March 29, 2005 – CSU Convocation Center – Cleveland, Ohio
I was an ’80s kid in every sense of the word. I had an original Walkman clipped to my jeans pocket and a stack of Garbage Pail Kids held together with a rubber band. My toy box was filled with Masters of the Universe, Transformers, and G.I. Joe. The television was always on—always tuned to MTV. Even when no one was watching, it stayed on in the background, filling the house with the sound of guitars, synthesizers, and the restless pulse of youth.
That’s how I grew up—surrounded by sound. The Police, Michael Jackson, the Eurythmics, Madonna, Prince. But the band that spoke to me the most was Duran Duran. When MTV first began, most videos were little more than concert clips. Bands mimed their way through performances on bare stages, one after another. Then Rio came out, and suddenly everything changed. Duran Duran made videos that felt like movies—sunlight reflecting off the ocean, silk shirts, champagne glasses, and the glimmer of something larger than life. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was like watching Indiana Jones through a dream filter.
For kids like me, growing up in the shadow of layoffs from Ford and the cold war, those videos were an escape hatch. They were color and motion in a decade that often felt gray. Watching Simon Le Bon swing from a vine or race through some tropical street made the world seem bigger than our small-town worries. You couldn’t stay gloomy while “The Reflex” blared through the speakers.
By 1985, though, the magic fractured. The band took a break, and for the original five—Simon, Nick, Roger, Andy, and John—that pause stretched into nearly twenty years. When word came in 2001 that they were back together, it felt like time had folded in on itself. They released Astronaut a few years later, and the reunion tour was announced. I’d seen them perform over the years, but never all five together. I was planning to go to the Pittsburgh show when Aunt Theresa called.
“If you drive me to Cleveland,” she said, “I’ll get us tickets.”
That was all I needed to hear.
As always, we drove to Wytheville, Virginia, to pick up Aunt Theresa and my cousin Matthew. It was our ritual. Matthew stayed at the farm with my parents while Aunt Theresa and I continued north toward Cleveland. The drive felt charged with anticipation—like revisiting a piece of youth you thought was gone forever.
Our seats were perfect. The lights dimmed, and one by one the band walked onto the stage, each stepping into his place beneath a halo of light. When they launched into “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise,” the arena erupted. But the real moment came just after that. Simon grinned, leaned into the mic, and asked, “Is anybody hungry?” Then came that familiar laugh—the one that opens “Hungry Like the Wolf”—and Andy’s guitar tore through the air. The crowd lost its mind.
The rest of the night was a blur of sound and light. They mixed new songs with old hits, keeping the energy high. Then came “Ordinary World.” The first notes quieted the room. It’s a song that’s always stayed with me.
What many people don’t realize is that Ordinary World was the song that resurrected Duran Duran’s career. In 1990, they released Liberty, an album that struggled to find its footing. The sound of popular music was shifting—grunge was emerging, and the industry seemed eager to leave the ’80s behind. The album flopped, and soon the band found themselves without a record label. With little money and no corporate support, they retreated to guitarist Warren Cuccurullo’s home studio and began working independently on what would become The Wedding Album. Released in 1993, it marked a rebirth. The first single, “Ordinary World,” was a worldwide hit—their biggest in years. It put them back on the map and saved them from the fate that had swallowed so many other ’80s bands.
But beyond its success, “Ordinary World” carried a deeper story. It was written in the wake of loss. In the mid-’80s, Simon Le Bon had lost a close friend and first explored that grief in “Do You Believe in Shame” from 1988’s Big Thing—a quiet meditation on death, guilt, and belief. “Ordinary World” was its continuation: a song about learning to live again after loss. A few years later came “Out of My Mind,” from the 1997 album Medazzaland, the final piece of the trilogy—a song about memory and the haunting that remains. Together, they form a portrait of sorrow, acceptance, and healing.
Before leaving for Cleveland, my mom handed me her cell phone. “Just in case,” she said. She loved “Ordinary World.” So when the band played it that night, I called her and held the phone toward the stage so she could hear. For a moment, the distance between us dissolved into melody. When the song ended, she said, “Thank you. I love you.” I told her I loved her too, and then I just stood there, letting the last notes fade.
After three encores, the concert ended, but neither of us was ready for silence. Aunt Theresa and I talked the whole way back to the farm—about the music, the memories, the feeling of being there. But what stayed with me wasn’t the spectacle or the sound. It was that small, quiet act—holding up the phone so my mom could share the song with me. That’s the moment I carried home.
Grief has a way of circling back when you least expect it. It sneaks into ordinary days and tugs at the places you thought had healed. My faith steadies me in those moments, gives me something solid to hold. But when I need a human reminder—something that captures both the ache and the beauty of surviving—I listen to “Ordinary World.” Its words still reach me, the way they did that night in Cleveland:
But I won’t cry for yesterday, there’s an ordinary world Somehow I have to find And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world I will learn to survive.
