Duran Duran – Come Undone

A song Duran Duran almost left off the album turned into one of the most romantic accidental valentines in pop history — written, finished, and gift-wrapped in a single day for the singer’s wife on her birthday.

The accidents are what make Come Undone work. Warren Cuccurullo, Duran Duran’s guitarist in 1992, had been sitting at home trying to reinterpret one of their old songs — First Impression from 1990’s Liberty, the lowest-selling album of the band’s career — when his fingers found a different riff entirely, slower and more circular, that did not sound like anything else they had recorded. Across the room, Nick Rhodes was running another album track, Too Much Information, at half speed as a kind of studio exercise. The two ideas slowly drifted into one another. Then Simon Le Bon walked in, heard what they were doing, and said something to the effect of: I love that. Let me write to it.

By the end of that day Le Bon had a lyric. It was October 29, his wife Yasmin’s birthday, and he had not set out to write a love song — but he had ended up with one. He worked the line “Happy birthday to you was created for you” into the opening verse as a small private gift, the kind of thing he expected listeners to skim past as decorative wordplay. Yasmin understood immediately. The rest of the band did not have the heart to take it out.

This is the song Come Undone almost was not. The 1993 Duran Duran album — universally known as The Wedding Album because of the family wedding portraits inside the gatefold — had been written, recorded, and basically finished. Bassist John Taylor had played his parts on everything else and flown back to Los Angeles. The band needed one more track. Co-producer John Jones, who would do double duty programming the drums and playing the bass John Taylor was no longer there to play, helped them stitch it together at Cuccurullo’s London house. The English singer Tessa Niles came in to add the wordless, haunting harmony line that drifts across the chorus. The drum loop, contrary to a long-running misconception, is an original John Jones programming, not a sample of the Soul Searchers’ Ashley’s Roachclip. It just sounds like one.

A second life nobody had expected

The Duran Duran of The Wedding Album was a band several years past its commercial peak. They had not had a US top-ten single since 1988 or a platinum album in seven years; the press had quietly moved on. Then the lead single from the album, the funereal Ordinary World — a song Le Bon had written about a friend who died — went to number three in America and became one of the biggest singles of their entire career. The label needed a follow-up, and they needed it fast. Come Undone, the experimental track that had almost been left in a desk drawer, became the follow-up.

It was released on March 29, 1993, with an acoustic version of Ordinary World on the B-side. It reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of April 17, number two in Canada, number 13 in the UK, and number one in Israel. For a band that had been written off as a leftover of the 1980s, The Wedding Album produced two consecutive US top-ten hits inside three months. It was the closest thing pop music got that year to a comeback.

Julien Temple directed the music video, filmed primarily inside the Sea Life London Aquarium. Tessa Niles plays the woman in chains being dragged into a shark tank — beautiful, slightly absurd, very 1993. The footage cuts between her, a knot in a purple ribbon coming undone, an elderly couple sitting on a flooding park bench, glass breaking, a car exploding. Everything in the frame is supposed to suggest a life unspooling. What none of those images quite captures is what is actually happening in the song: a man, alone in a house with his guitarist and his keyboardist, writing a love letter to his wife and not telling anyone for a few years that that is what it was. Watch the video and you can hear the secret right there in the second line.

Lyrics:
Mine, immaculate dream made breath and skin
I’ve been waiting for you
Signed with a home tattoo
Happy birthday to you was created for you
Can’t ever keep from falling apart at the seams
Can I believe you’re taking my heart to pieces?
Ah, it’ll take a little time
Might take a little crime to come undone
Now we’ll try to stay blind to the hope and fear outside
Hey child, stay wilder than the wind and blow me in to cry
Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone
Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone
Words, playing me deja vu
Like a radio tune, I swear I’ve heard before
Chill, is it something real?
Or the magic I’m feeding off your fingers
Can’t ever keep from falling apart at the seams
Can I believe you’re taking my heart to pieces?
Lost, in a snow filled sky
We’ll make it alright to come undone
Now we’ll try to stay blind to the hope and fear outside
Hey child, stay wilder than the wind and blow me in to cry
Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone
Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone (Can’t ever keep from falling apart)
Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone (Can’t ever keep from falling apart)
Who do you need?
Who do you love? (Can’t ever keep from falling apart)
Who do you love?
When you come undone