"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 . However, its music video was included on the band's audiovisual compilation Greatest, released in 1999 and 2003. 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.
Composition
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!" and "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?" ; later, "I tell you, somebody's fooling around" and "The rhythm is the power". 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 albumLiberty, to be released the following year.
Music video
The video for "Burning The Ground", much like the song, used snippets of many of Duran Duran's previous audiovisual work, including scenes from their 1985 concert filmArena and their 1987-1989 Strange Behaviour & Electric Theatre world tours. The video also used footage of burning South Americanrainforests, as well as the NASA space shuttles and even some scenes of the band walking around during their recording sessions for their upcoming Liberty album. It was directed by Adrian Martin.
The b-side was another megamix, this one more instrumental in nature, called "Decadance". The song uses the "why" bits of "The Reflex", the "no, no" from "Notorious", "wild" from "The Wild Boys", the chorus from "All She Wants Is", the solo from "Save a Prayer" mixed with "Rio", and a little bit of "Skin Trade", as well as some of the suggestive screams from "Hungry Like the Wolf".
