The video was lush and cinematic, with shots of jungles, rivers, elephants, cafes and marketplaces evoking the atmosphere of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes remained behind to finish the mixing of the Rio album while the rest of the band began filming in April Rhodes flew straight to Sri Lanka after handing over the final masters to EMI. The band had a vision of jungles and exotic women, and Mulcahy suggested Sri Lanka, a country he had just visited, which had the advantage of being inexpensive. Music video director Russell Mulcahy, who had directed the band's first video ' Planet Earth', was brought back to make the music videos for 'Hungry Like the Wolf' and several other songs for the band's ambitious 1983 video album.

In 2006, online voters rated 'Hungry Like the Wolf' #2 on VH1's list of 'The 100 Greatest Songs of the '80s' behind Bon Jovi's 'Livin' On A Prayer'. At first the song seemed to again be going nowhere as radio airplay was slim to none, but when the newly emerging MTV picked up on the video, requests began to pour into radio stations, and the song entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 25 December 1982 at number seventy-seven, eventually jumping into the Top Ten, peaking at number three on 26 March 1983, and remaining twenty-three weeks on the chart. The original version of the song was initially released in the United States on Capitol's Harvest label (B-5134, backed as in the UK by a live recording of Careless Memories), but did not gain any notice until its re-release (B-5195, with a remix on side A and the Night Version on side B) on 3 December 1982, after the remix album Carnival (September) and the re-release of the Rio album (November), featuring all of side one remixed by David Kershenbaum, began to gain popularity among deejays. The single peaked at #5 in the UK Singles Chart on 15 May. The song was first released on in Britain, where they had attained some earlier success. 'AIR was a big acoustic room with a very warm sound, which gave the track a distinctive sound,' Taylor says. 'We gave him far more ideas and music than the track actually needed, and he was important in the process of whittling them down to the essential elements.' Thurston and the band decided to keep the demo's original electronic backing track and just rerecord the other instruments and vocals. 'He was a great organizer and arranger,' Taylor remembers. I didn't realize it at the time, but his inspiration for that lyric was Little Red Riding Hood!'Ī final version was recorded in at London's AIR Studios with producer Colin Thurston. He has a great ear for putting a melody to a bunch of chords. 'Then we added the bass and drums, and the whole track was finished that day, including Simon's vocal melody and lyric. 'As soon as we heard that, we knew we had something, and I started working out a Marc Bolan-ish guitar part, a very Marshall-sounding Les Paul guitar lick, to go on top of it,' Taylor continues. 'That track came from fiddling with the new technology that was starting to come in,' guitarist Andy Taylor recollects in an interview with Blender, referring to the rhythmic backing track they came up with by joining a Roland 808 drum machine with a sequencer and a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard. 'Hungry Like the Wolf' was written and recorded quickly on a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1982 at the basement studios of EMI's London headquarters. The single was Duran Duran's second Top Five hit in the UK and was their breakout hit in the USA Its popularity was boosted by MTV, which played the accompanying music video in heavy rotation. This has become one of the band's signature songs.

Duran duran hungry like the wolf