Seven And The Ragged Tiger

I knew this record was coming up on TPL, and I was somewhat apprehensive about what I’d think or write when I got to it. Apart from a jokey Dave Q thread, I can’t find any thread specifically about this album. It’s had more bad press than I care to remember.

Then Lena and I listened to it, last night, and I remembered why I bought it in the first place. 1983 really has been a year where all my expectations about what number one albums should sound like have been well and truly overturned and this is no exception. So I have written a fairly stumbling, shambling blog post to try to explain why I think it’s so great and much better than people normally imagine it to be, and it is here:

http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/duran-duran-seven-and-ragged-tiger.html

I realise that over the years I have been guiltier of undervaluing them than anybody else, so regard this as my penance.

I think this record is comically dreadful so I'm looking forward to reading the case for the defence.

"My head is full of chopstick/I don't like it."

There was a time when "The Seventh Stranger" moved me a bit.

S&RT gets unmentioned these days despite my remembering it as the absolute peak of Duran mania.

Good write up Marcello. I especially liked what you wrote about The Seventh Stranger, always thought that was a beautiful song.

I've always liked this album but it suffers from coming after two albums that are just about perfect.

Never understood why Union of the Snake was picked as the lead single, Shadows on Your Side seemed like much more of an obvious hit to me and much better song. New Moon on Monday is great too, it rivals My Own Way as their most underrated single.

Am I gonna defend this album? Of course I am going to defend this album. Not so much as a work of pop (though I did listen to it about a year ago, and found it was nowhere near as universally terrible as it's been represented as being) as the thing-in-itself.

Like, whenever anyone tells me that a particular album is a band's "Seven And The Ragged Tiger", then that is the one that I will always go for (whether it's The Great Escape or Our Love To Admire or (insert your "successful band grapples with fame and destroys themselves in the process" example here)). Just because it's such a phenomenon, and the ways in which bands *fail* are sometimes more interesting than the ways in which they succeed.

In America its chart trajectory was interesting. Hitting the top ten album chart as "Union of the Snake" cruised into the top five, it dropped out a few weeks later. "New Moon on Monday" only hits #10 and the band's momentum looks stalled. Then a remixed "The Reflex" takes off in June and the album reenters the top ten and their fortunes are saved.

It was definitely their peak, at least in the US. There was constant chatter on the radio about DD being THE NEW BEATLES, and lots of stories in the press about THE NEW BRITISH INVASION (cf. Annie Lennox & Boy George on the cover of Newsweek, RS' "The Fab Five" DD cover story).

We tried thinking about what this album must have sounded like to somebody growing up in 1983 America where Lionel Richie and Flashdance were the stifling norm. We concluded that even “My head is full of chopstick” must have seemed like Wyndham Lewis next to “Penny lover, don’t walk on by.”

(NB: The Great Escape is a record that really can move me to tears and I'll be writing about it at an unfeasible length when I reach it. If you lived and worked in West London in the mid-nineties I think you'd know why it had such an impact on me.)

Great piece, btw. I haven't listened to this record in 30 years; gonna reacquaint myself with it now. Saw them on that tour in '84 (my first concert), and I can still remember how everyone screamed for Simon or Nick or Roger or John when they appeared on the video screen...but not for Andy.

It's weird because I remember it being slightly *after* the peak of mine own personal fandom. Maybe that was more to do with my hitting the awkward stage, where a band blowing up among me & my friends was fine, but a band blowing up so big as to be on the cover of magazines my parents read felt slightly naff? I dunno.

well his hair was dreadful even then

xpost

xpost I wonder if the band/label were expecting The Reflex to be that big? It was the same in the UK, New Moon on Monday just scraped the top ten but The Reflex made number one for a month here. It must still be their biggest selling single.

It’s amazing just how little, materially, Nile Rodgers did in his remix; sped it up a bit, put in a few sound FX – but it seemed to do the trick. Video filmed onstage in Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, as I recall.

Just because it's such a phenomenon, and the ways in which bands *fail* are sometimes more interesting than the ways in which they succeed.

