. … Andy wanted to be Eric Clapton, essentially, a bluesy rock ‘n’ roll guitar player. That’s why he left.”

Duran Duran also played JFK Stadium that day, and notably, this turned out to be the last time that Duran’s original “Fab Five” — guitarist Andy Taylor, bassist John Taylor, drummer Roger Taylor, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and singer Simon Le Bon — would perform together until 2003. Le Bon, Rhodes, and Roger were already fracturing off with their own very different side-project, Arcadia, and when Le Bon hit that infamous, unfortunate “bum note heard around the world” during Duran Duran’s Live Aid performance of their James Bond theme “A View to a Kill,” the annoyed, exasperated look on Andy’s face made it obvious that tensions were running high within Duran’s ranks.

Des Barres didn’t witness much acrimony between the Duran members that day, as he was too busy enjoying the rest of the show from the stage wings (his favorite Philly Live Aid performers were Neil Young, Patti LaBelle, Tom Petty, and Mick Jagger with Tina Turner). But once he went out on the road with the Power Station, he “could see it splitting apart. [John and Andy] weren’t even talking to each other much, and I was there, singing away. And that was that. … I would arrive, I would sing, I would leave. Then they could do their coke.” (Incidentally, Des Barres later helped both Taylors get sober. “So, I brought more than music to that experience,” he says proudly.)

As for the other snafus that took place at JFK Stadium that day, Des Barres may have kept his cool despite the daunting circumstances that led him to Live Aid, but he says, “Everybody [else] was in a different state of mind than I’ve ever seen from any artist, ever. It was fascinating. … It was very hard for a lot of people to come on and do 20 minutes, and Bill Graham is screaming because the snare drum isn’t there for someone. It got them on their feet, really. … They were all scared shitless, every one of them.”

Des Barres recalls that “Madonna was a wreck; she was shaking,” and that “Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, and Keith Richards were all playing in a different key; that was a trainwreck, but it was a fabulous trainwreck, I suppose.” His old Swan Song Records cronies Led Zeppelin, with Phil Collins on drums, were “not cohesive and didn’t have that brotherly Zeppelin vibe. It was almost like a rehearsal or something. And then it probably was a rehearsal! It wasn’t as powerful as I think people expected. … And nobody spoke about it [afterwards]. That’s the only way to deal with shit like that.

“The most interesting person there was Joan [Baez], because she hated it and was riffing on how everybody was awful and that only her songs really meant something to the audience. It was the weirdest thing. There was that kind of irrational behavior,” Des Barres continues. “But I think that was her way of being scared.”

After Live Aid, the Power Station recorded one song with the unflappable Des Barres — “We Fight for Love,” which Des Barres wrote, for the Commando soundtrack — and it was all over by 1986, with John returning to Duran Duran and Andy going solo. But Des Barres will always consider his brief time with the band “a major chapter in my life,” and he will always be thankful for the opportunity to play for “the biggest audience ever,” which boosted his career in ways he could have never imagined.

“I love them to this day,” he says. “I was very grateful to them for getting me on that stage.”

This interview originally ran on Gold Derby.

Happy holidays and New Year, everyone. There’s something you should know. To cut a long story short, 40 years ago, a true Christmas miracle took place. And you can witness it, in its full VHS glory, in the YouTube player above.

Happy Spandau Ballet vs. Duran Duran on Pop Quiz Day, to all who celebrate!

Yes, on Dec. 28, 1984, the United Kingdom’s two prettiest, pinuppiest, pouffiest new wave bands battled in a TV war of wits and wingtips on the British game show Pop Quiz, fielding trivia questions about Howard Jones, Tracey Ullman, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and even each other’s music. Television gold was indeed created that day. This episode, the holiday gift that truly keeps on giving, was nothing less than a historic fight for New Romantic supremacy.

The rivalry between these two superstar groups was as fierce as Nick Rhodes’s eyeliner back in 1984. Duran Duran had become the more successful band internationally, especially in the United States, but the BBC’s Pop Quiz offered a chance for Spandau to settle the score. Duran Duran were hungry like the wolf for victory, but Spandau had the power to know they were indestructible.

“I think we had a little dip at the beginning of the ’80s, and [Duran Duran] popped in with a few hits then. So, we’d open the door, and then they’d come in and there was that moment,” Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp told me back in 2014, when the (sadly only temporarily) reunited Spandau were promoting their excellent documentary Soul Boys of the Western World, which featured clips of this heavily rouged face-off. “I think it’s great to have that whole classic rock history about rivalry, whether it’s the Beatles and the Stones or Blur and Oasis. And actually at that point, it was us versus Duran.”

“Interestingly, in all that time that we were producing records, Spandau and Duran never released a record at the same time,” noted Spandau multi-instrumentalist Steve Norman.

