ROBERT PALMER : Music & Style

Nick Rhodes, meanwhile, had been living up to his image as the flamboyant, arty member of Duran. His super-glam wedding to Julie Anne Friedman at the Savoy on 18 August 1984 featured real flamingoes, and was photographed by royal – and Roxy – photographer Norman Parkinson. The couple moved into a Victorian townhouse in South Kensington with a lavish bespoke Art Deco interior and Warhols and Picassos on the walls, and Rhodes exhibited his own Polaroids in December (just months after his hero David Sylvian had done the same thing).

However, he too had been frustrated with Seven And The Ragged Tiger, albeit for very different reasons to John Taylor, and was feeling the itch to launch a side project of his own. As the dandy keyboardist explained to Canadian TV show Good Rockin' Tonite he, Simon Le Bon and Roger Taylor, the core line-up of Arcadia, had learned the virtues of "space within music" and "letting the music breathe", in contrast with the over-cooked clutter of some Duran records. Furthermore, Rhodes was ready to break away from the rigid "verse / chorus / verse / chorus / middle-eight / chorus-to-fade arrangement" which had become Duran Duran's formula.

It began, at least according to the twinkle-eyed tall tale Le Bon span to Good Rockin' Tonite, with a meter reading from the gas man just when he was leaving to go on holiday. The gas man's visit delayed his departure just long enough for him to happen to be at home when Rhodes rang with the idea of writing some songs together. He grudgingly agreed, the trade-off being that Rhodes had to promise to let Le Bon go on a boat race in his yacht next year (an adventure which nearly ended up killing him).

The pair decamped to Geneva to spend some time, as Le Bon told Mike Read on Saturday Superstore without detectable innuendo, "getting some ideas together in the snow, actually." Those ideas were the direct antithesis of the bully-boy artlessness of The Power Station. Rhodes had been buying highbrow electronic albums on Japanese imports (Ippu Do, Yellow Magic Orchestra), and also bingeing on the fragile keyboards of Richard Barbieri of the band Japan on the albums Quiet Life, Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum. Le Bon, too, had leanings in that direction. Previous Le Bon-led compositions had tended towards the elegantly ethereal - The Chauffeur and Seventh Stranger being two known examples – so it's reasonable to guess that his head was in a similar place to Rhodes.

Even the name Arcadia was rich with arty allusion, in contrast with the Ronseal-like functionalism of The Power Station. It was taken from Poussin's 1638 painting 'Et In Arcadia Ego', a memento mori depicting shepherds in ancient Greece gathered around a tomb, which drew upon Virgil's Eclogues, and would itself be referenced countless times, by Goethe, Nietzsche, Auden and Waugh among others. (In 1995, when I needed a name for the London club night I was launching for the Romo scene, I went with Arcadia. It had all the right connotations).

The Arcadia album was created in a spirit of "Anything they can do, we can do better". The cost came in at over £1 million, twice that of The Power Station, making it one of the most expensive of all time. The trio of Rhodes, Le Bon and Roger Taylor convened in Paris between April and June 1985, taking over an entire floor of the Plaza Athenée (the project's debut single spoke of having "more playtime than money", but they clearly had no shortage of either) and recording at the Studio de la Grande Armée, a Situationist brick's throw from the Arc de Triomphe. Le Bon praised the city's "inspirational" galleries and cinemas, as well as "rotting-body shops full of tack and trash... that nobody's been in for 50 years". The ambience of the French capital would feed into the mood of the album, Rhodes frantically scribbling down ideas at all times on pieces of scrap paper, which backfired when he sneezed on a tissue which contained notation for an Arcadia song. (A hater might joke that it sounds like they went ahead and recorded it anyway).

In personnel terms, Arcadia were the Continuity Duran, in the sense that their core line-up didn't introduce any outside elements, and that they retained the services of Alex Sadkin, producer of Seven And The Ragged Tiger (although, in terms of tone, his earlier work with Grace Jones on her classic run of early 80s albums was arguably more relevant here). They did, however, bring in a variety of guests, with cameos from Herbie Hancock, American jazz bassist Mark Egan, Ippu Do mainman Masami Tsuchiya, Bowie sideman Carlos Alomar, Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour and Roxy Music's Andy Mackay.

During the hiatus, the two halves of Duran Duran rarely met one another except for members' weddings, and not always at those. Andy Taylor didn't attend when Roger Taylor married Giovanna Cantone in Naples on 27 July 1984 (although in fairness, he had an alibi: his own wife was heavily pregnant, and gave birth to a son on 20 August). There were times, however, when they were obliged to work together, such as the recording session of Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas at Trevor Horn's Sarm West studio in November 1984, and the recording of A View To A Kill the following spring.