I like this but in the case of SATRT I felt it unveiled the fact that they were a fundamentally terrible band all along rather than a good one straying into dangerous territory, a la The Great Escape.

I was a Duran Duran superfan as a child and the Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour was the first big rock concert I ever went to. It was a strange experience being a nine-year-old boy with his parents in a sea of screaming teenage girls, but I had a lot of fun. Up to that point, I hadn't really thought of Duran Duran as "girl music". The concert was way louder than any of us had anticipated, and my six-months-pregnant mother was worried that my brother would be born with hearing loss or brain damage due to the high volume, but he appears to be mostly normal. I haven't returned to the album much since those days, but I still have my vinyl copy, so perhaps it deserves a spin now.

For a long time, because I was young and naïve and took Paul Morley’s word as gospel, I drastically undervalued Duran. But then years later I read Penman’s long and damning elegy to Ian MacDonald and these words stuck with me:

“I also hear the sound of a lost and lonely man, lonely most of all perhaps, and maybe that was in truth truly what he couldn't take, the state of his own world, the fact that he could react in his head to a 1000 things but knew, in his heart, that the heart knows better, and that somewhere back along the road, years or decades ago, he had cut off a piece of himself from the world, and it had withered and died.”

So I think coming to terms with Duran now is kind of like my letting the heart come in, and I don’t believe that being moved by “The Seventh Stranger” is any less valid than being moved by e.g. “Perfect Circle” or “Reel Around The Fountain.” Most of 1983 TPL has been like that for me, really, my gradual coming around, or coming back, to realise that yes, I actually DID love all this stuff in 1983 and if I am honest with myself I STILL love all this stuff, and this is maybe part of a bigger narrative about somebody turning or being turned into a ghost and then things happen and that the same somebody – the same “me” – comes back.

That having been said, 1984 is going to throw up some BIG challenges.

We tried thinking about what this album must have sounded like to somebody growing up in 1983 America where Lionel Richie and Flashdance were the stifling norm

As someone who turned 14 in the fall of 1983, in a town of fewer than 10,000 people, I can tell you it sounded TERRIFIC. My friends and I were all huge fans of the band and this record - we considered them the very epitome of cool, we wanted to dress like them, look like them, etc. We risked constant bullying from classmates, as this was a very rural/blue collar town, and most other kids listened to the AOR station from Cleveland, WMMS. (After I saw the band on this tour, I very nearly got an ass-kicking in shop class for wearing the concert tee.) My school had a lip-sync contest in 1986, and four friends and I did Duran Duran, lip syncing to "Is There Something I Should Know?"

Lionel Richie was my mom's music to me.

We tried thinking about what this album must have sounded like to somebody growing up in 1983 America where Lionel Richie and Flashdance were the stifling norm. We concluded that even “My head is full of chopstick” must have seemed like Wyndham Lewis next to “Penny lover, don’t walk on by.”

Well, as someone who was there (and who picked up Seven and Can't Slow Down pretty much right around the time, IIRC -- and who loved all the Flashdance hits earlier that summer) -- I dunno, that comparison never suggested itself? Or rather that division you're suggesting. If anything Duran WAS part of the 'stifling norm' in terms of what I heard and when I heard it, context being upstate New York, top 40 radio, as close to being in the sticks as I ever lived in my life. And they were all, Lionel and Simon and et al, on TV with videos and on the air and so forth. It wasn't a contrast, it was a continuum. And lyrically I remember having already been bemused/confused by some of Simon's stuff on Rio but not to the point where it seemed on a different level or specifically unusual vis a vis Lionel.

That said I remember things like the cartographic design of inner sleeve of Seven and the odd title and all seeming a bit 'weird,' but not offputting at all. It was just...them, somehow. And I still remember being excited as hell when "Union of the Snake" debuted on radio, and years later being annoyed that "New Moon on Monday" didn't make the original Decade compilation.

Ha, nice contrast with Phil there! Especially the 'mom's music' note at the end since as I mentioned, I was pretty much playing Can't Slow Down to death as well. And Def Leppard's Pyromania. And the Hall and Oates greatest hits comp. Middle to end of 1983 was a great time, really.

