by Andy Taylor
We were quite disciplined in our approach to work. We’d written and rehearsed all the songs and we knew exactly what we wanted to do in the studio. It’s fair to say, though, that we’d developed a few London habits that would come back to haunt us in future years. John and I spent a lot of time at the Embassy—particularly John, who became the absolute star of the place. When you record an album the bass player and the drummer are usually the first to lay down their material, and they often end up with time on their hands while the other band members record their contributions. Roger had done his bit during our first couple of weeks in London, and he went back to Birmingham to be with Giovanna because he was quite anchored with her, but John stayed on in London and partied almost every night. He was starting to get a staggering amount of female attention, much more than the rest of us. The record company had deliberately pushed him into the spotlight because of his looks, and I think all the wild partying was his way of letting off steam.
The Embassy was definitely an interesting place, but, unlike John, I was never that impressed with it. I didn’t mind having a bit of fun, but I didn’t want to sit there all night talking rubbish with people who’d overindulged in certain substances. Hayter, who later died of AIDS, had an office at the back of the club behind a bulletproof door. For a select few who were in the know, there would be mounds of cocaine on the table in the office after the club closed, and people would go there to party until morning. But I have never been a fan of sitting there trying to put the world to rights when you won’t even be able to remember what you were talking about the following day.
The guys from Spandau Ballet were based in London, as was Steve Strange, and it was through the Embassy Club that John and I first encountered Robert Palmer. We went back to Steve Strange’s house in Notting Hill one night and Robert was lying there on the bed, giggling away in a world of his own. He was behaving as if he had taken acid, just laughing his head off, until he came round a bit and we introduced ourselves. He was a proper partyer, but he always wore a suit and tie.
“I’ll never look out-of-date like this,” he used to explain.
Robert loved being around different people and going out to dinner with them. He drank wine and whiskey—the grape and the grain—and he had a great routine that involved getting up for lunch and having some wine before going to work and never dropping a beat. After that, he would go out to dinner and then go back to work again. But he never let his lifestyle interfere with his work. He was a great singer, lyricist, and all-round musician.
TRACEY and I had planned to get married in April or May 1982 in the Midlands, but after we finished recording Rio, the band had to shoot our videos in Sri Lanka and Antigua before playing in Japan and Australia. By the time we got back to the UK, I was exhausted and laid up with a stomach bug I’d picked up in an elephant lagoon (I’ll tell you about that in the next chapter). It turned out to be a very nasty virus. At one point I was in Wolverhampton General Hospital with a temperature of 103 before Tracey and her dad persuaded me to transfer to the private hospital.
Our plans for a spring wedding had been well and truly spoiled, and now we were due to play a series of gigs in the States. Capitol Records, EMI’s American division, had promised to put a lot of backing behind us if we remixed the Rio album for the States, which we did with the help of an American sound engineer. It gave the album a smoother, cleaner sound that went down better with US audiences, who are used to slightly more precise sound than we’d developed in the UK. We were in agreement, because we realized we needed to change our sound for the States, where the music industry spends far more time and money on mixing material. Not that we had much choice.
“Remix it and we’ll support you; don’t do it and we won’t,” said Capitol.
It was good advice, but the American tour left Tracey and me with no choice but to rethink our wedding plans again.
“Okay, if we can’t get married now, let’s do it in the UK in the summer after the US tour,” I suggested.
It sounded like a good plan, but after we went on the road the record label announced they’d managed to book us on a second US tour with Blondie, which would immediately follow our own. We were due to play the last date of our US tour at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on July 27 before joining Blondie’s Tracks Across America Tour in Kansas City on August 2. It meant there would be no time to go back to the UK to organize the wedding—and our families back home were beginning to wonder if we’d ever go through with it.
“Well look—in between our tour and the Blondie tour let’s get married in LA,” I said. “It will cut out all the headache of trying to organize things with our families, and if anyone wants to come they can get themselves an air ticket.”
Tracey agreed and we booked the wedding for July 29, 1982, at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It wasn’t just the timing that made America the best location to get married, because back home Duran Duran were starting to get an enormous amount of press attention. “Hungry Like the Wolf” had been released in the UK on May 15, and we were chased by screaming girls wherever we went. Getting married in the States would create less fuss than a wedding back home. John, in particular, was still being heavily pushed by the record company as a single man who made an ideal teenage pinup. I’d never really played up to the same image, so it wasn’t as if the media were going to react by saying, “The single guy in Duran Duran has gone now, girls.” But even so, there were a few paranoid people at the record company who feared that the first Duran Duran wedding might damage our image as available young men.
“The fans will see the wedding and wonder who is going to be next,” they said.
I had a bit more respect for our fans than that, and I argued that it was better for them to aspire to marry one of us than to just sleep with us, but in any case Tracey and I wanted to keep the day low-key, which probably suited the way the record label and our management would have preferred things if they’d had a say.
