Arena

Product Information

Other criticism arose from the omission of some of the band's biggest songs like " The Reflex", " Girls on Film" and " Rio". Arena deserves a special place among your collection of live albums, be they the 50 greatest ever or not. You don’t lose anything with these versions, but you do gain quite a bit more energy and a new sense of life that has been breathed into these songs.

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. But Le Bon Bon almost always had you thinking it all meant something because he put such emotion into his singing. There are few things as quintessentially American as thinking you are better than most of your fellow Americans, most of whom are thinking the same thing about you. The concert film Arena (An Absurd Notion) on long form VHS was quickly followed by The Making of Arena.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. Sure, Arena is no Live at Leeds or Made in Japan or anything, but I can think of a couple of albums they could drop from that list and at least get Arena in at number 50 or maybe even 49.

I get a similar feeling from a late song like All You Need Is Now – the section where Le Bon sings ‘And you sway in the moon the way you did when you were younger’ still takes me to a rare place of bittersweet emotion, even if the overall production already feels dated. The album was eventually re-issued on 1 June 2004 and included two bonus tracks " Girls on Film" and " Rio". Take “ The 100 Greatest Prog Artists of All Time ” (as though there had actually been 100 prog artists worth mentioning). I bet even he couldn’t tell you what a single song on the album is about, none of them are about anything really, they are just a bunch of random lines the band thought sounded cool. Rio may be an 80s touchstone, after all, but truth is, when I am I the mood for some Double Duran, I will reach for Arena every time.I don’t think I even realized back then it was a live album, but I really loved it – great song after great song.

It was meant to be a teaser for a full-length feature film of the same name, based on the 1971 novel The Wild Boys: A Book Of The Dead by William S. I mean really, the guy puts an incredible amount of emotion into the most incredibly meaningless lyrics you could ever hope to hear. There’s more kick to the instrumental parts too, and you still have all the assorted sounds that pop in and out (I have no doubt were prerecorded). The Arena video also featured the extended video for " The Wild Boys", as directed by Russell Mulcahy. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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”?