Duran had bagged the Bond gig when John Taylor accosted Cubby Broccoli at a launch party and told him "someone decent" should record the theme to his next film. John Barry himself composed the string arrangement, and Bernard Edwards was seconded from Power Station duties to oversee what would become his first No.1 as a solo producer. The sessions, however, proved about as easy as a nuclear war. Tensions ran so high that Edwards couldn't have the whole band in the studio at any one time, a situation which continued into the filming of the accompanying video, shot in Arcadia's temporary home town of Paris. In his memoir In The Pleasure Groove, John Taylor recalls that "the rift was everything", and that flying to Paris for the video felt like "a sortie into enemy territory". Watch the video now, and it's noticeable that no member of Duran is ever on screen with another. (There's a brief scene where the camera pans across the Eiffel Tower from Andy Taylor to Nick Rhodes, but they never share the frame.) The whole band did attend the film's Royal Premiere, through gritted teeth.

The next time the Fab Five would be obliged to reconvene would be even more public. The Live Aid concerts were coming up in the summer, and the combination of Bob Geldof's moral blackmail and Harvey Goldsmith's industry clout forced several estranged bands to put their grievances on the back burner and reunite in the name of charity, and Duran – perhaps the most recently riven of all – were one.

Both The Power Station and Arcadia were also approached to perform at the Philadelphia concert, with Arcadia (who had yet to release a record) planning to 'do a Phil Collins' and play Wembley before dashing across to the Atlantic for the Duran set, but logistics forbade it. The Power Station, meanwhile, had run into a slight problem of their own: they no longer had a lead singer. Rather than tour with the band, Robert Palmer decided to capitalise on his newly-raised profile to record a solo album Riptide (featured Tony Thompson, Bernard Edwards and Andy Taylor, in other words the entire Power Station minus John), which kicked him up into a higher tax bracket due to the success of the single Addicted To Love. Paul Young was initially approached to replace Palmer, but was unavailable, so they settled on the virtually-unknown Michael Des Barres (formerly of Silverhead, Chequered Past and Detective), whose friendship with notoriously hard-partying actor Don Johnson led to The Power Station making a cameo appearance on Miami Vice. With friends like that, clearly Des Barres was going to fit right in.

The Power Station made their live debut at the Ritz in New York on 1 July, then played a handful of other dates to warm up for Live Aid. Then it was time to face up to dusting off the cobwebs with the guys from the old day-job. "Duran had broken up and there was a rift", John Taylor recalled later. "Andy Taylor and I were touring with The Power Station in America, and Simon and Nick were working on the Arcadia album. We met in Philadelphia and did several days of rehearsal, and it was not a friendly or happy situation." (He has also been quoted as saying that these rehearsals were "more fun than the Power Station", which surely tells its own story about the doubts he was already having about the side-project.) "The only time we (Duran Duran) were able to get in the same space together was when we did the photo for the programme."

The timing couldn't have been better for both bands: A View To A Kill was No.1 in America on the week of the concert, and Some Like It Hot was in the Top 10. Andy and John Taylor, in particular, were entitled to strut the stadium stage as cocky as conquering kings. And so they did, grinning and gurning through Murderess and Get It On in their calf-length success coats, while Des Barres, in his ripped waistcoat and red pantaloons, worked up a sweat. Later in the day, after the actual Led Zeppelin had done their bit (with The Power Station's Tony Thompson filling in on drums), the Taylors returned for a Duran Duran mini-gig now remembered mostly for Simon Le Bon's infamous bum note, which he has described as the most embarrassing moment of his career. Nevertheless, John Taylor remembers Duran's set as a "moment of transcendence" which revealed The Power Station's US tour to be "a vanity project that had run out of steam". It would be the last time that all five members of the classic Duran line-up would appear together for 16 years.

On August 10 1985, Simon Le Bon cashed in that pre-Arcadia promise from Nick Rhodes (who didn't approve of the singer's sailing exploits: "The whole idea of orange cagoules was displeasing to me aesthetically...") by setting off on the Fastnet Race – a warm-up for the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race - in his 78-foot, personally-commissioned yacht, Drum. Midway through the race, disaster struck when Drum's 14-ton keel sheered off the hull due to a design fault, and the boat capsized off the Cornish coast, leaving Le Bon and his crew of six trapped in an air pocket as the water rose, till they were eventually rescued by frogmen. (Incredibly, Le Bon didn't lose his sea legs, and did complete the Whitbread later in the year). It's an indication of just how estranged the five members were by this point that Andy and John Taylor didn't learn of the full seriousness of the incident until they read about it in People magazine a whole week later.

Nevertheless, slowly, rapprochements began to happen. By the end of the year, Nick Rhodes had visited John Taylor in New York, and even walked onstage for a comedy cameo during a Power Station gig with a broom, pretending to sweep the stage. Before long, moves were afoot to reunite Duran Duran, or at least, a version thereof. But first, there was the small matter of a million-pound Arcadia record to be released.