“That’s because they were scared!” joked drummer John Keeble.

Spandau-vs.-Duran mania had already reached a fever pitch that holiday season, a month before the Pop Quiz episode, when both bands participated in Bob Geldof’s all-star Band Aid charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Gary recalled, “There’s a bit in [Soul Boys of the Western World] when we turn up at the Band Aid recording, and the night before we’d been in Germany on a TV show with Duran. It was the first time we’d ever been brought together since really early on, and we had a bit of a drinking competition. I think that’s why we all look so awful in that Band Aid documentary.” [Editor’s note: They did not look awful.]

“The competition between us and them was so strong when we left that bar the night before Band Aid, we both had private planes waiting; we even had a race to London, to see who could get there first!” laughed Spandau bassist Martin Kemp. (“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” producer and co-writer Midge Ure later told me that the two bands were actually in a race to gain first-dibs access to the on-set makeup artist at the Band Aid session, which tracks.)

The Spandau guys didn’t divulge who won that drinking competition, or who made it to Trevor Horn’s SARM Studios in London first, but in the new Band Aid 40th anniversary doc, Spandau’s hungover arrival is shown first. And Spandau frontman Tony Hadley was the first person who volunteered to record a vocal that day. So, it seems Spandau Ballet did win the Band Aid challenge.

However, Duran Duran ultimately won Pop Quiz, with 52 points to Spandau’s 40. Gary admitted in Soul Boys of the Western World that he and his hyper-competitive bandmates were “truly gutted” that they lost on Pop Quiz, but ironically, Duran Duran won because they had better knowledge of Spandau’s lyrics — while the Spandau guys couldn’t even answer a trivia question about one of Duran’s most recognizable hits, “Hungry Like the Wolf.” So, in an odd way, Spandau Ballet were the real Pop Quiz champions that evening, right?

Four decades later, however, there seems to be no hard feelings between the two groups (and in the new Band Aid doc, they’re seen chumming about in the studio and conducting interviews together, so clearly this was a faux feud). “There was always rivalry, whether it was Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Culture Club, Duran, Classix Nouveaux, whoever it might be,” said Hadley, who left Spandau Ballet in 2017. “There was all that chart rivalry that goes on, but when bands and musicians get together, it’s all, ‘Hi, let’s get to the bar and talk nonsense,’ you know. … We’re good friends with them to this day. I love Duran. I’ve got every Duran record. I’m actually a big fan.”

Well, since Hadley seems so familiar with the Duran discography, I suggest he reunite with his former Spandau bandmates this year for a trivia rematch against Duran Duran to commemorate the anniversary of this landmark Pop Quiz episode. Surely he and the Kemps will get those lyrics right this time.

Tune in to hear me discuss a subject near and dear to my heart.

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Real-life ‘Rio’ model Marcie Hunt in 1981 (left) and 2023 (right)

In the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, fashion model Marcie Hunt was known in the industry as “the smile.” But it took until 2024 for her to find out, along with the rest of Planet Earth, that she was the “cherry ice cream smile” — i.e., the face of Duran Duran’s iconic, Patrick Nagel-illustrated Rio album cover.

Hunt was as shocked as anyone else was last week, when Nagel historians Monica Moynihan and Mark Walker jointly announced on Instagram that a vivid image captured by Francois Lamy for a glossy Angelo Tarlazzi editorial spread had inspired one of the most recognizable and decade-defining album covers of all time. Not even the Duran Duran members themselves or the late Nagel’s technical art assistant, Barry Hahn, knew that that page, from the February 1981 issue of French Vogue, was the tear sheet consulted by Hahn’s former boss for Rio.

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“I was amazed!” Hunt tells me over Zoom from her home in Northern California, still flashing that broad, dazzling grin. “I didn’t know Patrick Nagel’s art was based on real people, and so at the time I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful album, lovely illustration,’ but I really didn’t think about it being me. Plus, there were other models at that time that were being questioned about whether it was them or not; I think they were looking at Carol Alt. … But now, I’m looking at the cover — the angle, the shape of the mouth — and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh. It’s me.’”

Hunt can only speculate, since Nagel died in 1984, why — of all the magazines and fashion layouts that Nagel could have referenced when he was commissioned by Duran Duran to create the art for their breakthrough sophomore LP — he gravitated to her photo. “There was a lot of energy in that picture, in the smile and the eyes, and Duran Duran are a big-energy group,” she muses. “There was this kind of glamour and adventure and fun, and I think something about the look in the eyes and this big smile was attractive. I don’t know why it was different from other models, but really, there weren’t as many big smiles going on at that time.”

