Hungry Like The Wolf Hungry Like the Wolf was Duran Durans second Top Five hit in the UK and was their breakout hit in the US. It was their fifth single, released off their 1982 album, Rio, and has become one of the bands signature songs. Its popularity was boosted by MTV which played the accompanying music video in heavy rotation. UK release: 4 May, 1982 US release: 3 December, 1982 Label: Capitol/EMI Format(s): 7, 12 B-side(s): Careless Memories (live) Peak chart positions: #5 UK Singles Chart #3 US Hot 100 #5 Australia Hungry Like the Wolf was written and recorded quickly on a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1982 at the basement studios of EMIs London headquarters. That track came from fiddling with the new technology that was starting to come in, guitarist Andy Taylor recollects in an interview with Blender, referring to the rhythmic backing track they came up with by joining a Roland 808 drum machine with a sequencer and a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard.[1] 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 continues. Then we added the bass and drums, and the whole track was finished that day, including Simons vocal melody and lyric. He has a great ear for putting a melody to a bunch of chords. I didnt realize it at the time, but his inspiration for that lyric was Little Red Riding Hood! A final version was recorded in at Londons AIR Studios with producer Colin Thurston. 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 keep the demos original electronic backing track and just 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. The song was first released on 4 May, 1982 in Britain, where they had attained some earlier success. The single peaked at #5 in the UK Singles Chart on 15 May. The original version of the song was initially released in the United States on Capitols Harvest label (B-5134, backed as in the UK by a live recording of Careless Memories), but did not gain any notice until its re-release (B-5195, with a remix on side A and the Night Version on side B) on 3 December, 1982, after the remix album Carnival (September) and the re-release of the Rio album (November) , featuring all of side one remixed by David Kershenbaum, began to gain popularity among deejays. At first the song seemed to again be going nowhere as radio airplay was slim to none, but when the newly emerging MTV picked up on the video, requests began to pour into radio stations, and the song entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 25 December 1982 at number seventy-seven, eventually jumping into the Top Ten, peaking at number three on 26 March 1983, and remaining twenty-three weeks on the chart. In 2006, online voters rated Hungry Like the Wolf #2 on VH1s list of The 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s behind Bon Jovis Livin On A Prayer.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 01:33:51 +0000
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