Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  “Look at this, John,” I said. I uncurled one of the suite’s posh toilet rolls and drew a giant pair of breasts on it and scrawled a rude message, aware that the next guest to read it would probably be a head of state. It was childish, but fun!

  The other thing we would do was to dismantle the toilet system itself so that it no longer flushed. We used to laugh hysterically at the idea of a world leader taking a dump, then having to call up maintenance and ask them to come and remove a turd. It was like we were reliving our Hyatt House antics from 1981 all over again. On one occasion the manager came and knocked on my door.

  “Would you mind putting a towel under the door, sir? I am afraid it is rather noisy, and there is a bit of an aroma that’s disturbing the other guests,” he would say distastefully, referring to the pungent smell of marijuana that would often seep out from our suite. We were still indulging in bad habits at this point, and we had a man who would come to visit with a toolbox filled with every pill or substance you could imagine.

  We would call room service any time of day or night demanding our laundry be done or to order some exotic food. Our rooms alone cost $750 a night, and with all the fine dining and extravagance it’s no wonder that we ran up such a huge bill. We hammered the room-service menu so heavily that it almost became boring. I can remember sitting there with John one evening and looking down the endless list of fantastic dishes.

  “Lobster?”

  “Had that.”

  “Foie gras?”

  “Had that.”

  “Truffles?”

  “I’m sick of them.”

  Eventually we decided to order a Chinese carryout from the local fast-food joint instead, and we arranged for it to be delivered to the Carlyle!

  OUR recording sessions at the Power Station would mainly start at 10 p.m. or midnight and go on until six or eight the next morning. But we were still recognized and photographed every time we went in or out, so we’d always dress in our full rock-star regalia. We caused a lot of attention. At one point a camera crew turned up with a woman and a baby, and they claimed the child was John’s kid. Her story was soon proved to be false. A similar thing happened to me not long afterward, when I received a phone call from Jim Callaghan telling me that an underage girl had made a false allegation that I’d taken her back to my suite. Fortunately the hotel logs and my travel records proved she was lying.

  Despite all the attention and high jinks away from the studio, Bernard Edwards always ensured that we stayed focused.

  “What’s the point of being here unless you record a song? Let’s make an album quickly and then get the fuck out of here,” he would bark. “Life’s too short. It’s only music and if you learn to play well you won’t have to be here all day.”

  It was a good attitude and a good mixture of hedonism and focus, very different from the laborious plod of recording Seven and the Ragged Tiger with Duran Duran. When John and I had announced our plans to Simon and Nick, they’d been a bit prickly.

  “Well, I’m going to be away sailing for a while, anyway,” said Simon dismissively.

  As far as I can remember there was never actually a row over it within the band, but Nick and Simon knew it had the potential to disrupt Duran Duran. They responded by announcing that they would be doing an album together called So Red the Rose, so two camps had now emerged. There were John and I on one side in the Power Station, and Nick and Simon in Arcadia on the other, with Roger (who was becoming increasingly weary of life at the center of the storm) floating in between. Both camps chose a hotel to set up their new headquarters, with us at the Carlyle, and Nick and Simon staying at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, where from all accounts Nick’s lifestyle was just as extravagant as ours. From then on it became a bit of a challenge between us as to who could make the best album—and the power struggles with our record company began soon afterward.

  “You can’t do this,” EMI bluntly told John and me. The person we were speaking to was someone I didn’t even know, and yet here he was trying to order us around.

  “Either call someone who gives a fuck or get somebody on the phone who knows what they are talking about,” I said in reply.

  But EMI stuck to their guns and said they would refuse to release our Power Station album. It reminded me of the struggle we’d had with Capitol over “The Reflex” because they considered it to be too black.

  “This will really freak people out. Two white boys from a pop band and two black dudes from Chic. They won’t be able to get their fucking heads around it,” laughed Tony Thompson.

  But on this occasion it wasn’t about race, it was more about control.

  “Right, well, if you won’t release it we will take it to another label,” I told EMI. John and I then did exactly that and approached an independent record company in New York. As soon as we did that, EMI caved in and we agreed to work with them. “Some Like It Hot” was released as a single and charted in March ’85, around the same time as the album. We announced plans for a Power Station tour during the summer, and both the album and the single sold well. More important for me, I’d proved to myself that I could cut it outside of Duran Duran by doing what I loved best, playing guitar music. The Power Station made me very happy for a long time. Sadly, I don’t think it did the same for John because he had too many personal demons to deal with and he didn’t have the same creative relationship with Bernard that I had.

  As for the $450,000 bill that we ran up during the six months or so that we lived on and off at the Carlyle . . . it was worth every penny.

  THERE was, however, one nasty incident that occurred in early 1985 that served as a stark reminder of the problems we’d been through the previous year—and once again it concerned Tracey’s health. While I was recording with the Power Station she had spent some time staying with friends down at Robert Palmer’s place in Nassau, but in February Tracey went back to the UK.

  “Why don’t you catch the next Concorde over with a friend and spend some time here with me,” I said.

