Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  There was only one snag. Due to strict union rules in force, every version of a song that was broadcast on Top of the Pops had to be a special new recording for the show. It was a rule designed to generate extra money for all the highly paid TV technicians. This was before Maggie Thatcher had ripped apart the unions, so the rules had to be obeyed—at least on paper. The record companies hated it because the last thing they wanted was to risk a bad recording going out on air.

  “So what happens is this,” explained someone in the know. “The version that goes out on air is remarkably similar to the album version.”

  Someone told me that what happened was there was a clandestine swap of tapes so that the “new” version never got broadcast, which suited everybody. I’d heard about this from an old friend of mine who knew about the music industry. The unions were none the wiser, presumably because they got paid anyway. It would have been a big scandal at the time if anybody had known, and it explains why our lip-synching on the show was a bit more obvious than it would have been otherwise—the version we “sang” had been recorded months earlier.

  On the day of filming, we were incredibly excited, although when we got to the studio we all thought, Is this it?

  It was small, with a tiny, tiny stage, and the dressing rooms were very basic. The BBC were very bossy and were notorious for slinging people off if you were not on time.

  “There will be no special treatment for anyone. If you miss your call you are out,” they told us.

  We discovered we were to be on the same show as the Who, who were obviously regarded as rock gods. They had a huge set and a giant dressing room.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I thought everyone was equal!”

  The reality was that dealing with the BBC establishment was like going back to school. You had to play by their rules. Record companies were terrified of the BBC because they had the power to make or break bands, unlike today. Every child of every age in the UK watched Saturday TV, Top of the Pops and The Old GreyWhistleTest.

  WE started being recognized almost immediately after Top of the Pops, and it gave us a real buzz. Whenever you spoke to anyone you’d want to ask them, “Did you see it, did you see it?” But unlike some of the other New Romantic bands we felt we still had a rock edge, and at first we thought we’d reach a much more rock-based audience than we did. EMI obviously had other ideas, and they had a publicity plan already worked out for each of us.

  “We are going to promote John first because he is the most photogenic,” they explained. “And we are going to start with him in Japan.”

  I sensed this strategy would secretly wind up Simon because, as the singer, he was naturally expected to be the front man. It was the shape of things to come, and there were many times when Simon and John would be vying for attention, often with hilarious results. It would irritate Simon that John attracted the most fuss from female fans, but when it came to photo shoots it would irritate John that the photographers always wanted the singer to stand in the center. Sometimes there was a lot of shuffling to see who stood in the middle. The simple fact was that John was incredibly photogenic but he wasn’t the singer, so that caused problems between them straightaway.

  Nick, meanwhile, who loved talking about pop art, was obviously going to enjoy doing a lot of interviews, so the record company had plenty of plans for him. As for me, Dave Ambrose had some interesting advice.

  “When we get to America, your role will become really important,” he told me. “Over there all the attention is always on the lead guitarist, and you will be the one who does all the interviews when we get to the States. You can’t break the States without a good guitar player, and the last band who did it were Queen.”

  It was a lot to live up to, but the record company seemed to have everything worked out, and, as always, what would really make or break us would be the music. “Planet Earth” had done well, but instead of capitalizing on it EMI next released a single called “Careless Memories,” which made only number thirty-seven. It was the record company’s choice, but everyone else around us said, “Why didn’t you release ‘Girls on Film’ instead?” It was a bit of a wobble that knocked our confidence, and after that we always made sure that we dictated which songs were released. But we needn’t have worried; on July 25 we released “Girls on Film,” and it really lit the touch paper. It got to number five and stayed on the charts for eleven weeks. Suddenly everyone wanted to meet us—and the female attention started almost immediately. Never mind “Girls on Film”—there were crowds of screaming girls almost everywhere we went, and it wasn’t long before the press picked up on it. We developed such a big female following largely as the result of a conscious effort on EMI’s part. They had a clever marketing plan based around what they learned from promoting the Beatles in the sixties—and the girls loved it.

  “It’s been so wild that we have even had to be smuggled out of our gigs in a Black Maria,” complained Simon in a Daily Star interview. “There have been times when I’ve gone back to my hotel room to find fans sitting on my bed.”

  Within a few months things had gotten so crazy that some of the venues we visited had to call the police because they were afraid they’d be overrun by marauding teenage girls. The tabloids got to hear about one incident in Sheffield when the cops had a real battle to get us out the stage door and Simon got mobbed.

  “Lead singer Simon Le Bon is recovering from almost being throttled when a girl grabbed the scarf around his neck and wouldn’t let go,” reported the News of the World, which also quoted Simon as saying, “I think she wanted to take my head home with her.”

  Simon got quite badly ruffled, but he loved it. Secretly, we were all loving the attention—and so were the record company, as it looked like their cunning plan was working. They made sure we appealed to the female audience through publicity in publications like Smash Hits. “Planet Earth” had got to number one in Australia, so EMI announced we were going on a world tour that would begin Down Under and would include Japan, Europe, and America.

