by Andy Taylor
IT’S Christmas Eve, 1980, and I am about to take cocaine for the first time. It’s not something that I am proud of, but nor am I going to pretend that it didn’t happen. Drug use would eventually play a big part in the story of Duran Duran, and it started here. When we landed our record deal with EMI it seemed like all our dreams had come true, and we were in the mood to party. By the time we arrived back in Birmingham for Christmas we were ready to indulge in our newfound status. Getting a record deal meant everything. We had most of the material we needed for the album from our first few months together at the Rum Runner, and we were confident we’d be in a position to release it early in the new year. “Planet Earth” had been written at the club shortly before we’d gone down to London, and a decision had been made that it would be our first single. “Girls on Film” was always going to be a bigger hit, but the plan was not to release that until we’d established a bit of a profile for ourselves. We already had most of “Planet Earth” recorded, and Nick and I were due to go back down to London together on Boxing Day to finish mixing it.
“In the meantime, we’re going to have a great big piss-up,” I declared to the rest of the band.
We had a gig booked at the Cedar Club in Birmingham. We were determined to turn it into a real Christmas show, followed by a rip-roaring party at the Rum Runner. There wasn’t enough time for me to go back up to Newcastle for Christmas, so I booked into a little bed-and-breakfast hotel near to the station so that I could catch an early train down to the studio on Boxing Day. All our crew came along to the Cedar Club, which was decked out in tinsel and cheap Brummie decor that the Berrows had probably gotten from the local market. The crowd consisted of the usual mix of gorgeous women, outrageous gays, and straight guys wearing makeup. The Hazel O’Connor tour had really sharpened us up as a live band, and at the end of our performance everyone came onstage to join us as we sang a load of old numbers by David Bowie. We were a lot more confident and starting to feel like we were going places, although I got brought down to earth when I popped outside for a smoke and a bouncer refused to let me back in.
“I am actually in the band!” I said, laughing at the idea that I couldn’t get into my own gig.
I was in a great mood that night, and cocaine certainly didn’t figure into my plans when we all piled back to the Rum Runner. There used to be a short driveway outside the club, which was really just a glorified alley where the bouncers used to line up people in a queue to get inside. A guy called Al Beard was in charge of the door and he was very meticulous. As we arrived that evening I noticed there was a battered old VW camper van pulled up on the curb, right outside the Rum Runner. It struck me as a bit weird, as the only people who were usually allowed to a park there were the Berrows in their flash sports cars. They loved to show off their wealth, and in that respect I guess they were the first of a new breed of entrepreneurs who became known as Yuppies.
There was something about the head doorman, Al Beard, that I didn’t quite trust. He was a bodybuilder, not hugely tall, but he was very physical. He was always surrounded by women whom he would attempt to chat up in a posh accent that sounded a bit fake. Al and his men had been told to keep a close eye on us in case we needed protection from any of the locals who took exception to all the makeup we used to wear, but in fact there was rarely any trouble inside the club itself. I was more interested in having fun, so I soon forgot all about the camper van and once I was inside the Rum Runner I was downing champagne like there was no tomorrow. Most of the band were there, and we drank late into the night. Everything we wanted was free (although we’d end up paying for it later when the money from the record company started to roll in). We all used to hang out near the ladies’ toilets, which had a big walk-in lobby and it was a bit of a meeting place. Some of the girls used to hold hands with each other, and sometimes they’d kiss and get very tactile with one another, so the atmosphere was always very free and easy.
Fantastic! I love this fucking place, I thought to myself.
The party was in full flow, when my attention was caught by a kid who I will call Johnny, who was slightly older than me. Johnny used to hang around with the older brother of one the girls in our circle, so I’d spoken to him a few times and we shared an interest in rock and roll.
“Hey, Andy!” he cried to me above the music. “You gotta come outside. I have something for you.”
“Nah, I want to stay here and party,” I yelled back, reluctant to leave the girls’ kissing show.
