Arena

Product Information

But now I had a problem – I had a ticket and my daughter didn’t, and I could hardly leave a nine-year-old girl outside the venue to wait for me. I also just read this one, “ The Greatest Prog Guitarists: An Essential Top 25 Countdown” (and slots 1-10 really should have been Robert Fripp) . Arena deserves a special place among your collection of live albums, be they the 50 greatest ever or not. The Duranies were a pretty tight band live actually – I actually snuck my nine-year-old daughter into one of the shows on the Astronaut tour with the five original members back in 2004.

Hungry Like the Wolf” would be laughable if it didn’t have the hookiest chorus 1982 had to offer, one that made it undeniably iconic. But one fantastic live album that isn’t included in the list – and to be honest probably shouldn’t be – is Duran Duran’s Arena.If you checked into this world any time between 1965 and 1975, the sheer ubiquity of Duran Duran indelibly stamped some of their songs on several thousand neurons that you have tucked away somewhere in your brain pan – and be honest, you like it. I get a similar feeling from a late song like All You Need Is Now – the section where Le Bon sings ‘And you sway in the moon the way you did when you were younger’ still takes me to a rare place of bittersweet emotion, even if the overall production already feels dated. Both the Sing Blue Silver documentary and the Arena film were reissued on DVD in 2004; the Arena DVD features The Making of Arena as an extra. Then one day many years later I looked up the All Music Guide review by that busy guy Mr Erlewine and was surprised to find he had awarded a mere two stars out of five. So unlike a lot of live albums up to that point, you aren’t really missing anything in the live versions compared to their studio counterparts, the band thoughtfully made sure to include all the bleeps and bloops and unexpected sound effects that were always popping out of nowhere on Duran Duran records, and they even included that marvelous pan flute solo at the end of “The Chauffeur”.

Other criticism arose from the omission of some of the band's biggest songs like " The Reflex", " Girls on Film" and " Rio". Then a few years later, wonder of wonders, Duran Duran had the greatest comeback this side of Aerosmith with The Wedding Album and the extraordinary “Ordinary World”, and then they subsequently shot it all to hell with a covers album nobody really asked for. I have no idea what it means to “save a prayer ‘till the morning after”, but I don’t really care because the melody pulls me in regardless. Burning the Ground" • " Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)" • " Serious" • " Ordinary World" • " Come Undone" • " Too Much Information" • " Perfect Day" • " White Lines" • " Out of My Mind" • " Electric Barbarella" • " Someone Else Not Me" • " (Reach Up for The) Sunrise" • " What Happens Tomorrow" • " Nice" • " Falling Down • " All You Need Is Now • " Girl Panic! This is a really decent album, and whilst it claims to be a 'live' album, it seems to have been produced to a level that makes it closer to a studio album, albeit with more atmosphere and depth.

But if I was going to select ten of them, I’m not sure I’d make many changes from the ten they picked for this release. Notorious” would be a disappointment in about every way imaginable, and they were completely left behind by the rest of the music world by the time the 80s slouched to its hair band denouement. So I did what any red-blooded American father would do – I told my daughter go sit by the pool where she’d been playing, and then slip under the tape and into the venue when no one was looking.