  Tracey agreed, but when she arrived and came to the studio, I noticed she seemed a bit withdrawn and didn’t connect with any of the people there that we both knew. I assumed it was just jet lag, and I agreed when she said she’s go back to the hotel for an early night. I came in late and crashed out after a long recording session.

  When I awoke the next morning I slowly became aware that there was no one else in the room and those little alarm bells started ringing inside me again: There’s no one here. I sat up and realized Tracey was gone, which was completely out of character. I called the restaurant downstairs in case she had gone down to breakfast, but she wasn’t there, so I rang the friend’s room, but she told me Tracey wasn’t there, either.

  Fuck.

  The illness was back. I called the cops and then gathered as many of our group at the hotel as I could find. Simon Cook, the trusted bodyguard who’d taken such a beating for us in Germany, was there, along with several other staff from London. Everyone went out to look for Tracey, and I told them to scout the whole of Manhattan. The police checked the security cameras, and they established that Tracey had left the hotel. Because we had already been through so much as a couple I didn’t panic, but a voice inside was telling me to fear the worst.

  Someone is going to do something fucking horrible to her, I thought.

  It was midmorning. I knew that if we didn’t find her soon we’d have to put it on the news in order to appeal for help, “The wife of the guitarist in Duran Duran is missing in New York City.”

  Fortunately one of our staff found Tracey wandering, dazed, near Macy’s department store. We discovered that someone had taken a bundle of dollars that had been in her pocket and replaced it with bundles of ripped-up newspaper. I thought, If she has been attacked then whatever has happened we will get through it again. But fortunately she was unharmed; she had just been mugged in a very passive way. She had suffered a relapse and was telling the same false story as before about being attacked by a man. T
his time the doctors were able to control her condition far more easily, and within about ten days Tracey was back to normal. But it had been a frightening scare.

  NOT long afterward, John got to talking at a party to Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the James Bond mogul.

  “When are you going to get someone decent to do a Bond theme tune?” asked John.

  It was a brash question (John was probably coked up to his eyeballs at the time), but they kept talking, and the next day John announced to the rest of us that Duran Duran would be doing the title track for the next Bond movie. John would often come back from a party and say something was going to happen, and nine times out of ten it would come to nothing. But on this occasion there seemed to be something to it, so we pursued it.

  When we learned that the new James Bond movie, starring Roger Moore and Grace Jones, was to be called A View to a Kill, we thought, Bloody hell—that’s a great title for a Duran Duran song. After all, the band itself was named after a character from a movie (which we exploited in the “Wild Boys” video) so this seemed to be another good film connection. I was slightly apprehensive about going back into the studio with Nick after all the freedom we’d enjoyed on The Power Station, but recording a Bond theme tune was too good an opportunity to miss.

  “Let’s do it with John Barry, he does all of the Bond theme tunes. He’ll put the Bond into the band,” suggested someone.

  “Yeah, we’ll do that,” replied John.

  John Barry turned out to be a hilarious character. He was a very posh old composer who played the piano with a tumbler of whiskey by his side. John Taylor and I were both heavily into booze ourselves at the time, and we set about heavily leading him astray with more drink. There was a great little pub just down the mews street from where John Barry was based, and we would all disappear there for long afternoons. Pretty soon after our first meeting, John came up with a wisp of a tune for the opening part of the song.

  “I think we have got a start here,” said Simon hopefully.

  Simon worked on it a bit more with John Barry, and they came up with the first line, “Meeting you, with a view to a kill.” Roger and I then developed a hybrid drum/electro sound that sounded great and Simon added the chorus. Originally he sang it as one flowing line, “Dance into the fire.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not quite right. Try putting a pause into the line for a drumbeat. It’s ‘Dance. (boom) Into the fire.’”

  Simon sang it again, leaving a pause, and it sounded right. We knew we had another Duran Duran hit on our hands.

  Working with Nick, however, was not so easy. He absolutely hated cocaine, so he wasn’t appreciative of JT’s and my behavior. He seemed to regard us in much the same way as he had during the Seven and the Ragged Tiger sessions.

  “It doesn’t matter if you have got a great song—you’ve done it in a way that I don’t like.” That seemed to be his general attitude toward us.

  Nick seemed to be resentful of the whole project because it was organized by John Taylor. At times it was impossible for all of us to be in the studio together without having a row, and it was Nick who seemed to be swimming against the tide. John Barry challenged him a few times about things he’d done musically, which seemed to annoy Nick.

  “I’m fucking not doing that,” Nick would say flatly.

  “You can say all you want, but I know what I am talking about and at this time, you don’t,” said Barry in his posh voice. “I’ve worked with people like Shirley Bassey and Roger Moore, and this is my gig, young man.”

  Simon, the eternal optimist as ever, did his best to make peace between the warring camps. But this was a power struggle that deep down we should all have known could only end in tears for Duran Duran.

