Duran Duran used to have some good ideas but, 12 year old metalhead that I was, I dismissed them on account of the fact they rapidly went from intense, tone-deaf arty posers to dense, tone-deaf commerce-friendly posers.

They’ve been good since then, I’m sure of it.

They were on the telly today as part of the get-wembley-on-the-telly-again-this-time-for-uh-global-warming-yes-that’s-it.

They were rubbish.

Girls On Film has always been an innocuous enough funky dance track, though its popularity may well have more to do with the accompanying not-so-soft porn video that was banned on the telly, but played in the nightclubs. It starts with a drum-machine latin pattern that is a kind of broken cha-cha-cha: it goes 1,2,cha-cha-cha, 1,2, cha-cha-cha. (Of course I don’t need to tell you that a real cha-cha-cha goes 1,2,3,cha-cha-cha,2,3,cha-cha-cha).

Anyhow, they did a spirited, if somewhat creakily zimmer-frametastic rendition of GoF until they got to the fancy bit in the middle. Back in the 80s this was an explosion of the then very fashionable rototoms that went on for several bars. Today it was a slightly confused snare solo that tripped over, dropped two beats, picked up three, and exited with Roger Taylor playing a beat ahead of the rest of the band and, crucially, of the fixed electronic percussion loop.

After the rest of the band realised he was not performing an exciting Jazz improv live in front of the world’s telly watchers, and nor was he going to come round to everyone else’s idea of where the beat lay, the rest of the band moved a beat up and played in sync. The result was a peculiar inversion of the Girls On Film we all know.

On the bright side, with the drum machine a beat later in the bar, at least they were doing an authentic cha-cha-cha for the rest of the song…