The original track is my all-time favorite, and the final song on what has become my favorite album of all time. Among any appreciators of Duran Duran, the Arcadia project is perhaps a high water mark, but surely a sign of 80s excess to anyone less sympathetic to their efforts.
“Wild Boys” had landed just as I was trying to come to terms with my grandfather’s suicide in October of 1984. The song had eventually put me on the path of discovering William S. Burroughs. More importantly, it became a bridge between the pop-centered days of my life before and the more angered music of the aftermath. Indeed, I was resentful of the way my life had changed and of all the acts in the world, DD’s heavy synth drums and touches of distorted guitar were signals to a fork in the road for me. That was October/November of 1984.
In November 18, 1985, the Duran Duran side project Arcadia released their singular album, So Red the Rose. A year later, I had been bootstrapping myself into a greater awareness of music and it landed at a perfect time. It was an introduction to art rock, and it would provide me branches into additional acts to discover. This is somewhat revealed in the collaborators who appear on the album (Grace Jones, David Gilmour, Carlos Alomar, Andy Mackay, Sting, Mark Egan and Masami Tsuchiya).
Nestled away at the very end of the album, “Lady Ice” starts as a sleepy ambient affair, building into an ominous mood, only to have the proper song elegantly arrive with a flourish of cymbals. I loved how cinematic it sounded, like you could hear a movie that wasn’t there. My creative mind was engaged in the ambiguity and would go to work playing visuals as it scoured the layers of sound that might hide clues to what is happening. And like so much of synth-driven music in the 80s, particularly with the innovative sampling that was the bedrock of the track, it sounds like nothing else. Truly. I have been looking for the entirety of my life since I heard that track for things that sound akin, and while the research bore fantastic discoveries of their own, nothing hit me quite the same way.
You could rightly point to this song as a crucial origin point for much (though clearly not all) of my musical aesthetic and sound, and while I doubt anyone could quite make out how, my fine art sensibilities too. I think this cover is merely the eventuality of most of the musical exploration that the album and song inspired now a full 40 years on.
Certainly there have been many attempts and false starts at this track over the years, dating back to even before I delivered Waste Land. I started another take as the writing for Of the Gods started in earnestness, circa ’04-’08. None of those efforts bore fruit I could be satisfied with, though the piano part you hear in this version was initially recorded around 2005, around the time that I was working on “decursor.” Playing piano was a therapy of sorts on that sobriety path.
While there are questions I have about where I ended up with it, I think most of them are born out of an impulse to perfectly reproduce every nuance of the original. And as ever, you have to let derivative works diverge from their origin and go someplace unique if they’re to have anything new to contribute. I hope I have adequately paid tribute to the song, while also fantasizing about it being mine for a minute (or eight).