Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  Eighteen months! I felt that Tracey would be better off at home rather than in the local hospital, so we organized twenty-four-hour medical care. Our doctors made a decision to sedate her by putting her into an enforced coma for six days. It was for her own safety because she was so ill that her brain needed complete rest—and the only way to do it was to medicate her.

  It felt as if everything in my life had just evaporated into ether. I looked at our little baby and I prayed Tracey would be okay. I couldn’t think about anything else. Everything that happened to me up until now was insignificant compared to this. I was terrified that even if Tracey pulled through it would be too late for her to bond with our child. I’d seen enough to understand that a baby smells and feels its way through the first few weeks of its life with its mother, and any disruption could only be a bad thing. The lowest moment was when the doctors suggested that one of the treatments that could be suitable for her was electroshock therapy. It sounded like something from Victorian times.

  “No thank you,” I said. “There’s no one else here who you can ask about that so don’t mention it again.”

  For six long days and nights I helped the medics and my mother-in-law care for Tracey. The nurses worked in shifts. They told me it was important to get a routine going so that everything stayed as familiar as possible for Tracey when she briefly awoke from time to time. I ate breakfast and watched TV each morning, and during the breaks in her medication I would help to bathe Tracey whenever she roused a little. At one point the doctors had to put her on a drip to get some nourishment inside her and to keep her hydrated, so there was a lot of equipment up in the bedroom. We’d recently decorated the room for the arrival of the new baby, and now it looked like an emergency ward. Tracey’s medication was increased during the evenings so that she could sleep for ten to twelve hours without being disturbed. I tried to cuddle her at night but she was all floppy. The nurses explained that she couldn’t react to me emotionally because she was so heavily sedated. The only thing we could do was to look after her hygiene while her brain relaxed and the medication did its job. The whole point was to prevent her from reacting to anything and let her calm down.

  Thankfully, it worked.

  Slowly, the doctors reduced the medication and she started to come around. I held her hand and it felt gentle again. The anger was gone, and the woman I loved was back. She managed to hold a glass by herself for the first time in a week, and I knew she was going to recover. Food was still not easy, but slowly she began to improve and the dark rings around her eyes began to vanish. Once Tracey had calmed down, the doctors were able to balance her hormones by giving her drugs, and her condition began to stabilize. Inducing the coma had been necessary so the doctors could control her mental psychosis before they could start balancing her body. A lot more is known about how to treat the condition today than was known in 1984, but she pulled through.

  It was a great relief when things started to return to the way they had been. I needn’t have worried about her bonding with the baby; I only needed to watch her splashing with him in the bath to realize everything was fine. But the doctors warned us there was a danger the psychosis could return in the future.

  “We don’t advise you to have any more children or you could find yourself suffering again,” the doctors told us.

  I would sit and wonder what had brought on the illness. Was it anything to do with my lifestyle in Duran Duran? Being trapped in a car at Heathrow Airport while it was ransacked and she was pregnant couldn’t have helped. Had the time Tracey spent with us in the States taken a heavier toll on her than I’d imagined? Was the furor over our cocaine use a factor?

  The honest answer is that I don’t know. It’s a rare illness, but it can strike any woman after childbirth. Tracey never smoked while she was pregnant, and she has never been much of a drinker, so physically she didn’t put any stresses on herself during pregnancy. In fact, she was a strong, energetic woman who went riding almost every day and kept herself very fit—and all those things helped her pull through.

  One thing that the whole episode taught me was that your priority in life should always be your family and the health of your family. If ever that collides with work commitments you should always choose family first. Sometimes it can be hard to juggle both. There were times during this period when people would call me with updates and assessments of how our release plans for Arena were going and I’d think, You know what? It’s not that interesting to me at the moment. I’ve got more important things to care about.

