"Burning The Ground" | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Single by Duran Duran | ||||
from the album Decade | ||||
B-side |
|
|||
Released | 4 December 1989 | |||
Format | ||||
Recorded | Olympic Studios, October 1989 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length |
|
|||
Label | ||||
Songwriter(s) | John Barry, Simon Le Bon, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Andy Taylor, James Bates | |||
Producer(s) | John Jones | |||
Duran Duran singles chronology | ||||
|
"Burning The Ground" is the 20th single by Duran Duran, released in December 1989. It was created as a stand-alone single to promote the compilation album Decade: Greatest Hits. However, its music video was included on the band's audiovisual compilation Greatest, released on 1999 (VHS) and 2003 (DVD). The song is essentially a megamix of Duran Duran's history, featuring tidbits of all of the band's hits of the previous ten years.
Instrumental elements of "Save A Prayer", "Hungry Like the Wolf", "Rio", "The Reflex" and "The Wild Boys", including the camera sound from "Girls on Film", form the core of the first part of the song, while the "chorus" is built up of alternating chants of "Girls!" (from "Girls on Film") and "Boys!" (from "The Wild Boys"). The nonsense syllables from several songs, such as the "noh-noh" bits from "Notorious", the "bop bop bop" from "Planet Earth" and the "tana nana" and the "fle fle fle fle flex" from "The Reflex", were also incorporated. Elements from "A View To A Kill", "Notorious", "I Don't Want Your Love" and later singles are gradually woven into the mix. Segments of the song are marked by signature phrases taken from other songs: first, "Can you hear me now?" ("Planet Earth"); later, "I tell you, somebody's fooling around" ("The Reflex") and "The rhythm is the power" ("I Don't Want Your Love"). The title derives from a "Hungry Like the Wolf" lyric.
The song also used several sound samples from the film Barbarella, from which the band took their name: "Barbarella?" "Mr. President!" "Your Mission, find Durand Durand!" "Just a minute, I'll slip something on!"
The remix was created by producer John Jones, with assistance from Dee Long and engineer Chris Potter, in an upstairs room at Olympic Studios in Barnes while Duran Duran was downstairs recording new material for the album Liberty, to be released the following year.