Hunt makes an interesting point. Most high-fashion editorials feature supermodels looking cool, surly, and unapproachable — smizing, perhaps, but not smiling — yet almost every vintage magazine cover featuring Hunt is totally toothy. “I actually have a fair amount of photos where I was pouty or sexy or whatever you want to call it: ‘Why does she look angry?’ or ‘What’s her deal there?’” she laughs. “But then I met Grace Coddington from English Vogue. I was walking out a door — I was just starting to work for French Vogue and I didn’t know who Grace was at the time — and I just gave her a big smile. And she decided that they hadn’t had a smile on [the cover of] English Vogue for forever. And so, that’s how that began: me doing so many of those covers with the big smile. It was all right place, right time.”

Hunt, who grew up in Saratoga, Calif., began modeling in 1974 in New York, after Victor Bruce Cooper, co-founder of the Wilhelmina Models agency, “came out to San Francisco to look for new faces. And at that time, it was just the ‘classic face,’ just kind of a classic look, and that’s what they thought I had.” Hunt actually lived with Victor and his wife/business partner, former Dutch model Wilhelmina Cooper, in New York City for six months before she got the opportunity to work in Paris. She was 21 — “old,” by industry standards, to be launching a modeling career — but that turned out to be an advantage for her.

“There are so many models that start when they’re 16, 17, 18. But because I went to college for a while and I studied French after high school, I was older. And I think it really helped me, because I was able to have my head on my shoulders and just be a little more solid in terms of knowing what I was getting into. There were a lot of models that were really young that would go to the nightclubs every night, and pretty soon they wouldn’t look that great — we didn’t have airbrushing like they do now, so when you were in front of the camera, you had better look good!” explains Hunt, who spoke “almost fluent French” by the time she hit the Paris scene. She then adds with a flash of that smile and a laugh: “So, I would go to nightclubs on the days when I wasn’t working.”

Hunt’s relative maturity and more sophisticated look also made her a perfect muse for both Nagel and Duran Duran, who always respectively depicted strong, full-grown women in their illustrations and music videos. “I was slender — not starved,” says Hunt (who reveals that while she never underwent extensive dental work like veneers or braces to achieve her signature smile, she did have to get “a number of fillings” due to her fondness for her mother’s home-baked sugary desserts). “I did have a few times when I did runway shows, like when Valentino would measure my hips and say, ‘Oh, no, I’m sorry, your hips are too broad.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do have hips!’ They wanted two- or three-inches-smaller hips, a more boyish look in the sense of the body. And I think it is a shame that later on it did take on that aspect, because for many young models, they were really starving themselves. And being anorexic is not a positive thing.”

Despite her va-va-voom figure — and the fact that she inspired Nagel, who was the in-house illustrator for girly mag Playboy — Hunt never did any racier modeling, like lingerie or cheesecake shoots. She only has one tiny regret about that. “It’s fine for other models to do this — I am not judging at all, of course — but Helmut Newton used to do an annual book where it would be nude, and he did ask me if I would like to do that. And at the time I said, ‘Helmut, how about if I’m behind the camera and you can be in front of the camera?’ And he just sort of looked aghast. And as I recall, I don’t think I ever worked with him again. I felt kind of bad afterwards,” she giggles.

Interestingly, Hunt never crossed paths with Duran Duran back in the day, even though the band members often partied with, made music videos with, or even dated and married models. But she does recall a couple of funny celebrity-circuit encounters. “In Tatler magazine, there was an interview about me, about Jack Nicholson following me across the seas, which wasn’t exactly true,” she laughs. “I met Jack in London while I was working for Tatler, and then he said, ‘Hey, you should come to a party.’ He gave me a call at 3 in the morning and was asking if ‘Marie’ was there. … It was at night, probably from wherever he was partying.” Hunt, who was at that time seriously dating the Frenchman who would become her first husband, turned the actor down, saying, “‘Hey, I’m monogamous. I’m living with somebody. I’m sure you’re very interesting, but I’m not interested in that way.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s never bothered me before!’ And this was in Tatler magazine.”

Later, Hunt had another interesting moment with Nicholson’s famous philanderer pal, Warren Beatty. “That was at a nightclub party. There was going to be a ‘model of the evening’ that Warren Beatty would spend time with, let’s put it that way. I want to say this the right way,” she chuckles. “So, we’re out on the dance floor, and Warren looks over to me and he whispers, ‘You’re not my type — but you’re Jack’s type.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know!’ Because that incident had already happened in London when Jack called me.”

Marcie with her own recent art prints, Napa 2024

By the mid-‘80s, Hunt had tired of such adventures; she was also separating from her French husband, so she “wanted to move back to California and start a new life, a different life.” But, she stresses, “I loved modeling. I loved the traveling and meeting all these super-creative, zany people. I treated it as a business, but also just loved the creativity involved in it. … I was always just creating myself in the photos. That’s how I saw it, and that’s what I really enjoyed the most.”

