Like a baby reaching for a bottle, similes are probably the first rhetorical device any of us reaches for. They are tragically easy to use, which is probably why we see so many tragic examples.

The reason they’re as popular as a Quentin Tarantino box set on an undergrad film studies course is that, judiciously used, the rest of your writing requires almost no narrative effort. We simply equate thing A with thing B so that the qualities of the latter are reflected onto the former, and allow the reader’s imagination to do the rest.

And in that sense, similes are also like off-white paint. Fine in small doses, fine when tastefully used, but overuse comes across like the politician who thinks they have got off a particularly potent verbal zinger. They drop it again and again. As this intro proves, you can have too much of a good thing. You can also have too much Spandau Ballet.

Spandau Ballet liked the phrase so much that in a song that only has 18 lines, eight of them were “she loved like diamond”.  Apparently it’s supposed to refer to a woman whose love is cold and hard. Omitting the indefinite article ‘a’ is an attempt to bestow on said femme fatale the qualities of a diamond although the song fails to make clear how she’s expected to feel about being compared to a tasteless, brittle solid that’s between 1 and 3.5 billion years old. The simile is an appeal to the abstract, and, as such, makes little to no sense.

Tony Hadley’s vocals on the single were described by Sounds magazine as “like a hoover doing an impersonation of Shirley Bassey”. Another simile, but a far more successful one. It matters not that the mental image of a vacuum cleaner performing a vocal imitation of Wales’ greatest female singer is just as nonsensical as “she loved like diamond”. It works because it’s a striking image that’s surprisingly easy to understand, despite the absurdity, and perfectly describes the vocal performance. There’s a reason why Sounds’s simile works so well while Gary Kemp’s fails so badly, just as there’s a reason why Smash Hits’ review of the single said that they preferred the singing on the instrumental b-side.

The Spandaus tried to repeat the, ummm, success of a single that charted at number 49 a few years later with the release of the album “Heart like a sky”, a possibly even worse simile than “she loved like diamond” despite the fact that the indefinite article made a re-appearance. The album excused itself into the charts at number 39, stayed for three weeks, then apologised itself away into the great discount bin of life.

“Hungry like the wolf”; now there’s a simile for the ages. “Mouth is alive with juices like wine”; there’s another.

Short, to the point and unambiguous – these are phrases that have never been applied to Simon Le Bon’s lyrics, and in fact to much of UK pop’s lyrical output in the early 80s. We might be tempted to describe some of Gary Kemp’s lyrics as poetic but only in the way that Gary Kemp is like Ogden Nash whilst Simon Le Bon is like William Blake. Only Simon Le Bon could write a note to the milkman and make it sound like erotica fanfic based on the Book of Revelation. 

But sometimes, as here in “Hungry Like The Wolf”, or as in “Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand / just like a river twisting through the dusty land”, the similes are simple and striking. His imagery is at its most effective when he strips away the gothic drama queen pretensions and writes good old-fashioned pop songs.

At their best, imperial phase Duran Duran songs are like communion wafers; they fizz on your tongue, you undergo a highly concentrated ecstatic experience, and then there’s just an absence and the belief that, for a dizzying moment, you saw the face of God, or a least got a snatch of his NYE party playlist.

And I think that last, resounding example demonstrates the key when it comes to the use of similes: less is often more. The ideal simile draws attention to the image, and not to the words.