  Tracey later told me that she had some very deep spiritual experiences while she was unconscious. She went through the sort of thing that you hear about people going through when they are very near to death. You can’t really describe it unless you have been through it yourself so I won’t try, but afterward Tracey became very religious. She hadn’t been in danger of losing her life, but she had experienced what it was like to lose her mind. As a result her Catholic faith became very important to her, and she became close friends with a sister at our local convent. There was still a very nasty relapse ahead (which I will tell you about later), but Tracey eventually made a full recovery. She is now much more conscious of how important it is just to have a normal life—for her, being normal each day is a gift. We’ve been married now for over twenty-five years. Despite the warnings from the doctors, we have three more beautiful children, in addition to Andrew. Tracey is a healthy and well-balanced person.

  She is also a very brave woman.

  I explained about what had happened to Tracey to the rest of the band, but I don’t think any of them really understood. To be fair, nobody from London had really been around us at the time, and I was glad to keep things separate from my life in Duran Duran. Tracey and I were more interested in slowly learning to stand on our own two feet again and learning all the things you need to know in order to bring up a baby—which is hard work even when you have plenty of help. I think I told John about it in a bit more detail than the others, who were mostly busy getting on with their own lives.

  Everyone was managing their own affairs. I didn’t know it, but at the same time I was questioning whether or not I wanted to remain in the band, Roger wasn’t feeling too grand about it, either. He’d gotten married to Giovanna in Naples in late July, and the newlyweds managed to escape from the crowds by going on holiday to Egypt.

  Nick’s wedding, meanwhile, was a much more public affair. It had taken place at the Savoy Hotel in London two days before Tracey had given birth to our son. Everybody wore pink, including all the guests, and when we arrived at the hotel there were pens filled with pink flamingos. Nick’s “best man” on the day was his ex-girlfriend Elaine Griffiths, and you had to hand it to him and Julie Anne—they knew how to cause a stir. I went to the wedding with Simon and his girlfriend Claire Stansfield, and the papers were full of speculation that they too would soon be wed. What they didn’t know was that Simon would soon have his eye on an attractive young model named Yasmin . . .

  So after the chaos of our US tour, everybody was really getting on with their own lives for a while. We all needed the breathing space.

  We had less contact with each other than normal during the second half of 1984, although we still got together for the odd promotional event or TV appearance. One memorable occasion was when we recorded a Christmas edition of the BBC’s Pop Quiz, with Mike Reid. The publicity about the rivalry between us and Spandau Ballet had gotten so great that the BBC begged us to go head to head with them on the show.

  Neither band would ever live it down if they lost, so I had a quiet word with Jimmy Devlin, a legendary A & R man at EMI who knew everything about how to pull strings and plug bands.

  “We can’t get beaten by that bunch of tossers from London; we’ll never hear the last of it,” I told him. “We’ll probably know how to handle the easy questions, but we need you to get the answers to the hard ones.”

  “Donnea worry,” said Jimmy, who was a burly Glaswegian.


  It was my idea, but he was happy to oblige. This was going to be a real-life case of “Jim’ll Fix It”! A while later he came back to me with some great news: he’d secretly got hold of the answers for the final round. I sensed a major coup. On the day itself things had been ramped up so much that there were sets of fans of both bands queuing outside the BBC. John was our captain, but all five of us took part against all the members of Spandau Ballet. Nick answered our first question correctly to give us an early lead, but by the time we went into the third round both bands were dead even on fourteen points each. The finale ended on a cliffhanger with Mike Reid asking us a really obscure question.

  Bing!

  I thumped the bell and gave the correct answer—we’d won! You could see immediately from the faces of Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp that they knew they’d been stitched up. When Jimmy confessed everything to Tony Hadley a few years later, Gary Kemp came up to me afterward and laughed: “I always fucking knew you fixed it.”