Hunt met her second/current husband, Tom Dinkel, in 1992, and in 2006 they co-founded the Dos Lagos Vineyards winery in Napa — which brings new meaning to the Rio-era lyric “mouth is alive with juices like wine” from “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which the couple actually danced to at their wedding. (A longtime Duranie, Hunt cites “Reach Up for the Sunrise,” “Notorious,” and “Ordinary World” as her other favorite Duran tracks.) She also continued to tap into her creativity, becoming a painter and designing the labels for Dos Lagos’s wine bottles. (She’s fan of Nagel’s artwork as well, saying, “I love the pop art that Patrick did. It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, it’s sexy.”)

Marcie Hunt and her husband, Tom Dinkel, dancing to “Hungry Like the Wolf” at their wedding in the ’90s

After she retired from modeling, Hunt became a “very private person,” and until very recently hadn’t posted on her personal Instagram account since 2021. (She logged back on last week, after her identity as the real-life Rio went viral.) However, Hunt is enjoying her newfound, completely unexpected fame. “I just thought this was such a beautiful thing, and the [fans’] energy is so incredible. I feel so honored really to be linked with Duran Duran and all the fans, of which I include myself,” she says.

Hunt reveals that the band has been in touch “through their management group” and gave a “brief hello,” and she’s hoping that when she and Dinkel are vacationing in Europe this summer, their travels will coincide with Duran Duran’s tour itinerary and they’ll be able to meet up in person. “I mean, that would be fantastic,” she marvels. When pressed to name her favorite Duran member, she gigglingly confesses “probably Simon,” but she is thrilled at the prospect of meeting the entire group that unwittingly immortalized her as the Mona Lisa of the new wave era.

“I am just so honored by everything, by being connected with the band and its members, and I hope for even more of that in the future as well,” says Hunt. “It’s just been so much fun, and I feel so blessed.”

Marcie Hunt speaking via Zoom, with her own artwork behind her, in 2024

In the words of Simon Le Bon: Hey now, woo, look at that!

Forty-two years after decade-defining Playboy illustrator Patrick Nagel was commissioned by Duran Duran to create one of the most iconic album covers of all time for Rio, the Mona Lisa of the new wave era has at long last been found.

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The big reveal was announced by Monica Moynihan, a Nagel historian and art broker who runs the definitive Patrick Nagel Arts website and Instagram. The cover girl’s identity was actually uncovered by another Instagrammer, @nagel_angel, aka Nagel expert Mark Walker, who Moynihan said “deserves all the credit” and “spent $$$ and countless hours” in a hungry-like-the-wolf quest to hunt down the original lady with the cherry ice cream smile.

And it turns out that in an alternate ’80s universe, Rio might have been dancing on the sand while wearing eyeglasses, creating a different sort of pretty view.

Walker, who’d been “buying a lot of various fashion magazines from the era that Pat might have purchased: Everything from European versions of Vogue, to Linea Italiana to American magazines like GQ, Glamour, and U.S. Vogue,” tracked down the album cover’s original source image — a multi-page editorial spread for Angelo Tarlazzi in the February 1981 issue of Vogue Paris. “I saw that smile. I saw those eyes, those eyes that I’d stared at hundreds of times by this point in my life, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’ve been entranced by this magical woman for over 40 years. I knew it was her,” Walker posted on his own Instagram account.

Another fan, Sarah Bastos, responded to a post by Moynihan asking for help identifying the mystery woman, saying she recognized the porcelain-skinned, raven-haired beauty as fashion model Marcie Hunt (who can be seen on different ’80s magazine covers below). Nagel’s technical art assistant, Barry Hahn, then confirmed to Walker that the stunning Tarlazzi photograph of Hunt — wearing a paisley blouse, graphic cat-eye spectacles, and a wide-brimmed fedora not unlike Duran bassist John Taylor’s, but still instantly identifiable thanks to her inviting, toothy grin — was indeed the tear sheet used by his former boss. Hahn told Walker, “Great catch.”

According to Annie Zaleski’s 33 ½ book about the Rio album, Duran Duran’s co-manager in the early ’80s, Paul Berrow, was intrigued by Nagel’s sharp, stylized work while flipping through an issue of Playboy, so he commissioned the artist to do create two covers for what would become the Birmingham band’s breakthrough LP. One option, of a woman languidly reclining with a yellow blossom pinned in her hair, was eventually used for the “My Own Way” single art. But, as Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes told Zaleski, it was “love at first sight” when the band members saw the second, stronger image of a bare-shouldered bombshell alluringly staring down the camera lens, shining and really showing all she can. “We all said instantly: ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the cover,’” recalled Rhodes.

