Video Killed the Radio Star :: Duran Duran :: New Moon on Monday

If one band was chosen to represent my teenage years it would be, without a doubt, Duran Duran. They were my first musical crushes, my first band obsession and my first encounter with what it is like to be a all-out, complete and total fan. I kept oversized photo albums full of magazine clippings of the band, I bought every album and single and 12″ remix they released, I hung posters and pin-ups on my wall, closet, back of my door and even tacked up on my ceiling. I wrote what would later be coined as fan-fiction about my friends and I, and the band, usually involving us being paired up romantically with our favorite band member. I was what was termed a Duranie, and my love for them was so deep and true and loud that my Mother still refers to them as “my boys” all these years later.

Of all their albums, Seven and the Ragged Tiger seemed to be the dearest to my musical, fan-girl heart. To me, there was something poetic and magical to the collection of songs on the album that I was completely transfixed and enamored with. And honestly, listening to songs like New Moon on Monday, I can still see and hear what I felt back then, these are poetic and magical songs.

The video to New Moon on Monday is still one of my all-time favorite music videos. I loved the feeling of intrigue presented, the start of it all in a french theatre reminiscent of the Moulin Rouge cabaret era of Paris, or of the Paris I imagined in my own crafted vampire stories, all rife with old theaters, stage make-up, dark alleys, and secrets traded in dark ends of a city, lit only by the night’s moonglow. I would watch this video and imagine myself the girl in black on the motorcycle who comes to take Simon off into the night’s escape, I wrote her in my mind as a spy who had been caught off-guard by her feelings for the one she was supposed to capture, falling in love in the midst of some kind of political uprising, falling in love with the perceived enemy (oh how attracted adolescent hearts are to unrequited, starcrossed love stories).

I wanted to hide in the alleys and run through the streets with the band so badly. It was a fantastic escapism dream that seemed so much more preferable to the sterile halls of parochial school, and the abusive home I came back to each day. I wanted to live an adventurous life, and I wanted to escape my own.

“Breaking away with the best of both worlds,
a smile that you can’t disguise.
Every minute I keep finding clues that you leave behind.
Save me from these reminders,
as if I’d forget tonight.
This time La Luna.”

New Moon on Monday :: Duran Duran