Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  Musically, we found we shared a lot of ground straightaway. The advert that the band had placed in Melody Maker had cited certain guitar influences whom I admired, such as Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Mick Ronson of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars band. John also confided that he was a fan of the American bass guitarist Bernard Edwards. I admired Bernard, too, so I thought, Oh, great, we’ve got something in common. John was a bit of a traditionalist when it came to guitar, because he wanted to hear a rock-and-roll sound in the mold of Steve Jones, so later that afternoon I played him the Pistols track “Pretty Vacant,” and thankfully it blew him away.

  There was a strong punk influence in the Midlands and there was an old punk club there called Barbarella’s, where all the top bands used to go to play. Just as New Romanticism grew out of punk, I discovered that Duran Duran were named after Milo O’Shea’s character, Durand-Durand, in Barbarella, the sixties movie starring Jane Fonda. I got the impression that the name had mainly been John’s idea, and it was an example of his art-school mind working at its best. He didn’t realize how good he was as a bass player; he was a complete natural at it and he could play effortlessly.

  He was very particular about getting the look and feel of everything right, but you got the feeling that, at the heart of it, what he wanted most of all was to form a great rock-and-roll band.

  Meanwhile, my first impression of Roger, who was also age nineteen, was that he was very much the quiet one. His dad ran a small business near Castle Bromwich, so, like John, Roger was another local boy. Roger had done a few dead-end jobs since leaving school, but he was only really interested in playing drums. He’d previously been in a punk band called the Scent Organs, who’d reportedly been banned from practicing at the local church hall. But I soon sussed out that Roger wasn’t the sort of person who liked confrontation. In fact he was quite shy and definitely not one to be pushing his views into your face all the time. He didn’t say much, he just went over and started banging the drums. Roger had a classic James Dean look; he was quite muscular and he reminded me a bit of the Fonz in Happy Days (except instead of saying “Hey” all the time, Roger would go “All right” in a Brummie accent). One thing Roger definitely had was fantastic ability as a drummer. He was coming out of a punk phase, and he was beginning to approach things in a slightly different way, which was influenced by disco, and it sounded really interesting. A drummer needs a lot of mental discipline, because if his timing is out then the rest of the band will lose it, too, and I could see that Roger’s concentration was very impressive.

  Nick Rhodes was the next person to arrive. He turned up about an hour or so later than arranged, and I would soon discover that was Nick all over, because he was always late.

  “If there’s one bad thing I’ve learned,” he once told an interviewer, “it’s that if you absolutely have to be somewhere by six a.m., you don’t have to get out of bed until at least eleven.”

  My other enduring first impression of Nick, to this day, is that he carried all his personal possessions around with him in a plastic bag. It would always be a “decent” carrier bag, maybe from Marks & Spencer rather than a flimsy one from the corner shop, but he simply refused to put his personal stuff in a briefcase or a satchel. Nick’s dad was quite wealthy and owned a toy shop. Nick was the youngest member of the band and he hadn’t quite turned eighteen, but he’d been childhood friends with John. Nick was naturally androgynous even without makeup; he had a sort of boy/girl look about him that was to become one of the hallmarks of being a New Romantic. His voice was slightly flat and nasal, and his real surname was Bates. (I used to call him Master Bates and he later changed his name to Rhodes for “aesthetic reasons.”) As a keyboard player he was a bit of a genius in the sense that he had the ability to see some things in a completely different way from anyone else. Having said that, he didn’t seem to want to understand the traditional structure of music, and he didn’t care about knowing the difference between a major and a minor scale. Musical scales are a bit like male and female. One is minor and dark, the other is major and uplifting, and you have to be careful how you cross them. When Nick played I noticed that he was just using the black notes on his keyboard, which was something that Kate Bush was famous for doing at the time.

  “You’re only playing the black keys?” I said.

  “Yeah, so?” he replied.

  “Well, that means you are just doing one key.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, like Kate Bush,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, like Kate Bush,” he replied, but I wasn’t quite sure if he knew what I meant.

  Nick’s interpretation of doing music was very obviously going to be different to mine. Playing seemed to be the last thing on his mind, but he wanted to make keyboard sounds and textures and layers of sound—and in that sense he wanted to do something different that had never been done before. He could certainly make beautiful sounds, but in those days he couldn’t sing or dance (in fact, I used to joke to myself that his voice sounded a bit like a robot with a Brummie accent!). In terms of music, John and Nick had grown up watching Top of the Pops on BBC One, just as I had. There were no Internet or satellite music channels, so Top of the Pops was a huge event that the whole nation would tune into. In that way we all shared a common background, and we spent most of the afternoon jamming and playing together.

  It was obvious that they wanted someone who could really play in lots of different styles and genres. But I soon discovered that they didn’t really have anything by way of their own repertoire. They didn’t have any lyrics or finished musical numbers, but they did have one little diamond, which was the chorus to “Girls on Film,” and Nick had a little wisp of a keyboard sequence to go with it. You could hear immediately that it was something special. John and Roger had obviously practiced together a lot, because they were using many different techniques to let the sound come through from Nick.