Renowned graphic designer Malcolm Garrett, known for his striking, minimalist album art for the Human League, Culture Club, and especially the Buzzcocks, then added design elements and typefaces to evoke the vintage vacation vibes of 1950s cigar boxes. “We all looked back and smiled at the girl,” Rhodes told Zaleski of the end result. “It just seemed to represent everything we wanted at that point. It was uplifting. It was fun. It was modern, and colorful, and bright, and optimistic, but with something in it that you just didn’t know what was going on.”

The artwork similarly captivated music fans of the early-MTV generation, conveying the aspirational album’s promises of champagne-fueled, jet-setting, yacht-hopping adventures. That was a theme that of course carried over into Duran Duran’s tropical music videos from the album, in which Nagel’s glamour girls seemed to spring to three-dimensional life. Part of the Rio era’s appeal for the band’s largely female fanbase was undoubtedly its pro-woman imagery. Duran Duran’s music video castings — the sassy Bond heroine who captured drummer Roger Taylor in a fishing net in “Rio,” the tigress who tussled with Le Bon in “Hungry Like the Wolf” — always depicted strong, self-assured women, which was a welcome contrast from the usual video vixens that starred in other exploitative clips of the time.

“The women [in our videos] were manipulating us! In ‘Rio’ or ‘Hungry Like the Wolf,’ we’re chasing them. They’re the ones with the power,” John Taylor explained to me in a 2022 interview celebrating the “exotic, erotic” album’s 40th anniversary. “They’re on the pedestal — as it should be.”

As for why it took more than four decades for the real Rio to be identified, Nagel, who conducted very few interviews during his brief lifetime, died less than two years after the Rio album’s release, at age 38, in perhaps the most ’80s way possible (he suffered a heart attack after participating in a celebrity “aerobathon”). Hunt retired from modeling and now leads a much more reclusive life. According to her Instagram, which was last updated in 2021 and describes her as a “former top model in Paris,” she and her husband of three decades have owned and operated the Dos Lagos Vineyards winery in Napa for the past 12 years — which brings new meaning to the Rio-era Duran lyric “mouth is alive, with juices like wine.”

Duran Duran were apparently just as surprised as anyone by this news, stating Monday via Instagram: “WOW!… We suspect the model and maybe the band Duran Duran had no idea Nagel was influenced and used this image to create the cover of their musical masterpiece, Rio. He certainly changed many things, most specifically removing her glasses, but he obviously loved her smile. And that smile has been an iconic piece of Duran Duran history for decades.”

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Was there ever any album that embodied all things grand and glamorous about the escapist, excessive, exotic, erotic, aspirational ’80s more than Duran Duran’s Rio? The vivid cover art alone — its pale Patrick Nagel creature, with her beguiling cherry ice-cream smile, a sort of Mona Lisa for the New Romantic Age — lent the album instant icon status. And the nightclub-meets-Club-Med classics contained within were as slick as a Vogue magazine cover or a shiny new lip gloss.

But Rio — which, incredibly, celebrates its 35th anniversary this week — was never about style over substance. The album, impeccably produced by Bowie/Iggy engineer Colin Thurston, still holds up, from the primal pop of the jungle-love breakthrough single “Hungry Like the Wolf,” to the wistful, whistling one-night-stand ballad “Save a Prayer,” to the harrowing, noir-ish, David Lynch-approved outro “The Chauffeur.” And its sound has been replicated and revered by everyone from the Killers to Mark Ronson to new AFI/No Doubt supergroup Dreamcar.

“Obviously with every new album we make, we always have to believe in it and feel we’ve gone in the right direction. But when we finished the Rio album, I looked around and I knew we’d done something special,” recalls Duran Duran keyboardist and co-founder Nick Rhodes. “I didn’t know what on earth would happen to it, whether it would be a hit or a flop or whatever, but I knew when I was listening to it: ‘Yep, this has got really strong songs on it, and this one just feels right.’”

Rhodes admits that Rio was tough to top. “It’s something that’s been a double-edged sword for us, because it was such a powerful record, and perhaps the images from the videos stuck in people’s minds. Then it came to the end of the 1980s, and people wanted to close the door on us.” But bassist/co-founder John Taylor is grateful that Rio allowed Duran Duran to eventually establish a career that has lasted well beyond the ’80s, comprising 14 albums and 100 million in record sales. “It’s been such an amazing journey, and I think Rio is probably the reason why we’re still getting to do what we do today, basically,” Taylor says. “This is the album that put us on the map — and has kept us there.”

For bubblegum-card-carrying members of the original MTV generation, Rio will forever be inextricably linked with sherbet-colored music video scenes of sexy yachting adventures and champagne-fueled, grownup good times. Despite being from the gray and decidedly unexotic West Midlands city of Birmingham, England, with Rio, Duran Duran were selling a jet-setting, island-hopping fantasy. (“There was something about Brazil and Carnival, the color, the energy. … It felt like that was the energy that I wanted to tap into,” Taylor, who named the album, recently told SiriusXM.) And starry-eyelinered kids on both sides of the pond were definitely buying what Duran Duran were selling. Cynical music journalists, however, coming off the bleak, raw protest punk of the late ’70s, weren’t quite as enthralled.

