POP MUSIC REVIEW : Duran Duran, Pursuit of Happiness A-Go-Go

Admirers of the female form in a state of go-go had a field day Thursday at the sold-out Universal Amphitheatre, where headliner Duran Duran and opening act the Pursuit of Happiness both offered gyratin’ gals aplenty as sidelights to their respective shticks.

The mutual attraction to miniskirts aside, the two groups couldn’t conceivably have been more different--not even in what their respective use of dancing girls signifies about their art.

Duran lead idol Simon le Bon, is, frankly, a lousy dancer himself--which doesn’t make him any less sensitive a human being, but, hey, his combo is in the process of re-establishing itself as the premier white teen dance band (after a short-lived quasi-adventurous phase), and Le Bon does still insist on moving himself around on stage. Thus: all distractions welcome, be they ladies or light shows.

Initially, the sexy, graceful choreography of the two backup singers added needed visual spice, but we should know better than to expect the folks that brought us the “Girls on Film” video to leave well enough alone, and soon the femmes were simulating salacious stuff with band members, before stripping down behind a screen and shaking their stuff in silhouette to the purportedly anti-porn “Skin Trade.” Would someone please explain, as the song says, the reason for this strange behavior?

Duran Duran’s occasionally savvy dance fever mightn’t have seemed quite so empty had it not followed the much tougher, more tuneful and literate hard-pop blitzkrieg of the Pursuit of Happiness, a Canadian quintet with all the makings of a great rock ‘n’ roll band. Where Duran is still caught up in selling sex, marrying the prurient and the pretentious, the Pursuit’s Moe Berg actually writes about it, addresses it, tries valiantly to make some sense of it or at least get a laugh out of love’s odd politics.

And in this case, the winsome women framing the stage were actual members of the band. Backup singer Leslie Stanwyck’s frisky-a-go-go dancing reflected a casual joy in the music, something that couldn’t be said for the often ponderous impersonality of the headliner’s Teflon dance music and its accompanying goils-on-film.