by Andy Taylor
“I got involved in drugs more than most people I know. I loved some drugs,” Simon said in an interview with the Daily Mirror in the nineties. “I enjoyed a very hedonistic life and had some great experiences, but drugs are dangerous and I am certainly not advocating people using them.”
Dangerous is the right word, but it would not be until at least another year after the Al Beard story hit the newsstands that John and I would discover just how destructive drugs could be.
THE cocaine scandal had an immediate effect. The police pulled in our road crew and started to question all our top boys. They didn’t touch any of us in the band because we were mainly out of the country, but from then on every time we returned to the UK we would be turned over by Customs. The indignity and hassle that Simon and I had suffered at Heathrow a few weeks earlier started to become a regular occurrence. The Rum Runner was already experiencing problems with its license at the time the story appeared, but from this point on it was obvious that the police’s main objective was to close the club down for good. On August 1, the Rum Runner’s management found themselves before Birmingham’s city magistrates and were fined after admitting to selling drinks without a license. DURAN DURAN WERE DEEPLY INTO DRUGS, said the headline in the Daily Mail’s report of the court case the following day.
“Pop group Duran Duran were alleged yesterday to be regular users of cocaine and cannabis in the nightclub which launched them to stardom,” reported the paper.
“There is no question that members of the group were regular users of cocaine and cannabis as is common in that world, not only in their private lives but in the club also,” solicitor Stephen Lineham told the court, according to the Daily Mail.
“The claims about Duran Duran will come as a shock,” added the Daily Mail. “For it was the appeal of their clean cut image which three years ago set them off to international stardom . . . In July last year, Princess Diana said they were her favourite rock group.”
The police activity at the Rum Runner continued. During another raid they eventually found what they were looking for, and seized some cocaine which had been discovered hidden behind a brick in the wall. They arrested an associate of the band. He’d been on the road with us at one stage to organize some of our merchandising. It was terrible, because in many ways he was just the fall guy. Meanwhile, the Rum Runner had a compulsory purchase order served on it. It was bulldozed to the ground and a Hyatt hotel was built on the site. The party was over.
A strange and unexpected postscript to the cocaine scandal was that it actually made us more acceptable to certain sections of the public. “The Reflex” sold better than ever, and we were suddenly seen in a new light by the New Musical Express. Nobody necessarily admired us for taking drugs, but the story humanized us because it made people realize we were fallible. It showed that we weren’t perfect and that we had our flaws just like everybody else, and it gave us a gritty realism in some people’s minds.
Drug use is very common in the music industry, so the people immediately around us were not actually that shocked. It’s true that we had a young teenage audience, which sat very uneasily with the drug revelations. But we were all teenagers ourselves when we started out, and we didn’t consider our audience to be younger than ourselves—and we certainly didn’t ask to be role models. Drugs grew out of the circumstances that we found ourselves in, when really all we needed to do was to take a bit of time off to relax. But like I said earlier, there were no days off. It would eventually drive me to the brink of a breakdown and force John to go into rehab, but at this point all that was still in the future.
I always used to maintain that I never needed to go to rehab; I just needed to go home. At least back at home I always had Tracey, who remained the one constant in my life. She was unaffected by all the madness.
Or so I thought . . .
CHAPTER TEN
Wild Boys . . . and Darker Still
I need to slightly rewind the clock to the moment I arrived back in England following the stabbing incident at the Coca-Cola party in Los Angeles in April. As our car sped up the motorway through the darkness of the night to Shropshire, it felt as if the pressure of life in Duran Duran diminished with every mile that we traveled up the M1. Tracey was expecting our baby in August and our home life, for the time being, seemed settled and stable compared with the chaos that surrounded the band.
We had decided to stay at our cottage in Tracey’s old neck of the woods so that she could be near her family when the baby arrived. I used the next few days to take stock of where my life was—and where it might be going. For the first time I began to wonder if things might actually be better outside of the band. We’d had a fantastic time and enjoyed enormous success, but was it starting to take an unacceptable toll on all of us?
The first person I confided in was my brother-in-law, Sean. We’d been out together at some of the fantastic old country pubs in the area, and it turned into a late-night drinking session that ended with us watching the sun come up. We were lying down in a cornfield looking up at the sky. I can see us today in my mind’s eye, as if I’m looking down from above, with the vivid greens and yellow of the corn all around us. I’d been bottling up my feelings until now. They say that’s what cocaine does. It cuts you off from your own emotions. It makes you bury things. It was the first time I admitted that I was starting to get very weary of life in the band.
“Would it surprise you, Sean, if I told you that I don’t necessarily want to do this anymore? I don’t know if I should stay in Duran Duran,” I said.
I think Sean was shocked, as we had it all: money, success, fame.
“It’s probably just something you are feeling because you are tired. You’ve been on the road for a long time,” he said. “With Tracey being pregnant you’ll need a break at some point. You probably just need a rest.”
