Songoftheday 10/21/12 - Dark in the city night is a wire, steam in the subway earth is afire...

Duran Duran - "Hungry Like The Wolf"
from the album Rio (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (three weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 16

Today's Song of the Day is the American breakthrough hit for British New Romantics Duran Duran, who named themselves after a character in the Jane Fonda campy scifi flick Barbarella. The band came together under Nick Rhodes and John Taylor at the tail-end of the 70s. Stephen Duffy was the original lead singer, but was replaced eventually by Simon Le Bon in 1980. A year later, they released their self-titled debut album, and their first single "Planet Earth" made the top-20 in Britain, the #8 position on the Australian pop chart, and the top-30 of the US dance chart (as a double-sided single with "Girls On Film"). That latter song would become a top-5 hit in the UK.

For their second album, the band, now a fivesome with Le Bon, Taylor, and Rhodes joined by Andy and Roger Taylor (none of the Taylors are related), expanded their scope, with an emphasis on video, which came just at the right time when MTV was getting a massive youth audience. With Rio, they filmed videos for all the tracks on the album, and used exotic tropical locations to set them apart from the usual "band in the studio" clips. The album was originally released in May of 1982, but it wasn't until the dance mixes done by David Kershenbaum and the band's appearance on Dick Clark's New Year's Eve show that the first US single, "Hungry Like The Wolf", caught fire in the States.Also helping is the iconic video filmed in Sri Lanka, with the band running through the jungle and wetlands (and getting guitarist Andy Taylor seriously ill), that MTV played non-stop.

"Hungry Like The Wolf" became the first of many top-10 hits for the band, and the one-two punch of them with Culture Club heralded the second "British Invasion" was in full swing. And Duran Duran was the first of these to have a huge teen fangirl following (my sister among them). The song also made the top-40 on the club chart, and #5 in the UK. And signalling a change in rock music, "Hungry Like The Wolf" topped the American rock radio chart for three weeks.

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In 1996, the comic alt-rock band Bloodhound Gang interpolated the song on their "Your Only Friends Are Make Believe"...