by Andy Taylor
We were glad to go back, and we played a series of great gigs while in London during December. We were shown on Top of the Pops on Christmas Day doing our lip-synched version of “Is There Something I Should Know?” as part of a seasonal round-up of the year’s number ones.
Christmas 1983 held a special significance for me due to the wonderful present Tracey was about to share with me.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she confided, when we were alone together in our cottage in Wolverhampton. “I think I am pregnant . . .”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“The Reflex” . . . and Cracking America
A HELL of a lot of blood, sweat, and tears were spilled during our tour of America in 1984. It was the year that we finally conquered the United States and we were duly anointed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which billed us as the Fab Five in comparison to the Beatles. We were honored with two Grammy Awards, and we fulfilled our lifelong dreams of performing in front of a sellout audience at Madison Square Garden. It was fantastic. For a while everything that we touched seemed to turn to gold. But adulation comes with a price; and over the next few months we were about to experience a series of deeply disturbing incidents. The US leg of what fans referred to as our Sing Blue Silver tour that year was the last time that all five of us went on a major tour together during the 1980s. John, in particular, would end up in a very dark place, and I would finish the year secretly questioning whether or not I wanted to remain in the band. But for the time being, things seemed to be going perfectly.
I was overjoyed that Tracey was pregnant, and we were looking forward to becoming parents. I’d met and married the woman I loved, so starting a family was naturally something that we wanted to do. The timing was going to be difficult, with me having to be on the road for so long, but Tracey was very close to her mother and brothers, and I knew they would look after her while I was away. Before we went to the States at the end of January, we were due to play a series of gigs in Japan to warm up. Tracey and I decided the traveling would be too much for her to come along to Japan, although we arranged for her to join me later in the States.
The tour was preceded by an enormous high—and on this occasion that high was the first time we heard the finished version of the remix for our new single, “The Reflex.” We’d originally recorded the song as a track for our third album, Seven and the Ragged Tiger, which had a very difficult birth and was finished way behind schedule. The track on the album isn’t the greatest version of “The Reflex,” and it was very different from the remix that we eventually released commercially as a single. We’d learned about the value of remixing for the American market from our experience with Rio, so we asked Nile Rodgers of Chic to produce versions in both 7-inch and 12-inch formats. Before CDs or digital downloads, 12-inch vinyl discs were often the only way you could achieve a truly rich depth of sound, so it was an ideal medium for Nile. As well as being hugely successful as a guitarist and founder member of Chic, Nile was just about as hot as it got at the time, having worked with INXS. He’d produced “Let’s Dance” for David Bowie and later did “Like a Virgin” with Madonna. Nile agreed to work on “The Reflex” with an Italian sound engineer, Jason Corsaro, and together they came up with something very special.
We were on the road when we got a phone call from our management, who were the first to be sent a copy of Nile’s version of “The Reflex.”
“Chaps, I have got the remix and I think you ought to come and listen to it in person,” boomed Paul Berrow in his deep voice.
He didn’t say anything else, so I didn’t really know what to expect when we all arrived at his hotel suite in the Midwest to hear it. I can remember that as we walked into the room everything smelled strongly of mint, and we were greeted by the sight of Paul, who’d just finished having a massage with mint oil by his new girlfriend, Miranda, whom he later married.
“I hope a massage is all you’ve been having, you dirty bugger,” I joked, rather unkindly, under my breath.
“I’ve only just got this from Nile, chaps,” Paul explained. “Miranda, can you just pop this on play over there.”
Suddenly the room filled with the magical sound of the opening bars of the new remix: Ta nah, nah, nah. Ta nah, nah, nah.
“Fuck me! That’s good,” said Simon, on behalf of all of us. “That’s exactly how we want it to sound, exactly.”
Within a second, you could hear that the vocals were brilliantly engineered, the bass was fantastic, and everything about it screamed hit, hit, hit! If you do this for a job, after a while your instinct always tells you very strongly if something is good—and all of us, to a man, just went: “Wow!”
Paul seemed less convinced.
“Well, no . . . hold on,” he stammered, but we wouldn’t hear any of it.
“Go back to your massage,” I said.
Nile’s mix sounded different to anything we’d done up until then, yet somehow it still retained all the qualities of a great Duran Duran song. One of the things that was so groundbreaking about it was that it was the first time a black producer had really exploited sampling to its full potential on a commercial single by a leading white band. Nile had taken Simon’s vocals and reworked them using new forms of programming to give the single a brash, funky, and futuristic sound that instantly stuck in your head. Twenty years later everybody would be doing it, but Nile was way ahead of the times.
“Fle, fle, flex,” echoed Simon’s voice, hauntingly.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be too far ahead of the times for the likes of Capitol Records. Incredible as it may seem today, we initially faced a battle to persuade them to release it. The first thing we did after hearing it was arrange to sit down with our management the next day to talk about a strategy for marketing “The Reflex” with an accompanying video. We were determined to film something that represented the core of what we were about as a way of bouncing back from the “New Moon on Monday” video, which contained those embarrassing dance sequences. Our tour was sold out and people were clamoring to see us live, so the time seemed right to do a live video. At the time, we were the only British band that could pull off those huge arena shows (Spandau were dust by now!), so we put together a grand plan. It included shooting the video, filming a Sing Blue Silver documentary, and recording a live Arena album. The only drawback was that when it came to “The Reflex,” the record label had other ideas.
