To my mind, Duran Duran’s relevance to pop culture has stretched like a rubber band over the decades. But now comes their latest single Girl Panic, and it isn’t just the sound of synths we’re hearing; it’s the sound of flagging relevance being reignited with a boom.
The key to bringing their new track to a much wider audience? Pulling out the oldest trick in the Duran Duran book: the Supermodel.
The original supermodels, whose careers are of roughly the same vintage as the band’s, star in the film clip for Girl Panic. But rather than star as themselves they cleverly play the parts of the band members – singing, doing interviews (“obviously, we were one of the first to put models in our videos,” says a tongue-in-cheek Naomi Campbell, playing the role of lead singer Simon Le Bon) and getting up to the kind of rock ‘n’ roll mischief bands are famous for. It’s an entertaining piece of cross-over between music and fashion that’s spread like wildfire for the draw of those ever-alluring household name models.