It felt good to talk to somebody, and I knew Sean had a good head on his shoulders. I decided to make a go of things. Now that the tour was out of the way, we mainly had just postproduction work to do on the Arena album, so it felt as if we had some breathing space. Roger and Nick both planned to use the spare time to get married over the summer. All of us were still tax exiles, which was part of the reason I was in France later when the Al Beard story broke, but I was hoping to spend as much time in England with Tracey as possible.
WITH all the births, marriages, and escapes from death that occurred over that summer, you might think there wouldn’t be time for much else, but the other thing we managed to cram in was the video shoot for “Wild Boys,” which took place prior to the weddings. The opulence and expense we went to on that video outstripped everything we had done until that point. Once again Russell Mulcahy was the chief architect. It was filmed during a ten-day shoot at Shepperton Studios, on the huge soundstage that had been built by George Lucas for Star Wars, and the cost was staggering.
The title of the song came from a William S. Burroughs novel that Russell had acquired the song rights to, so it was an unusual project because the idea for the video came along before the track itself. The book tells of how a gang of teenage marauders from North Africa terrorize a population, but when all the cocaine revelations started to emerge it seemed like a great song title for us. The first line starts with “The wild boys are calling . . . ,” and people assumed it had been written about us. Underneath, I suppose it was, but on the surface it is based on the book. We were putting together the Arena album with footage from Toronto, the NEC in Birmingham, and San Francisco, and we needed an extra track.
“Let’s go in the studio with Nile Rodgers and see if we can come up with something with Russell’s Wild Boys idea,” somebody said.
When we first started doing the track we set up a really interesting drum sound with Roger, and I had a little riff that I thought I could weave into it. The problem was that by this time I was mostly staggering into the studio drunk or flying high as a kite on cocaine, or both. By 10:30 at night I can remember standing up and trying to play guita
r, but I’d had so much Jack Daniel’s that I gave up.
“I’m going,” I said. So we went down to the Cafe de Paris, where a group of us sat in one of the cubicles they have there.
When the time came to leave I tried to stand up and fell over. It was the first time I had gone out and gotten so plastered that I had to be assisted out of the place. It was also the first time that I didn’t care what people thought anymore; I had enough bodyguards to carry me out. In those days there were very few paparazzi around, so I escaped being plastered all over the front pages. Fortunately, during the sober parts of the day we managed to come up with a good track with the help of Nile, who gave it a dance edge—but it took a few weeks to do.
When we came to shoot the video, the scale of the event was enormous—and Russell had bizarre plans for Simon.
“Simon I want you to be stripped and strapped to a revolving waterwheel, and you will then be fully submerged upside down as it rotates through the water,” said Russell.
“You want me to do what?” said Simon.
It was a dangerous stunt, but we could all see that he secretly loved the idea of all the attention it would create. Fair play to Simon, he was always willing to do something if it would help the band, especially if it appealed to the natural showman in him. This was something we would all want to see.
AS well as the William Burroughs references, the subplot of the video was that we would have Milo O’Shea’s original Durand-Durand character under the stage, snatching people into his dark underworld. There were a lot of men running about in loincloths, and it was all a bit too camp for me, but it was at a time when there was a lot of hedonism, drugs, money, and ambition to outdo anything that even Michael Jackson had done in a video. Russell had decided to really push the boat out. I was sitting in one of the dressing rooms at Shepperton when one of our accountants came in.
“I’ve just had to take ninety thousand pounds out of the account of each band member towards the cost of the shoot,” he said.
“Ninety thousand pounds!” I winced. “Why does it have to be a ten-day shoot? What’s the matter with five?”
With £90,000 from each of us the band’s contribution added up to a cool £450,000, and with EMI’s contribution at least matching it, the total bill for the video came to around £1 million. Don’t forget this is at 1984 prices, so the idea of a band making something so extravagant today would be an impossibility; the economics simply would not work. I grumbled a bit about the cost at the time, but in hindsight we probably got our money’s worth over the course of our lives, because it was such a memorable project.
As well as Simon being tied to a waterwheel, I was due to be strapped into a Superman-style harness so that I could swing back and forth through the sky, while Roger would be fired up and down on a jet pack. John was due to be tied up in a derelict car, and Nick, meanwhile, would stick to playing his keyboards in a cage. The set was enormous, with lots of big scaffolds, and there was a giant statue of a gargoyle-like character with a high forehead (which we joked looked a bit like Paul Berrow). At the end of the ten days, Russell planned to blow up the entire set in a giant fireball. Give the man some credit—he liked to go out with a bang.
One interesting departure from all our other videos up until now was that there were no girls in this one and there was a lot of comment at the time about how homoerotic it looked. One touch that I added was the ripped-jeans look—as far as I know we were the first to do it, so maybe that’s my one contribution to fashion!
