Rio is the quintessential Duran Duran song, launching the 1980s as a glamorous decade filled with high fashion, models, and luxurious surroundings. At least in music videos.
The song’s opening lines waste no time in bringing those very elements to the forefront of our minds with its references to suave ladies and exotic locations.
Moving on the floor now babe you’re a bird of paradise
Cherry ice cream smile I suppose it’s very nice
These lines were however inspired by a moment in Birmingham, England rather than somewhere like the Brazilian beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Simon Le Bon explained on social media, “I was in a restaurant in the middle of town and I saw this waitress literally swanning across the floor, and that was how the lyric was born.”
Rio was the band’s seventh single overall, and the fourth from the Rio album. It was first released as a single in Australia in August 1982, followed by a UK release on 1 November 1982. The song was the fourth and final single lifted from the band’s album of the same name, and becoming a Top 10 hit in both the UK, Ireland, Canada, and – eventually – the US.
The song contains some interesting wordplay in the lyrics. Rio is continually sung as if it’s a girl’s name, and the word conjures images of the popular and glamorous Brazilian city, which goes with the exotic image the band was cultivating. The lyrics clearly state, however, “from mountains in the North down to the Rio Grande,” which is the span of America. The Rio Grande River separates the US from Mexico.
On the VH1 show True Spin, the band explained this reference: Rio is a metaphor for America, and the song expressed their desire to succeed there. Which they did, after Hungry Like the Wolf peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1983.
I’ve seen you on the beach and I’ve seen you on TV
Two of a billion stars it means so much to me
Like a birthday or a pretty view
But then I’m sure that you know it’s just for you
Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand
Just like that river twisting through a dusty land
And when she shines she really shows you all she can
Oh Rio, Rio dance across the Rio Grande
“Rio was one the first songs that we would write in the studio,” said John Taylor in a 2021 YouTube video. “We’d not played the song live before we got to record it. It would be the culmination of a lot of ideas that had been lurking in our collective conscious for some time.”
Some of those ideas that John is referring to already existed in two earlier songs. Rio’s verses were adapted from an early Duran Duran song called See Me, Repeat Me. The same chords are used, but they were tightened up considerably for Rio by a band with a lot more experience.
The chorus, however, was inspired by the song Stevie’s Radio Station by the band TV Eye, fronted by Andy Wickett, who briefly had been the frontman for Duran Duran as well, prior to Simon Le Bon’s tenure. According to the Duran Duran Wiki, Wickett had initially performed the song with Duran Duran. As it was a particular favourite of Nick and John, they continued to perform it for a while after he left, changing “Stevie” to “Rio”.
The resulting song at one point had the title Amy A-Go-Go. “I came up with the title Rio,” said Roger Taylor, “which I thought sort of said it all in kind of a Roxy Music cool sort of way.”
“We were like, ‘Yeah!’ It absolutely, does,” said Simon in reference to Roger’s suggestion on the UK TV show Songbook. “And we’d been to America and it had a lot of references to America in it. And I’d seen this girl working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. And I just started writing on the back of a napkin about how she was, and that’s what turned into the verse.”
The song begins with a peculiar sound, which was the result of just trying things out and experimenting. “I’d been fiddling around with the grand piano at AIR studios,” said Nick Rhodes in the Classic Albums documentary. “I actually opened up the top of it and I was fiddling with the strings inside. What I actually did was that I got some metal rods, and I threw them onto the strings of the piano. And they bounced around and made this strange noise. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but there was something interesting about it and I said to Colin Thurston: ‘Can we reverse that tape?’ Because at that time we were just discovering things like tape loops and reversing and slowing things down or speeding things up… And he said, ‘Sure!’ And we reversed the sound, and what we got was the very intro of Rio.”
The sound of the girl laughing in the bridge after the second chorus was also added by happy accident. She was the girlfriend of Nick Rhodes.
A few studio tricks were also employed to get the distinctive synthesizer pattern featured in the song. The synthesizer was hooked up to an arpeggiator, which is a tool that creates an arpeggio effect by automatically stepping through a sequence of notes. It was once rumoured that the synthesiser used to achieve this was a Roland Jupiter-8. However, Rhodes has confirmed that it actually is a Roland Jupiter-4, using the random mode on the arpeggiator with a C minor chord.
What most people quickly pick up on, is the groove of the song as the rhythm section of John and Roger establish a very infectious beat and bass line. The fact that the band’s rhythm section ended up defining the songs to such a degree set them apart from their contemporaries.
“That was really the beginning of the song, that groove,” says John in the Classic Albums documentary. “Roger started playing a groove with that and we sort of built the song around that line. So we started to think in terms of chords.” He also told the A.V. Club that for the song’s complicated arrangement, which “shifts gears several times,” the band were thinking along the lines of Sly & the Family Stone’s 1969 tune I Wanna Take You Higher.
