When Duran Duran take their place at the Olympic Opening Ceremony concert a week on Friday, it will be a triumph of more than enduring music.
Duran Duran - looking like pop stars, behaving like pop stars, back in the day
Today is the band's 32nd birthday, with their first gig taking place on 16 July 1980 in Birmingham's Rum Runner.
The band have been going, in various incarnations, ever since, but, as guitarist John Taylor's forthcoming memoir details, originally did their best to succumb to all the temptations on offer to five strapping pop star gods who conquered both the UK and America.
His book, The Pleasure Groove, reports how the itinerary of their sell-out 1981 tour to the US would include the respective ages of consent in each state they visited, to make sure none of the chaps got arrested for under-age sex.
It also details how the five - singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, guitarists John and Andy Taylor, and drummer Roger Taylor, would be given key information on a daily basis - "It's Friday, and you're in Detroit" type thing in case events had become too much of a hedonist blur.
In an excerpt in the New York Times, John Taylor hints at the tears behind the parties, however: "Everyone wanted to party with me, but behind the party face, I was caught up in a vortex of fear, arrogance, loneliness and extraordinary popularity."
And the band's lead guitarist, Andy Taylor, who left the band in the mid-80s and again in 2006, had previously released a memoir, detailing the band's extensive use of cocaine and how it nearly led them to break up. (Read an excerpt here...)
The five lead relatively stable lives these days, although John Taylor also reveals that his battle with addiction is an ongoing process. Married to Juicy Couture co-founder Gela Nash (his first marriage to Amanda de Cadanet ended in 1995), he admits, "The addictions are still there, and keeping them at bay requires work."
So it will be a good medals for endurance all round when they take to the stage in Hyde Park on Friday 27 July.
Here are the Wild Boys in all their glory through the years... remember all the blusher? Plus, who's your favourite - everyone had one...
