Duran Duran in Milan: fans in delirium, stage cakes and chilling choirs

When you are a certain age and go to a concert, you usually don’t go to see a new band, but an artist or a band that you liked when you were high. And always usually the audience with which you find yourself sharing the audience or lawn is an over 50 audience and ninety percent male. But not last night. Last night, at the concert of Duran Duran At the Snai San Siro Hippodrome in Milan during the I-Days, women were there. And how they were.

The most determined entered at 5 pm and crushed themselves against the barriers under the stage, risking insolations, dehydration and scalds. At 7pm, while they play Les VotivesOpening Act so much young when gritty, the grassy soil of the racecourse is now full of inverting. As expected, the average age is not far from 55, with some rare exceptions (usually twenty -five girls who accompanied the mother launched at the third age at the concert), but what affects the eye is the absolute predominance of women.

With all due respect to all the efforts that the most advanced companies are making to deny the division of the world in pink and blue, it simply happens that certain phenomena likes more to men and certain other phenomena likes more to women. And the Duran Duran have always been a phenomenon that women like most, little to do. A little more than twenty -year -olds, at the beginning, were the idols of the pre -adolescent girls in all the United Kingdom in the ground. A luster later, on the thirties of the thirty, were pre -adolescent girls from all over the world. A little enviable situation, they complained to them in the interviews.

But let’s go back to Milan and 20 June 2025. Duran Duran are one of the few bands born in the 80s to never have melted and have now taken on an almost mythological status, they are in all respects i Rolling Stones of the Eighties. They go on stage that is still clear in the usual five -training formation: Simon Le Bon under the item, John Taylor on bass, Nick Rhodes to keyboards, Roger Taylor on the battery and the turnstus Dom Brown on guitar. The original guitarist, Andy Taylor, It has long been sick of cancer and has been outside the band for almost twenty years. The roar at the entrance of the band is for great occasions, but the concert starts a little quietly with the dark Night boata very old piece of the beginning, slow and mysterious. In short, you don’t dance. But it is enough that on the giant screens placed on the sides of the stage and on the central turret John Taylor is framed to start a deafening unison of female screams that suddenly upsets the hypnotic atmosphere of the song. Because, all the real experts know this, Simon Le Bon is the band’s frontman, his most famous component, but the real object of female desire (and not) has always been the very thin and tormented bass player. The female scream is repeated as soon as the first battery beats of The Wild Boys. The real concert begins here, Simon triggers a little about the sharp but gets help from the audience on the refrain. The scene is this: thousands of ladies in the sixties, shuffled by the wet heat and the working day just completed, they shake, dance with their eyes closed and play the lyrics of the song by heart. With **Hungry Like the Wolf ** The policemen in service scattered between the public begin to worry.

The Scaletta of the Duran Duran concert of 20 June at the I-Days at the Milan Hippodrome.

The concert rows away that is a wonder, perfect sound, beautiful songs, rare moments of tired (predictably in the few “new” pieces, that is, taken from the albums of the last 20 years), peaks of emotion and uncontrollable enthusiasm when the notes of historical songs resonate such as Notorious** Careless Memories**, ** Like UNONE,** The reflex, Planet Earth And Ordinary World (preceded by a speech by Simon who invites the public to reflect how people in Gaza and Ukraine, Israel and Iran, have lost the sense of living in a “ordinary world”).

The show closes with a medley of Girls on Film And Psycho Killer of Talking Heads. But at least two essential pieces are missing from the appeal and the ladies of the public, now transfigured by more than two hours of continuous exaltation, know it. When the band returns to the stage for the encore, Simon shows up a tricolor and launches himself in a experienced praise of our country. “Italy has adopted us from the beginning, more than forty years ago, here we have always passed unforgettable moments, such as the 1987 concert at the San Siro stadium, right here. On that occasion the fifty thousand spectators present sang this song in chorus and I would like the same to happen tonight », and part ** Save a prayer.** It is a very intense moment, the song is one of the most beautiful of the Eighties and is linked to the memories of anyone who has been a teenager in those years. The execution in chorus of the whole public is creepy. When the latest notes resound, someone has shiny eyes and here and there couples of sixty -year -olds as if outside the high school.

But it’s not over yet: it’s John Taylor’s sixty -fifth birthday and a cream cake appears on stage with a candle and chorus “Happy Birthday to John”. John turns off the candle and says: “This is the best city in the world and you are the best audience i’ve ever seen”, “this is the best city in the world and you are the most beautiful audience I have ever seen”. Roar and part Rio. The former girls of the eighties still have the strength to dance and scream all their enthusiasm for the six minutes of the song.

Thus ends, after two and a half hours, an unforgettable concert. Honor to the four old men brummies. Bollati as sure meteors at the beginning, relegated to the role of bands for the girls, regularly unleashed by pure and hard rockets, after 45 years they do not seem to have any intention of giving up and they still know how to do their jobs: giving emotions and good mood to fans.