“Great” was not an adjective widely applied to Thank You. I hope when people hear this they are going to go and buy Transformer which is the record it came from. But the commercial thing hasn’t crossed over.
“ is such a great songwriter and not a lot of people know that,” Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes had told MTV on the set of the video shoot, implying he and his bandmates were doing the rock icon a favour by putting a spotlight on his work. Fittingly the video for the Reed cover saw the band performing inside a padded cell – as if they had temporarily taken leave of their senses. Not content with defiling Public Enemy, Duran Duran applied their necromantic touch to Bob Dylan (Lay Lady Lay), Bowie and Iggy Pop (Success) and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. “It is abysmal on every level, as befits an album where you have Simon Le Bon trying to cover Public Enemy.” It's not funny for even a split second and not even the sort of thing that you would put on for a laugh if you were drunk.” Sometimes these things are redeemed by some sort of kitsch or novelty value, but it didn't even have that. “We put it on in the office to remind ourselves how bad it was. “Duran Duran was the one that united everyone in agreement,” the magazine’s then-deputy editor, Gareth Grundy said. It beat off some robust competition, including Lou Reed’s unlistenable Metal Machine Music and the onslaught of stygian horror that was Westlife’s Rat Pack album, Allow Us To Be Frank. Such was the honour bestowed on it by Q magazine in 2006 in a public poll of the biggest howlers in rock history. It was almost immediately condemned as among the worst long players of all time – a project so ill-conceived you couldn’t even savour it on the level of absurd car-crash. Thank You was released 25 years ago this month, on April 4 1995. But they did themselves no favours by choosing to follow the Wedding Album with a record consisting almost entirely of covers.
Two years later, however, with Britpop in full swing, Duran Duran were once more seen as yesterday’s poseurs – and primed for a kicking. Duran Duran weren’t just the mascara-basted tin-men of catwalk pop. Ordinary World had showcased a different side to a combo until then synonymous with yuppie-era consumerism, model girlfriends and pastel suits. That record had yielded number six hit Ordinary World – written by Le Bon as a way of processing his grief following the 1986 suicide of childhood friend David Miles. Cast into pop oblivion in the late-Eighties, Simon Le Bon and chums had bounced back, Alan Partridge-fashion, with their self-titled 1993 LP, often referred to as the Wedding Album. In 1995 no band was more ripe for a mauling than fading New Romantic pretty boys Duran Duran. “And finally, the week before the record came out, they gave two pages – two pages!!!– where they called up Led Zeppelin’s tour manager and asked him to review Thank You.” “Every week in the NME it’s been like a running gag up to the release of the album,” Duran Duran bassist John Taylor would lament shortly afterwards. Would Cole be up for reviewing the new Duran Duran LP – in particular, their cover of Zeppelin’s 1969 blues workout, Thank You? In March 1995, a journalist from the NME put in a call to Richard Cole, former tour manager for Led Zeppelin.