Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  Of course, some of the younger crew members were more than happy to reap the rewards of being besieged by gorgeous women, and I daresay that quite a few rock chicks were invited onto their buses. During shows, our fans would throw their knickers onto the stage with phone numbers attached, and as a consequence our road crew were constantly sweeping the stage! It was unbelievable—we’d get backstage after the gig and there’d be 2,000 teddy bears, 150 pairs of knickers, 300 bras, 50 joints, and God knows how many hotel room keys.

  Of course, the theatrical streak in Simon thrived on all the attention, and he loved to go crowd surfing. He’d puff out his chest and dive into the audience so that they could catch him in a forest of open arms. I used to joke afterward that there must have been a few sharp intakes of breath when they caught him because he’s a big bloke! On one memorable occasion, the audience were treated to an eyeful of Simon’s crown jewels when his bulging leather trousers tore open. He was energetically bouncing around in full flow onstage when he dropped down on his knees with his legs apart in order to belt out some vocals.

  Rip!

  Unfortunately, Simon wasn’t wearing any underwear, and his entire undercarriage went on show to a packed auditorium. It made Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl faux pas look like kid stuff. Fortunately for everyone in Duran Duran it wasn’t televised, and the incident made only a few lines in the press. We were always ribbing Simon for being a bit podgy, so the fact his trousers had torn open simply added to all the hilarity.

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured him afterward. “It was only a very small thing so I don’t think anybody noticed!”

  Despite our good-natured gags about Simon’s weight, we were all very physically fit, including him. Life on the road can be very grueling, and if you’re playing energetic shows for two and a half hours a night for three or four nights a week you soon start to build up levels of fitness similar to those of a young footballer. I used to love to let rip onstage and I’d climb onto amps and jump off in order to entertain the crowd. It played hell with my ankles, so I used to wear specially strengthened boots so that I wouldn’t end up breaking a leg. Our energy onstage was very important to Duran Duran and at heart we always wanted to be a great live band.

  We hoped this would come across in the video for “The Reflex,” which was put together using footage shot at several different shows. The main one was a performance we gave at the National Exhibition Center in Birmingham, but major portions were also shot during a gig we did during the Sing Blue Silver tour at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Russell Mulcahy once again did a fantastic job as director, and in my opinion “The Reflex” is one of the best live videos ever made. We wanted the atmosphere to feel as if we were performing in an amphitheater, which is why there are Roman columns at the side of the stage. The set was based on something extravagant that Nick had sketched out while we were in Montserrat together the previous summer. The video is the best representation of the energy of the band. You can see the fun we were having onstage during that tour etched across our faces.

  The camaraderie you experience on the road can be one of the best things about being in a band, and we’d often play practical jokes on each other. On my twenty-third birthday we were staying in New Orleans for a gig when Jim Callaghan (whom we called JC) laid on a surprise as we left the hotel. We were all going together to a bar called O’Brien’s with loads of the crew to celebrate my birthday by getting bladdered on cocktails with big straws. Tracey was with me as we walked down the road, and as we got to the corner there was a street musician standing there playing.

  “Yo! Andy—Happy Birthday to you!” he sang out of the blue, just as I walked past.

  Suddenly crowds of street musicians seemed to appear from everywhere, and they all surrounded Tracey and me, singing “Happy Birthday!” It seemed like JC had secretly tracked down every street musician in New Orleans and arranged for them to give us our own special serenade as we walked to the bar. It was a lovely gesture and it really made our day.

  I think all of us were enjoying things at this point. It seemed as if we were at the peak of our indestructible youth. But sadly, even though we were enjoying things for now, there was plenty of trouble just around the corner. As I said earlier in this book, life in the rock-and-roll industry is like being on a roller-coaster ride with its highs and lows. Well, if the early part of our American tour was a peak, we were about to go into a dip. The danger signs had been there a few months earlier while we were in Australia recording our third album. Going to the studio to fight our way through crowds every morning in Sydney had been a morale-sapping process that had eaten away at our resolve to make great music.

  As Tracey described it, “Every day all the band seemed to do was get up, go to the studio, and work. Then you’d come home and go to bed. Day after day after day.”

  Worse still, the experience had chipped away at the band’s unity. After John and Roger had made their contributions and were therefore no longer required in the studio, it had seemed as if Nick had constantly wanted to change things, and some days I felt as if I was fighting to protect our input. Nick seemed to want a more arty electronic sound than John, Roger, and I, and Simon often seemed happy to go along with it. John, meanwhile, seemed to struggle to fill all the extra time on his hands and resorted to his familiar trick of wild partying. By now his relationship with Janine Andrews was becoming increasingly fiery. When the producer of our third album, Alex Sadkin, had asked John to rerecord some of his bass work, John’s reaction said it all: he lashed out in anger and hurt his arm in a fury. Roger, meanwhile, was likable and quiet, as usual, but we later found out that he was becoming dangerously exhausted. It seemed as if every time we were away from home for long periods of time the pressure would eventually begin to take its toll on all five of us—and America was no different.