If anything Duran WAS part of the 'stifling norm' in terms of what I heard and when I heard it, context being upstate New York, top 40 radio, as close to being in the sticks as I ever lived in my life

I erased a post which said basically this. I don't know the state of radio in England in late '83 or early '84, but, man, Top 40 in America was never more fecund.

(That concert tour was also one of my first forays into hipsterism. A girl in my biology class had gone also, but didn't have the band's first album, so she didn't know songs from the set list like "Friends of Mine" and "Careless Memories," so I got to be all, "Yeah, you should listen to their early stuff.")

Marcello, your take on Can't Slow Down  – the recrudescence of bland bearded white MOR – is about half right when you consider his popularity in the States. "Running with the Night" sounded right slotted next to "Adult Education," "Let The Music Play," and "New Moon on Monday."

Richie was very much mom music in the States too, of course, but 10 million + sales means that in 1984 genre categories dissolved more than they ever have. In other words, 1984 was OUR 1982, our New Pop renaissance.

I think it was a definite disadvantage that I didn’t hear American radio of the period because the juxtaposing of Duran, Richie etc. would make a lot more sense. Here in Britain the Top 40 was, as John Peel said at the time, essentially a Radio 2 chart, and it was stifling to the point of suffocation. Why did “Blue Monday” stay in the charts for so long? Not much competition.

Should also add to my latter half of 1983 moment that besides Madonna starting to break wider, Thriller was about to shift into its second wind with the one two of "Wanna Be Starting Something" and the title track (if I have the order right). Prince still just coasting a bit too with "Delirious" after "Little Red Corvette."

I should post some pictures of the disastrous results when I attempted to get a small-town men's barber to give me a haircut like John Taylor on the cover of the Duran Duran s/t. Instead of his cool long hair with spiky bangs, I got a big puffy mullet.

xp haha my mother actually liked "Delirious" but had no use for anything else by Prince

I was a Duran Duran superfan as a child and the Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour was the first big rock concert I ever went to. It was a strange experience being a nine-year-old boy with his parents in a sea of screaming teenage girls, but I had a lot of fun. Up to that point, I hadn't really thought of Duran Duran as "girl music". The concert was way louder than any of us had anticipated, and my six-months-pregnant mother was worried that my brother would be born with hearing loss or brain damage due to the high volume, but he appears to be mostly normal. I haven't returned to the album much since those days, but I still have my vinyl copy, so perhaps it deserves a spin now.

― nitro-burning funny car (Moodles), Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:21 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Same. My first show, I was 11, went with my friends and their parents, had the flu (103 fever), fucking loved the show. My friends and I formed a band around this time, one keyboardist and two drummers, and we did "Planet Earth," "Girls On Film," (both instrumental) and not much else.

There was a moment in '83 when sixty percent of the top twenty Billboard singles were by British acts.

Lionel Richie was my mom's music to me.

― bi-polar uncle (its OK-he's dead) (Phil D.), Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:26 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Lionel seemed like Adult Contemporary music for people in their 30s (although I've since come around to how amazing all those singles are). The S&RT singles didn't seem hugely different from the Rio singles, so it didn't come as a huge shock.

For me, the biggest change/shock was "Hungry Like The Wolf" getting huge airplay at the exact moment the Who disappeared from the scene -- you could almost feel the culture shift.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/b5931fe1427378ee3021daa4515c9c09/tumblr_mm8a8ze2kB1qfkzqqo1_1280.jpg

I want to know about the Kissinger Report

btw look at the nominees for 1984 Album of the Year: 1985 Grammy Awards Album of the Year poll

She's So Unusual getting a Grammy nod is still mind-boggling to me, in the good way.

Haven't even read the rest of the thread after this clanger but:

I like this but in the case of SATRT I felt it unveiled the fact that they were a fundamentally terrible band all along rather than a good one straying into dangerous territory, a la The Great Escape.

GTFO. Like, how can you look at the band that made Rio and the band that later made The Wedding Album and think they were a "fundamentally terrible" band. Just... no.