“I think it was just the times, really,” Taylor tells Yahoo. “We took a lot of criticism for that aspirational aspect. This was in the wake of the punk-rock thing, and Thatcher. But from a creative point of view, we would have to go in a different direction — we couldn’t go down the road the Sex Pistols had been down, or the Clash had been down. We had to find our own mood and our own lane.

“I suppose we were criticized for selling people a dream. I remember when Heaven 17 put out their album The Luxury Gap, [critics] said, ‘Well, a luxury gap — that’s what Duran Duran sell, this fantasy to people who can’t afford it!’ But I never really thought about it like that,” Taylor continues. “To me, I liked music and art when there was something a little untouchable about it, something exotic, something erotic. I think those are the kinds of artists that I’ve been drawn to, that we’ve been drawn to. We were naturally going to do that.”

“There were a lot of [music critics] who didn’t like the concept that there was a new way of doing things,” says Rhodes. “It wasn’t the way of a lot of the 1970s, although many of the artists I liked — David Bowie, Roxy Music, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones — all took care with their imagery and their creative vision outside of just the music. It’s just that when it became more part of something you had to do, if you wanted to be on the frontline of music, that some people started to object.”

Critics in general were not kind to Duran Duran at the time, mainly due to the fashionable band’s young female fan base. (“The music intelligentsia has always been very male dominated, a boys club, and they like their music a certain way,” Taylor shrugs.) But the group had no qualms about courting the teen magazines and doing “the pinup thing” that ultimately helped turn Rio into an international, multiplatinum sensation.

“I really don’t think I would have done anything different, in any way,” Taylor insists. “I don’t regret it at all. I mean, I don’t know how we would have developed as musicians if that had never been a part of our story, but I do know that that thing we had gave us power, and it enabled us to work in the way in which we wanted to work. I mean, if we hadn’t had the teenage girl fans, then we might have had no career past the mid-’80s, you know?”

Still, Taylor admits that he and the original “Fab Five” — Rhodes, singer Simon Le Bon, drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Andy Taylor — were not prepared for how the undying adoration of Planet Earth’s teenyboppers would change, and strain, relations within the then burgeoning group.

“I think the teen thing caused us to infight a little bit, because it became quite competitive,” Taylor muses. “We hadn’t really considered that — that it was going to be ‘John fans’ and ‘Nick fans’ and ‘Simon fans,’ and that we were going to be involved in this kind of popularity contest, this ‘love contest.’ That could get in the way a little bit, because it puts you under a different kind of pressure. Particularly for Andy — a lot of us, really, but Andy in particular — he was like the musician in the band, but he was probably the least popular in the band with fans. I think that was quite frustrating for him, because he’d never considered that that [his looks] might even be significant. For him, it’s all about his musical skills; that was what validated him as an individual. The fact that he might not be as popular as me was very frustrating for him.”

At the time, a typical readers poll in 16 or Tiger Beat would usually name John as the group’s most popular member, followed by Simon, Nick, Roger, and, always dead last, poor Andy. “There were rankings, for sure, yeah,” Taylor says ruefully. When asked how he feels about his heartthrob status, he answers with weary sigh, “I don’t even want to think about it anymore, to be honest.” (Andy Taylor left Duran Duran in 1986, rejoined in 2001, and quit for good in 2006; John and Roger left the band at different points, but have been back in the lineup, alongside Le Bon and Rhodes, since 2001.)

Part of Rio’s appeal for female fans was undoubtedly its pro-woman imagery. Along with the above-mentioned Nagel cover, the band’s bold music video castings — the sassy Bond heroine who captured Roger in a fishing net in “Rio,” the tigress who tussled with Le Bon in “Hungry Like the Wolf” — always depicted strong, self-assured women, almost like Nagel ladies sprung to life. This was a welcome contrast from the usual video vixens that starred other exploitative clips of the era. “No, the women were manipulating us! You know, in ‘Rio’ or ‘Hungry Like the Wolf,’ we’re chasing them. They’re the ones with the power. They’re on the pedestal — as it should be,” grins Taylor.

Both Taylor and Rhodes accept that their music videos were crucial to the success of Rio (which came out less than a year after the debut of MTV), perhaps as much as the music itself. “I think it’s part of our history, and I try to step outside and have a more balanced view of the thing historically,” say Rhodes. “I think it’s fair comment. We were clearly a major part of the MTV generation, and I think we did a lot with video that other people hadn’t done, a lot of groundbreaking things, like taking videos onto location, using digital technology and effects that people hadn’t thought about. So I’m not surprised, and I’m not bothered that it comes up.”

