Confessions of a former Duran Duran lip-synch performer

I was a teenage Simon Le Bon.

My best friend was John Taylor. And three other buddies (including one who’s now an elected official in Thurston County) masqueraded as the rest of the Fab 5.

The year was 1984, and every Friday night that spring we owned the stage at the Capitol Theater in downtown Olympia. We perpetrated our Duran Duran sham in front of a crowd of blissfully self-deceived teenage girls as the lip-synch craze reached full-tilt.

Can you believe the real John Taylor didn’t know lip-synch tribute bands were a real thing? More on that later.

Back then, we were 17-year-old boys with too much sap in our branches, too much time on our hands (obvious Styx reference), and way too much makeup on our faces.

We watched MTV videos to get the moves just right. We danced and leaped in trenchcoats and fedoras, lit sparklers onstage in defiance of fire codes, and made puppy eyes at girls while mouthing the words to “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

If this seems like a pathetic and isolated adolescent vanity project, you’d be half right. Pathetic, yes; isolated, no. Other groups of wannabe pop stars and jukebox heroes (Bryan Adams, Rick Springfield) also pantomimed and posed on those long spring nights. But Duran Duran was always the headliner, in our minds.

Outside the theater one night, I nearly came to blows with a Hall & Oates lip syncher who said our act was lame. It wasn’t just our integrity at stake; it was Duran Duran’s integrity.

Just when our weather balloon-sized egos couldn’t take any more hot air, a local theater owner tantalized us with talk of a summer tour. He wanted to send several Olympia lip-synch bands on the road around Washington and British Columbia.

It never happened, and soon we came back down to Earth, where I’ve remained for the last 30 years.

During my recent interview with John Taylor (the real one) promoting the band’s show at the Washington State Fair, he said he wasn’t aware that teenage boys formed Duran Duran lip-synch bands back in the day.

“That’s a new one on me,” he said, laughing.

I asked him what sounded more dreadful: People pretending to perform his music in a lip-synch band, or people singing his songs badly in a karaoke bar.

Taylor paused, then gave a charitable answer, as cool as his bass line on “Come Undone.”

“Actually, neither of them sounds bad to me,” he said. “Whatever makes you happy.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 6:45 PM with the headline "Confessions of a former Duran Duran lip-synch performer."