Duran Duran: Teenage Wallpaper

 

(Originally published 7/28/2012 Revised and Updated 4/29/22)

Music has always been a big part of my life.

 

Music is one of the only things that helped me through a lot of rough times and has always been there for me no matter what; it was an outlet that even Mom-ster couldn’t keep me from.

Those times when she grounded me from my boombox and record player, I had a small transistor radio my dad gave me that I kept hidden away; I could still listen to music from under my pillow or with headphones.

 

Back in the ’80s, I was your typical teenage girl – I was completely infatuated with Duran Duran. 

 

My best friend and I were total fanatics; we had the same type of Oxford shoes that the band wore – we called them our “Duranies” – I had both a white and a black pair.

When I would spend the night at her house, we would put on concerts with our own style of karaoke, complete with tennis rackets as guitars and hairbrushes as microphones; most of the time, her dog was our audience. Those were some of the best times we had together and we think fondly of those times to this day.

 

Duran Duran was a very popular band and they graced the cover of many teen and music magazines.

 

duran duran star hitsMy best friend and I would walk up to our local discount store and rummage through the magazine rack, trying to find the best pin-ups and posters for our walls. I started gathering a big collection of posters of Duran Duran and soon began taping them to the walls of my room.

Within a few months, there wasn’t a bare space on the two walls of my room that were usable; I had filled them with images of Duran Duran.

John Taylor had his own wall up against the headboard of my bed since he was my favorite. The other wall around my bed had posters and centerfolds of the entire band. I even put them on the ceiling above my bed when I ran out of wall space.

I took such great delight in my posters. Somehow, the posters made me feel like a normal person like I was doing something I knew other girls my age were doing; it made me feel secure.

The posters were the first thing I’d see in the morning and the last thing at night. They eased my mind and gave me great visuals to look at while listening to music since we didn’t have cable and therefore, no MTV.

 

 

My posters of Duran Duran were my beacon of happiness in the darkness of despair since I didn’t have very many reasons to be happy at home.

 

Mom-ster knew this and she hated my posters. How dare I clutter up her walls of her home with my “slut puppy” music stars. Her angry words still haunt me to this day.

If Mom-ster couldn’t feel any joy or happiness in her life, no one could.

I will never forget one specific day. I came home at around eight that night; I went to my best friend’s house after school, as I did almost every single day. Mom-ster was sitting on her “throne” in the kitchen, as always, and had the biggest evil smile on her face.

I trudged through the house, listening to her usual comments about me being fat, and made my way to my bedroom for some solace. When I walked into my room, my heart dropped – Mom-ster slashed all of my awesome posters with a razor blade and left the shredded pieces all over my bed. Nothing was salvageable. All Mom-ster said was, “I told you I didn’t like that in my house.”

I cried myself to sleep that night. I hated her for taking my posters away from me.

But I was a fighter…

Slowly but surely I began to collect posters again after that incident, but this time I kept them in a Trapper Keeper. I couldn’t have them on my walls, but I could have them hidden in a folder where I could look at them whenever I wanted. 

I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to find that Trapper Keeper again. I’m sure it’s buried in that house somewhere.

 

duran duran wild boys