Yeah, the release of this album (with cartographic inner sleeve, adventure videos, and near-total lyrical inscrutability) plus the associated first rock concert ever around age 10 just cemented their status as a sort of Indiana Jones/Road Warrior phenomenon that you could sing along to in addition to watching, and it absolutely dominated my imagination, and that of my friends too. How it compared to other music at the time was totally irrelevant... we just didn't think about it that way. In that sense I prefer it to the first two albums.

Christgau:

Seven and the Ragged Tiger [Capitol, 1984]

As public figures and maybe as people, these imperialist wimps are the most deplorable pop stars of the postpunk if not post-Presley era. Their lyrics are obtuse at best, and if you'd sooner listen to a machine sing than Simon Le Bon, what are you going to do with both? Yet the hit singles which lead off each side are twice as pleasurable as anything Thomas Dolby is synthesizing these days. Which had better teach you something about imperialism. C+

imperialist wimps

Ah, here's that John Taylor quote I was looking for:

"I don't really think there's anything constructive about marching on the Houses of Parliament or, you know, breaking down the walls of Babylon. I think we're more in favour of free enterprise. Bands like the Jam and the Clash seem to encourage these sort of tribal movements, this gang mentality, and I don't like it. It seems to me that the only people getting anything out of these movements are the Paul Weller's and the Joe Strummers, who are, as individuals, getting somewhere. I'd say to anyone following these bands that they could each do the same things themselves. But we're not a band that says do this or do that. We're a band that says do what you want."

I was also living in Upstate NY when this thing came out (and hating it... and the British run on the US charts of that era was this real sense of "see? this country sucks, my home even does *pop* better than them" to me). But I do remember the local hard rock station (PYX106) had this daily request chart every evening, which was dominated by exactly what you'd expect. And yet SATRT songs kept getting voted to the top again and again, and I just remember the DJ struggling to keep the condescension out of his voice, mystified that "gurls" or whoever kept voting this terrible shit higher than... 90210 or the latest Robert Plant solo project or whatever *he* though deserved to be at the top of the listener charts.

I wish I could say it was a real eye-opener that music - and music fandom - was gendered, and that my side would always lose, but that lesson took another 10 years to sink in.

God, I loved the sleeve, though. I was obsessed with maps and cartography at the time, so really it could not have *been* any more relevant to my interests.

see? There's another one: Robert Plant. The Principle of Moments and Shaken 'n' Stirred are two other records indebted to this MTV/post-New Wave hybrid.

In that situation wasn't it the pissed off old rock dude who lost and the Duran fans who won? I always thought the good thing about the charts was that the side you're talking about does win, week after week.

xp lol 90210. Poor Yes.

We're a band that says do what you want.

I know they're more Thatcherite than Thelemite, but this quote made me wonder if someone out there has done a Crowleyian analysis of the Union of The Snake etc

Well, actually, in the long run, I still think the Old Rock Dudes won, in terms of who got ~canonised~ and who didn't. And the same damn cliches that even get repeated in the start of the blog post at the top of the thread. And every few years some dude "rediscovers" DD and "omg they weren't as terrible I thought and I should have given them a chance, but, like... *gurls* loved them" and it's supposed to be this big eye-opening thing of "wow, a band that combined Chic, Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols? How did I miss this?" and you will excuse me for just crossing my arms and rolling my eyes.

That wasn't actually what I said.

MC, this is not the first op-ed I've encountered on this subject over the past 30 years (or even the 30th). But this is your thread, and your blog post, and so I think I shall respectfully leave rather than get into an argument over it.

You'll be happy to know that PYX106 is still shit.

90210 or the latest Robert Plant solo project or whatever *he* though deserved to be at the top of the listener charts.

Anyone remember the nationally-broadcast Duran Duran call-in radio show in early 1984? Nick and Simon said "Owner of a Lonely Heart" was the best thing Yes had ever done. Can't say I disagree.

The marvel about American music in 1984: everyone from Lionel Richie and Robert Plant and Billy Ocean to Steve Perry, Tina Turner, and The Cars were 1984'ed.

