Songoftheday 9/11/18 - Came in from a rainy Thursday on the avenue, thought I heard you talking softly...

"Ordinary World" - Duran Duran
from the album Duran Duran (The Wedding Album) (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 18

Today's song of the day comes from British new wave group Duran Duran, who were a huge part of the second "British Invasion" that came in 1983 and dominated the early part of the decade. Scoring thirteen top-40 pop hits in the U.S., and 20 in the UK, they survived lineup shakeups and changing musical styles to last farther then most of their contemporaries in that wave (think: Culture Club). By their 1988 album Big Thing, they were officially a trio of lead singer Simon LeBon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and bass player John Taylor (guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and drummer Sterling Campbell joined the band officially during their tour), where they scored a top five pop hit in the States with "I Don't Want Your Love", followed by a top-40 single that was a #1 club hit in "All She Wants Is". After a retrospective album, they returned in 1990 with their Liberty album. In the UK, it was a moderate success, reaching the top ten (#8) with a lead single "Violence Of Summer" hitting #20. But in the States, it was a different story, with both the album (#46) and "Violence" (#64) missing the top-40. Brown would leave the other four shortly after that. They regrouped to record their next album, simply titled Duran Duran (fans would come to name it "The Wedding Album") but faced resistance from the business who normally sees the change in the decade as a way to "dump" older artists in favor of the new crowd (in fact, they were in part beneficiaries of the turnover in the early 1980s). But the bigwigs in the biz couldn't stop the buzz that happened when the first single "Ordinary World" was released to American radio, where we took to it immediately. Written by the four bandmates, the lush ballad was both recognizable as a Duran Duran song and something new and evolved...

"Ordinary World" returned Duran Duran to the pop top ten in the U.S. in February of 1993. The song spent one week at #2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart, and even was their first to cross over to the magazine's Adult Contemporary chart at #14. Internationally, the single spent five weeks at #1 in Canada, and reached the top ten in Sweden (#2), Italy (#2), Ireland (#3), New Zealand (#3), Norway (#5), the UK (#6), and France (#6). It also got to #11 in Switzerland, #15 in Austria, #16 in both Germany and the Netherlands, #18 in Australia and Finland, and #20 in Belgium.

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Here's the band appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1993...

Later that year, they did a delicate reading for the French TV show Taratata...

Duran Duran used their new returned fame to appear on MTV's Unplugged series; here is a clip of "Ordinary World" from it...

In 1996, LeBon performed with opera king Luciano Pavarotti for a benefit concert and album...

Jump ahead to 1998, where Duran Duran performed the song for the concert for the late Princess Diana...

Here they are a year later at the Hard Rock for a show...

Bringing in the new millenium in Chile...

That same year, British dance act Aurora made a HI-NRG Eurodance version of the song, with vocals from Irish singer Naimee Coleman, which actually charted a notch higher than the original in the UK (#5), while going to #37 on the American Dance Club Play chart...