1982 · Behind the Songs
The most famous Duran Duran song that was never a single — five minutes of night-driving atmosphere at the end of Rio.
Rio, released in May 1982, gave Duran Duran three of their defining singles — “Rio,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and “Save a Prayer” — and this site has told all three of those stories. But the album’s final track might be its most beloved: “The Chauffeur,” a slow, hypnotic closer that was never released as a single and never needed to be. Credited to the whole band and produced by Colin Thurston, it is five minutes of pure atmosphere — the sound of the party winding down and the car waiting outside.
The track is built on one of Nick Rhodes’s great synthesizer figures — glassy, repeating, faintly menacing — over a winding bassline from John Taylor that seems to circle the song without ever quite landing. Simon Le Bon’s vocal is at its most restrained, half-sung and half-whispered, as if he doesn’t want to wake the neighborhood. It is the least “pop” thing on a pop landmark, and sequenced last, it reframes everything before it: the yachts and the models give way to empty streets and headlights.
The song’s afterlife has been as unusual as the song itself. In 2005, the American metal band Deftones — not an obvious Duran Duran constituency — released a faithful, dreamy cover on their B-Sides & Rarities compilation, introducing “The Chauffeur” to an audience that had never bought Rio. It was the ultimate compliment: a band from a different world entirely, hearing what the song was and playing it straight.
Duran Duran would go on to bigger hits and louder productions, but they never quite made another record like this one — so still, so patient, so sure that the quietest moment on the album could be the one people remembered longest.
Why it still matters
Every great album needs a closing track that earns the silence after it. “The Chauffeur” is one of the decade’s best — proof that the band MTV sold as pretty faces could also be the most atmospheric studio craftsmen of their generation, when they chose to be.