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jobyrne's review
3.0
Nice basic history and story of Duran Duran. No great revelations, but still an enjoyable read.
mbkarapcik's review
3.0
MTV darlings, Duran Duran, receive the royal treatment from noted rock journalist Stephen Davis in the biography, Please Please Tell Me Now. It reflects on their musical interests from the very beginning, early days touring, and their wild times before and after their incredible success. I'm sure fans will gobble up this book.
Although I'm mostly a rock person, you cannot help but love Duran Duran and their memorable tunes. Many of my friends considered themselves Duranies, and I distinctly remember how they fawned over John Taylor. In the book, you learn his real name, hear about his addiction issues, and his influences.
I personally crushed on Simon LeBon. Having been a huge fan of the Doors and Jim Morrison since high school, I was surprised to know what a fan Simon was of the band and the singer. He tailored (no pun intended with all the Taylors in the group) some of his songs and act after Jim.
In the beginning, I was entranced hearing about the band members extremely diverse influences. Depending on the band member, they range in scope from hard rock to disco and all over the place. In that regard, I really gained way more respect for their talent. This is not some so-called "boy band." They seriously worked hard at their craft and their image. Of course, they partied hard, too.
I loved hearing about favorite songs like "Rio", "Hungry Like the Wolf," "The Reflex," "Is There Something I Should Know?", and "Ordinary World." Sometimes, though, the author skirted over those parts. I really wanted to get more in-depth about how they came up with the tunes and wrote the lyrics.
Same goes for the accounts of their wild partying. Yes, you definitely get a taste for those drug-filled days and boozy nights, but I feel like it was scratching the surface. You do get information about their encounters and relationships with extremely famous people including Princess Diana, but I kept feeling like there was more. Maybe this is a matter of space or pace of the story.
Also, after, say, their recording of "White Lines" (I remember when I first heard the original at 9 or 10 on this Nickelodeon teen talk show--it has stuck in my head since then--what an amazing song), the story speeds up (again, no pun intended with mentions of "white lines") and quickly gives you updates on their subsequent tours. Some were incredibly successful, so I felt they needed more coverage.
But I will say I've read many of Stephen Davis's books and always find them entertaining and informative, but towards the end of this one, I really lost interest. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars once the book started wrapping up.
Thank you NetGalley and Hachette Books for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! It was a pleasure!
Although I'm mostly a rock person, you cannot help but love Duran Duran and their memorable tunes. Many of my friends considered themselves Duranies, and I distinctly remember how they fawned over John Taylor. In the book, you learn his real name, hear about his addiction issues, and his influences.
I personally crushed on Simon LeBon. Having been a huge fan of the Doors and Jim Morrison since high school, I was surprised to know what a fan Simon was of the band and the singer. He tailored (no pun intended with all the Taylors in the group) some of his songs and act after Jim.
In the beginning, I was entranced hearing about the band members extremely diverse influences. Depending on the band member, they range in scope from hard rock to disco and all over the place. In that regard, I really gained way more respect for their talent. This is not some so-called "boy band." They seriously worked hard at their craft and their image. Of course, they partied hard, too.
I loved hearing about favorite songs like "Rio", "Hungry Like the Wolf," "The Reflex," "Is There Something I Should Know?", and "Ordinary World." Sometimes, though, the author skirted over those parts. I really wanted to get more in-depth about how they came up with the tunes and wrote the lyrics.
Same goes for the accounts of their wild partying. Yes, you definitely get a taste for those drug-filled days and boozy nights, but I feel like it was scratching the surface. You do get information about their encounters and relationships with extremely famous people including Princess Diana, but I kept feeling like there was more. Maybe this is a matter of space or pace of the story.
Also, after, say, their recording of "White Lines" (I remember when I first heard the original at 9 or 10 on this Nickelodeon teen talk show--it has stuck in my head since then--what an amazing song), the story speeds up (again, no pun intended with mentions of "white lines") and quickly gives you updates on their subsequent tours. Some were incredibly successful, so I felt they needed more coverage.
But I will say I've read many of Stephen Davis's books and always find them entertaining and informative, but towards the end of this one, I really lost interest. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars once the book started wrapping up.
Thank you NetGalley and Hachette Books for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! It was a pleasure!
stuporfly's review
2.0
"There's nothing worse than an authentic biography of anyone."
