Original Duran Duran performing after 18-year break

Now, a decade since a pared-down version of the group scored a bona fide hit, Duran Duran’s founding members are taking their first steps back on stage together in 18 years, with an eye on recapturing a glimmer of their past glory.

“I feel this band, the five of us as musicians playing together, never really made any mistakes musically,” bass player John Taylor said in Fukuoka, Japan. “I’m really proud of the records that we made and I felt that we could actually pick up where we left off and be relevant.”

Taylor and the other band members – frontman Simon LeBon, drummer Roger Taylor, keyboard player Nick Rhodes and guitarist Andy Taylor – followed up a handful of shows in Japan with a few performances in Southern California and Nevada.

During their first US show, at the Roxy in Los Angeles, the band showed a bit of rust with a few false starts, but still convincingly delivered their new songs and of course the hits.

Duran Duran regrouped in the autumn of 2001 and have been in and out of the studio ever since. They don’t have a record deal or a finished album, but decided on a tour to test the new material and gear themselves up for completing a new record.

“We’re not going to bore people, we’re not going to come out and play all the new songs we’ve written,” John Taylor said. “But there’s enough of the new songs to show you that the band is still a work in progress, that it’s not a nostalgia trip.”

Still, nostalgia for the band’s early hits has made best sellers out of two greatest hits compilations released about 10 years apart.

While the band’s fans are now grown up, they’re still around, said Jim Mazza, who was president Capitol Records, the band’s label. “The appetite will be out there for them,” Mazza said. “They certainly had a lot of hits, enough to carry the live show.”

Duran Duran formed in the late 1970s in Birmingham, when a post-punk music scene characterised by synthesiser sounds and a polished, modern look was beginning to take hold in the UK.

The emergence of MTV in 1982 helped boost the band to superstardom only a year after their first self-titled album was released. Duran Duran’s good looks and sexy videos helped foment a fan frenzy, particularly among teenage girls, drawing comparisons at the time to The Beatles.

After a world tour in 1984, the group took a break and members splintered into two side projects. By the time Duran Duran were called on to play a 15-minute set during Live Aid, the band was all but over.

“There was no love there. The love had dried up,” said John Taylor. “And by the time we got to Live Aid, we were shattered.”

Burned out from touring and tired of the limelight, Roger Taylor left the band first, retiring from the music business almost entirely for 15 years. Andy Taylor left next and started a solo career.

In interviews at the time, he cited qualms with the musical direction the band was taking and frustration over the group’s emphasis on its pretty boy image. In one 1987 interview, John Taylor chalked up the guitarist’s departure to insecurity and a lack of love for the band.

The remaining members carried on, but failed to sustain the fevered following of their previous records.

Andy Taylor now says frustration with band management and the record company drove him to leave, not personal problems with his bandmates.

“The bad blood was never really inter-band stuff. It was circumstances around the band that caused it all,” Andy Taylor said. “I tried to blame the music. It was the music (that) was getting better by the time we split up.”

In 1997, John Taylor left the band to handle personal problems at home in Los Angeles.

“I really needed to concentrate on (myself),” he said. “I lost the passion for the band, I just did. I stopped being a fan, for a while.”

Rhodes and LeBon, along with former Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, went ahead with recording two more albums, the last one released in 2000, to lacklustre sales.

Mending fences happened slowly, beginning in 1993, when the band saw a flash of its ’80s mainstream success with the hit Ordinary World.

Andy Taylor went to see the band perform for the first time. Roger Taylor played on a track of the band’s 1995 cover song record, Thank You.

Duran Duran considered reuniting for a Millennium tour, then dropped the idea. The timing clicked a year later.

“There’s been a lot of times when I didn’t think it was going to work. But there’s something that’s just been keeping me there,” John Taylor said. “Against tremendous odds. We’re doing it all and we’re doing it with our own hair.”

The band wants to record three more albums and then hang it up, Andy Taylor said.

“Whatever (record) deal we do it’s the last deal any of us is going to do,” he said. “So we’re not going to rush into anything.”