“Duran Duran released ‘Save a Prayer’ as a single in the UK on Aug. 9, 1982, and it became the highest-charting hit from the Rio LP in their home country,” (UltimateClassicRock). “The midtempo No. 2 smash was a departure, as Duran Duran’s previous singles were all geared for the dance floor. The song was an outlier on Rio, too: … a moody ballad driven by lush, pirouetting keyboards and acoustic guitars, and a rhythm section that propelled the song forward with nuanced grooves.
‘Save a Prayer’ coalesced in the band’s rehearsal space at the Rum Runner, Duran Duran’s de facto headquarters in their hometown of Birmingham. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes was idly working on a piece of music on the Roland SH-2 synthesizer and CSQ-100 sequencer and then fed it into a cutting-edge instrument called the Roland Space Echo. ‘As I was playing with it, I stumbled upon this fantastic delay that was in time with the sequencer, which was something that I’d never really used on the first album like that. And this was a slower sequence, so it had the space in the music for the delay in between it. It really just sounded hypnotic and magical.'”
The band’s melodic sensibility was a bit limited here (this track could easily have been titled “journeying up and down the minor pentatonic scale”). But the tune was certainly bolstered by the tune’s cutting-edge synth textures and supercharged by its industry-leading mastery of music video, which had only recently taken over as the primary driver within pop music. Filmed in Sri Lanka with no end of record company funds, the video looks expensive, because it was; the band look like kings of the world, because they more or less were (winning the #5 slot for best-selling pop artists of 1982, worldwide). The tune’s intro and verse are in D minor but there is a shift to B minor for the short chorus (first heard from 1:00 – 1:17); the pattern continues from there.
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