  For us it had been a bit of a prank, but everyone took it totally seriously. Even today clips from the show still regularly pop up on YouTube—and our fans still argue with theirs about who deserved to win. Of course, Spandau never went on to crack America like we did, so all I will say is that Duran Duran might have been from Birmingham (which Spandau’s manager Steve Dagger liked to claim would put us at a disadvantage), but at least we did our homework!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Power Station . . . and Power Struggles

  I was looking for a bridge to take me in a new direction, and I found it in the Power Station, the band that John Taylor and I formed with Tony Thompson and Robert Palmer during a gap in Duran Duran’s schedule in late 1984. It was a very satisfying experience, so much so that John and I ran up a hotel bill of $450,000 while we were recording the Power Station’s first album in New York (and that was without the tip!). Not surprisingly, the project itself didn’t make us very much cash and neither did it stop us from being self-destructive, but it did give us a renewed focus, and for that I was grateful. The music that John and I made together in the Power Station was born partly out of frustration at not being able to play the way we wanted in Duran Duran. The memory of how painstaking it had been to record Seven and the Ragged Tiger was still fresh in our minds, so when the opportunity came along to do something different we seized it with both hands.

  The first conversation I had with Tony Thompson about us doing some work together had occurred at the end of 1983, when John and I went to see him playing drums with David Bowie while we were in Sydney. Bowie had just released Let’s Dance, which was a very influential album, and the drumming on it sounded phenomenal. We had the same agent as Bowie, so John and I were invited back to his hotel for a private party after the show, and it was all very friendly. Tony was one of those rare drummers, like John Bonham, who could create an individual sound of his own. John and I bumped into him in the loos, and we spent the rest of the evening chatting about music. He confirmed my suspicions that he was a big fan of John Bonham, and John Taylor and I both felt we’d made a good connection with Tony. He was famous as the black funky disco drummer from Chic, but he was really a rock drummer at heart. A member of Bowie’s entourage came over and interrupted us while we were talking.

  “David would like to talk to you downstairs,” we were told, rather grandly.

  I hope this doesn’t spoil my fun, I thought. I’d learned pretty early on in life that meeting your heroes doesn’t always live up to expectation. But we went downstairs and were introduced to Bowie. He was very opinionated and quite odd to talk to, but then I thought, Well, he’s supposed to be odd—he’s David Bowie. (No offense, David—most people who meet me say I am much shorter than they imagined!)

  I didn’t hang around too long. I went back upstairs with John and we carried on talking to Tony, whom I remember was drinking Seagram’s 7 whiskey with 7UP soda, which he called a seven and seven. We obviously came from very different backgrounds, but we had all enjoyed a tremendous amount of success, and I think he was as fascinated by us as we were by him. He knew that Nile Rodgers, one of his former band members in Chic, had already agreed to mix a track for us. He was intrigued to know more. I would later discover that Tony was one of the funniest people I’d ever met; the man had a sense of humor, and when you worked with him you always knew he performed best when he was laughing. He was a very happy sort of guy. Nothing in the industry had really taken its toll on him like it had on John and me. He was just a big, powerful, superfit drummer with a great spirit. I can work with this guy, I thought.

  “We are going to have to talk again,” I said, when it was time to go our separate ways.

  When we eventually got together it was Tony Thompson who anchored the Power Station, not John or I. Tony was the true inspiration for the sound because he played the drums with alarming power; it was his loudness and his reflexes that originally inspired the whole thing. I heard from him again during the early part of 1984, while we were in New York.

  “I want you to come and meet my good friend Bernard Edwards,” he said.

  We were staying at Le Parker Meridien and we had a meeting in the Black Suite there. It has walls that are painted completely black, so when you pull down the blinds you don’t know what time of day or night it is. We explained to Bernard that even though John and I were already in a band, we were thinking of moving sideways with some of our music. I wanted to retain certain values of Duran Duran, but I felt it was time to change the rhythm of our sound and be a bit more creative, with a harder guitar edge. I had always wanted a slightly more rock-based sound than we’d had on the third Duran Duran album. Bernard was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s top producers and everyone’s favorite bass player, and he understood us in a way that only a good producer can.

  “Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll come over to England and we will do some sessions together,” he said.