“We have a problem. Capitol Records don’t want to release it. They think it is too black,” explained the Berrows.
“Too black? What do they mean, too black?” we asked.
“They think it’s the wrong sort of association. It sounds too much like something a black artist might do.”
I was incredulous. “Well maybe that’s because it’s been fucking mixed by the world’s leading black producer,” I spat back in anger.
I’d never encountered this attitude before, not on this scale. Where I grew up in northeastern England there were no black people. As far as I and every other member of the band was concerned, Nile Rodgers, Tony Thompson, and Bernard Edwards of Chic were successful artists who we respected and admired. Everyone rated Bernard as one of the greatest bass players in the world; our appreciation of him had been one of the things that John and I had discussed together on the very first day that we met at the Rum Runner. I could hear Bernard’s influence in John’s playing at that first jam session. Chic were people who were great inspirations to us because of their music and their style . . . and then suddenly we were told we couldn’t work with them. No way!
But you have to remember that this was 1984, and even the likes of MTV, which was very progressive, in the main aired only videos by white bands. In those days, shameful as it may seem today, it was very hard for black musicians to get airplay, and the people in charge of the record industry were very open about it.
“No, it’s too black. He’s black. Don’t release it.”
It’s shocking to think that just a generation ago things wer
e so screwed up, but all five of us in Duran Duran were indignant and we were determined to fight our corner. Michael Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean,” from his Thriller album, had already been a huge success on MTV in 1983, so thankfully things were starting to change for the better, but it was a slow process.
Ironically, John and I had already had some initial discussions with Tony Thompson in Sydney the previous year about the possibility of working together at some point in the future. We’d also become good friends with Bernard. There was still an awful racist streak in America, but the Chic guys were so cool about it, and Bernard had actually explained to us what it had been like for black people to grow up in the South in the fifties and sixties. I think their characters were a lot tougher because of all the things they’d had to deal with in the past. It was a hard struggle for them, but the one thing that can bridge most divides is music—and in this case we were determined not to back down.
“Well, actually, you haven’t got a choice about whether or not to release it,” we told the suits at Capitol. “Go and call EMI in London because you will find that you can’t do that. Our contract says you don’t have the power to prevent us.”
Capitol were an American subsidiary of EMI and they were ultimately controlled from the UK, so we knew that whatever deal we had in Britain would have to be honored in the States. Thanks to the clause in the contract that we had signed as fledgling artists four years earlier, we had retained creative control over our music—and we had learned from the flop of our second single, “Careless Memories,” not to let the record label dictate to us about release decisions. But it was a risky strategy. We could force Capitol to release “The Reflex,” but we couldn’t make them spend money promoting it unless they genuinely believed it could be a hit. And without proper promotion even the best singles can struggle. We didn’t often meet with the record company at this point. We would normally just sit down with them for ten minutes and let them know what we were doing—and this was going to take more than a quick meeting to resolve. When the five of us were united about something we were a powerful force to be reckoned with, so the Berrows were dispatched to London to sort things out. Meanwhile I phoned our old ally Dave Ambrose at EMI.
“Dave—do you know what’s been going on?” I asked.
“Yeah Andy—I’ve been thinking about it as well. It’s one of your best pieces of work, you’ve got to release it.”
Fortunately, everyone else in London backed us to the hilt, and eventually they managed to get their American counterparts excited about it. “The Reflex” became our eleventh single and it was our most successful. It gave us a hit just when we needed it most, after we’d struggled to complete our third album, and in that respect it saved our careers from going off the boil. It got a fantastic review in the New Musical Express (the first track of ours to be praised in print by their journalists), and it reached number one in both the UK and the USA. It also got to number four in Australia, and it won an Ivor Novello award for International Hit of the Year—but most important of all, it bridged the divide.
Some things are worth fighting for.
AT first, America seemed like a great big playground, and we were flattered by the constant comparisons that the US media made between us and the Beatles. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were our heroes, so it was a huge accolade to be mentioned in the same breath as them, and it became a regular talking point. In early February, we held a press conference at the Magic Castle pub in Hollywood, which was attended by a crowd of 150 journalists, who treated us as if we were the original Fab Four. We’d worked out a few lines together beforehand, and it became a very humorous affair as the reporters moved their way down the line and each of us introduced ourselves.
“Hello, I’m Simon and I’m the singer.”
“Hello, I’m Roger and I’m the drummer.”
When it got to my turn I joked: “Hello, I’m Ringo and I get pissed a lot!”
