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. 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. The guy had an enormous amount of talent to be able to take such lyrical gobbledygook and sing about it like his heart was breaking. I can live without “The Reflex”, I can live without “New Moon on Monday”, but the few Duran Duran songs I can’t live without are all here (except “Rio”, but the 2004 remastered version with the bonus tracks fixed that): “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” and “The Seventh Stranger” and “The Chauffeur”, and then a bunch of the kind of interchangeable songs where it hardly matters which songs they picked.

Other criticism arose from the omission of some of the band's biggest songs like " The Reflex", " Girls on Film" and " Rio". 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. Sure, their keyboard driven backdrops seem less futuristic now than they did in the early 80s, but I say they still have a unique sound all these years later, a kind of Brian Eno-ish approach more compatible with mass consumption than anything Eno himself ever did. The album featured most of the band's big hits in a live environment, as well as some album tracks from Rio ( 1982) and Seven and the Ragged Tiger ( 1983), and a new studio track " The Wild Boys" produced by Nile Rodgers, who had previously remixed the single " The Reflex". Some people think that means it lacks the atmosphere of a live album, but I beg to differ, it just means I don’t have to hear a bunch of idiots whistling while I am listening to the music.The intro to “The Seventh Stranger” is like going over a musical waterfall and dropping into an enchanted, sumptuously extravagant synthesizer lagoon.

Sure, some of it was sequencers rather than live musicianship, but all the same they were masters of musical atmosphere in their idiom. Union of the Snake" • " New Moon on Monday" • " The Reflex" • " The Wild Boys" • " A View to a Kill" • " Notorious" • " Skin Trade" • " Meet El Presidente" • " I Don't Want Your Love" • " All She Wants Is" • " Do You Believe in Shame? 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.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. And what, you may be wondering, is the appeal of what was probably intended to be little more than the kind of contractually obligated live release most bands are forced to put out by the record company after a few studio albums?

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. 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. Once I knew she’d slipped in, I used my legitimate ticket to get in and we joined some really nice people on the lawn who kind enough to let a couple of latecomers crowd in.

And I mean, yeah, everybody and their brother bought a copy of Frampton Comes Alive in 1976, but does it really belong on a list of the 50 greatest live albums ever? But one fantastic live album that isn’t included in the list – and to be honest probably shouldn’t be – is Duran Duran’s Arena. Do I really care that wild boys never lose it, never chose this way, never close your eyes but always shine? 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.