Watch Duran Duran Play “Save a Prayer” on “Austin City Limits”
Duran Duran turned “Save a Prayer” into an atmospheric synth-pop chant for their episode of Austin city limits. The performance, available below in an exclusive video, highlights the band’s hour-long appearance in Season 47.
True to the version from their hit 1982 LP, Rio, the track shimmers with Nick Rhodes’ synthesizers and Simon Le Bon’s sweet croon, turning into a grating guitar solo in the back half. In the backing vocals, Le Bon relies on the audience, his face illuminated by the flashlights of cell phones.
The episode airs Jan. 22 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS, with online streaming beginning the following day at 10 a.m. ET. Each episode of Season 47 will be filmed in front of a limited live audience at ACL’s home studio in Austin.
“Save a Prayer” closes out the 10-track set, which mixes classic cuts (“Girls on Film,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Ordinary World”) with tracks from their latest LP, 2021 Future Past (“Birthday”, “Invisible”, “Tonight United”). The season kicked off on January 15 with St. Vincent and Joy Oladokun, and the final episode arrives on February 12 with the best of Nanci Griffith.
Duran Duran returned to full live gigs in September 2021, playing their first since Autumn 2019 in their hometown of Birmingham, England. “I didn’t realize how much I missed playing those songs until he got to play them with an amazing audience like you guys,” Le Bon said during the show. “Let’s celebrate!”
The following month, drummer Roger Taylor revealed that the band were in the early stages of work on a biopic. “It’s something that’s under discussion,” he told the Sun. “It is being discussed and we have come up with different scenarios and ideas. We haven’t quite chosen the right one yet. But there are things in development so we’ll see where they go. We would like to do something like that and I think something will happen in the next few years.
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