The debut single from Arcadia couldn't have made their stance – and their aesthetic opposition to The Power Station – more obvious. Election Day was a flagrant contravention of the prevalent mid-80s idea that we'd left all that silly, posey 'art' stuff behind when the Blitz closed, and it was time to get sensible and save the planet. It was a song which opened with the verse "Wild kind of look to the day/Opening eyes impale neon flickers/She moon she turning away/The city's her slave but he's cheating his mistress...", and two thirds through, suddenly cut to an impenetrable dominatrix diatribe from Grace Jones. Clearly, Arcadia prized the arcane and esoteric over the dumb and direct. And the video, oh the video. A nine-minute mini-movie from Alien art director Roger Christian, inspired by Jean Cocteau's La Belle Et La Bête, its aesthetic was ultra-New Romantic and heavily-stylised, with Le Bon and Rhodes, their hair newly dyed gothic black, pulling shapes in a Bosch-like underworld, high-cheekboned models everywhere, human chess pieces springing out of the floor, and a cameo from William Burroughs. It was a Visage video on ten times the budget. "Pretentious?" smiled Nick Rhodes when challenged on it. "I should jolly well think so."

Le Bon admitted to Good Rockin' Tonite that the Arcadia album, So Red The Rose, could alienate some fans who might miss what he called "the bubble, the pop, the fizz" of Duran Duran. He had a point. After Side 1 opens with Election Day, Keep Me In The Dark and Goodbye Is Forever drift past unmemorably. But things pick up again with The Flame, which sounded like a sequel to A View To A Kill, with a Japanese female spoken intro which appears to be a direct homage to Bowie's It's No Game. When The Flame was released as a single, there was further evidence that a thaw had begun between the two Duran camps: in the Rocky Horror/Hammer Horror-inspired video, John Taylor turns up as a record company executive hiding in a closet.

The side closes with gaseous but not-unpleasant ballad Missing, and Side 2 begins with a Sakamoto-esque instrumental, Rose Arcana, which is arguably the best thing on the album. The understated elegance of The Promise, another single, is somewhat ruined by the presence of bloody Sting on BVs. The Hispanic pop of El Diablo and the seven-minute, Japan-like Lady Ice, complete with woozy fretless bass, round off a record which was never going to be a zillion seller but which, as vanity projects go, is a thing of underrated beauty.

Years later, for tQ, I reminded Le Bon of his famous boast that So Red The Rose was "the most pretentious album ever made". He'd forgotten ever making the claim. "Did I say that about pretension?! Maybe I was pre-empting, thinking that it was better for me to say it than anybody else. I think there's a very fine line, a blurring, between 'pretension' and 'aspiration'. It's about trying to reach for something. Halfway through the making of the Arcadia album I met Yasmin for the second time, and nothing else mattered. I'm surprised we finished it, to be honest, cos all I could think about was Yasmin." Nick Rhodes, however, was happier to wear the accolade with pride. "Was Arcadia's the most pretentious album ever made? Yes, we've struggled with that one," he smiled, "but I always like to retain that title."

Another thing the Arcadia project struggled to do was to recoup the enormous outlay. Election Day, released in October 1985, made No.7 in the UK and 6 in the US, but but subsequent singles barely troubled the charts. The album, released a month later, only reached No.30 in the UK (23 in the US). Meanwhile, The Power Station had called it a day, and John Taylor released a one-off solo single I Do What I Do from the 9 ½ Weeks soundtrack, which he promoted with a slurring appearance on Saturday morning TV after pulling an all-nighter in the company of Freddie Mercury. It didn't chart.

In the aftermath of the Arcadia/Power Station schism, Andy Taylor left Duran Duran to release a solo album and become a producer-for-hire. Roger, worn out by the whole experience of 1985, quit the music business altogether to live on a farm in Gloucestershire. And understandably so: having been a part of both Arcadia and The Power Station, it's a miracle Roger survived into 1986 at all.

Duran Duran became a trio of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, cannibalised Some Like It Hot and Election Day into the band's live set, and made a fantastic funk-pop album, Notorious, with the other half of Chic Productions, Nile Rodgers before soldiering on for the rest of the 80s and 90s through various line-up changes.

Tony Thompson went on to play even heavier rock with Nine Inch Nails, and was reunited with Palmer, the Taylors and Bernard Edwards when The Power Station made an ill-fated comeback in 1996. Before the sessions had even been completed, Edwards tragically died after a Chic reunion concert in Japan. When it finally emerged, Living In Fear sounded much the same as the first Power Station album, right down to a clunky seven-minute version of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, but music had moved on, and nobody bought it, literally or figuratively. By 2003, Robert Palmer too would be gone: he died from a heart attack in a Paris hotel room, aged 54. Just two months later, Tony Thompson died of renal cell carcinoma aged 49, leaving the two Taylors as the only survivors of The Power Station.

It wouldn't be till 2001 that Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor returned to the Duran Duran fold, and the classic Fab Five line-up was finally welded back together for a stadium-filling comeback, the various protagonists having perhaps realised that the fabulous clutter and clatter they'd been making before the ructions of 1985 - that "bubble, pop and fizz", rather than that "huff and puff" - was what people really wanted to hear.

Simon Price (The Quietus - 2015)