  Another negative factor was that the friction between certain band members and the Berrow brothers continued to fester. Nick and I were increasingly hostile toward them because we were unhappy with the financial deal we’d signed with them back in 1980. We had no objection to them making a living from Duran Duran—after all, they’d helped to make everything happen so quickly in the first place—but we felt their share of our profits was simply too great. Worse, in our minds, was the fact that they had some of the ownership rights to the music that we had created. It was ironic that Nick and I, who rarely saw eye to eye on most things, were united over our concerns about the financial arrangements.

  At the end of February 1984, my relationship with the Berrows reached an all-time low and exploded in a violent row—and it was over something that should have been one of our finest moments. Unbeknownst to anyone in the band, we had secretly won two Grammy Awards—and our esteemed management didn’t tell us.

  To receive one Grammy, let alone two, is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement that most rock acts can only dream about. It still makes me furious to this day that I didn’t find out until it was too late for us to collect them in person because I didn’t know that we’d won until the actual day. I don’t know exactly when the Berrows knew, but I was furious with them because I felt it was their job to keep us informed about things as important as this. We were performing a string of gigs at destinations that included Kansas City and Pittsburgh, and at the time I assumed that someone thought the disruption would be too much to handle on short notice.

  Instead, we were told we’d won at the last minute, and we had to make do with accepting the award trophies on the road via a live video link. Our first Grammy, and we fail to attend the biggest television rock-and-roll event in America. I was furious. If there was even the slightest chance we could have won, all we would have needed to do was postpone one gig—the fans would have understood, and we could have rescheduled the gig. For the record, we won Best Short Video (for our “Girls on Film”/“Hungry Like the Wolf” video 45) and Best Video Album (for our Duran Duran video album), but the row totally soured the achievement. It was a horrib
le thing to miss out on and it stole our thunder. I was incandescent with rage and I was soon shouting at Paul Berrow.

  “We win a Grammy and you don’t tell us?”

  Paul tried to argue there hadn’t been time to arrange things.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I screamed. “There was time to bring the Grammy trophies here to us but we’re not allowed to go to LA to accept them?” By now I had completely lost it. “You might be a tall streak of piss compared to me, but one day I’m going to run up you and fucking head-butt you,” I raged.

  As usual, the Berrows were full of excuses, but I wondered if the reason they didn’t tell us was because they were afraid of losing a little bit more of their control over us in LA? I was twenty-three years old and married with a pregnant wife, but maybe they thought I was too naive to handle it. Simon was twenty-five, yet I felt they were treating us as if we were still teenagers.

  “Right, you motherfuckers. That’s it,” I threatened. As far as I was concerned, I’d had enough of the Berrows.

  The sooner we ditched them the better.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  America . . . and Cracking Up

  WHEN you burn the candle at both ends, pretty soon something has to give—and in America it happened during April 1984 at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. I can’t remember who it was who first called me in the middle of the night to tell me that John Taylor’s hotel room was drenched in blood. What I can vividly recall is the horrific scene that greeted me when I arrived there in the early hours of the morning.

  Everywhere, blood.

  It was all over the bed. I can remember it on the covers and on the sheets, I can remember it on the wall up by the window, and I can remember it on the floor and all over an antique chair. In fact, one whole side of the room was covered in blood and there was a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on the floor. It had smears of red gloop congealing on its broken edges. John sat on a chair in the corner, whimpering.

  I couldn’t get any sense out of him, and it took a second or two for my brain to try and make sense of the scene. I’d been drinking heavily that night and I’d also taken cocaine; so had John. I assumed John had been involved in some sort of argument with a girlfriend. The room was in a state as if there had been an argument. Things had been turned over, but the room wasn’t completely trashed or smashed up. John continued to rock back and forth, crying in pain and clutching at himself.

  Then I saw where all the blood was coming from.

  The soft underside of his foot was covered in a mass of cuts that seemed to have shards of glass sticking out of them. I assumed that he must have stepped on the broken vodka bottle with the force of his full weight, but I couldn’t tell if all the mess had been caused by his foot spurting or whether or not in his semiconscious state he’d walked around the room with bits of glass embedded in him.

  I grabbed the telephone. “Emergency. We need a doctor . . . ,” I said, as the adrenaline in my veins began to sober me up.

  I could now see that John was very emotional. He was crying and screaming out in pain, but his eyes looked out of it. I didn’t think he was necessarily aware of what was happening to him. He was breathing deeply, as if that was the only thing keeping him sane. I put my arm around him to try and comfort him, but I could feel panic beginning to rise within myself.

  “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” I repeated over and over.

  I don’t know if I was trying to reassure John or convince myself. I kept thinking, Fuck me, please don’t let him bleed to death.

  I could see that he’d suffered a horrible wound. By now his foot was a really nasty piece of work, all purple and swollen, with lumps of flesh hanging from it. I don’t know how long it took for the medics to arrive, but pretty soon it seemed as if the whole world had descended upon John’s room. The first thing the medics wanted to establish was whether or not there was any tendon damage. I could see from their demeanor that they regarded it as a serious wound, but they reassured John that they would do their best to patch him up.