  We had a wild stopover in Thailand on the way to Sydney, and the journey was a bit of an experience in itself. Including our road crew, there were about twenty-five of us traveling in a group. The record company booked us economy class with an Indian airline. Air travel was a lot less regulated then, and there were actually people trying to cook up meals in the aisle of the plane using little gas camping stoves. During the brief stay in Thailand we were high on excitement, and there was lots of drinking and wild partying. When we finally got to Sydney we were greeted by a great big bear of an Aussie, who picked us up at the airport in a large American car and acted as our minder.

  “G’day, I’m Grant Hilton—pleased to meet you boys,” he said, extending his hand like a big paw. He was a six-foot-two-inch stereotypical Aussie.

  We soon found out that the local sheilas were just as mad for us as the English girls were, except they were much noisier and were never afraid to get their kit off! Grant was the manager of a little rock-and-roll hangout called Benny’s Bar, where the boys from INXS used to hang out. It was only a tiny venue and it had a little round window set in the front door, which you had to go up to and show your face in order to be let in. We met INXS there on our first night. Simon and Michael Hutchence spent a lot of time together and eventually became good friends. INXS were a young band just like us and they wanted to have fun, so the first thing we decided to do was throw a party out by the beach for our road crew. It was a rock tradition to give them a celebration before the start of a tour.

  Someone phoned up a modeling agency, so the beach was crawling with crowds of gorgeous women at the party. There was a trampoline on the sand, and everyone was urging the girls to have a go, shouting, “Come on—it’s for the road crew.” Before we knew it, the girls took off their bikinis, and they were bouncing up and down, topless, on the trampoline while the crew were all openmouthed. We were fast learning that 80 percent of our audience was female, and that kind of raw female energy follo
wed us everywhere. Some of the fans could be incredibly persistent; they would wait outside our hotel and tell us they had never missed a single gig.

  We would react by saying, “Fucking hell, how many gigs did you say you had been to? Okay, fifty shows! We’ll let you in for an hour.”

  It was a really young hot female audience, and at that age it was a very difficult thing to manage—at times, impossible. Our fans were—and still are—amazingly warm to us and they’d go to great lengths to do something nice. Once, Simon mentioned in an interview that he liked continental chocolates, and suddenly we were sent an avalanche of them. Apart from Roger, who was with Giovanna from the beginning, none of us had serious girlfriends in the very early days, so there used to be a lot of rivalry, particularly between Simon and John, about who got to chat up the best girls.

  Being number one in Australia gave things a lot of heat. We were invited onto Countdown, the Australian version of Top of the Pops, which was presented by a lovable old bloke named Molly Meldrum. He was famous for wearing a big cowboy hat and his catchphrase was “Molly Meldrum loves you lots.” He gave us a massive buildup for weeks on end to promote us, and the tour soon sold out. We’d travel from gig to gig under the blazing sun in a dusty convoy of giant cattle trucks with all the gear stowed in the back, which was open sided.

  To celebrate, we went to a party at Molly’s house in Melbourne, and all the Australian cricket team came along. Molly had lots of expensive Egyptian art all around the place and I was amazed it survived the party. On another occasion we went to the Manzel Room in Sydney, which had a reputation for being the roughest rock-and-roll place on the planet, and we got thrown out for being too rowdy.

  We pretty much met everyone we wanted to meet in Australia, and the whole thing was like a big dream. I loved cricket, so it was a big deal to meet Greg Chappell and his boys, as they were people you only normally got to see on the BBC.

  LIFE was so much fun that when we got back to the Rum Runner, I remember thinking, Well, even if we don’t make it any bigger, this has all been worth it. We were surrounded by everything that young men aspire to have, and at times some of us tended to get a bit overindulgent. We had a little private room at the back of the club for “extra activities,” which was decked out to have a bit of fun. We had cushions and mattresses and candles in there, and it was a place where you could go to smoke a spliff or be alone with a girl. I jokily called it the “sex offender’s room” (things weren’t so politically correct then), and it ended up being used quite a lot. The Rum Runner was still very much our base; it had a policy of letting in two girls for every guy, so there was never any shortage of female company.

  There was one girl in particular who was absolutely gorgeous, and she just loved sex with any man who would go with her. I won’t use her real name here, so let’s just call her Miss X instead. I was the first to discover her delights but I found out that afterward she went through quite a few of the males at the club. She was blond and beautiful, with looks that would have made any Hollywood starlet jealous, but she was quite happy to service you in the sex offender’s room or anywhere else if need be. Generally the MO of girls like Miss X was that if they went with one of us they’d attempt to go after the others, too, not just the band but those around us.

  Sometimes someone would accidentally walk in on people when they were in the sex offender’s room. I can remember Al Beard running over on one occasion and spluttering, “Oh chaps! Have you heard about Roger and Giovanna? We’ve just caught them at it!”

  I think most of us had an unexpected walk-in at some point, but we were just doing what young men do when they’re single and surrounded by beautiful women, and the choice of females at the Rum Runner was overwhelming and unreal. This was before the scourge of AIDS became a national issue, so things were still very hedonistic.

  “That was the whole point in forming a band. Girls, absolutely gorgeous girls,” Simon once said in an interview. “We were five heterosexual, good-looking men. We competed against each other for the sexiest girls . . . and I won!”

