Arena

Product Information

Take “ The 100 Greatest Prog Artists of All Time ” (as though there had actually been 100 prog artists worth mentioning). It wasn’t the last time I snuck her into a concert actually – I took her to listen to Bob Dylan outside a different venue a couple of years later, and once security took down the barricades before the encore we slipped in to see His Bobness sing “All Along the Watchtower” (big mistake taking her to this one – a Bob Dylan concert is not something a pre-teen girl finds impressive, she kept begging to go home. Then one day many years later I looked up the All Music Guide review by that busy guy Mr Erlewine and was surprised to find he had awarded a mere two stars out of five. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

But then when you have a countryful of people taught almost from the moment of conception that they are part of the specialest, most amazingest, most freedom-and-democracy lovingest God-blessed sun-kissed country from sea to shining sea there ever was or ever will be, well, frankly, that is going to do some really weird things to your national psyche.They brought a color and vibrancy to the Top 40 with their keyboard textures that had been presaged by David Bowie on Low and Heroes, one that pop radio wasn’t quite ready for in 1977 and 1978 but was well primed for by the 80s.

The Arena video also featured the extended video for " The Wild Boys", as directed by Russell Mulcahy.

The concert film Arena (An Absurd Notion) on long form VHS was quickly followed by The Making of Arena. It was released in 1984 and in this version there is the addition of 2 bonuses that maintains the optimum level of the album. Popular though they may have been in their prime, but they were pretty formulaic in the early 80s, and hearing any random Duran Duran song was hardly different than hearing any other. To cap off the band's highly successful 1983/1984 Sing Blue Silver World Tour, EMI released a live album, which according to the sleeve was "Recorded Around The World 1984". So when I see a link for an article on “ The 50 Greatest Live Albums Ever”, do I really have time to read about 50 live albums that may or may not be deserving of the appellation of “greatest ever”?

Which is why I am not surprised at the quality of the musicianship on Arena, although there’s not a snowball’s chance in Satan’s front yard that there weren’t some fixes in the studio (I always thought the two bonus tracks tacked on to the 2004 remaster sounded a lot rougher than the tracks on the original album, which I take to mean they didn’t get the same amount of “fixing” the ones that made the cut did). For some reason I guess I thought Duran Duran concerts were mostly pre-recorded, not sure why I thought that, guess it was the obsession with sequencers in the early 80s that seemed to obviate the need for actual musicianship for many bands. Personally, I like the track list far better than the greatest hits compilation Decade they released, well, at the end of the decade. And as far as the American charts went, that was mostly that (although I will always maintain that “Electric Barbarella” from Medazzaland may just be their finest song ever, and for a fleeting moment recaptured that early 80s magic in a way no band has since). He almost has me caring that “the union of the snake is on the climb” with the amount of passion he puts into singing about it.This is a really decent album, and whilst it claims to be a 'live' album, it seems to have been produced to a level that makes it closer to a studio album, albeit with more atmosphere and depth.