“Come on, I’ve got something very cool you’ve got to try.”
He looked at me conspiratorially, so I assumed he wanted me to go outside and smoke some dope with him. I’d hung out with enough crazy GIs in Germany to recognize an invitation to smoke a spliff, or so I thought, so I followed him to the front of the club and we went into the street together. The dirty old camper van was still there, and Johnny paced straight up to it and beckoned me over. Before I knew it we were inside, where a couple of his mates had already sat down in the vehicle’s living area. There was a small amount of white powder on the surface in front of them, and then I realized: Shit, it’s cocaine.
“Come on,” said Johnny. “We’re going to have some coke.”
I’d done some pretty mad things during my time on the road with various bands, so I wasn’t fazed or intimidated—in fact, I was curious to discover what it would feel like. As far as drugs went, I was nineteen and still at the stage where I was willing to try anything once, except heroin, which had killed Sid Vicious and just about everyone else who had meddled with it. Heroin had been heavily demonized by a government awareness campaign, but cocaine had been glamorized by the media. Unlike heroin, cocaine seemed new and exotic, and my attitude to drugs at this point was innocent, experimental, and social. Cocaine had an image of being a rich person’s drug and there was a naive belief that it couldn’t do you much harm. Nothing could be further from the truth, although I didn’t know it at the time.
“Okay, what the fuck do you have to do?” I said eagerly.
I watched as they took part in the simple ceremony of rolling up a crisp banknote and using it to sniff up the powder, each of them gasping and tipping back their heads after they snorted it. It was so quiet in the van that I could hear the distant thumping of the music back in the Rum Runner. When it was my turn to roll up a banknote, it seemed as if my own heart was thumping almost as loudly. I leaned forward, quickly inhaled through one of my nostrils and then . . .
BOOM!
They say the first time you do cocaine is so intense that you’ll never experience the same thing again, and it’s true. Within seconds your teeth go numb. The second time might still be powerful but it’s not quite as heavy. The first time, you just go bang and you’re immediately overcome with a tidal wave of euphoria and a feeling of overwhelming confidence. I felt as if the whole world had suddenly speeded up and at the same time I’d won the football pools and the lottery. There was very little drug awareness. I just wanted to enjoy the great feeling, which enhanced everything, sexually and socially. Cocaine makes you feel as if nothing can stand in your way, and that was exactly how I felt, like I was riding the crest of an enormous wave at the Christmas party. You feel that everyone is there for you; it’s your party. Your mind cannot naturally be elevated to that state of euphoria, that’s the danger, and there are diminishing returns from day one, so you’ll end up paying a heavy price. But it was 1980, we’d won a record deal, and I’d just been watching three girls kissing.
I didn’t hang about. I went straight back into the club to get some money to buy some more cocaine. Before I knew it I was in the camper van again and handing over £60 for a whole gram of the stuff. The rest of the night passed in a fantastic blur. I was the life and soul of the party; I felt invincible. Whenever I took cocaine everything went into Technicolor. I didn’t think twice about the fact that Al Beard’s doormen had witnessed me going back and forth to the camper van.
“Everything okay, Andy?” was all they would have said as I
went in and out.
Al Beard would soon discover that I’d taken cocaine, but at the time I didn’t care. After all, I thought he was there to protect me. Years later, when we found ourselves at the center of a cocaine scandal, I would realize that life isn’t that simple. But that was all still in the distant future, and this was to be the first of many occasions on which I took the drug. Tabloid headlines were the last thing on my mind—all I wanted to do was party. Circumstances tend to dictate the way that cocaine affects your moods, and this was the beginning of a period that consisted of one long party. It was only much later on that my occasional cocaine use turned into regular abuse.
When I got back to the little bed-and-breakfast place that night, I couldn’t sleep because of all the booze and coke, but as I lay there tossing and turning and sweating, I didn’t care. It had been a great evening and I felt indestructible. Eventually I drifted off into a stupor, unaware that a little time bomb was now ticking away and that one day cocaine would come back to bite me.