DURAN Duran were really starting to take off in the States by the time the big day of the wedding arrived. We’d made our first major appearance on US television in Philadelphia when we went on the dance show Dancin’ on Air and “Hungry Like the Wolf” was beginning to get major airplay on US radio. Our videos were getting great exposure on MTV and we were being constantly played on TV screens in nightclubs, which helped to raise our profile all the time.
Meanwhile, we were working our butts off and played gigs across America and Canada, which included shows in New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco. We’d travel from city to city by train, which was a strange feeling because even though we were being mobbed in public by fans in the UK, in the States we could still travel by public transport without being recognized. Our record sales were starting to earn us serious sums of money, but we still weren’t at the point where we could afford to travel everywhere by private jet, so the train made sense for accounting reasons as well. But we were starting to enjoy our growing financial freedom, so we’d check into the most luxurious hotel we could find whenever we were in a major city. When you are newly in love, there’s nothing nicer than checking into a palatial hotel and getting a nice room, perhaps with an open fire, and living off room service. Tracey and I did a lot of that, and it was a nice bit of sanity away from the huge amount of fuss and attention that was beginning to surround the band.
Two days before Tracey and I got married, Duran Duran sold out the Greek Theatre. Eight thousand people saw our show there. It was the first glimpse of what was about to happen across the United States—and it was fantastic. Until then we’d been opening for a couple of other bands and playing to audiences of 3,000 to 4,000, but with every show interest was growing. We’d seen what had happened in the UK, so we had a sense of where it was all going. Our attitude was “Wow—it’s about to happen here, too.”
For the wedding, everyone in the band had checked into their own bu
ngalow at the Chateau Marmont. Tracey and I took one of two special apartments that stand on the top of a hill within the hotel grounds. It had its own garden, a big lounge kitchen, and three or four bedrooms, so there was plenty of room for entertaining. It was the ideal place to spend your wedding day—although the atmosphere at the hotel was slightly strange because the actor John Belushi had recently died in the bungalow next door. The Blues Brothers star had been found dead from a drug overdose in March, but the whole place was still covered with police tape, and all his cars were being examined by cops in the underground car park. The police were actively investigating his death, so there were lots of forensic people coming and going, but we didn’t allow it to spoil things.
There was a little tree close to our bungalow and we arranged to be married there by the Dean of UCLA. The day before the wedding I went into town to organize all the wedding suits while the other band members went off to a yacht party. We all planned to wear gray top hats and tails; one of the security guards and I had to try and get everyone’s sizes correct.
“Don’t worry—everything is going to be perfect,” I whispered to Tracey that night.
The only problem the next morning was that we nearly didn’t wake up! The others were supposed to come and rouse me to ensure I didn’t oversleep—but it must have been a great yacht party because they were all still out of it from the night before. Luckily I woke up just in time, and I went around all the other bungalows knocking on their doors, starting with John. He was still asleep so I had to wake him.
“You look dreadful. Fancy a livener?” I smiled.
So we downed a Jack Daniel’s and Coke each, put on our suits, and off we went. But despite all the hangovers, the ceremony itself was very private and lovely. It was attended by about thirty close friends. We released a couple of nice photos of Tracey and me to the media through the record company. We also had some pictures of the five band members together in our top hats drinking champagne. Then we had a huge wedding cake and lots of pizza. Afterward, Tracey and I sipped more champagne together and relaxed in the sunshine on the beautiful grounds of the hotel.
It was a perfect rock-and-roll wedding. To cap it all, things were going great in the band and there didn’t seem to be a cloud on the horizon. But although we had no way of knowing it on that day, as a band we were about to face some problems later that year.
In fact, we were about to face a whole lot of trouble.
I was in a dreamy sleep cuddled up in a hotel bed next to Tracey in October when I slowly became aware of a distant commotion that seemed to be happening somewhere far away. Slowly, as I began to wake through the fog of sleep, I could hear voices shouting outside in the corridor. For a second I thought I heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass, then things grew quiet again.
“What the hell was all that? Did you hear it?” I asked Tracey.
“Ignore it and come back to bed,” she replied, sleepily.
But somewhere inside me little alarm bells were ringing. It was autumn and we were on the road in Germany, having finished touring the States with Blondie a few months earlier. I had arranged for Tracey to be picked up from the Munich airport earlier. We’d spent the evening eating pizza together in bed at the hotel, while some of the other members of Duran Duran went off to a nightclub. They’d planned to meet Bryan Ferry there; the Roxy Music guys were big in Germany and they were out there at the same time. Intrigued by all the fuss I’d heard outside my room, I got out of bed to investigate.
“It’s John. Don’t worry—it’s all right, he’s gone to bed,” said one of the crew. I could see from the expression on his face that things were far from all right. “There was some trouble at the nightclub,” he explained.
We were all checked into hotel rooms that had doors connecting to the same corridor, which was lined by glass light fittings that were spaced high up along its walls. I could see that one of the fittings had been smashed, and beneath it was a dark smear of blood.
