Ordinary World

Nobody expected Duran Duran to have a second act. They were supposed to be a punchline by 1992—hairspray casualties, yacht-rock refugees, the band your older sister liked before she developed taste. And then Simon Le Bon wrote a song about watching a friend die, and suddenly nobody was laughing.

“Ordinary World” came out of genuine grief. The specifics matter less than what they produced: a song about loss that doesn’t wallow, about hope that doesn’t lie. The ordinary world of the title isn’t paradise. It’s just life without the person who made it extraordinary. The song asks if that can ever be enough.

The arrangement is gorgeous without being showy. Strings swell in the chorus, but they’re not reaching for manipulation—they’re reaching for the feeling of something large happening inside a small moment. Le Bon’s voice, always more expressive than critics admitted, carries decades of learning how to sound sincere while meaning it.

This was their career salvation. The song reached number three, reminded everyone they could write, earned the kind of reviews they’d been chasing since “Rio.” But that’s not why it matters. It matters because it’s true. Because anyone who’s lost someone knows exactly what that title means. The world doesn’t change after loss. It just becomes ordinary in ways you never noticed before.

The string arrangement at the end builds and builds, then fades. No resolution. No triumph. Just the acknowledgment that you keep going because that’s what people do.

Some comebacks are calculated. This one just hurt enough to be honest.