I awoke on Christmas Day alone in the little B & B with a raging hangover. What a comedown! John, Roger, and Nick were all spending Christmas locally with their respective families, and Simon always had plenty of friends from University to hang around with. No one had thought to ask me round for Christmas lunch, so I ate a lonely meal and watched a bit of TV on the black-and-white portable set in my room. During the time that Duran Duran were based in Birmingham, we used to take Sundays off, and I would often find myself on my own when everyone else went off to their families. It could get very miserable and lonely. I wasn’t dating anyone by this point, and I can remember thinking that I needed to find a decent girlfriend. Still, at least it was never long until the next party.
On Boxing Day, Nick and I caught the train down to London together and we finished mixing “Planet Earth” as planned. It was one of the last songs we wrote for the first album and it was influenced by the Rod Stewart hit “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” The rhythm is very similar in terms of how it is arranged. Not many people spotted the similarity at the time, but years later I did actually tell Rod. It wasn’t a copyright issue because the two songs obviously sound very different, but the style of “Planet Earth” and the way it was put together was similar to Rod’s way of doing things.
“It’s going to be a hit,” said Nick.
Nick and I were probably the two band members who were the most involved in making the commercial decisions at this stage. Nick can be very astute when it comes to money, and his dad had done a bit of research into how things worked on our behalf. I’d also spoken to a lawyer who lived near me back home in Cullercoats, and I’d picked up a lot of advice from older musicians over the years. So even though we were still just kids, we were pretty switched on when it came to the financial side of things. Phonogram had offered us slightly more money, but we were in love with the whole romance of being signed to EMI because it was such an iconic label. The celebrated cover sleeve photograph of the Beatles peering over a stairwell on the fourth floor of the EMI offices in the West End was one of the most famous images in rock. One of the first things we did was lark about on the same stairwell, taking photographs of ourselves in similar poses to our idols. Thankfully the pictures were never released because they would have sent out an arrogant message for a fledgling band, although ironically we were soon to be dubbed the Fab Five by the press.
Surprisingly, the one member of the band who initially struggled a bit when we got into the studio was Simon. Singing on an album is not like simply going into a studio and plugging in an instrument. When you sing into a microphone with headphones on for the first time, you can hear every aspect of your voice and you have to learn how to control it. I knew how difficult it could be, as I’d done vocals in the past and I could see a bit of apprehension creeping into Simon when it was time for him to record. We’d laid the rhythm tracks down on drum and bass at Red Bus Studios in London with a producer called Colin Thurston, who had worked with Bowie and the Human League. We then went to Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire to complete guitars, keyboards, and vocals; and for the first few days it was tough for Simon. The label were really aggressive about wanting to get things moving, and we felt they were putting him under a lot of pressure to do things very quickly. It got to the point where a couple of people at EMI were openly critical, which was stupid because Simon had written all the lyrics in the first place and that made his position unassailable. He hadn’t been in a band as long as some of the other members of the group, so to be fair it was no surprise that he was a bit wobbly.
Colin Thurston was a nice man, but he could be a bit pedantic. He was very tough on Simon and kept asking him to redo things. The Berrows were also initially concerned about Simon, and they privately confided that they feared his singing might be too flat. There was even a hint that we might be asked to get rid of Simon if he couldn’t learn to sing in tune. In the end Dave Ambrose intervened. Dave had worked with some seriously big bands in the past like Queen and AC/DC, so he’d seen it all before and knew it was nothing to worry about. “You know it’s your first album and everyone has got to find their feet,” he reassured Simon. “If you’ve never done it before you just have to take your time—and don’t forget, it’s all about the songs.”
I agreed. “Yeah, and Simon wrote all the fucking songs, so it’s not as if anyone else is in a position to tell him what to do,” I pointed out.