I interviewed Duran Duran bass guitarist John Taylor late last year for Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me website, and while our conversation yielded plenty of great stuff, the "authentic biography" quote is the one I keep coming back to. We were talking about his excellent 2012 memoir In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran and whether he'd been influenced by other rock bios. Taylor mentioned Albert Goldman, who'd already written popular accounts of the lives of Elvis Presley and Lenny Bruce before publishing The Lives of John Lennon in 1988. All three of Goldman's subjects were dead by the time he got around to them, unable to directly answer to past transgressions that might cast their legacies in an unflattering light. It was the scandalous Lennon bio that stuck with Taylor...
"I remember reading that book, and it became apparent that if you put anyone’s life – yours, mine, any of us – under that kind of microscope, they’re going sound like wankers. There is no one who can come under that kind of scrutiny that is going to come out looking good. It’s the humanity that exists in all those many, many, many days between the contributions to the cool songs or whatever where they treat their gardeners like shit, or they’re unfaithful to their wives, or they get drunk and spit in the face of the doorman at the Troubadour. And you’re reading it like, Oh my god, he’s a wanker! I don’t want to read that! Now I know we’re all wankers!”
Taylor later admitted to having skimmed but not entirely consumed prior Duran Duran biographies, and it's reasonable to wonder whether he will enlist the same mild curiosity with the recently published Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story. After all, it was written by veteran rock scribe Stephen Davis, perhaps most famous for Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, published in 1985. And according to Davis's own author notes in his latest book, he was brought into the inner circle by Duran Duran's management in 2004 to document their "Fab Five" reunion for a planned official biography. That book never materialized, not by Davis or anyone else. Both John Taylor and former guitarist Andy Taylor have since penned their own memoirs, and it's unclear whether an official biography will ever happen (though if it does, I am available!). Davis turned his attention to Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses, published in 2008. And somewhere down the line, Davis decided to return to those 2004 interviews with members of Duran Duran and turn them into this book. And I don't know whether John Taylor would consider Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story an "authentic biography," but it's difficult to imagine anything worse.
I went into Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story (its title ripped from the chorus of the band's eighth single, "Is There Something I Should Know?", their first U.K. #1) with reasonably high hopes. I've long had a fondness for rock bios, and I'd enjoyed Davis's Led Zeppelin book, as well as Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, and Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones. But it's been more than two decades since those books were published. And as I plunged into Please Please Tell Me Now the experience was so thoroughly dispiriting that I began questioning why I'd liked anything Davis had ever written in the first place. Maybe I was less discerning back then. Maybe I was more forgiving. I wondered about my own tastes, which with nearly all art has ebbed and flowed through the years. There are some authors who've remained personal favorites, films I still revere. And bands, too. And Duran Duran is one of those bands.
A brief intermission: I'd heard Duran Duran before what I've always likened to my personal Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment, but we didn't have cable until maybe 1984 and I'd only caught glimpses of the band's now iconic videos on MTV at friends' houses. On March 19, 1983, Duran Duran were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and fuck it if it sounds corny, but that night changed my life. Instantly I was hooked on their sound, their look. It was thrilling, and in my own ridiculous semi-suburban way I tried to emulate their style. I first saw them in concert at Madison Square Garden one year and two days later, and despite my reticence to accept the long-standing-but-let's-face-it-extremely-corny "Duranie" term for myself, I've been a devotee ever since. I've bought records, cassettes, CDs, video in all available medium, posters, t-shirts, magazines, and books. Lots and lots of books...
Most books about Duran Duran have only loosely qualified as biographies, focusing primarily on photographs or quotes or both. Some of those remain invaluable gateways to the band's early years - The Book of Words (Malcolm Garrett and Kasper de Graaf), Sing Blue Silver (Denis O'Regan), Beautiful Colors: The Posters of Duran Duran, and The Music Between Us: Concert Ads of Duran Duran (both by Andrew Golub) are all essential visual (and sometimes textual) documents to an undeniably visual band.
In addition to the memoirs by John Taylor and Andy Taylor (they're unrelated, which I'm sure you know, and the same goes for drummer Roger Taylor too), there have been others. Garrett and de Graaf collaborated in 1984 on a thin but intriguing volume called Duran Duran: Their Story, which was still mostly photos. That same year the first Duran Duran bio proper was written by Neil Gaiman...yes, that Neil Gaiman (I've never read it, or even seen a copy, but I'll take him at his word that it's lousy).
