Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  “I was hanging on by my fingernails,” he said.

  Roger was right. The whole band seemed to be hanging on by our fingernails.

  We were recording with John Barry in his mews house in Kensington when the call came in from Bob Geldof asking us to take part in Live Aid. We’d already sung on the Band Aid single, which had raised funds for starving people in Africa, and we’d also appeared in the video the previous Christmas, so we were top of Bob’s list for his grand plans that summer.

  “I’m going to organize a great big fookin’ gig like you have never seen, and I need you boys to come on board first,” he said. “You’re the only UK band with any sales in America, so if you come on board it means America will come on board.”

  I wasn’t much of a fan of Bob at the time. I thought he was a bit of a gobby Irish singer whose band hadn’t achieved much, but you had to admire his determination. We’d had a bit of a laugh shooting the Band Aid video, because we’d been in Germany the night before with Billy Idol. We had been playing out there at the same time. We’d all gone back to the same hotel, only to be told the restaurant was closed and room service was finished for the night. Rather than go to bed hungry, we waited for the hotel staff to bed down for the night, then some of us crept downstairs and raided the kitchens. We spent the night helping ourselves to everything in the pantry, all washed down with copious amounts of booze. The next morning I was so hungover that we nearly missed the plane taking us to London for the Band Aid shoot. If you watch the video closely you’ll see I’m wearing a hat because I wanted to hide how scruffy and hung-over I looked! I wasn’t the only one a bit worse for wear; the guys from Status Quo kept everyone amused at the shoot with some boozy antics of their own. The episode had been a brief interlude of fun away from the usual hassle, so initially I hoped Live Aid might be the same. I was wrong.

  After doing “A View to a Kill,” John and I were busy with our Power Station tour. We took a bit of a blow when Robert Palmer pulled out, saying he couldn’t spare the time. We were determined to go ahead, though, and we asked Michael Des Barres if he would take Robert’s place. The Power Station was still going to be my bridge out of the madness, with or without Robert. One thing I was determined to do was to make a clean break from the Berrows, who I remained unhappy with over the large slice of our earnings that they were entitled to under the terms of our contract with them. To my mind they were one of the causes of a lot of the madness, always driving us on to do more shows, public appearances, interviews, and dire projects like the embarrassing video for “New Moon on Monday.” And all the time they were earning more and more money for us to pay for their gleaming new Ferraris and expensive escapades abroad. So it was around about this time that I checked through all the paperwork and realized there was a legal way I could sever my ties with them.

  Under our deal with the Berrows, they owned some of the rights to our music, which was something I couldn’t change, but there was a time clause that allowed me to employ my own management after five years. It meant that even though the Berrows still owned some of our publishing rights, I no longer had to work for them directly. It had the potential to get messy, but I eventually phoned them up and told them of my intentions. John was in agreement with me and I phoned the Berrows up from his house.

  “You don’t represent me anymore. Your five years are up—you’re fired,” I said.

  Of course, the Berrows still looked after the others (until 1986, which I’ll come to later).

  I knew some of the other band members were beginning to feel the same way as John and I, but the sticking point was going to be Simon, who was much closer to the Berrows than the rest of us. Simon had two big passions in his life at this point: his future wife, Yasmin, and sailing—which was something he had in common with the Berrows, who shared his nautical ambitions to sail around the world. Together, they’d purchased an expensive yacht called The Drum, and they intended to enter the Fastnet yachting race on some of the most dangerous seas in the world. To me it was just another of the Berrows’ daft plans, like the time one of them had tried to build a lasting temple in Sri Lanka. Coming from a fishing family, I knew the sea was something to treat with respect. Simon’s plans to sail around the world would also mean him taking off the best part of a year, and I knew the chances of us resolving our differences with the Berrows while he was away with them were very remote.

  When I raised it with Simon, it exploded into a spectacular row.

  “I think we need to reconsider our contract with the Berrows. Things are not working the way they should be,” I said.

  “No, it’s all right. Everything is okay, it will be fine,” insisted Simon.

  His optimism would never dampen, but on occasions like this it would infuriate me. Simon is a kind, decent person, but at times he gets lost in Le Bon Land. Which Simon have we got here today? I wondered. The one from the real world or the one from Le Bon Land?

  “Take the blinkers off, Simon. Everything is not okay. It’s not okay to feel like this,” I argued.

  “Oh mate, come on. You just need to calm down a bit,” Simon replied calmly.

  Don’t give me that big brotherly “I am the oldest” load of shit, I thought. Take the blinkers off, Simon. Don’t address me and my problems until you’ve addressed your own. As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have been taking a year off and going on a boat with the Berrows. It just opened the door up to make everyone else feel contemptuous of both him and them for leaving the rest of us behind.

  “Well I want to do it,” said Simon flatly, his expression hardening.

  “So we’ve got to wait for you to take a year off? I want to get rid of them and you are protecting them,” I shouted.

  “Well, I am doing it,” said Simon sternly.

  I lost it completely: I used some very blunt language along the lines of accusing Simon of wanting to “wank off around the world with them on a fucking boat.”