“I think we were lucky to have connected with [director] Russell Mulcahy, and I think Russell was very cinematic in his vision,” says Taylor. “He’d be looking at Apocalypse Now, at Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that. We can do that with your three-minute epics. How much can we get out of these things? Let’s get out of the studio. We’re going to make these miniblockbuster videos that take people to another place, a place they’ve never been to, and it’s going to be exotic and dangerous and sexy.’”

“I am very grateful that our timing — our accidental timing — with the advent of music video was so fortuitous,” says Rhodes. “If we’d been five years later, I think the exciting bit was already over; if we’d been five years earlier, we would have been usurped by newer, younger bands. It just happened that we were at the right place at the right time.”

Taylor agrees that Duran Duran were “the right guys for the moment” when asked to pinpoint what made Rio connect on such a major level in the early ’80s. As he told SiriusXM’s Richard Blade: “If the Rio cover had been different, if the Rio cover had been a picture of the band, maybe it wouldn’t have impacted in the same way. If we hadn’t gone to Sri Lanka with Russell Mulcahy, if that ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ video had been another studio video in London, who knows if it would have connected?”

“You can’t predict these things,” Taylor tells Yahoo Music, modestly. “You don’t even notice when it’s happening. You just notice when it stops happening.”

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This article originally appeared on Yahoo Music.

Electropop artist MNDR, aka Amanda Warner, is lounging backstage at San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival, dressed in her casual-Friday post-show uniform of cargo pants and bomber jacket; her glittery smudges of neon teal eye shadow are the only glamorous evidence of the fact that, mere moments ago, she was on the main stage with Duran Duran, standing stoically behind the synth banks while channeling her inner “Planet Earth”-era Nick Rhodes in an impeccable white suit. Since Rhodes temporarily left Duran’s summer tour to attend to an “urgent family matter” in the U.K., Warner has faced the task of filling the famed ice-king keyboardist’s mighty big Capezios. It has been intimidating, to say the least (Warner literally only had 20 hours to learn all of the set’s songs), but after a month on the road with the Paper Gods, she has finally hit her pleasure groove.

“At first, honestly, I just had to learn everything. It was like cramming for finals,” Warner tells Yahoo Music of the whirlwind experience. “I just had to get it done and figure it out. My first show with them was in Chicago, and the only thought going through my head was just, ‘Don’t look like a d—! Don’t screw up the leads! And play them on the right keyboard!’ The hardest thing is knowing which keyboards to play. Then, after about three or four gigs, I started to feel not crazy up there onstage, and then I was like, ‘Holy s—, I can’t believe this!’ I mean, Nick Rhodes is a synth legend. He’s an iconof keyboards.”

Rhodes handpicked Warner to be his replacement, having met her when she played in Duran Duran producer Mark Ronson’s Business Intl band. (Warner sang on “Bang Bang,” the first single from Mark Ronson & The Business Intl’s 2010 album Record Collection; Duran Duran’s Rhodes and Simon Le Bon appeared on that album’s title track.) This led to MNDR opening for dates on Duran Duran’s 2012 tour; Rhodes also did a remix of MNDR’s “Feed Me Diamonds,” and she returned the favor with her remix for TV Mania, Rhodes’s side-project with former Duran guitarist Warren Cuccurullo.

But even after all this, sometimes Warner still can’t believe that she has become a member of Duran’s extended entourage. “In six years, I’ve run into them fairly often – which just seems weird. Like, ‘Oh yeah, hey, there’s John Taylor. What’s up?’ Seriously, what is going on? It’s surreal,” she chuckles. “But they’re really down-to-earth people and super-cool.”

Related: A Chat With Mark Ronson, The DJ That Will Save Your Life

It seems DD’s diehard devotees have also accepted MNDR as one of the Duran family — which comes as a massive relief to Warner. “That’s what hit me later. Their fans were legitimately nervous about [me filling in], and I don’t blame them. Because Nick is NICK RHODES, you know what I mean? I am sure they were thinking, ‘Is this going to suck? What the hell?’ Luckily, they’ve been so awesome, and absolutely so lovely to me. I haven’t had any negative feedback. I think if I didn’t live up to their expectations, they would be like, ‘That was disappointing.’ But I also think because Nick chose to phone me first, that helped. They were like, ‘OK, he obviously feels like she can do it.’”

With 18 years of keyboard experience and a lifetime spent listening to Duran Duran, Warner was more prepared for this summer gig than she humbly lets on. “I know Duran Duran’s catalog really well. Everyone was a Duran Duran fan in my circle. It was kind of like liking, I don’t know, Michael Jackson or Prince,” she says. Warner, a child of the ‘90s, is even a longtime fan of DD’s controversial and critically panned 1995 covers album Thank You — which probably helps when it’s time to play Duran’s version of Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel’s “White Lines” every night.

