Duran Duran was Mrs. solost’s favorite band back in the day, so when she saw they were coming to Detroit on their ‘Future Past’ tour she was like, hells yes. I’m not a huge DD fan; they were too ‘poppy’ for me-- back then I was more into rock, or harder-edged alt music like The The or Midnight Oil. If you had asked me at this time yesterday to name as many songs of DD’s as I could think of I’d say “Rio” and maybe “The Reflex” and that would be about it. So she was going to go with a girlfriend, but plans fell through, and I became her +1.
Opener was some band called “Bastille” I had never heard of. They were a youngish band doing what sounded like retro-alt pop. They were fine, though their songs could have been DD outtakes.
Then Nile Rodgers and Chic came on. As would be expected, a lot of Disco music. I was also not a Disco fan, but these were all songs I had heard before, so it was kind of a fun nostalgia experience. Rodgers was a pretty big-time producer back in the day, so he kept name-dropping big artists whose songs he had produced (Mrs. solost says in my ear: he sure brags a lot!), and the band did covers of those songs by Diana Ross, Madonna, and two songs by David Bowie- Modern Love and Let’s Dance.
Then came the main attraction. They put on a good show-- the band sounded pretty tight, and Simon Le Bon sounded in good voice, though it was clear his vocals were being electronically enhanced. Nothing wrong with that- for a 64 year old he sounded great (he did sound a little hoarse when he spoke between songs though; hope his aging vocal cords will hold out through the rest of the tour). I was surprised, as a more or less non-fan, how many of their songs I recognized- they had more big hits than I thought.
One thing that really bothered the hell out of me-- during the entire concert there were stage lights that repeatedly shone bright, bright, retina-searing lights directly at the audience. Sometimes they subdued the brightest of the lighting and I could actually see the stage, but literally 70 to 80 percent of the time I had to keep my eyes away from the stage, or close my eyes altogether when they were at their brightest.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the lighting was ridiculuously too freakin’ bright, and this isn’t just an old man-ism; at least I don’t think it is. I wasn’t bothered by the gul-durn loudness of the music or anything else, and it’s not like I grew up before the era of concerts with big light shows, lasers, pyrotechnics, etc. which were very fun back in the day. I don’t remember past light shows capable of permanent retina damage. The last big stadium concert I think we saw was the Rock Paper Scissors tour with Peter Gabriel and Sting (2016?), and their light show was elaborate but enjoyable, not blinding.
BTW, I googled Simon Le Bon to see how old he was, and this pic came up at the top of the Google results-- he’s wearing the same t-shirt he had on last night. When I expanded the image search I saw it here too– same white blazer jacket / t-shirt combo that he started out with last night. So apparently he has a favorite, or lucky, t-shirt. Anybody know what the t-shirt image is in reference to? It’s a negative image of what looks like a woman wearing chain mail on her head, with cursive writing around her. I blew up the first linked image to read the words that are visible, which say “…drop of my self-esteem depends on your acceptance…”. Googling that phrase fragment, all I came up with was a quote by Quincy Jones saying “Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me.”