“For Roger and I,” said John Taylor in a 2021 YouTube video, “it was a chance to reference so many of the great rhythm sections that we’d been listening to and that had been inspiring us. George Murray and Dennis Davies – Bowie’s rhythm section. John Gustavsson and Paul Thompson – the great Roxy Music rhythm section. Mick and Steve from Japan, of course. Euro-disco and even Motown. But what would come out at the other end would be quintessential Duran Duran.”
John Taylor’s bass lines went a long way towards defining the Duran Duran sound. People will often talk about a “Duranie bass line” as a reference to the sound of syncopated bass playing – i.e. playing a bass line off-beat or with rhythmic accents where they wouldn’t normally occur, creating a bubbly, playful, and energetic groove often connected with dance music. John confirms a definite focus on the syncopated bass playing approach by the time they recorded the Rio album: “I touched on syncopation in some of our earlier songs, but by the time we did Rio, I was obsessed with it.”
The tenor saxophone solo was performed by Andy Hamilton, who has also worked with Wham! and Elton John amongst others.
The singles, album, and the tour broke the band on the world stage, bringing them into pop’s elite division. They were still grounded and not tired of each other, which was illustrated by the fact that most of them went on a vacation together.
John Taylor smiles at the novelty of it, but confirms: “When we were done touring the Rio album, we all took a vacation together. And it was just like a scene from Help! [Beatles movie from 1965] You know, where the Beatles all get out of the car and they all go into four separate doors, but actually it’s all one house that they’re living in. And we all took a vacation together. We went to Antigua – well, the four of us. Andy didn’t come. We all went – we took our girlfriends. And we all took beach houses together, you know. So every morning, we’d come out with our towels. ‘Morning!’ ‘Morning!’ You know… very Monty Python. Haha!”
It is impossible to discuss the Rio song without also looking at the iconic music video. The decision to film it was taken by the band’s management after the tour, while the band were vacationing in Antigua. That was not a problem – they sent down Andy and shot the video there, on location.
“We got a phone call,” remembers John. “They said, ‘Guys, don’t leave. We’re coming out with Russell [Mulcahy, video director] and a crew, we’re going to make a video! And Andy’s coming!’”
The video did a great deal to frame the image of Duran Duran as international superstars. The crew arrived with a selection of expensive suits and a yacht, which the band was shot riding around in along the Antigua coastline. The video added the female character Rio, who appears as an exotic-looking woman (sometimes wearing body paint) that is the object of their affections. The colourful video stood out on MTV, which didn’t have many videos at the time and played it often.
Hey now woo look at that did she nearly run you down
At the end of the drive the lawmen arrive
You make me feel alive, alive alive
I’ll take my chance cause luck is on my side or something
I know what you’re thinking I tell you something I know what you’re thinking
The clip was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who did most of the band’s videos around this time. It is rumoured that one of their managers had pushed for a storyline which featured the band yachting in Antigua because he fancied doing this himself, and along he came for the video shoot and used the yacht afterwards.
Nick Rhodes recalled the filming of the song’s video to Observer Music Monthly November 2008: “We were on holiday in Antigua, staying next to each other, like the Monkees. We were rung up and told, ‘Stay there, we’re bringing a film crew.’ I only like boats when they’re tied up, and you can have a cocktail without spilling it. We were initially going to shoot the video for Rio indoors and we’d had Antony Price make these beautiful suits for us. I remember thinking: ‘Oh my God, that sea water, it’s going to ruin all this silk.’ With a sail boat, you’re off into the distance and it takes a while to turn round. I was glad to get off. Simon Le Bon loved it, climbing as far as he possibly could along the prow. He always had an action man side.”
Rhodes was reportedly dreadfully seasick during the filming, but did a good job of hanging on and – for the most part – avoiding trouble.
The video features several short segments where various band members trying to live out their assorted daydreams, only to be teased, tormented, and made fools of by the body-painted vixen Rio.
There was a bit of drama when John Taylor threw Andy Taylor off the side, and there was a real moment of horror later when the director Russell Mulcahy was filming separately with Reema (the artist name of the girl in the video), and a gust of wind shattered a giant mirror next to her. She only had a couple of scratches.
Reema was said to be a member of the Models One agency of half English/half Lebanese origin. Her true name was lost, and the band was not able to keep in contact with her.
The yacht in the video is a 1936 wooden Fife yacht called Eilean. Regularly confused with Simon Le Bon’s former yacht Drum, Eilean fell into a serious state of neglect after the video was shot. She was purchased by an Italian watch company, who completed a 2½ restoration and relaunched her in 2009.
The band received some criticism that the video “sold a lifestyle”. Simon Le Bon addressed this when it came up in an interview with Q magazine in February 2008, saying “No! Rio wasn’t a lifestyle, it was total fantasy. You don’t wear a silk Anthony Price suit on a boat with some painted chick running around. It was a comedy video. None of us had boats. It was a greedy reaction to the hard times that had gone before.”
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