“I actually really like ‘90s Duran Duran,” Warner says. “To me, they were an ‘80s band, and then they transcended that in a really huge way with hits in the ‘90s. So they really should be acclaimed as one of the best bands, because there’s very few bands that can do that.”

Related: The Pressure’s Off: Duran Duran Don’t Need the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Another cover song Warner enjoys playing with Duran Duran is their new mash-up of “Planet Earth” with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” — a tribute to the Starman who was a huge influence on both her and the DD boys. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere, in North Dakota. I was a fierce David Bowie fan. He meant everything to me. I know every moment of his albums. So when we play that, it’s super-amazing. I get really emotional.”

Duran Duran are having a critical renaissance right now with the recent release of their acclaimed album Paper Gods, so there’s no better time to reexamine the Birmingham boys’ rich legacy. Now Cleopatra Records is officially releasing a fascinating artifact from the band’s pre-Simon Le Bon days: a rare EP of 1979 demos, featuring core members John Taylor (on guitars as well as bass), Roger Taylor, and Nick Rhodes along with early vocalist Andy Wickett, who served in the band for a year and a half before Le Bon joined in 1980.

Related: The Pressure’s Off: Duran Duran Say They Don’t Need the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The recordings come from Wickett’s own archive of demos, and Yahoo Music is excited to officially premiere the Wickett-penned, prototype demo version of “Girls on Film” here.

Speaking with Yahoo Music, Wickett recalls the surprisingly unglamorous origin of the classic New Romantic track – the much grittier post-punk version of which, heard here, has little sonically in common with the glossy recording that eventually ended up on Duran Duran’s 1981 debut album.

“I was working at Cadbury’s Chocolate factory in Birmingham and came up with the chorus melody while I was at work on the pan wash,” Wickett recalls. “I kept the tune in my head until I got home. The Durans were rehearsing in my room, and later that day I showed them the chords and asked Nick to play the melody on his new string synth. I found the words ‘Girls on Film’ in one of my notebooks and fitted them to the melody.

“The lyrics were dark and influenced by imagery from old black-and-white movies like Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, showing the darker and often more tragic side behind all the glitter and glamour of Hollywood. It’s the complete opposite of the Duran’s happy, prosperous view.”

Related: Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon on How the Band ‘Outlasted the Haters’ to Become ‘Cool Again’

Wickett says he departed Duran Duran voluntarily, because he “was getting into dub reggae at the time and wanted to go more in that direction.” Later, he remembers, he realized Duran Duran “were going places when Nick phoned me from London after they had played our demo to the big labels. Nick said EMI liked my voice and were interested in signing us if we could write more songs like ‘Girls on Film.’”

(Andy Wickett today) 

But Wickett insists that he harbors no regrets — even though he claims he directly influenced Le Bon’s distinctive vocal style (“I used to go to the Rum Runner club where they rehearsed; Duran’s managers used to pay me to teach Simon to sing like me”) and admits, “It was hard because they never gave me credit for my contribution. They used to come and watch my new dub band with their managers and they again copied my ideas. It’s a worthwhile achievement to have written a few hit records, though.” (Wickett also says “Stevie’s Radio Station,” a song by his pre-Duran band TV Eye, later became the basis for the smash hit “Rio.”)

While Wickett jokes, “Of course [Duran Duran] would have been much bigger and better with me writing and performing with them!,” he doesn’t consider himself to be the Pete Best of new wave. “I am glad I left, because I have had some fantastic experiences in music and have been able to explore a wider range of music that I wouldn’t have had I stayed with Duran Duran,” he says. (Wickett continues to make music today, and his band World Service even opened for dates on Duran Duran’s 1996 tour, which was the last time he was in contact with “the Durans.”)

As for the stark, punky 1979 demos — which include “See Me Repeat Me,” “Reincarnation,” and “Working the Steel,” and have circulated among superfans via bootlegs, CDRs, and cassettes over the past decade — Wickett says, “The comments I’ve had so far are that people like the rawness of the sound. I only had about an hour to record all the vocals and was still finishing off writing the lyrics and melodies while I was in the studio. So it’s very rough and ready — as opposed to the commercial version, which had a lot of time and money spent on it and was very polished.”

And as for his own opinion of the ‘70s-era Duran Duran versus the MTV version that became world-famous, Wickett says, “I preferred them when they were darker and edgier… I liked a few of their singles from the early days, as they were more my style, but I didn’t really enjoy their albums much. They were a bit too smooth for me.”

The Girls on Film (feat. Andy Wickett) [1979 Demo] EP will be out April 1. Completist Duranie collectors can pre-order for vinyl, CD, and digital HERE,
or on iTunes HERE.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.