The Chauffeur

"The Chauffeur" closes Rio, 5:10, and was not a single. Le Bon wrote the original lyrics in a notebook in 1979 while staying at the Gvulot kibbutz in Israel, and Rhodes and Le Bon developed the electronic version; an early version had been recorded with the engineer Renate Blauel. Wikipedia's song article says only Le Bon, on vocals and ocarina, and Rhodes, on keyboards, synthesizers, drum machine and effects, played on it, with Rhodes using a Roland TR-808 and the ocarina coming from Thurston's percussion collection; the Rio article instead says it was created in the studio and lists the whole band. An acoustic version, "The Chauffeur (Blue Silver)", 3:48, was the B-side of the "Rio" single on November 1, 1982.

The lyrics are abstract, read by critics as stream of consciousness, an alienated couple on an aimless drive, a chauffeur longing for an unattainable lover, or a driver obsessed with a passenger; no remark from the band about the meaning was found. Ian Emes directed the video for the 1983 video album Duran Duran, after Russell Mulcahy asked for an erotic film: four days in London, black-and-white 35mm, Gilbert Taylor as cinematographer and Perri Lister in the last sequence, with influences cited from Helmut Newton, Godard's Alphaville and The Night Porter, and its explicit content reportedly kept it off MTV.

Record Mirror was negative on release, but later writers have taken it up: Joan Freeman called it the band's finest and Alexis Petridis their best deep cut, and Mark Ronson, who produced All You Need Is Now, put it among his five favorite Duran Duran deep cuts for some of the coolest, eeriest synth programming of any pop song ever. Setlist.fm counts 374 plays, the first on November 19, 1983 at the Festival Hall in Brisbane, with years of heavy use in 1987 (86 plays), 1993 (58) and 2005 (69). Deftones covered it on B-Sides and Rarities (2005), and Jonathan Davis of Korn performed it live in Las Vegas in 2007.