Sure, a lot of it was Velveeta over-processed cheese product, but I think we have to give music in the 80s some credit for searching for new sounds in ways the music industry hadn’t since the days of The Beatles. So Red the Rose has the best production of any 80s album I have ever heard, bar none. So Red the Rose is superior to Rio in so many other ways. It was pretty cool – at least when you’re 17 anyway.īut it isn’t just the album cover that makes this “Duran Duran album that never was” so much better than the best album they actually made. Back in the 80s when I was a teen I used to decorate the walls of my room with album covers, and I had that one in the perfect place on the wall where it was illuminated by a streetlight shining in through my bedroom window in the dark of night, and I’d lie in bed and the only thing I could see in the dark was the face of Lady Ice in the night. So yeah, So Red the Rose is obviously going to be the better album.īut seriously, you have to admit that cover is pretty striking. Whereas I think I saw the girl on Rio as one of the models on the wall at Walmart one time. Wikipedia tells me the “album’s artwork featured painted ink drawings by fashion illustrator Tony Viramontes of fashion model Violeta Sanchez”.
You’d expect to see the so Red the Rose woman on the runway – you’d expect to see the Rio girl at the mall. The Rio girl is the girl next door compared to the So Red the Rose girl’s Russian double agent, maybe triple agent.
She’s like the Rio girl’s more sophisticated, enigmatic, passionate older cousin, who has much more adult pursuits in mind while her younger cousin “dances on the sand”. You can tell by looking at the album covers – sure, the “cherry ice cream smile” brunette on Rio has a cute sort of appeal, but there is something stark, bold, and mysterious – almost sinister, certainly with a hint of danger – about the woman pictured on So Red the Rose. Surely not better than Rio you say? To which I reply, yes, it is in fact better than Rio. I appreciate a clever turn of phrase as much as the next guy, but I think a correction is in order – this is better than any album Duran Duran ever made. Kelvin Hayes over at the AllMusic site called So Red the Rose “certainly the best album Duran never made”. If ever there was a criminally underappreciated album from the 80s, this is it. I need to warn you up front, I am going to gush about So Red the Rose for the next few minutes, I am a huge fan of the album. And I guess it’s OK if Roger Taylor tagged along. Arcadia kept the heart and soul of what made Duran Duran one of the greatest pop bands of its time, and if you had to pick as few members of Duran Duran as possible and still preserve as much of its sound as you could, Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhoades are the two I’d pick. Andy Taylor was good at coming up with guitar parts that suited the band’s songs well, but Duran Duran was never really considered a guitar band. That Arcadia was the far superior of the two side projects makes total sense – after all, what was Duran Duran’s appeal built on? Simon Le Bon’s charismatic and emotionally resonant vocals, and the synthesizer wizardry of Nick Rhodes. Which is a shame, I would have loved about 10 more albums just like it. Singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and drummer Roger Taylor wisely avoided any Robert Palmers and formed their own band, Arcadia, releasing their only album, 1985’s So Red the Rose.
When Duran Duran took a break in the mid-80s after ruling the radiowaves for the first part of the decade, the band split cleanly into two camps – bassist John Taylor and guitarist Andy Taylor joined The Power Station with Robert Palmer, which anyone with any sense whatsoever would never have done.