The Greatest Songs Ever! Hungry Like the Wolf

“THANK GOD for MTV!” John Taylor, bassist and heartthrob-in-chief of the 1980s hit machine Duran Duran, summed up the sentiments of his bandmates with his exclamation. The five carefully coiffed New Romantic clotheshorses had already charted high in the U.K., Australia and all points east, but their second album, Rio, spent most of 1982 gathering dust in record stores across America. Before MTV went live in August 1981, a hit single’s success had depended on radio airplay.

But the young music-video cable network was gaining strength, and when it placed the video for Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” into heavy rotation in 1982, the single jumped onto the charts. Its success was proof: Suddenly, MTV was the kingmaker.

“The radio stations had very strict programs of REO Speedwagon, the Doors and Led Zeppelin, and the television shows didn’t want to show us either,” vocalist Simon Le Bon has said. “MTV had a more open mind, and they wanted to show new bands.”

“Wolf” was written and recorded on a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1982 at the basement studios of EMI’s London headquarters. “That track came from fiddling with the new technology that was starting to come in,” guitarist Andy Taylor remembers. What Taylor calls “that ticka-ticka rhythmic backing” was a happy accident caused by linking a Roland 808 drum machine with a sequencer and a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard.

“As soon as we heard that, we knew we had something, and I started working out a Marc Bolan- ish guitar part, a very Marshall-sounding Les Paul guitar lick, to go on top of it,” Taylor says. “Then we added the bass and drums, and the whole track was finished that day, including Simon’s vocal melody and lyric. He has a great ear for putting a melody to a bunch of chords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but his inspiration for that lyric was Little Red Riding Hood!”

Duran Duran recorded a final version of the track at London’s AIR Studios with producer Colin Thurston, the early-’80s hitmaker behind Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” “He was a great organizer and arranger,” Taylor remembers. “We gave him far more ideas and music than the track actually needed, and he was important in the process of whittling them down to the essential elements.” Thurston and the band decided to preserve the demo’s original electronic backing track and merely rerecord the other instruments and vocals. “AIR was a big acoustic room with a very warm sound, which gave the track a distinctive sound,” Taylor says.

No sooner was the song in the can than the band met with video director Russell Mulcahy, describing visions of a video with jungles, temples and exotic women with lethal fingernails. Mulcahy, fresh from a visit to Sri Lanka, said he knew of the perfect location, and the band made a stopover there in April, en route to a scheduled Australian tour.

The image of a band working cohesively and efficiently now stands at odds with gossip published recently in the British music magazine Q about the Durans’ behavior while shooting the video. Visiting photographers, Q reported, were “alarmed by how divorced from reality the band had become. Living in individual beach houses on different corners of the island, they were dragged together for photo shoots, strung out on cocaine and losing their grip.”

Still, the video would become the most significant element in launching Duran Duran in America. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was released in Britain in May 1982 and quickly went Top 5, but the band, despite several international hits, had found the U.S. remarkably resistant to their charms. They tapped the first chink in America’s armor in September 1982 with the release of Carnival, a U.S. mini-album of remixes by David Kershenbaum. “David really had that attention to detail that gave the tracks that FM smoothness –made them bigger, more sonically detailed,” Taylor says.

The EP stalled at number 98, but that was enough to give the band a radio toehold until MTV rescued “Hungry Like the Wolf” and gave the song its legs. “MTV got so many requests that people started requesting it on the radio,” says Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran’s keyboardist. “So it sort of quickly turned around.”

But the network’s support was a double-edged sword: Duran Duran quickly became so closely identified with MTV that their abilities as pop craftsmen were often overlooked, if not openly derided. “We wrote songs that were massively catchy,” an annoyed Le Bon has argued. “I challenge anybody to deny that. I mean, don’t tell me that ’Hungry Like the Wolf’ isn’t catchy!”

On January 22, 1983, “Hungry Like the Wolf” peaked at number 3 in the U.S. After that, Duran Duran’s status as ’80s superstars was never in doubt.

“We were knocked out at the time, but we had no idea at all that the song would still be around 20 years later,” Taylor says. “It’s been in movies, it’s been covered by young bands like Less Than Jake and Reel Big Fish, and even Courtney Love’s had a go at it. There’s one thing we haven’t done with it, though –Burger King has been at us to use it for a commercial ever since it came out. We’ve spent 20 years telling them to fuck off!”