I was torn between investigating further and going back to bed. Things seemed to have quieted down, so I decided to return to my room to be with Tracey. But try as I might, I couldn’t sleep. A couple of hours later I got up and went to John’s door, where I could hear muffled voices coming from inside.
“It’s Andy. Let me in,” I ordered.
The door swung open and there was John, surrounded by some of our crew members. I could see he was in a terrible state. His right hand was wrapped in a huge swath of bandages, and he looked pale and distraught.
“What the hell happened?” I demanded.
“They came at us with baseball bats in the nightclub and beat the hell out of us,” explained one of the crew.
Only then did the full horror of what had taken place begin to unfold. John and Roger had been part of the group that had gone to the nightclub in Munich along with several of our entourage, including our bodyguard, Simon Cook. The group had met up with Bryan Ferry as planned and the evening was going well. No one could explain exactly what had happened next, except that they’d been sitting around a table downstairs in the club when a group of men armed with baseball bats rushed over. The vicious attack that followed had been premeditated and nasty.
“It was too coordinated to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. They came at us very quickly and they knew where we were,” the crew explained to me.
Roger had taken the worst of it. He’d been beaten close to unconsciousness after being smashed over the head. He had a nasty bump on his skull and he was probably lucky to be alive. A full-scale war had then broken out between the attackers and our own security. Simon Cook had taken a real pounding, but despite that he’d never stopped punching back while he tried to defend the band. He was a brave bloke, and he even managed to briefly drag a few of the attackers back down the stairs as they made their escape. He was a good friend to all of us, so it was upsetting to hear he’d taken such a nasty beating on behalf of Duran Duran.
It was John who had sustained the bloodiest injury. The wound to his hand would keep us off the road and force us to scrap the rest of our dates in Germany. Ironically, the wound hadn’t been sustained during the fight in the club. John had actually cut his hand at the hotel by putting it through the light fitting that was now shattered and dripping with blood in the corridor. He’d suffered a deep, nasty wound, and there was no way he was going to be playing bass guitar anytime soon.
I discovered that during most of the fight, John and Bryan Ferry had been hidden away in the toilets. I suspected that by the time John got back to the hotel, he was overcome by the fact that he hadn’t done anything to help the others. Band of brothers? Forget it. In my view, when he’d punched the light fitting he’d been lashing out in anger at himself. Perhaps he felt bad and wanted to punish himself for what he rightly or wrongly perceived to be his own failure to be able to join the fight? There was no need for John to feel that way. He wasn’t a coward—it was just a human reaction. But I was torn between having sympathy for him over his plight and being angry with him because I knew his injury was going to cause us a lot of problems. I think you can forgive anything when someone is suffering, but in my view John had either meant to punch the light, or he’d been so out of control that he’d done it by accident—and either way he needed help.
“I mean, it’s a fucking wall, there’s lots of places you can punch. Why go for the most painful bit?” I said to myself.
“Right—we’re going home in the morning,” announced Simon the bodyguard. Despite the terrible beating he had taken he was still being the most rational of all of us. “We’ve got to get flights and get out of here fast. No one has got to know about this. We’ll pay the hotel bill, no fuss. Dead quiet. We’ll catch the earliest flights we can get.”
We knew he was right, and the next morning we caught the elevator down to reception in silence. The hotel weren’t very happy with us, but we were all determined to keep quiet as we checked out. Then it was quickly through the hotel door, looking straight ahe
ad, and onto our tour bus. By now, John was out of it, half asleep with his hand wrapped in a giant ball of bandages; a doctor had dressed his wound during the night. Every one of us felt tired and ragged.
Getting married earlier in the year had been the nicest thing that had happened to me, but getting beaten up in a nightclub was the nastiest thing that had happened to the band so far. I think that some of what occurred that night got bottled up inside John and Roger, and it may have had a bearing on how things unfolded in the future. I can’t believe something like that doesn’t have an effect on you. Roger had been the victim of terrible violence, and John was powerless to help. We weren’t a violent bunch of people, but everyone now knew what it felt like to be a target. Suddenly it was as if a whole new negative dimension had become part of the equation, and it was a turning point. Our reaction was, “Okay, we better have more bodyguards in the future.” It was also a turning point for me personally, because I was on my way to becoming regarded as the king of hedonism for always being up for a party. As I’ve mentioned I had a reputation for having hollow legs when it came to putting away the booze, and if the mood took me, I happily stayed up all night drinking—and I was out most nights. I also continued to use cocaine from time to time. But on the evening of the nightclub incident, thankfully, I’d opted to have a quiet night in with my wife.
THE pressure had been building up on us all since the Blondie tour, which had been fantastic, but it was also a time during which early frictions began to form within Duran Duran for the first time. Before we got to Germany, things started to change over the summer with the arrival on the scene of Nick’s new partner and future wife, Julie Anne Freidman.
A few days after Tracey and I got married, Tracey went back to the UK and I met with the rest of the band at the LA airport to fly off to meet with Blondie elsewhere in the States.