As far as I was concerned Simon was our vocalist: end of story. Plenty of singers would have taken a lot longer to get it right; he just needed a bit of time to learn his own vocal technique in the studio. I knew from my own experiences that when you put on the headphones and hear your voice in your ears, it feels like your clothes have been ripped off because it sounds totally different to what you expect. But Simon is a very positive person and he never got moody about it; he just took his time to get things right. Simon’s character overcame it and I admired his professionalism. Eventually, it all worked fine, and we soon had a good-sounding record that was full of attitude and energy. We all had to learn as we hit the ground and it took us until the Rio album to understand exactly how to do it. In Duran Duran, it was always about precision, because it was a very tight, technical electronic sound that had real drums, real guitars, and real keyboards. There were lots of different facets to our music, so we needed a bit of help from someone like Colin, who had worked with avant-garde bands and who had a different set of ears. John called it “punk chic,” because we were all heavily influenced by punk, but also because we loved the new disco sound emerging in the States from bands like Chic (hence us being fans of their bassist, Bernard Edwards).
“PLANET Earth” was due to be released early in the new year, but Spandau Ballet’s debut single was released before it, in November. At the time we were a bit worried they would steal our thunder as we were still in negotiations with EMI, so we managed to obtain an advance copy of the Spandau record. They were signed to Chrysalis, and they were getting a bigger write-up in the music press than us, mainly because the London scene was slightly more fashionable and people like Steve Strange and Visage were based down there.
We’d done our first press interview with Betty Page of Sounds just after she had interviewed Spandau, and she told us, “Oh, yes—they have been talking about you. What have you got to say about them?”
Their manager, Steve Dagger, had been slagging us off to everybody in London, saying things along the lines of: “Duran can’t do it. They are from fucking Birmingham, they are never going to make it.”
We were very much perceived as the underdogs, so we couldn’t wait to get their single back to the Rum Runner. Nick, as always, was anxious to be first to check out something new.
“Let’s see how good they are,” he said as he put it on the turntable and blasted it through the big sound system in the club. We knew straightaway that we had much punchier songs than their release, which turned out a bit of a dirge called “To Cut a Long Story Short.”
I thoug
ht, Oh yeah—is that it? If that’s the best they can do, we’re not going to have too much to worry about.
It was an anticlimax. If that’s London you can keep it, I thought. Everyone had been saying Tony Hadley had a style similar to Sinatra. He had a good voice, but to me it just sounded corny. The others were all as unimpressed as I was. We felt their song was overtheatrical and very German-sounding, like Kraftwerk. Spandau had been over-hyped, and even though it got them to number five, we thought their song had a coldness about it, whereas, later on, “Planet Earth” didn’t. I think we had a more original sound and we played better together. We had blasted all our own tracks through the same sound system in the club to check that all the mixing was cool, and we had a hunch we would appeal to a broader base than Spandau. There were five of us and five of them and we were all the same age, but in my view we had very little in common with Spandau musically.
“PLANET Earth” was finally released on February 21, 1981. It got to number twelve, and it stayed on the charts for eleven weeks. More important, it got us a vital slot on Top of the Pops. We launched a mini tour just before the single hit the shops, and we were in Liverpool when we got the call from the record company to tell us we’d gone into the top forty. We had to do an interview on Radio One and go down for a recording for Top of the Pops.
We all thought, Fucking yeah! It’s happening—this is a dream come true! I remember phoning my dad in excitement from a call box and saying, “Dad—we got it—Top of the Pops!”
“Well done, son—I am proud of you,” he said.
I tried to stay in regular contact with my dad whenever I could, although in those days there were no mobile phones (and not all hotel rooms had their own phone either), so sometimes we’d go a while without talking if I was on the road.
As far as the band was concerned, EMI had really fast-tracked us. Top of the Pops was the BBC’s flagship entertainment show at the time, and it used to get around 18 million viewers, so everybody wanted to appear on it. It was an iconic thing to be seen on and your record was guaranteed to do well in the charts afterward. All eyes and ears would focus on Radio One and Top of the Pops, because there was nothing else.
