Music of 1983: Duran Duran... WHAT, just what!

It isn't often a song on the radio makes you stop dead in your tracks, least of all when the radio is something just on as background while you work. In 1983 I was working in a commercial photographers and photo lab; part of my job was to copy artworks using large-format film, and while I was quietly setting up a copy job on the stand, with Radio 1 playing, on came 'Is There Something I Should Know?' the new single from Duran Duran. It's fair to say that by 1983, if you didn't particularly like the Brummie new romantic survivors, you were heartily sick of them by then! Since their breakthrough two years earlier they'd got steadily bigger and by '83 were vying with Spandau Ballet for the title of the biggest pop group in the UK.

Anyway, 'Is There Something I Should Know?' comes on the radio, I am taking little notice of it until the line 'You're About As Easy As A Nuclear War' seeps through the tinny little speaker and into my unsuspecting young lugholes. What? What was that? As easy as a NUCLEAR WAR? Just, what?!? I clearly remember stopping what I was doing and turning round to stare at the little transistor radio, as if to ask 'did I really just hear 'as easy as a Nuclear War'?'

Don't forget, back then, the Cold War was very much in the back of everybody's mind still.  People of my generation really did 'grow up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud', (to borrow from Queen) and the fear of either the NATO or Warsaw Pact alliances starting something that would end up in them blowing each other (and the rest of us) to smithereens was very, very real. To hear one of the top bands of the day use that as such a throwaway line - well, my teenage brain just couldn't process it! Did they REALLY sing 'you're about as easy as a nuclear war' - really?!?

Perhaps it was just a cunning plan to make the song stick; the track itself is fairly bland to these ears and had it not been for THAT line, it would have drifted in one ear and out of the other as I carried on with my artwork copying that day. If that was the case, it worked since 'Is There Something I Should Know?' became the group's first UK Number One chart hit, and was also a hit in the US.

The band themselves must have been aware of the stir that one lyrical line caused, since they made another song many years later built around the line. 'Yo Bad Azizi' was an obscure B-side, but like most things these days is easily accessible on youtube. So to close this look back, here is 'Is There Something I Should Know' from 1983 and as a bonus, 'Yo Bad Azizi' - it still makes me cringe now! :)