  So in late ’84 Bernard, Tony, and I met up in the UK and went into the studio together. John wasn’t around (I think he was busy out crashing cars), but I broke the ice by suggesting we start by doing a cover version of “Get It On” by T-Rex. I chose it because it was a song we all recognized, and it was something we could just play straight off. Together we came up with a new groove for it, and we were pleased with the way it started to shape up. Prior to forming the Power Station, John and I had already written and recorded an early demo of a piece of music in Paris, which John titled “Some Like It Hot.” I played it to Bernard and Tony. We cut a new version of it together, without John’s bass, and Tony’s drumming brought the track to life in an impressive way. (Some of John’s bass was added later on.) It was during this period that Bernard and I really hit it off. The drum intro at the beginning of the track was sensational, and we had to position thirty-seven microphones around the studio to get that echo sound that it became famous for.

  When John surfaced he loved the results, and he enthusiastically sent a copy of “Some Like It Hot” to Robert Palmer, whom we knew from our Embassy Club days. John included a note saying we needed some lyrics for it. Robert listened to it on the beach at his home in the Bahamas, and he came up with a very clever vocal harmony for it on the spot.

  “Listen to this, it’s fantastic,” John told us when he heard the results.

  Everything was now set, and we arranged to start recording at the Power Station studios on Fifty-fourth Street in New York. It was an impressive building that had an elevator into which you could drive a limo and be taken up to the relevant floor. It was where Michael Jackson and all the rock greats like Bruce Springsteen went to lay down their material, and we decided to name our band after the studio. We were in Power Station Studio Three at the top of the building, and Mick Jagger was recording a solo album on a floor below us at the same time. Robert Palmer was in a booth with headphones on when Jagger walked in with Jeff Beck, who had been playing guitar with Mick. Robert didn’t spot them and proceeded to perform a very complex set of lyrics for “Some Li
ke It Hot.” Jagger started hopping about in excitement, and we could see that Jeff was impressed, too. Soon more and more people started to trickle into the studio to listen to Robert sing, including the famous producer Arthur Baker and Nile Rodgers, and they were all hugged by Mick Jagger when they arrived.

  “Come on. Come and listen to Robert Palmer sing,” was the word that went around the building.

  When Robert finished, he came out of his cubicle to discover a small crowd of his fellow musicians had gathered.

  “Fookin’ hell—a full house!” he said, displaying his dour Yorkshire humor.

  Would he hug you like Jagger? Not Robert. It was interesting to observe the contrast between him and Mick, who was bouncing around just like he does onstage. Robert was calm and understated in his formal suit and tie.

  “Oh yeah, man—that was great,” clucked Mick enthusiastically.

  Jagger’s ears had also been pricked by Tony’s drumming, so he asked Tony if he would be willing to do some drums with him, too, and Tony agreed. Tony would find humor in everything, and he would come back to us after a session and give us a progress report on Mick’s antics.

  “He’s mad. He was doing all that stuff in front of me that he does when he’s onstage,” laughed Tony. He described how Mick would strut up and down like a giant cockerel. Apparently, Mick sang every number with great theatrics, even though there was only a bemused Tony and Jeff to appreciate his preening. Tony would be thinking, Calm down, Mick! That’s the lovable thing about Mick Jagger: he’s one musical hero who is exactly the same in the flesh as you imagine him to be.

  We had a lot of fun of our own while we were recording. John’s art-school credentials came out in him while he planned the album cover; in Duran Duran he’d been stifled by Nick, Simon, and EMI. I gave him free reign and didn’t interfere. I, too, was allowed to really pursue guitar, so Tony and I were the noise in the band. John and I moved into the Carlyle, New York’s most luxurious hotel, on East Seventy-sixth Street. Virtually every major politician or senior dignitary stayed there, including the Reagans. John and I enthusiastically set about working our way through the room-service menu, which contained just about every fine thing you could ever think of. Our suites were enormous, and whenever we decided to change them from time to time we would leave a little surprise for the next guest.