  I remember Nick telling me, “This is one of the songs that we have got and we really think it is going to be a hit.”

  Then he sang the line “Girls on film, girls on film,” and I knew he was right. I thought: Fuck me! That’s cool—I wonder who wrote that? But it turned out none of them had, because it had been written by their previous singer, Andy Wickett, whom they told me was on holiday. In fact, Andy had already quit the band, and what they didn’t mention at first was that they didn’t have any singer at all. That small piece of chorus from “Girls on Film” was the only thing that had survived from their earlier lineup, but to be fair to Andy Wickett it was quite significant, and later on we had to do a deal with him when we released the song commercially. It was a very good chorus for a song, and I am pretty sure that we came up with the basics for the rest of it when we first jammed together that afternoon. They were impressed by all the different styles I could do. Playing rock and blues was my standard thing, but I could also do funky stuff, and I’d learned all the different chords that go with R & B as well as pop. My time in cover bands had served me well, and I could do things by bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Thin Lizzy.

  I knew I had won them over, because while we were playing together all the secretaries and the staff from the rest of the nightclub stopped work and came down from upstairs in order to listen to us and watch us play together. By the time we had finished the club was due to open for the night, and they invited me to stay on for the evening. I had to get the late train back up to Newcastle, but before I left I could see that the Rum Runner had a fantastic buzz about it. There were people starting to queue up outside, and you could see it was going to be packed.

  The whole nightclub scene was going through a period of change in those days, and places like the Rum Runner were at the forefront of it. The old-style cabaret establishments that were famous for serving chicken in a basket were being replaced by disco clubs. Then off the back of disco came a new breed of ultraslick clubs like the Rum Runner, where people went to drink champagne and have a great time
. I guess it was a kind of counterculture that allowed people to get away from all the gloom and unemployment in the real world. Whatever it was, I could see the Rum Runner was like a little fun palace where it was party time every night. It also turned out to be packed with Page 3 girls, who were at the top of the showbiz A-list. In those days topless models were regarded by the press a bit like the way newspapers today regard footballers’ wives who the headline writers in the UK are fascinated with and now refer to as WAGs (which stands for Wives and Girlfriends). The Page 3 girls were the WAGs of their generation, but instead of dating footballers they were desperate to be seen with pop stars.

  By the time one of the club’s managers offered to drive me back to the station I’d already seen enough of the Rum Runner to know that I wanted to be part of it. The club was owned by two brothers, Mike and Paul Berrow, who were in their late twenties and part of an established Birmingham family who had business interests in the rag trade and property. Their father, Roy, had run three or four casinos in the city during the sixties and seventies. If you run casinos you inevitably get the odd member of the underworld frequenting your establishments, and it turned out that an associate of the Kray twins had once been arrested while coming out of the Rum Runner.

  The Berrows themselves were straight, but some of the gangster chic rubbed off on them and people used to wrongly assume they were into all sorts of shady dealings—and I suppose it was an image that didn’t do them any harm. They were actually sharp-minded businessmen, and it had already been agreed they were going to be the management of Duran Duran. It was obvious the club’s party scene and the band were going to complement each other perfectly. As Mike dropped me off at the station, I noted the fact that he had a flash BMW and I remember thinking, This is perfect—even the managers have got plenty of money!

  They’d told me that they had a few more people to try out and I went back to Newcastle, but it was all very positive. Sure enough, a few days later I got a phone call asking me to go back down. I borrowed £30 off my dad, packed the rest of my gear and that was it—my new life began.

  The Rum Runner was an ideal base because I could crash there and use the facilities in the old boxing gym to shower each morning before work. We’d spend our days practicing and jamming, then we’d party every evening in the club. We were soon running up an enormous champagne tab every night, and in order to pay it off I did a bit of cooking in the kitchen and a few odd jobs around the club. Roger, who was dating one of the cloakroom girls, Giovanna Cantone, also collected glasses and did a bit of painting here and there to pay his share. I daresay the odd rump steak used to get wolfed down by us on the quiet, but we never took advantage of the hospitality.

  TUESDAY was the big night of the week at the Rum Runner, when the New Romantic crowd would turn up. All the guys dressed in frilly shirts and wore makeup, and there would be scores of gorgeous female models, some of whom were very famous. Mike Berrow was dating Carole Dwyer, a Page 3 girl. Her sister Joanne was also a regular at the club, along with another model, Joanne Latham. They all had big, blond, back-combed hairdos, and they wore skintight Lycra leggings or miniskirts, just like Hot Gossip, the sexy dance troupe from The Kenny Everett Show. Giovanna caused a stir by shaving her head bald like a character from Star Trek, which was a very bold thing for a girl to do in the eighties. The Rum Runner was very exclusive—the doormen would make customers line up outside the entrance, and then they would deliberately turn away anyone who didn’t look cool enough to be let in. This just made everybody else all the more desperate to come inside! Nick was a great DJ. He used to work in the club, and he really knew how to get people onto the dance floor.

