Once Upon a Time in the Top Spot: Duran Duran, “A View to a Kill”
30 years ago today, the original Fab Five lineup of Duran Duran – Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, Andy Taylor, John Taylor, and Roger Taylor – earned a #1 hit with the single that would prove to be their last effort as a quintet (or that particular quintet, anyway) ‘til the group reconvened for their 2004 album Astronaut. As it happens, the song in question was also tied to another “last” in the history books: the last James Bond film to star Roger Moore.
The way John Taylor tells the story, “A View to a Kill” came about because he bumped into Bond producer Cubby Broccoli at a party and asked, “When are you going to get someone decent to do one of your theme songs?” And, yes, he does admit that he’d had a few drinks at the time, but you can’t argue with results like the one he got for his trouble: the band was introduced to longtime Bond composer John Barry, and the rest is history.
No, really, it is: to date, “A View to a Kill” is the only theme song to a James Bond film that’s topped the Billboard Hot 100.
As far as Andy and Roger decamping from the band’s lineup for the better part of 15 years not long after the single hit #1, People Magazine did an interview with the members of Duran Duran in conjunction with the filming of the video for “A View to a Kill,” and Roger’s comments turned out to be pretty ironic in retrospect:
"Even my mum's worried now (about the band breaking up): every time she rings up she says, 'Are you all going to split up?' "Roger laughs. "A lot of people think this is the end of the band, but that's rubbish—we start a new album in September. We may do things outside the group, but Duran Duran is the most important thing in our lives. It controls our lives, whether we like it or not."
Well, he was right about one thing, anyway: the band didn’t break up. It just went on without him for the better part of a decade and a half. (He did turn up on a couple of tracks on Thank You, though. Just in case you thought we’d forgotten.)