  “Calm down, John. Breathe deeply, everything is going to be all right,” they said to him.

  The incident would be downplayed in the media. It was later reported that John needed twenty stitches, but I think it was more like forty-two or forty-three stitches. Believe me, this was not a minor incident. Slowly, I started to feel relief that John was receiving proper medical attention, but I still had an awful, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was scared for John and what this would mean for him, but I was also scared of the implications it could have for everyone else in the band.

  “My God, how is this going to look?” I asked myself, when I eventually got back to my room.

  I was in a state of numb shock and I started calling various members of our crew. “Right. Meet me here now. We’ve got a serious problem,” I told them.

  It dawned upon me that the timing couldn’t have been worse. We were due to shoot some major sequences of a show for our Arena film at Oakland Coliseum in California the next day—and the preparations for that were due to start in a matter of hours. I’d seen enough of John’s foot to know he would be lucky to walk anytime soon, let alone be in a fit state to run up and down onstage with a bass guitar.

  “Andy, it’s going to cost several hundred thousand dollars to scrap the shoot,” I was warned. “Plus, there are the insurance implications to think about.”

  I was more concerned about John at this point, but the question of the film shoot was something that we’d be forced to deal with as soon as the sun came up. I feared our insurance company would not cover the losses if they could argue, rightly or wrongly, that the injury had been caused by reckless behavior or if it could in any way be construed as being self-inflicted. I obviously wasn’t in the room when John got hurt, so I don’t know how it happened—all I saw was the mess and a man who I cared for who was in trouble. But getting drunk and dancing on vodka bottles was hardly the sort of thing that our insurers would be in a rush to pay out on. John would later deny (both to the band and later to the media) that he did anything on purpose or in a rage that night, and at the time we were more worried about dealing with the fallout than apportioning blame.

  A group of us sat down in my room and tried to work out what to do next. If John was unable to play, then there would be no show . . . and no show meant no film shoot, which in turn would jeopardize our whole marketing plan for the next few months. All in all, we estimated we could have kissed good-bye to a cool $750,000, which would be worth several million dollars today.

  “How are we going to get through this, then?” I asked.

  “Well, we are near to the end of the tour. Maybe we can call in the Rock Doc and John can just hobble through it,” said someone in reply.

  The Rock Doc is the name we gave to a friendly medic whom we could call upon if things got heavy and we wanted something dealt with quietly. Most major rock bands have them and in an emergency they can often medicate you with whatever it takes to get you onstage, even if it involves some slightly unorthodox medical practices. So that’s what we did. John was patched up during the night and the next morning we called the Rock Doc, but I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It was no coincidence that I was the first band member who’d received the phone call about John’s injury. Ever since Australia he had been increasingly erratic, and I was regarded as the only member of Duran Duran who could really talk to him because we were close—and kindred spirits when it came to cocaine. It shows how disjointed we’d become as a group. One thing that was certain was that John was going to need a serious amount of morphine to kill the pain. Of course, apart from easing pain the other thing that morphine does is turn you into a zombie, so John also needed something else to keep him awake.

  When the Rock Doc arrived the next morning I was the only guy in the room with John.

  “Come on, we’ll get through this,” I said to him.

  In the end, John had to be
fired up at both ends. The doctor gave him huge amounts of morphine in the foot. Then John took pharmaceutical cocaine through the nose to keep him awake. It was the only solution; otherwise, the morphine would have knocked him out. The doctor was there and he was actually letting John snort it. That’s how crazy things had gotten: a doctor was actually allowing us to take Class-A drugs.

  “Here, Doc, while you’re at it,” I said, pointing at the cocaine.

  He looked at me sadly.

  “Fuck it—do you know what we have been through in the last twenty-four hours?” I said, helping myself to a line of the drug.

  And that was how we got through it all day. The doctor injected John in between the toes and wrapped up his foot. Then it was sniff, sniff, and onstage. Forty minutes later John was back in his room.

  “Arrggh!” he screamed, as the bandages came off while he leaned back in his chair.

  Sniff, sniff. Wrap. Then it was back onstage for another forty minutes. I want to stress for legal reasons that the doctor involved wasn’t a member of our regular circle. Let’s just say that when you work in the rock-and-roll industry, there are always ways and means of contacting people like that. We went through the process of John coming offstage to take more drugs three or four times until we finally got the filming done.

  Unbelievable.

  Looking back, it was all so surreal. When I replay it in my mind it’s like watching the sort of mayhem you’d expect to find in a Quentin Tarantino movie. John would later be quoted as saying that he felt as if his body had left him and his soul was pinned to the ceiling—and that’s exactly how he looked: as if his soul had left him. Anybody looking down on us from the ceiling of that hotel room the night before would have witnessed a morbid sight, with the stark red of all the blood against the white sheets and me panicking as I cradled him.