  THE record label didn’t have to think very hard about “A View to a Kill.” They just put their stamp on it and watched it fly out of the shops until it became the best-selling Bond theme tune of all time. John had been right to be so brash to Cubby Broccoli.

  For the video, we approached our old friends Godley and Creme, who’d directed our “Girls on Film” video in 1981. The plan was to hire the Eiffel Tower for the morning and shoot a series of gravity-defying special sequences. I was to play a character called Agent Spiff, who was pretending to be blind with a white stick (that was Godley and Creme’s Northern humor). In truth, I wanted to get it over and done with after all the friction in the recording studio, but there was a big nasty incident at the Plaza Athénée before I got a chance to flee Paris.

  A couple of days prior to the Eiffel Tower shoot I was talking to Ronnie Wood, who was recording with the Stones at EMI’s famous Pathé studios in Paris. He invited me down, and I accepted. I’d always wanted to go and see the Rolling Stones recording, because their studio setup was legendary. My intention was to go alone, but on the night a little posse of us went, including John. When we got there we found a small crowd of people already hanging out. I was in the guitar room admiring all the Stones’ instruments with Ronnie, when Keith Richards arrived in a foul mood.

  “Oh yeah—down here on a fucking coke deal are you? Well, get it out then,” he snarled.

  I’m going to have to give him a line and I’ll make it a right big one, I thought.

  “You lot are just down here for a line of fucking coke and a mooch about,” he repeated aggressively.

  “No, no. Keith, it’s all right,” said Ronnie.

  I chopped out a line of cocaine for Keith and it seemed to pacify him. I’d known what to expect from him, because he’d been obnoxious to Simon when we’d all met previously, and Keith felt so bad about it afterward that he wrote Simon an apology. Despite the hostile reaction from Keith, it was amazing to see the Stones’ studio. Everything was perfect, from the bar stocked with ice to the instrument cages that contained all their beautiful old guitars. Bill Wyman wasn’t there, but it didn’t seem to bother any of them. They just swapped instruments around and all got on with each other. God, I wish our band was like that, I thought.

  I just wanted to sit in the corner and enjoy the rawness of it all. They were a real band’s band. But as the night wore on I could see that John was all over the place, and he started making a real spectacle of himself. At first he was just swaying all over the place and going “woo whoooo,” but after a while he started to get very emotional about something. I don’t know whether or not one of the Stones said something to upset him, but he ended up crying his eyes out on Jo Wood’s shoulder. Jo was used to dealing with mad rock stars, but I thought, Shit, I wish I had come on my own. Keith Richards might have behaved obnoxiously, but he was right—most of the people present were just there for “a mooch,” and they didn’t have any real interest in what was going on.

  “Come on, John, let’s go,” I said.

  I went off to a club in Paris with Nick and his wife one night around this time, but the things between us went from bad to worse. Julie Anne got up on the dance floor on her own, and it seemed to make Nick a bit moody.

  When we got back to the Plaza Athénée all hell broke loose. From what I could gather, Julie Anne locked Nick out of their suite and she barricaded herself inside. She was screaming at the top of her voice out on the balcony, and it caused a big commotion, because some people feared she might fall off.

  The whole thing then descended into a farce when the fire brigade were called. I was feeling the worse for wear by now, and I watched Nick charging up and down the corridor, not knowing what to do next. Despite our differences I felt sorry for him, as his marriage was clearly not going to be a happy one. They’d had a blazing row and the following day his new mother-in-law and father-in-law flew over from the States.

  When I woke up early the next morning, the day before the Eiffel Tower shoot, a wave of depression hit me as I recalled all the events of the last few days. I felt embarrassed at the memory of John staggering around at the Stones session, and I felt exhausted by the nastiness of the commotion at the hotel. Suddenly, I was uncontrollably upset and I kept crying.r />
  This can’t go on, I thought.

  That’s when I made up my mind that I’d do the Bond video and get the hell out of there. I called one of our accounting staff whom I was friendly with and confided to him how badly I was feeling. The booze and the drugs and the carnage that surrounded Duran Duran were all just too much. I knew I was fast heading for a nervous breakdown if I didn’t change my lifestyle.

  The next morning I got up at five, put on my dark sunglasses, and went to the video shoot. I left the Plaza Athénée soon afterward and I’ve never been back since, didn’t even want to walk in there again.

  Looking back, when John and I formed the Power Station prior to “A View to a Kill,” Duran Duran had already split up.

  We just didn’t know it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Live Aid: The Final Curtain

  I wasn’t looking forward to Live Aid. Sure, the scale and the grandeur of the event was something that I wanted to experience. But by the time we gathered in Philadelphia I was apprehensive about seeing Simon and Nick again. I think we were all starting to feel very frayed one way or another, particularly Roger. He was always very much the quiet man of the band, but somebody whom I respected immensely. I think the pressure of the constant attention, the touring, the traveling, and the whole circus just became too much for him and he started to become agoraphobic. He was naturally quite a shy person, and he began to dislike being involved in promotional appearances for our Arena album. Years later, I asked Roger how he’d been feeling at this point.