Duran Duran gig review: The band prove they have the wind in their sails again in Birmingham

Duran Duran                                                                     O2 Institute, Birmingham 

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Afterlight                                         Afterlight                                       Out October 1

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It is 40 years since Duran Duran arrived in the top ten with Girls On Film. A band remembered for cavorting on a yacht have the wind in their sails again. A new album is coming on October 22, they’re playing Hyde Park next summer and they have over half a million followers on Instagram, a medium that seems made for them – or at least for John Taylor’s cheekbones.

Once the world’s most adored bass player, Taylor is still making women swoon at 61. Next to him, singer Simon Le Bon reassures the men by proving that you can be a portly dad-dancer in skinny jeans and still be a pop star.

Duran are back home in Birmingham to warm up for the Isle of Wight Festival, which they headline tonight. This audience is made up of devoted Durannies. A menacing presence in the days when I manned the letters page at Smash Hits, they are now affable middle-aged women.

The new album, featuring Graham Coxon from Blur, is called Future Past, so Duran are not all about nostalgia. They play three solid new songs, but it’s the oldies that stand out – a pulsating Planet Earth, a moving Ordinary World, a stirring Girls On Film. There’s life in their electro-funk yet.

Cat Stevens did it, Prince did it, so did Terence Trent D’Arby. Every so often a star changes their name. Now, unusually, a woman has done it: Afterlight is the folk-pop singer formerly known as Thea Gilmore.

The change was born of trauma. Gilmore had been with Nigel Stonier ever since she was 16 and he was 39. He was her husband, guitarist, the producer of her first 16 albums and the father of her two sons. Now, at 41, she feels the relationship was abusive and controlling, and that’s what this record is about. It’s the mother of all break-up albums. The first and last tracks are spoken, and, though powerful, are agonisingly raw. But in between are ten songs in which Gilmore pulls off the eternal trick of good music, turning one person’s pain into others’ pleasure.

On tracks like Stain and The Ghost Of Love, she’s still the singer-songwriter next door, coming up with memorable choruses, literate lyrics and vocals that shake the rafters as well as the heartstrings.