Arena

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Union of the Snake" • " New Moon on Monday" • " The Reflex" • " The Wild Boys" • " A View to a Kill" • " Notorious" • " Skin Trade" • " Meet El Presidente" • " I Don't Want Your Love" • " All She Wants Is" • " Do You Believe in Shame? Personally, I like the track list far better than the greatest hits compilation Decade they released, well, at the end of the decade. 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) . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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!

So when I see a link for an article on “ The 50 Greatest Live Albums Ever”, do I really have time to read about 50 live albums that may or may not be deserving of the appellation of “greatest ever”?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”. The Union of the Snake” sounds like it’s a secret society that is about as threatening as the Mickey Mouse Club, but that’s one hell of a monster melody in the chorus. Which is why I am not surprised at the quality of the musicianship on Arena, although there’s not a snowball’s chance in Satan’s front yard that there weren’t some fixes in the studio (I always thought the two bonus tracks tacked on to the 2004 remaster sounded a lot rougher than the tracks on the original album, which I take to mean they didn’t get the same amount of “fixing” the ones that made the cut did). About halfway through the show one of the concessions workers got off and saw me sitting there while my daughter was playing over by the pond by the entrance, and offered me the free ticket she had, which was very generous of her and which I gratefully accepted.

They brought a color and vibrancy to the Top 40 with their keyboard textures that had been presaged by David Bowie on Low and Heroes, one that pop radio wasn’t quite ready for in 1977 and 1978 but was well primed for by the 80s. Sure, some of it was sequencers rather than live musicianship, but all the same they were masters of musical atmosphere in their idiom. And I mean, yeah, everybody and their brother bought a copy of Frampton Comes Alive in 1976, but does it really belong on a list of the 50 greatest live albums ever? The intro to “The Seventh Stranger” is like going over a musical waterfall and dropping into an enchanted, sumptuously extravagant synthesizer lagoon. Popular though they may have been in their prime, but they were pretty formulaic in the early 80s, and hearing any random Duran Duran song was hardly different than hearing any other.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. Arena would be the only full-length live Duran Duran release until the 2003 Encore series of official bootleg recordings, taken from shows in Japan and the West Coast of the USA. To cap off the band's highly successful 1983/1984 Sing Blue Silver World Tour, EMI released a live album, which according to the sleeve was "Recorded Around The World 1984". It was meant to be a teaser for a full-length feature film of the same name, based on the 1971 novel The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead by William S. 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.