As far as I know, the first Duran Duran bio published after the '80s was by Steve Malins, an unofficial tome initially called Notorious, but renamed Wild Boys in later editions. Like many fans, I approached the book with great enthusiasm, buoyed by the thrill of the reunited Fab Five touring their reunion album Astronaut (vinyl reissue plz), and...It was a letdown. In a bit of self-righteous bluster, I posted a lengthy review to the official Duran Duran message board in which I detailed numerous factual inaccuracies. I was full of it passing myself off as some sort of authority, and while I don't remember everything I wrote, I'm sure I came off like a dick. And because writers are narcissists (see: me), Malins must have been looking for reactions to his book because he found mine. But curiously, rather than telling me to go fuck myself, he was incredibly gracious for my feedback, and we exchanged a few very nice e-mails. And then he took it a step further and added my name to the acknowledgements of a paperback edition of his book. What a mensch!
I don't expect the same will happen here, though it must be said that Davis's book is also riddled with factual inaccuracies. And it often feels underwritten, like a first draft. Scenes are repeated often as though to hit a specific word count for a manuscript the author has lost interest in but has already blown through the advance.
And it's occasionally peppered with Davis's opinions, sometimes dressed as consensus with no source to back it up: "Duran Duran finished the best album of their career, Rio, in the late winter and spring of 1982. (Some think Rio is the only great album they ever made.)" He calls them a "boy band" throughout the book, a loaded term that implies they were cooked up in a laboratory, a dismissive jibe repeated by fellow old fart journo Paul Morley nearly a decade ago. I asked John Taylor about that last December, and he found it as ridiculous as I did, though he added that he understood why Duran Duran might have been an easy target.
"I think we were products of our own experience...I’ve never considered that we contrived any of our positions. They felt entirely authentic to me. But I guess I could see somebody outside of that thinking it, particularly as we did make it quite quickly.”
Some mistakes are merely typos that should have been caught by Davis or his editor: On p. 26, "This turned into a residency for Dada that lasted a few weeks in May 1968." Davis meant 1978 here: In May 1968 John Taylor was not qute nine years old, possibly precocious, but still too young to be playing around Birmingham in an art school band.
Elsewhere, Stuart Sutcliffe's last name was misspelled. Sure, he'd died before the Fab Four became a global phenomenon, but he was a Beatle once and getting it right would have been as simple as giving enough of a shit to look it up.
A May 1982 weeklong visit to Antigua by four of Duran Duran - minus Andy - is described in detail over a paragraph, as is the decision to keep them there at the end of the trip to film a video for the "Rio" single. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter, Davis claims "Andy arrived in Antigua a day after the rest of the band," an error that bends time itself.
And somehow, Davis, his editor(s) at Hachette, nobody caught the curious claim that Duran Duran recorded "Pressure Off" with Janelle Monae and Nile Rodgers for both All You Need is Now (2010) and Paper Gods (2015).
There are also bizarre turns of phrase: "...when Duran Duran came out, the audience looked to the band like monkeys in the jungle after the bananas had fermented."/"...and quickly began to assert himself as the band's new pair of balls, replacing Duran Duran's original testicles..." Oy vey.
Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story understandably leans heavily on the years prior to the band's fracture in the mid-'80s, with the year 1985 arriving on page 251 of 336. I get that. It's possible Davis assumed - perhaps even correctly - that many readers would be most interested in Duran Duran's meteoric ascent and less engaged by what followed. Or it could be he just ran out of steam.
I wanted to love this. Really I did. But Davis repeatedly failed to capture the energy and excitement of Duran Duran. The great Duran Duran biography remains unwritten.
I interviewed Duran Duran bass guitarist John Taylor late last year for Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me website, and while our conversation yielded plenty of great stuff, the "authentic biography" quote is the one I keep coming back to. We were talking about his excellent 2012 memoir In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran and whether he'd been influenced by other rock bios. Taylor mentioned Albert Goldman, who'd already written popular accounts of the lives of Elvis Presley and Lenny Bruce before publishing The Lives of John Lennon in 1988. All three of Goldman's subjects were dead by the time he got around to them, unable to directly answer to past transgressions that might cast their legacies in an unflattering light. It was the scandalous Lennon bio that stuck with Taylor...
