Release, Promotion and Tour
With their Sing Blue Silver world concert tour to commence in November at the National Indoor Sports Centre in Canberra, Australia, the band departed for the sands outside Sydney to film the video for lead off single "Union of the Snake" with director Simon Milne. Twenty-four hours before the band were due to deliver the single for "Union" to EMI, Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon did an all-night session to complete the writing, recording and mixing the B-side "Secret Oktober". At the end of October, Duran Duran raised a few eyebrows by deciding to release the "Union of the Snake" video to MTV a full week before the single was released to radio, at a time when the industry feared video really might kill the radio star.
The simultaneous worldwide release of the album followed a few weeks later on 21 November. The album swiftly went to number one in the UK and achieved platinum status there only a week after its release. It also reached #8 in the US and was certified platinum by January 1984, and eventually double platinum.
The tour for the album, which played large indoor arenas and continued through the first four months of 1984, was recorded in the Russell Mulcahy-directed documentary Sing Blue Silver, the music video for "The Reflex", and the concert videos Arena (An Absurd Notion) and As The Lights Go Down. The live album Arena was also recorded during this tour.
The next single "New Moon on Monday" was released in January, accompanied by another ambitious video. In February, they appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and won two Grammy awards in the brand-new Long Form and Short Form music video categories.
A Nile Rodgers remix of "The Reflex", released in March, became the band's second number one single in the UK (four weeks at number one) and first number one in the US (two weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100). The live concert video was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Stage Performance (but lost to Van Halen's "Jump").
Read more about this topic: Seven And The Ragged Tiger
Famous quotes containing the words promotion and/or tour:
“Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Left Washington, September 6, on a tour through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia.... Absent nineteen days. Received every where heartily. The country is again one and united! I am very happy to be able to feel that the course taken has turned out so well.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)