Goodbye Is Forever: Duran Duran, Live Aid & the End of the Second British Invasion
The band’s splinter projects, the Power Station and Arcadia, were a symbolic turning of the page of British pop music in America
It should have been a happier time for Duran Duran when the group hit the stage on July 13, 1985, in front of an estimated 90,000 people (and to a televised audience of 1.5 billion around the world) at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium — one of two concert sites for Live Aid, the massive all-star musical event mounted by Bob Geldof to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. For Duran Duran, the appearance at the ‘global jukebox was reaffirmation of its tremendous popularity, joining such other luminaries as U2, Queen, Madonna, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and a reunited Led Zeppelin for an important humanitarian cause.
In the same week that Live Aid took place, Duran Duran scored its second U.S. number one hit, “A View to a Kill,” the theme song for the then-new James Bond movie of the same name. Several months earlier, Duran Duran released the live album Arena, which yielded a smash hit in “The Wild Boys.” Both those songs continued a hit streak for the band that began two years earlier with its American breakthrough single “Hungry Like the Wolf.” With some…