  I soon discovered that lots of local celebrities liked to party at the Rum Runner, including the footballer Frank Worthington, who played for Leicester City and who lived in a Holiday Inn, which was considered the height of luxury at the time. We’d sometimes go off to the Holiday Inn for late-night boozing sessions. Roy Wood from Wizard was another regular at the Rum Runner, and all the characters from Black Sabbath would hang out there, too—so there used to be some pretty full-on partying.

  We would stay up until six in the morning in a little drinking posse at the back of the club after it closed. It didn’t take much to encourage us. I was known for being very loud and for having hollow legs when it came to drinking. Nick could drink copious amounts of champagne (which meant Roger and I had to collect even more glasses). John, in contrast, used to get drunk on two pints of beer, and he’d lose his spectacles and walk into walls!

  SO my first memories of life in Birmingham aren’t just about the band but everything that went with it. It was like walking into this ready-made rock-and-roll world that was filled with excitement. What we desperately needed, however, was a front man, so for our first big task we auditioned a singer named Guy Oliver Watts. He was a lovely bloke and stayed around for a couple of weeks, but we just didn’t click. I was flattered when the other guys asked me what I thought of him—because I was still very much the new boy myself and it showed they valued my opinion—but I told them I didn’t think Guy was right for us. We sent him packing, which seemed a bit brutal at the time, but it was part of the process of elimination that we needed to go through in order to form a perfect band. We did some demo material on which John wrote some lyrics and I sung some vocals, just to have some singing on our music, but it wasn’t very productive.

  Then one of the barmaids told Mike Berrow that she shared a flat with a guy who had sung in a band and he had written a lot of songs.

  “He could be just what you are looking for,” she said, so Mike arranged for him to come down to the club one afternoon.

  So there we all were, in the Rum Runner, when in walked this tall, good-looking guy with long legs and lots of confidence.

  “Hello, I’m Simon Le Bon,” he said in a Southern accent.

  The first thing I thought was, Fuck me—he looks just like Elvis!

  He reminded everyone of a young Presley because he still had a lot of boyish puppy fat around his face . . . You knew straightaway that he would be a hit with the girls. The only slightly unfortunate thing was that he was wearing skintight pink leopard-print trousers! The flashy pants had been Simon’s way of making a grand entrance, and I can assure you that all the stories that have been repeated over the years about how outrageous he looked are true. He was perfect, our own ready-made Elvis (albeit one who looked like he’d been to the chip shop a few times)!

  Simon explained that he’d been in a punk band called Dog Days when he was seventeen. He’d also done a bit of singing with seventies pub bands. He sang us a few numbers and we were impressed. But most important of all, we discovered he could write lyrics. Simon brought along an A5-sized book with a paisley pattern on the cover, which was packed with his own handwritten poems. The book turned out to be a real Aladdin’s lamp because it contained all the lyrics we could ever wish for. Looking back, I believe that was our Ground Zero —for me, the defining moment in the history of Duran Duran was when Simon pulled out that little book of lyrics. There was even one poem that he brought along on that first day, called “Sound of Thunder,” that fitted perfectly to one of the tunes we had already been rehearsing. We tried it out straightaway that afternoon and it worked; eventually it became a track on our first album. We were in business.

  Simon is a much better songwriter than people realize. He’s very deep and thoughtful, and he was just like that when he was young. It was obvious that he was very well read, and I was very impressed by him. His lyrics and his tone fitted our music perfectly, and he always managed to find a vocal melody that worked with the music that I had already created. He also had a commercial ear, which appealed to all of us.

  “I really like the new Simple Minds album,” he told us in conversation, which impressed both John and Nick, who had both just bought the same album.

  “Good, you’re in,” said John. “We’ve got a gig in four weeks.”

  And that was it, he was
hired! That was the day the band was formed. Everything before that moment seemed to suddenly lose importance. As well as the lyrics, Simon had a decent voice, maybe not the best, but he had an original voice and, more important, it was a pop voice. We never needed a rock singer; we needed someone like Bryan Ferry who could cruise over the top of our music—and that was exactly what Simon could do brilliantly.

  Simon and I bonded straightaway. We had something in common—unlike the others, who all grew up locally, we were both from outside Birmingham. Simon was a drama student at the University of Birmingham, but he came from a suburban family down in Bushey, just outside of North London. His family were descended from French Huguenots, and his father, John, was a civil servant. His mum, Anne, ran small businesses in antiques and catering. Simon was the eldest of three brothers . . . and he loved attention. In fact, he was totally up himself—but I mean that in a nice way, because the one thing you need in a good front man is for him to be self-obsessed in a theatrical manner.

  SO with Simon Le Bon on board, we were flying before we knew it. There were now five of us and we each brought something special to the mix. A good band is made up of people with different strengths and weaknesses, and the sum is always greater than any one part. In Duran Duran we were each good at something different, and the strength of each person’s individual contribution was important. For example, Nick’s contribution was very different from mine, but every member of the band was equally vital. I developed a knack for being able to hear something and pick out the bones in order to work out how every part fit together. I had done all the basic work of learning music while I was out on the road, and I’d figured out how all the guys before me had done things. It meant that I could take an idea and help translate it into something original, so I hoped that what I gave the band was a kind of musical cohesion that they had previously been lacking.