Did any artists of that general ilk (ie already established and successful mainstream radio types) make anything as demented as The Reflex at the time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdu4UOCUZc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpJ0bM5zbM

I would love to hear a band that actually sounded like Chic + Roxy + Pistols. It's a great idea for a band.

or a band that sounds like The Cars + Hall & Oates

Did any artists of that general ilk (ie already established and successful mainstream radio types) make anything as demented as The Reflex at the time?

― emmeline skankhurst (NickB), Tuesday, March 25, 2014 11:50 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsx3nGoKIN8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6mI708yWc

I remember a deluded local DJ claiming that the album title referred to the members of the band (all 7 of 'em) and their manager. Good times.

This is an interesting record.

As a kid, I was a bit crestfallen, hearing it the first time. I still remember popping it in the tape player, listening (SO) intently... thinking "Hmm... The Reflex is ok. Not as good as most of the Rio songs though" and having that pretty much be my impression of the album as a whole. It was much later on that the music started to reveal itself as a communique from inside the hysteria. It's not a comfortable or happy album at all. Even a bit. It's certainly manic and skittish at times. The breakdowns/nick moments/meandering solos after the second chorus (all great Duran songs have these) of most songs work wonders. So much about this album contains a bit of magic to me. Probably because I was 12 when it came out.

Also:
the artwork/the videos/look of the band = killer (probably my favorite Duran period, visually)
the show I saw on that US Tour was cuckoo. Haven't heard volume like that screaming crowd since. Even when the band wasn't close to coming onstage, there was this continuous low-level scream, rising and falling. I couldn't hear right for days.

7&tRT now seems of a piece with albums like The Great Escape and Skeletal Lamping (and zillions more I'm sure). The confident and ambitious, yet a bit over-cooked and somewhat less fun, follow-up to the breakthrough/canon/whatever record.

It's the Duran record I listen to most, these days.

from Marcello's post:
"How many teenagers got into Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, the Pistols, Chic, or for that matter into art, or literature, or cinema, because Duran was their first port of call?"
I'll stand up and be counted. Warhol, Haring, Fellini, Bowie, Roxy, Sylvian, Picasso... Duran put a lot out there for dopey enthusiastic curious kids like me to investigate. For that alone, I'll always love them.

Fantastic entry, Marcello.

I learned who Renoir was from the Reflex!

and TV sets!

I did not want to be around when THAT got out.

this thread made me listen to The Reflex album mix for the first time ever and.. holy shit! no idea why i've never heard the whole album before even though i love RIO and the DD singles.

Great writing as always, but there's nothing in the world that could get me to sit through this album again.

show me your secret
tell me your name
catch me with your fizzy smi-ya-ya-ya-ya

I got this for my xmas when it came out. I hadn't asked for it. I ended up liking it though.

Not heard it since mind you

ignore the lyrics, don't concentrate too hard over either one of them, but the first two singles from this album -- union of the snake and new moon on monday -- are both great, weird pop songs.

Prior to this record, they were one of my favorite bands: I had the s/t on import, Rio and all the 12"s. I even had a VHS overdub of the video laserdisc much to my mother's disapproval.

And even yet at as a very young age, I knew this record was a step down in quality compared to its predecessors. I promptly got off the bus with DD, only taking The Reflex remix away from this period (and maybe a deep cut? forgive me it's been a few decades). I remember being satisfied with my decision when that horribly corny "A View To A Kill" song came out some time later.

Was also (and I'm sure this was mentioned) the last full studio album from the classic lineup until Astronaut. And that's kinda something when you think about it: three albums, a slew of singles, and pretty much immortality.

Forgot to add that The Power Station record was far more interesting to me. So I thank DD for opening up my mind to T-Rex, Chic, Robert Palmer, etc.

"Communication" is the best Power Station song.

Great writing as always, but there's nothing in the world that could get me to sit through this album again.

I did actually sit through it while reading Marcello's piece and I wished I was hearing the record he was hearing because this ain't it.