  In fact, it was John who often found himself with the most girls on his arm, sometimes with outrageous consequences. John was very popular, and he just bounced in and out of girlfriends every few weeks. After the album had come out he’d managed to find time to sneak off to Paris for a romantic couple of days with a girl named Roberta. It must have been a passionate time, because a few years later we opened up a copy of the Daily Mirror to see Polaroid photos they had taken of each other in bed. John was pictured drinking a cocktail naked in bed, and Roberta was reclining on the sheets dressed only in stockings, suspenders, and high heels, under the headline A HIGH TIME IN PARIS.

  “When we went to the Louvre it was closed, so we spent most of our time in bed, eating strawberries, cheese and French bread,” she told the paper.

  The rest of the band had a bit of a quiet smirk at the article, but to be fair to John it can’t have been very nice for him, especially as his parents would have seen it. The article was one of many invasions of privacy he suffered, and it must have been upsetting. When we played in Japan, John had more girls chasing him than anyone, and I think it started to get to him. We knew we would have female attention, but it was hugely difficult to manage on a personal level. The record company had planned it that way and had pushed John into doing lots of interviews with Smash Hits, but they didn’t realize just quite how big it would become. It started with John, and then it spread to Simon and the rest of the band.

  In some ways our hedonism was completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the country. This was the summer of ’81. There were violent riots all across the UK, caused by mass social discontent. In music, as well as in the country generally, it was almost as if there were two cultures running in parallel. There were bands like UB40 and the Specials, who were singing about unemployment and urban decay, and then there were the likes of us, who just wanted to have a good time. I was the same as any other guy on the street—we were working-class escapists who wanted to live out our dreams.

  We played one gig at Birmingham Odeon while there was literally a full-scale riot going on outside. The Odeon was in a beautiful old building on New Street, and the rioters were tearing the city apart while the police battled to clear the street. We had allowed a journalist from the New Musical Express to accompany us inside, so it was a very strange interview because we could hear the roar of the crowd outside. These were very troubled times in the UK, and it was also the height of the cold war, so the world was living in fear of nuclear disaster, but we took it all in our stride. It was during this interview that Simon came out with the famous line, “We want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops.”

  WHEREVER we went, we were determined to export the party atmosphere with us—and America was no exception. Our first jaunt to the USA turned out to be three weeks of mayhem and we nearly got kicked out of the States before we’d made an impression.

  Los Angeles was one of our first stops. We’d heard lots of legendary stories about British bands’ hell-raising in the past at the famous Hyatt House Hotel on Sunset Strip. It was nicknamed the Riot House because Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, had ridden a motorcycle through its corridors and Keith Moon of the Who was supposed to have driven his car into the pool there. We’d read a book called The Diary of a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, by Ian Hunter, which catalogued all the wild behavior of British bands on tour in America, and it became our bible.

  “Come on, fellas, we’ve read the book, now let’s do it,” I said to the others.

  The only trouble was that by 1981, the Hyatt wasn’t quite so tolerant. We had been boozing it up all day long, and someone decided it would be a wheeze to put shampoo in the fountain. It was amazing—there were bubbles billowing everywhere. Then we went up to the roof and we could see all these well-heeled guests enjoying a brunch buffet down below. Before long there were cream cakes raining down on them. I think at one point I actually tipped a bucket o
f water over someone from above on the balcony. We were just being childish rock stars, but it couldn’t have been fun for anyone else in the hotel. There were lots of complaints about us during the day, but we didn’t really take any notice until about 6:30 p.m., when the stormtroopers finally turned up in the form of the LAPD. One of our crew had gone to the toilet and heard the police talking outside. It gave us thirty seconds to escape.

  “Quick, it’s the cops—get rid of all the dope!” shouted one of the roadies.

  The adrenaline suddenly kicked in. Before we knew it the place was swarming with big, armed cops, who were very tough and aggressive. In my boozed-up state, I was convinced we’d all be deported, so I legged it as fast as I could. I ran up the road to the Roxy club and banged on the door.

  “If anyone is in there, let me in,” I begged. “We need to call the British Embassy.”

  I was allowed into the Roxy, but after a stiff drink I decided that maybe calling the embassy wasn’t such a good idea after all. Thankfully nobody was nicked, and a member of our entourage managed to smooth things over with the cops. The person who sorted it out had a great sense of humor and he used to get drunk and fall asleep with a briefcase containing all the cash from our gigs chained to his arm. The police agreed to let everyone go on condition that we left the hotel. But the news traveled fast. We discovered no other decent hotel in town would take us, so we had to stay in this grotty little shithouse for the rest of our stay in LA. Nick and I had to share a room, and I can remember the sheer horror on his face when a cockroach crawled over him in the night.

  New York turned out to be far more welcoming and we were greeted there as if we were a young Bohemian band whom everyone wanted to be seen with—even the great pop artist Andy Warhol. We could just walk into anywhere and be given a table, which was amazing given the short space of time we’d been together as a band. Capitol Records, who were owned by EMI, were looking after us; when one of their press officers heard that Nick and John were fans of Warhol, she called him up to arrange a meeting.