"I remember reading that book, and it became apparent that if you put anyone’s life – yours, mine, any of us – under that kind of microscope, they’re going sound like wankers. There is no one who can come under that kind of scrutiny that is going to come out looking good. It’s the humanity that exists in all those many, many, many days between the contributions to the cool songs or whatever where they treat their gardeners like shit, or they’re unfaithful to their wives, or they get drunk and spit in the face of the doorman at the Troubadour. And you’re reading it like, Oh my god, he’s a wanker! I don’t want to read that! Now I know we’re all wankers!”
Taylor later admitted to having skimmed but not entirely consumed prior Duran Duran biographies, and it's reasonable to wonder whether he will enlist the same mild curiosity with the recently published Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story. After all, it was written by veteran rock scribe Stephen Davis, perhaps most famous for Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, published in 1985. And according to Davis's own author notes in his latest book, he was brought into the inner circle by Duran Duran's management in 2004 to document their "Fab Five" reunion for a planned official biography. That book never materialized, not by Davis or anyone else. Both John Taylor and former guitarist Andy Taylor have since penned their own memoirs, and it's unclear whether an official biography will ever happen (though if it does, I am available!). Davis turned his attention to Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses, published in 2008. And somewhere down the line, Davis decided to return to those 2004 interviews with members of Duran Duran and turn them into this book. And I don't know whether John Taylor would consider Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story an "authentic biography," but it's difficult to imagine anything worse.
I went into Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story (its title ripped from the chorus of the band's eighth single, "Is There Something I Should Know?", their first U.K. #1) with reasonably high hopes. I've long had a fondness for rock bios, and I'd enjoyed Davis's Led Zeppelin book, as well as Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith, and Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones. But it's been more than two decades since those books were published. And as I plunged into Please Please Tell Me Now the experience was so thoroughly dispiriting that I began questioning why I'd liked anything Davis had ever written in the first place. Maybe I was less discerning back then. Maybe I was more forgiving. I wondered about my own tastes, which with nearly all art has ebbed and flowed through the years. There are some authors who've remained personal favorites, films I still revere. And bands, too. And Duran Duran is one of those bands.
A brief intermission: I'd heard Duran Duran before what I've always likened to my personal Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment, but we didn't have cable until maybe 1984 and I'd only caught glimpses of the band's now iconic videos on MTV at friends' houses. On March 19, 1983, Duran Duran were the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and fuck it if it sounds corny, but that night changed my life. Instantly I was hooked on their sound, their look. It was thrilling, and in my own ridiculous semi-suburban way I tried to emulate their style. I first saw them in concert at Madison Square Garden one year and two days later, and despite my reticence to accept the long-standing-but-let's-face-it-extremely-corny "Duranie" term for myself, I've been a devotee ever since. I've bought records, cassettes, CDs, video in all available medium, posters, t-shirts, magazines, and books. Lots and lots of books...
Most books about Duran Duran have only loosely qualified as biographies, focusing primarily on photographs or quotes or both. Some of those remain invaluable gateways to the band's early years - The Book of Words (Malcolm Garrett and Kasper de Graaf), Sing Blue Silver (Denis O'Regan), Beautiful Colors: The Posters of Duran Duran, and The Music Between Us: Concert Ads of Duran Duran (both by Andrew Golub) are all essential visual (and sometimes textual) documents to an undeniably visual band.
In addition to the memoirs by John Taylor and Andy Taylor (they're unrelated, which I'm sure you know, and the same goes for drummer Roger Taylor too), there have been others. Garrett and de Graaf collaborated in 1984 on a thin but intriguing volume called Duran Duran: Their Story, which was still mostly photos. That same year the first Duran Duran bio proper was written by Neil Gaiman...yes, that Neil Gaiman (I've never read it, or even seen a copy, but I'll take him at his word that it's lousy).
As far as I know, the first Duran Duran bio published after the '80s was by Steve Malins, an unofficial tome initially called Notorious, but renamed Wild Boys in later editions. Like many fans, I approached the book with great enthusiasm, buoyed by the thrill of the reunited Fab Five touring their reunion album Astronaut (vinyl reissue plz), and...It was a letdown. In a bit of self-righteous bluster, I posted a lengthy review to the official Duran Duran message board in which I detailed numerous factual inaccuracies. I was full of it passing myself off as some sort of authority, and while I don't remember everything I wrote, I'm sure I came off like a dick. And because writers are narcissists (see: me), Malins must have been looking for reactions to his book because he found mine. But curiously, rather than telling me to go fuck myself, he was incredibly gracious for my feedback, and we exchanged a few very nice e-mails. And then he took it a step further and added my name to the acknowledgements of a paperback edition of his book. What a mensch!
