WEEKEND EVENTS : Duran Duran Turns Up the Techno-Heat at Tower : Pop music: Band plays with intensity for in-store and satellite fans in interactive international gig.

“We’ve just stretched the Strip a hundred yards,” quipped John Taylor, Duran Duran’s bassist, after his band’s post-midnight gig Saturday morning at Tower Records, a mere hop, skip and jump east on Sunset Boulevard from such nightclubs as the Whisky and Roxy.

Clerks had hurriedly cleared half the store’s floor of product between closing time late Friday and Tower’s 12:30 a.m. Saturday reopening as a music venue replete with stage, lighting and sound board. Though the in-store performance managed a legitimate club feel with its low ceiling, high energy, booming volume and late-late-night ambience, much more was going on here than just re-creating the coziness of the widely worshiped group’s pre-stardom L.A. debut down the street at the Roxy over a decade ago.

Not just stretching the boundaries of the Strip’s joints, Duran Duran was stretching the potential of satellite technology to provide an instant mini-tour. Audiences in London, Tokyo, Sydney and Berlin--plus, just for good overflow measure, the Beverly Center’s Hard Rock Cafe--were able to watch and even take some part in the intimate proceedings, which were also broadcast on radio. Driving home the point, the band’s record company billed Saturday’s interactive international gig as the “No Ordinary World Tour.”

For this techno-promo event, the erstwhile techno-pop group performed for more than an hour with a three-piece string section, and using an acoustic guitar along with the usual synths and such, as if for an “MTV Ever-So-Slightly Unplugged” episode. Perhaps ironically, this slightly more ornate approach actually seemed to invigorate the band, as this nine-strong version of Duran played with more passion here than veteran viewers might remember seeing in larger, more electric settings.

Between songs, foreign fans were invited to make song requests and ask questions of the group. Technical hang-ups made some of the queries from fans in other countries hard to decipher, with one notable exception.

“As you heard, the Japanese have it the most together--clear, no delay on the voices, it was perfect,” said guitarist Warren Cuccurullo afterward, laughing.

The most-asked question from each country, of course, was when Duran would be coming to play there . Still, might not this event be a step toward single-night satellite hookups supplanting the six-month tours of tradition?

“No,” said Taylor, winding down in a tiny storage room serving as a dressing room, “because when the music video came along, everybody thought, ‘Ah, maybe this means we won’t have to go to Australia.’ That was the idea, that you could be in so many places at once. But it’s too enjoyable--playing live is the soul of it.”

“We’ve always tried to be on top of technology and first with it,” added keyboard player Nick Rhodes, “whether it be with videos or whether it be with being the first band to take a huge projection screen on tour. So I suppose this is really all just following the curve. This has its advantages as a way of communicating with places that are a long way away. . . . But no, I don’t think anything replaces being in the room.”

The fans--both those inside the store and those relegated to catching the wafting roar on the sidewalk outside--would agree with that: They flew in from Jersey. They drove in from Oklahoma City. They caught buses from Bakersfield. From across America the Durannies flooded into Los Angeles, hoping against hope to somehow score one of the 300 wristbands being given away by KROQ for admittance to the show.

The sheer number of true devotees made one imagine a contemporary remake of “The Grapes of Wrath,” with the tide of immigrants all humming “Save a Prayer” as they made their way toward West Hollywood.

Lori Majewski of Weehawken, N.J., was one of several Duran fanzine editors passing out subscription forms at the site. (Her latest quarterly issue includes a chat with Cuccurullo’s mom, plus an adversarial interview with “the guy we love to hate,” Jim Farber, the rock critic who gave Duran’s latest album a D-minus in Entertainment Weekly.) Majewski said she’d cried when it turned out her plane arrived too late for her to catch Duran’s appearance at Arsenio Hall’s Hollywood Bowl taping Thursday night. But somehow she scored a wristband for the more significant event at Tower. What would she have done if she’d come all this way and hadn’t? “Sat in their hotel till they got back and screamed at them.”