At that time I would sneak a cassette recorder into every gig I went to, and I set the machine to record when they began to play, even though I had no idea who they were. It was quite possible a band you had never heard of yesterday could become your favorite band tomorrow.

The singer with The Police also played bass, which struck me as quite clever and quite “un-punk.” After the second number, he struck up a rapport with the audience of mostly students. A little too familiar, I remember thinking at the time, not knowing then that Sting had been a teacher and spoke “student” way better than he would ever speak “punk.”

Sting: We’ve got the Heartbreakers coming on next.

(Cheer from me and one or two others)

Sting: They can’t play, you know.

Me: Fuck off!

Sting: Who said “Fuck off”?

Me: I did. (all of this going down onto the cassette tape)

Sting: It’s true. They’re great guys but they can’t play.

Me: Fuck off, you wanker!

Sting: You’ll see. This next song is called “Fall Out”! 1 2 3 4 . . .

He was wrong about the Heartbreakers. They were awesome that night. At the BBC in 1993, filming “Ordinary World” for Top of the Pops, I was standing next to Sting watching a playback of our performance on a monitor. I thought to myself, I’ve got to tell him about that night, but before I opened my mouth he half-turned to me and said, “I wish I’d written that song.”

Let’s leave it at that then, I thought.

Seeing The Human League for the first time was another turning point. Nick and I saw them supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees and Penetration at the Mayfair Ballroom in the Bullring shopping center and watched in stunned, amazed silence. They had no drummer. No guitars.

They had three synthesizers and a drum machine instead.

So what made for a much more exciting proposition than me attempting to teach Nick guitar was for us somehow to get hold of a synthesizer and make that his instrument.

Nick’s mom, Sylvia, made a £200 purchase of the first Wasp synthesizer to arrive in Birmingham, at Woodroffe’s music store. It was the best investment she ever made.

We also bought a Kay rhythm box for fifteen pounds. It had presets such as “mambo,” “foxtrot,” “slow rock,” and “waltz.” So with Nick controlling the keys, setting the tempos, and pushing the buttons on the Kay, Steve Duffy singing and on bass, and myself on guitar, the three of us made our first recordings on a cassette tape recorder in the space above Nick’s mom’s toy store. The resulting “album” was called Dusk and Dawn. We named the band Duran Duran.

Where did the name come from? Every fan knows that. From the film Barbarella, which starred Jane Fonda as the most gorgeous astronaut detective the galaxy has ever seen, who is sent on a mission to “Find Durand-Durand and . . . preserve the security of the stars.”

So why not Durand-Durand the band? Because you can’t hear the final Ds in the film, nor the hyphen, and there was no imdb.com back then.

Poor old Duran(d), played by Milo O’Shea, had stolen the Excessive Machine—a machine guaranteed to give women extreme pleasure and more—and who could blame him? Woody Allen would parody it with his invention of the orgasmatron. Barbarella is a masterpiece of Euro-kitsch and we have been forever proud of our association with it.

We brought in Steve’s friend Simon Colley to play clarinet and occasional bass for Duran Duran’s first live appearance, in our college lecture hall on April 5, 1979, at 6:00 P.M.—practically during class time. It was performance art in a sense. I listened to a recording of it recently. It’s hard to imagine that band selling out Madison Square Garden, but as a shoegazer, noise-making concern, along the lines of My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain, we could have had an entirely different career experience.

Our friends showed up—maybe twenty or thirty in all—to support us, and we took advantage of the projection screen to show abstract slides that were meant to enhance the meaning of the songs. The Human League had done that too.

Music was moving on and we were moving with it. We were the zeitgeist. Since Shock Treatment, we had been unconsciously tapping into all the changes that were happening in the culture. We were evolving away from the three-chord angry noise. We aspired to something else, something fresh. Multimedia, fashion, dance, art. We wanted it all in the mix.

The cover of Dusk and Dawn featured a black-and-white photocopy of a New York streetscape shot on long exposure, car lights trailing up and down Park Avenue.