Duran Duran, Forum, London<br></br>Patrick Wolf, Barfly, London

Signs of life at the reunion of the snake

'Half Chic, half the Sex Pistols". That, from the outset, was Duran Duran's mission statement. The latter half of it, of course, was somewhat delusional. But with the Chic acknowledgement, Le Bon, Rhodes and the three Taylors were spot-on.

What Chic did was to borrow the romance and opulence fetishised by Roxy Music - all that "Baby Jane's in Acapulco, we are flying down to Rio!" stuff - and apply it to populist black funk as opposed to artschool rock. What Duran Duran did was to borrow it back, with interest (specifically, Nile Rodgers' trebly guitar chops, imitated by Andy Taylor on countless occasions, most memorably just before the chorus to "Girls On Film" kicks in). By combining these elements, Duran made romantic, opulent populist-yet-artschool rock-funk, and in so doing, matched the musical and cultural mood of the early 1980s perfectly.

This, of course, is why they were so reviled when the cultural tide began to turn: all that escapism, all those shoulder pads, all those videos on yachts looked far too much like a tacit endorsement of Thatcher/ Reagan, Dallas/ Dynasty values.

Like they cared. Simon Le Bon may, on one of Duran's twilight hits, have whined "I won't cry for yesterday/ There's an ordinary world somehow I'll have to find", but the five of them spent their wilderness years somewhere much sunnier than you or I did.

And strangely, the cultural current has been turning back in Duran's favour. This might be because the hip set have been reappraising them (Erol Alkan included "My Own Way" on the Trash compilation album, and bands like The Faint have been unashamedly copying Duran's moves and grooves). I also like to think it has something to do with a widespread realisation that, in the age of Blue and Westlife, we shouldn't look so harshly upon the pin-up pretty boys of two decades ago. They may have been Japan-lite, their lyrics may often have been pretentious gibberish (I doubt even they knew what "Union Of The Snake" was about), but at least they tried to be interesting and, you know, a bit arty. (Can you imagine One True Voice commissioning a Patrick Nagel painting for their second album? I mean, assuming there will be a second One True Voice album.)

Either way, there's a heightened, static crackle to the atmosphere tonight that you don't get at most Eighties reunion shows. This one-off concert - by the real, five-piece, famous Duran (not the depleted line-up that has been doing the rounds for the past decade) - was only announced on the internet the previous Friday, and sold out within four minutes.

It's a celeb-packed crowd (Victoria Beckham, Mark Owen, Stephen Fry, Keith Flint and, if she counts, Tara Palmer-Tompkinson), but this is very much a show for the true fanatics: opening track "Friends Of Mine", an obscure early album track but always a fan favourite, provokes a reaction which utterly refutes my long-held belief that Duran are a band you could like, but never love.

Although I do adore the song which follows it, "Hungry Like The Wolf", while "Is There Something I Should Know" provides a long-desired excuse to bawl "you're about as easy as a nuclear war!" in public, and the encore of Grandmaster Melle Mel's "White Lines" (a notoriously preposterous version of which appeared on Duran's covers album, Thank You) allows me to roll around dangerously on the upper tier with laughter. (I'd joked beforehand that they ought to play that, but I never dreamed that they would).

Glancing up at the montage of Eighties videos which accompanies "Careless Memories", then down at the men on the stage, you conclude that wild boys really do never lose it. They still look handsome in the way that all those dipso British actors - O'Toole, Burton, Reed - did when they hit middle age. Le Bon looks a lot more slimline than he did when I stood next to him at the Heathrow luggage carousel a few years ago. John Taylor is as cheesily hunky as ever (even though he still plays bass, as a friend points out, "like he's shitting himself"), Andy Taylor as raggedly rat-faced, and Roger also has a Dorian Gray thing going on.

Nick Rhodes remains the coolest, naturally. Still one of the most beautiful men alive, he stands behind his bank of keyboards, imperious and aloof in a black velvet suit, wondering - as ever - how he ended up in a band with these middlebrow peasants.

As a Duran virgin, I was unaware that their live show involved so many Rocky Horror-style rituals. For example, during "Notorious", their superb Prince pastiche, the couplet "Girls will keep the secrets/ So long as boys make the noise" is the cue for some gender-divided screaming. And after the line in "Planet Earth" that goes "like some new romantic looking for the TV sound", everyone - led by John - shouts "SWITCH IT OFF!".

There are some new songs, which try even the hardcore's patience, but a muddy sound system makes it impossible to pass judgement. This has, thankfully, been sorted out by the time they reach the finale of "Girls On Film" (the twelve inch "Night Version", don't you know). If pop won't give us a new Duran, we'll stick with the old one. Some people call it a one-night stand, but we can call it paradise.

Patrick Wolf, the Cork-born, Paris- and London-raised electro-folk singer-songwriter, has just turned 20. The acts of metamorphosis, the rites of passage detailed in his extremely promising debut album Lycanthropy (geddit?) should now be behind him, but as he sings in his wonderful closing song (which sounds as though it was inspired by, of all things, Billy Joel's "The Longest Time"), "a boy like me should shut those books so he can be happy". The books, you suspect, are diaries, and he will never, you suspect, close them.

With his Andy Pandyish outfit, his mop of custard-blond hair, and his bare arms as skinny as pipe cleaners, you cannot imagine him walking around his native town with impunity, but he looks damn fine on a stage. Wolf - alone but for one female accomplice, playing synths and an antique harp-like contraption - is a man of many talents, strumming a ukulele, howling like an actual wolf at regular intervals, and he plays a violin, by turns languid and chaotic, on "To The Lighthouse", while singing at the same time, his jaw bumping on the chinrest.

Wolf's brain follows random but always engaging paths. He rambles about Mary Poppins before "Pigeons", and unexpectedly drops in a snatch of "Not Gonna Get Us" here, a "we-e-e-ell" nicked from Lulu there.

"We have to pick up our own gear," he apologises at the end, "but just close your eyes and pretend we have a load of groupies to do it for us." He shuffles back to the mic, shamefaced. "I mean roadies." "Freudian slip," laughs his Girl Friday, punching him in one of those pipecleaner arms.

s.price@independent.co.uk