Simon’s waterwheel stunt was the obvious highlight of the shoot. There had been a few injuries so far, with people falling from scaffolds and so on, but thankfully Simon came through it unscathed. There were two divers on hand the whole time in case anything went wrong, but it still must have been very scary and claustrophobic for him. A lot was made in the press about the fact the wheel stopped turning at one point while Simon was underwater and the papers assumed he’d been trapped and had to be rescued. I think it was more of a case that the wheel was always supposed to pause and arrangements had been made for Simon to breathe through an air pipe. It was actually a very complex stunt worthy of a Bond movie, and our very own “Simon Le Bond” performed brilliantly. The final video was breathtaking (quite literally in Simon’s case), and the waterwheel scenes were very hypnotic to watch. It was released to critical acclaim, and it won a Brit Award for Best Music Video.
TRACEY and I were at home at our cottage when her water broke, and our son, Andrew, arrived right on time on August 20. It was a long delivery, but we were both elated. I was present at the birth, and the first thing I did after cutting the umbilical cord was to count every finger and toe! The midwives wrapped him up in this little white towel and handed him to me, the medical procedures were over, and we had a little baby to care for.
“He’s gorgeous,” I told Tracey.
Nothing prepares you for the delicacy of holding a newborn baby. He was like a piece of fine bone china, and the first thing I thought as I sat down in a chair was Christ—don’t drop him!
We had two bodyguards with us, and we kept the location of the hospital really quiet. I wasn’t going to chance any repeat of the horrible incident Tracey had suffered at Heathrow. The local newspaper found out where we were, but they weren’t intrusive and we went home safely with a midwife to our cottage. I found changing a nappy difficult at first, but you soon learn how to pick up the little legs and get on with it. As well as the midwife, we had a lot of help from Tracey’s mum, who taught me how to sit a baby on my knee and burp him while you gently hold his neck with your other hand. It requires you to be completely gentle in your approach, and I found the whole thing mind-blowing.
Lots of Tracey’s old friends lived nearby, and there was an extended network of people from the Midlands who were all there and all very happy for us. Sometimes it would get to eight in the evening and everything would be dead quiet, so I’d slip out to a great cider pub around the corner and wet the baby’s head with a few close friends and family. I’d found a completely new form of happiness that was so different from anything I was used to in Duran Duran. I was still going back and forth to London, making plans for the release of Arena and “Wild Boys,” but it was a big relief to know I had a beautiful family and my own tranquil little world away from the band.
LIFE then took a very dark and completely unexpected twist—and it made me realize that all the success and adulation can suddenly count for nothing when a loved one’s life is in danger. Sadly, it is often only tragedy or the threat of it that reminds you that you are still human.
Tracey had been a bit tired in the weeks that followed the birth, but we both thought that everything was fine. In fact, she was about to become very sick and it would rock us both to the core. The only way I can describe what happened is that I came home one night and there was a different person in the house. At first I thought Tracey was just giving me a hard time about something or other, but she was swearing at me and behaving very belligerently, which was completely out of character.
“What are you talking about? Calm down,” I said.
She seemed to be confused about who she was. She started to make up things that she claimed had happened to her in the past, including a horrific account of how she’d been attacked by a man. None of it was true, but I later found out that she was going through some experiences in her mind that were demonic and seemed very real to her at the time.
“Are you okay?” I asked, putting my hand on her arm.
“Get off,” she growled, as she lashed her arm back. I could feel the strength in her as she pulled herself away from me and it scared me.
I thought maybe I’d done something to upset her, but then I noticed that her eyes had changed and I realized that something else was going on. To this day, I’ve kept two photographs of Tracey that were taken a few days apart. In one her eyes are beautiful and bright, sparkling with life soon after she gave birth to our son. In the second photograph, which was taken after she
became ill, her eyes are dull and dead. Every time I tried to physically calm her by putting an arm around her, she became aggressive and her strength was frightening. I later found out that increased strength can be a side effect of psychosis. When I touched her hand it was so tense that she felt like rock.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea and run you a warm bath,” I said, hoping it would relax her.
Eventually I managed to get her in the bath and I went downstairs for about twenty minutes, wondering what to do. Our cottage was old, so I could hear everything upstairs. I heard the floorboards creak as she got out of the bath and went into the bedroom where our baby was asleep. A tiny little alarm bell started ringing inside me. I went upstairs and I found her standing at the open window with little Andrew in her arms. I spoke to her softly, but there was no reaction from her—she didn’t seem to know what she was doing. Then the penny dropped and I knew there was something very, very badly wrong. She was completely unrecognizable, and for one fleeting moment I thought maybe she was possessed. I don’t know what her intention was, but I was terrified she was going to jump.
“Give me the baby, Tracey, and come away from the window.”
I tried to take Andrew from her but she wouldn’t let me. I managed to move her away from the window and I closed it. As soon as I’d made things safe, I called Tracey’s mother and I rang a doctor.
The medics knew what was wrong pretty quickly. The psychologist explained Tracey had suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by a full-blown postnatal psychosis. Many women experience postnatal depression, but only one in a million suffer something as severe as this. There was a danger it could become life-threatening.
“How long will it last?” I asked.
“The level of seriousness depends on the patient because it’s a hormonal thing, but it could be up to eighteen months,” explained the doctor.
