Simon Le Bon

About

Simon John Charles Le Bon is an English singer. He is best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the new wave band Duran Duran and its offshoot Arcadia. Le Bon has received three Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, including the award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. He received an MBE from Charles III in 2024.

When he was six years old he was entered in a screen test for a Persil washing powder TV advertisement, which proved successful. He was a member of the local church choir from a young age, and was trained as an actor.

Le Bon worked on a kibbutz—an Israeli collective community—in the Negev desert in Israel in 1978, and then returned to England to study drama at the University of Birmingham before meeting the fledgling band Duran Duran in 1980.

Duran Duran was founded by childhood friends John Taylor and Nick Rhodes along with singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy in 1978, but Duffy left a year later, convinced that the band was not going to be successful. The band went through a long succession of line-up changes after Duffy’s departure, but finally…