I don't expect the same will happen here, though it must be said that Davis's book is also riddled with factual inaccuracies. And it often feels underwritten, like a first draft. Scenes are repeated often as though to hit a specific word count for a manuscript the author has lost interest in but has already blown through the advance.
And it's occasionally peppered with Davis's opinions, sometimes dressed as consensus with no source to back it up: "Duran Duran finished the best album of their career, Rio, in the late winter and spring of 1982. (Some think Rio is the only great album they ever made.)" He calls them a "boy band" throughout the book, a loaded term that implies they were cooked up in a laboratory, a dismissive jibe repeated by fellow old fart journo Paul Morley nearly a decade ago. I asked John Taylor about that last December, and he found it as ridiculous as I did, though he added that he understood why Duran Duran might have been an easy target.
"I think we were products of our own experience...I’ve never considered that we contrived any of our positions. They felt entirely authentic to me. But I guess I could see somebody outside of that thinking it, particularly as we did make it quite quickly.”
Some mistakes are merely typos that should have been caught by Davis or his editor: On p. 26, "This turned into a residency for Dada that lasted a few weeks in May 1968." Davis meant 1978 here: In May 1968 John Taylor was not qute nine years old, possibly precocious, but still too young to be playing around Birmingham in an art school band.
Elsewhere, Stuart Sutcliffe's last name was misspelled. Sure, he'd died before the Fab Four became a global phenomenon, but he was a Beatle once and getting it right would have been as simple as giving enough of a shit to look it up.
A May 1982 weeklong visit to Antigua by four of Duran Duran - minus Andy - is described in detail over a paragraph, as is the decision to keep them there at the end of the trip to film a video for the "Rio" single. Yet at the beginning of the next chapter, Davis claims "Andy arrived in Antigua a day after the rest of the band," an error that bends time itself.
And somehow, Davis, his editor(s) at Hachette, nobody caught the curious claim that Duran Duran recorded "Pressure Off" with Janelle Monae and Nile Rodgers for both All You Need is Now (2010) and Paper Gods (2015).
There are also bizarre turns of phrase: "...when Duran Duran came out, the audience looked to the band like monkeys in the jungle after the bananas had fermented."/"...and quickly began to assert himself as the band's new pair of balls, replacing Duran Duran's original testicles..." Oy vey.
Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story understandably leans heavily on the years prior to the band's fracture in the mid-'80s, with the year 1985 arriving on page 251 of 336. I get that. It's possible Davis assumed - perhaps even correctly - that many readers would be most interested in Duran Duran's meteoric ascent and less engaged by what followed. Or it could be he just ran out of steam.
I wanted to love this. Really I did. But Davis repeatedly failed to capture the energy and excitement of Duran Duran. The great Duran Duran biography remains unwritten.
nicki_theoverflowingbookcase's review
4.0
Reliving my youth and bringing back fond memories of the heart throbs that graced my walls as a teen made this a great book. I found myself replaying the videos on you-tube and singing along with vocals I thought I had forgotten. It was inspiring to read just how the band came together and the reasons behind the key members departures. Mismanaged and misunderstood this was a band that will always be a favorite and the book really did them justice.
lizaroo71's review
3.0
I am what you call a Duranie. Without shame, I LOVE this band. The early chapters here are rehashed information from other books I've read. The author, apparently, did extensive interviews with the band and, in the early chapters, he uses direct quotes from those interviews. This gets a bit annoying as the chapter preceeding it contains all of the information in the subsequent chapter - just told in different perspectives.
Luckily, I stuck with it. This is fairly extensive. Once the band is formed, they pretty quickly begin to fall apart. John Taylor's drug use is alluded to way more than in his memoir [b:In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran|13589176|In The Pleasure Groove Love, Death, and Duran Duran|Nigel John Taylor|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343244415l/13589176._SY75_.jpg|19176669]. This also highlights the band's monetary woes. It seems they toured relenlessly in the early aughts to make money.
One thing that bugged me is the author indicated once that someone was gay and another time that someone was black. Why?
This sent me down a rabbit hole looking up songs and time traveling back to junior high.
The end of this one felt rushed, but it took us all the way up to 2020.
