I missed a Duran Duran design exhibition … booooooo!

It looks like I missed a great event in London last week where there was an evening exhibition of Malcolm Garrett‘s design work for Duran Duran between 1981 and 1986, with members of the band in attendance. I didn’t realise it was happening otherwise I would have put on my gladrags and done my best to blag my way in.

Duran Duran were the first band I would say I was properly a “fan” of. The first band I had a t-shirt of. And the 12″ single of New Moon on Monday was the first record where it suddenly occurred to me that instead of waiting for my uncle to buy the record and taping the extended version I could … just use my own pocket money and go and buy it myself. That was in January 1984.

In March 1984 I bought the 12″ of Depeche Mode’s People Are People, and from that point on the pattern was set. I can’t imagine there was a single week I didn’t buy a record, CD or cassette after that until I abruptly stopped collecting physical music media when I left Reckless Records just before Xmas 2000.

Poring over the design of the packaging was very much part of being a physical collector, and I love all those early Duran Duran covers, sometimes featuring the band, but often very abstract.

To accompany the evening’s exhibition, there’s a great interview with Garrett in Design Week just gone up in the last few days. You can read that here.

I did at least get to see Malcolm Garrett’s work back in 2021 when he provided the graphic backgrounds for a Heaven 17 show where they played the first two Human League albums in full.

[Heaven 17 at the Roundhouse, with graphics by Malcolm Garrett]

Read more here: Design Week – Malcolm Garrett on designing for Duran Duran