Wow, pop music used to be exciting. "The Reflex" – a song of quite rude imagination – hypnotises the charts for what seems a whole school term and Duran Duran are the exotic mirror image of film star pop sex. Our young eyes are pumped to burst with tousled hair, chiselled jaws, the dashing lunacy of the New Romantics and the fearful unknown pleasures of drugs.
Twenty years on and things aren't quite as simple as they used to be. However, to bastardise a phrase from one rather hyped current cultural gunslinger – LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy – there is more to the reunion of Duran Duran than simply borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s.
Of course, any visit to the Wembley Arena hell-hole is like taking a seat below a blind dentist with an aggressive hand spasm. Equally, the spectre of the now reunited original five-strong line-up standing upfront, triumphant, like, er, gods, before a note is even played, has to be swallowed with a stiff glass of irony.
But it soon becomes obvious that this is a resurrection Duran Duran have no plans to delay. Svelte – or so it seems from half a mile away – sharply dressed and ready to blow, it's only guitarist Andy Taylor who appears to have truly suffered in the intervening years. However, it seems unlikely any shrinking of his frame can be blamed on rock'n'roll excess.
Crucially, there are an utterly magnificent spell of songs here this evening that put the current charts and imagination of the head honchos pulling the strings to damning shame. This is pop music elevated way beyond the skeletal nature of the form by many things, perhaps most notably the pioneering electro flesh of Nick Rhodes, an androgynous robot of still metallic proportions.
The pulsing bass-chase of "Planet Earth", the rolls of film pouring from the speakers before the raffish porn-sleaze of "Girls On Film", the extravagant breakdown in "The Reflex", the tribal, nihilistic glory of "Wild Boys", "View To A Kill"'s invitation to "dance into the fire". All rule. And the choruses, oh so many drop-dead choruses, sprinkled freely like cocaine on cornflakes.
Of course, there are problems. Namely, the torrent of nonsense that constitute Simon Le Bon's lyrical mind – "you're about as easy as a nuclear war" anyone? – the almost universal disaster of the majority of the band's new material and their spectacularly rubbish cover of "White Lines". It also seems mobile phones have replaced lighters as the accessory du jour for aircraft hanger gigs, with fans blessing the babysitter at home with a 1-D screech of a towering – if your, like, at the gig - "Ordinary World".
Whatever. Duran Duran also played "Rio", "Notorious", "Is There Something I Should Know" and "Hungry Like A Wolf". Wow, pop music used to be exciting.