This is one of my favorites off their new album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0j9iG8XyRQ&list=PLfiMjLyNWxeZl4lBVJRHdAV-IhMY2W24T&index=7
Luckily, I stuck with it. This is fairly extensive. Once the band is formed, they pretty quickly begin to fall apart. John Taylor's drug use is alluded to way more than in his memoir [b:In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran|13589176|In The Pleasure Groove Love, Death, and Duran Duran|Nigel John Taylor|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343244415l/13589176._SY75_.jpg|19176669]. This also highlights the band's monetary woes. It seems they toured relenlessly in the early aughts to make money.
One thing that bugged me is the author indicated once that someone was gay and another time that someone was black. Why?
This sent me down a rabbit hole looking up songs and time traveling back to junior high.
The end of this one felt rushed, but it took us all the way up to 2020.
This is one of my favorites off their new album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0j9iG8XyRQ&list=PLfiMjLyNWxeZl4lBVJRHdAV-IhMY2W24T&index=7
joliebeth23's review
4.0
I'm a Durannie through and through. They've been my favorite band since I was 12 years old. As such, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even if most of it was information I was already intimately familiar with. However, as Crispin Kott outlines in his review here, there were some sloppy errors that would have been easily fixed with some basic fact-checking/editing. Still, it was an enjoyable read.
mverdoorn's review
3.0
Not bad, but I knew most of this already. It is a pretty basic (and sadly, kind of boring) listing of everything that went on up until 2004, then it wraps up way too fast. Worth reading for any Duran Duran fan. Although, it seems like the author hated all of the members except for Andy, but he even makes him look like a jerk towards the end.
lynburn's review
3.0
3 stars. I love Duran Duran! I’ve been a self-confessed Durannie since The Reflex. Love these guys!
And I will confess I’ve read John Taylor’s, “In the Pleasure Groove” and Andy Taylor’s, “Wild Boy.” Those two books provide a more intimate look at Duran Duran while focusing on the band members’ own perspectives. “Please Please Tell Me Now” by Stephen Davis is a more clinical version of the bands story. Mr. Davis interviewed the band members in 2004, yet the book was just published last week. It’s a very slow pace through the early days of the band at The Rum Runner, various members of a very young Duran Duran, and the early days touring of the lineup that became the Fab 5. If you’ve read both the Taylor’s books, there isn’t really a lot of new information in this book about the band. But it was fun revisiting the band, hearing all the songs I’ve loved for 30+ years (in my head), and reading of some other huge artists who orbited their band.
Ultimately I gave this book 3 stars because the structure of the book led to repetition at times. Also, there is a detachment that lends a coldness to the storytelling. I don’t believe Mr. Davis is a fan, so there’s a distance in the writing, a lack of enthusiasm for the story. Also, there were anecdotes tossed in, that while fun, seemed irrelevant and odd to the story (example: a newly divorced Princess Di catcalling Simon at the gym. Fun, but seemed to be just thrown into the narrative).
If you love Duran Duran, read this. It’s a fun trip down memory lane. Thank you to #netgalley and @hachettebooks for the advanced e-copy of #pleasepleasetellmenow .
#book #bookreview
And I will confess I’ve read John Taylor’s, “In the Pleasure Groove” and Andy Taylor’s, “Wild Boy.” Those two books provide a more intimate look at Duran Duran while focusing on the band members’ own perspectives. “Please Please Tell Me Now” by Stephen Davis is a more clinical version of the bands story. Mr. Davis interviewed the band members in 2004, yet the book was just published last week. It’s a very slow pace through the early days of the band at The Rum Runner, various members of a very young Duran Duran, and the early days touring of the lineup that became the Fab 5. If you’ve read both the Taylor’s books, there isn’t really a lot of new information in this book about the band. But it was fun revisiting the band, hearing all the songs I’ve loved for 30+ years (in my head), and reading of some other huge artists who orbited their band.
Ultimately I gave this book 3 stars because the structure of the book led to repetition at times. Also, there is a detachment that lends a coldness to the storytelling. I don’t believe Mr. Davis is a fan, so there’s a distance in the writing, a lack of enthusiasm for the story. Also, there were anecdotes tossed in, that while fun, seemed irrelevant and odd to the story (example: a newly divorced Princess Di catcalling Simon at the gym. Fun, but seemed to be just thrown into the narrative).
If you love Duran Duran, read this. It’s a fun trip down memory lane. Thank you to #netgalley and @hachettebooks for the advanced e-copy of #pleasepleasetellmenow .
#book #bookreview