We had this thing about trying to make the American media laugh with us and it worked. They saw us as quirky English eccentrics and they loved us. It was a relief for such an important big press conference to go so well, and we later showed some brief sound bites from it in our Sing Blue Silver documentary. Duran Duran were finally accepted into American culture, and we were probably the last British band to achieve that. The tour itself was sponsored by Coca-Cola, and they couldn’t have asked for better publicity—even though at one point John pissed them off by admitting he preferred Pepsi!
They were happy times. It was as if we’d suddenly moved up another notch. It was the first time that we used a private plane on a tour—a big 727, which Simon jokily nicknamed the Excess-a-jet! The entourage that we traveled with was very large by this point—there were around 150 of us, including the road team and our camera crew.
The scale of each gig was enormous, and it was like a military maneuver each time we needed to assemble or disassemble our stage set. If we were due on the road the next day, a small army would descend the moment a show finished, and they would work quietly through the night in order to transport all our gear to the next venue. When a major band goes on the road it’s like undertaking a civil engineering project every day. There’s a whole science that has grown up around getting everything in the right place at the right time.
We had a convoy of eight or nine big trucks that would start loading as soon as we came offstage at around 11 or 11:15 p.m. The crew could get incredibly ratty if anyone was hanging about in their way—and with good reason. They’d be on a tight schedule, which meant they had to get the first truck out and onto the road by 12:30, after which the vehicles would come out one by one as they became ready. The order of the truck flow is very important, and it has to be planned with precision—otherwise, everything arrives in the wrong order at the other end, which can delay building the new set. Depending on the nature of the itinerary, the crew have to start building the new stage while bits of it are still on the road. It’s tough, physical work and it takes a lot of discipline to get it right. Everything is overseen by a stage manager, whose job it is to mastermind the ins and outs of the setup and breakdown. The head trucker then has to organize things to run smoothly and makes sure that none of the trucks go missing along the way.
The crew themselves travel on buses on which they eat and sleep throughout the night until they arrive at the new venue the next morning. Next, it’s a quick shower at the venue before they get called to assemble their gear from around 6 or 7 a.m. In addition to the stage, there’s all the equipment and a massive sound system; a complex lighting rig with hundreds of spotlights and projection gear; plus all of the backstage equipment needed for the dressing rooms, wardrobe, makeup, TV room, band room, hospitality, and greenroom. In all, there are many hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of specialized equipment, all of which seems to weigh a ton! Then there’s all the catering and merchandising stands that have to go up—and that alone can involve twenty or thirty stalls. I remember explaining it all to my dad one time and he was fascinated. It’s like UPS or Fed-Ex on a busy day. The loading and unloading can go on around the clock for twenty-four hours, from the first truck leaving to the last truck arriving. It’s a phenomenal deal, every day.
Every show has to be perfect—or as close to perfect as you can get it. For the band it might be show number 27 on a 100-date tour, but for a fan who has paid his or her hard-earned money for a ticket it still has to be every bit as good as the first night. Without a really excellent crew something is going to suffer, and it will usually be the show. Fortunately, in Duran Duran we were generally surrounded by a really good crew made up of intelligent guys who were always smart and on the button. We paid them well and we always made sure they had plenty of food and drink on their buses, which they basically lived on for the duration of the tour. The guys who made the most money were the riggers, who would assemble all the lighting. It was breathtaking to watch them at work 150 feet in the air, suspended above the stage. We had a very high-tech s
how and a lot of the moving lights that we used were new and varied. For safety reasons the riggers’ work always had to be spot-on—you don’t want a two-ton lighting rig crashing down on Simon Le Bon in the middle of a performance.
As well as our regular entourage, don’t forget that during the Sing Blue Silver tour we also had a full-sized film crew accompanying us everywhere in order to shoot our documentary! It was a big old show. No British band had done a set quite on this scale before, certainly nothing that involved big video screens and such intricate lighting. It was a nice feeling for everyone in the band to be the bosses of something so big. I can remember taking a step back and watching it all happen with Simon one day.
“We’ve created a whole little industry here just from wearing makeup and all hanging out together in a Birmingham nightclub!” we mused.
We performed in front of more than 500,000 people during the American leg of that tour, and there was always something happening on the road to keep us talking. There were plenty of interesting characters in our crew: most of them were English and we knew them well. We’d persuaded a couple of the Stones’ fixers, Jim and Paddy Callaghan, to work for us, and there wasn’t a trick in the book that they didn’t know. They were tough old Cockneys of Irish extract and they’d seen it all. Meanwhile, I even had my own spliff roller in order to save time on rolling joints (which gives you an idea why our plane was called the Excess-a-jet).
Every day the crew would be buzzing with banter about who’d done what the night before. Contrary to popular perception, unlike the free and easy days of the Rum Runner, no member of the band slept with fans while we were on the road. It was just something that we never did because we simply didn’t allow outsiders into our inner circle, plus we all had partners by now. In addition to Tracey, Giovanna, and Julie Anne, John was dating Janine Andrews (my ex) and Simon was close to a model called Claire Stansfield. It was as if we were in our own little bubble with its own community that was separated from the fuss and chaos of the outside world.
