Duran Duran: Those Weren’t the Days : Pop music: The band may be less popular nowadays, but they’re having more fun.

Old bands never die, they just fade away.

At least that seems to have been the case with Duran Duran. During the mid-’80s, these pop messiahs sold millions of records and produced innovative videos that put them at the forefront of the MTV revolution. The mere mention of their names could whip a pack of pubescent girls into a screaming mob.

Ah, those were the days . . . right?

Not according to singer Simon Le Bon and keyboardist Nick Rhodes.

“The music was always supposed to be primary. But we were much more controlled at the time by marketing plans that people came up with,” Le Bon, 33, said this week, sitting with Rhodes in a Beverly Hills hotel room before a rehearsal.

“It all made making music very difficult to enjoy. It is much simpler now. And that makes it a lot more fun, because you don’t have to think of everything else that’s going on. You just get on and do your job, and that’s the fun part.”

And though the band is not as popular as it once was, it certainly hasn’t faded away completely.

In fact, the English group--whose current lineup also includes co-founder bassist John Taylor and former Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, who joined in 1986--has been making itself quite visible recently. Its first record in more than two years, “The Wedding Album,” is due in late February, and the band headlines the sold-out “KROQ Acoustic Xmas” concerts Saturday and Sunday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

“Goodness knows if this will be thought of as a comeback. I don’t really mind if it is,” Rhodes, 30, said. “I would just like it to be successful. If people want to call that a comeback, fine.”

Considering where the band has been, comeback seems a pretty appropriate word.

An early leader of the English “New Romantic” movement, Duran Duran had become a favorite in England by the time its second album, “Rio,” was released in 1982. But its combination of disco beats, synthesizers and catchy guitar riffs got short shrift from American radio programmers.

Still, they found an American outlet for their music with an upstart cable outfit called MTV. The clips for “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” featured exotic locations and sophisticated production techniques that left most other groups’ efforts looking prehistoric. Their subsequent success established them as a supergroup, and MTV as one of the rock world’s dominant forces.

Though idolized by their fans, the band became a favorite target of critics who saw them as a symbol of pop shallowness, finely packaged but lacking in substance. But the press wasn’t their only problem. Musical differences and the group’s dissatisfaction with management, their record company and lawyers led to the decision to split up in 1985.

“There was a time during 1984 when everything seemed to be going really great, and then suddenly, these cracks appeared everywhere,” Le Bon, 33, said. “And that is when we had to stop and re-evaluate.”

Resurrected only a year later--minus drummer Roger Taylor and soon to lose guitarist Andy Taylor--the group continued to put out music, but to a decreasing audience. In 1990, they struck bottom with their album “Liberty.”

“You can say it bombed,” Le Bon admitted.

The fall from pop-god status hasn’t left Le Bon or Rhodes obviously scarred. In fact, both say they enjoy making music more without the pressures of stardom.

The group spent more than a year working on the latest release. That relaxed pace gave the group something it has always been missing, Le Bon says.

“The result of the time we spent working on the album is that we have finally got ourselves into a rhythm of working and an attitude we have been aiming for since 1985. We have tried and tried, and now we finally got ourselves into the right frame of mind and we got the right piece of music.”

While the two say they have no regrets about the past, there must be something they miss about the old days?

“You mean like hangovers?” Le Bon said, laughing. “No, there is nothing I miss, nothing we had that I don’t think we will have again.”