  “Well . . . I am doing it!” he roared.

  YOU can understand why there were a few awkward silences when we got together for the Live Aid rehearsal in Philadelphia. We were at number one in America with “A View to a Kill,” and we were about to perform at the biggest show on Earth, but you wouldn’t have known it from our demeanors. Physically, John and I were lean and concert-ready from being on the road with the Power Station, but Simon seemed bloated and distracted. Roger was suffering in his own private hell and Nick was . . . well, Nick was just Nick. The five of us hadn’t been on the road together since San Diego the previous year (the night of the stabbing at the Coca-Cola party), and when we started playing together it showed. There seemed to be scores of people whom we didn’t know milling around at the rehearsal.

  “Excuse me,” I shouted into a microphone. “Can everyone who is not actually working please fuck off out of the room.” It was something I’d learned from the Keith Richards School of Charm.

  The next morning—the day of the show—I awoke in my hotel room and had breakfast in bed while watching the TV. Live Aid had steamrolled into being an enormous phenomenon. There were events all around the world to raise money for the starving in Africa. The principal gigs were at Wembley Arena in London and at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and virtually every major artist in the rock world was taking part. It was a culturally defining moment, like Woodstock had been a generation earlier. The day raised millions and it saved lives—but whether or not the awareness and the goodwill that it generated had any lasting good is another matter, because twenty years later Africa is still in poverty. Like I said at the beginning of this book, half the world watched the show while the other half starved.

  Because of the time difference between London and Philadelphia, I was able to watch the opening act at Wembley from my hotel room before we left for JFK Stadium. Status Quo were first onstage in London, and their rousing performance reminded me of their antics at Band Aid. When it was time to leave my hotel I went down and got into our limo. As well as with Duran Duran, John an
d I were performing with Tony Thompson in the Power Station that day—and in turn Tony was due to play drums with Phil Collins and Led Zeppelin. So in our entourage we had elements from three groups: Duran Duran, the Power Station, and Led Zeppelin. We were joined by Danny Goldberg, a very shrewd LA showbiz agent who’d agreed to look after my affairs now that the Berrows were soon going to be off the scene.

  It was a sunny day, and there were crowds thronging about on the streets everywhere. Inside our limo the five members of Duran Duran sat in silence, as if we were going to a funeral. I suppose that in a way we were, because Live Aid was our final curtain. Only Danny and Tony Thompson spoke occasionally to break the ice. Tony was trying to crack the odd joke, but I think even he could sense the tension.

  The bustle behind the scenes at the gig bordered on mayhem, with trucks and trailers parked up as far as the eye could see behind the stadium. Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards gave us a good laugh when they turned up drunk and fell out of their limo. I spent most of the time backstage gulping white wine and eating Domino’s Pizza; there was no fancy catering. Bill Graham, a powerful American music promoter who’d famously played a rock promoter in Apocalypse Now, was calling the shots. When the time came for John, Tony, and I to go on stage with Michael Des Barres in the Power Station I pulled in my guitar and . . . boom. Both amps were dead.

  Shit.

  I am about to appear at the biggest show in history and I can’t play a note. I turned to Keith, my technical assistant.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Give me ten minutes,” he said.

  “I haven’t got ten minutes.”

  I could hear the roar of the crowd. The two noisiest audiences in America are usually Seattle and Philadelphia, and today Philly was really up for it. Then, above all the cacophony of noise I heard Bill Graham shouting.

  “What the fuck is happening? We’ve got to get this show on the way!” he bellowed.

  I looked at Keith. Suddenly he went charging off and grabbed one of Jimmy Page’s amps from the Led Zeppelin crew.

  “Can I borrow this?” he said, and grabbed it before waiting for an answer.

  Keith and the crew carried out the amp and I plugged in my guitar. Every second counted to prevent the audience from becoming impatient. I spoke to one of the other technical staff in the live broadcast truck to explain to them they’d have to make some adjustments.

  “We are off the rig, just crank it up,” I shouted.

  We managed to get everything working after four minutes and we performed “Get It On,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “Murderess,” but we had to drop one number to make up for lost time. When I came offstage Bill Graham was still ranting.

  “Why don’t you shut up?” I shouted at him.

  “Steady on, Andy,” Jim Callaghan said to me. He was aware of how powerful Bill was, but I was past caring.

  The rest of the day flew by. The other memorable event was Simon’s squawked bum note during “A View to a Kill.” In hindsight, it’s possible his voice wasn’t fully trained at the time because he’d been off the road for so long, but I wasn’t too bothered by that either. Back at the hotel that evening I crashed into bed after partying with Ronnie Wood and Jimmy Page. The shenanigans were still going strong downstairs, but when a knock at the door came from one of the crew inviting me back out I couldn’t take it.

  This time the party really was over.

  THE following day I gave up drinking. I got up and went to lunch with Danny Goldberg and explained the way I was feeling.

  “You know, I need to get out of this,” I said.

  “Everything?” he replied.

  “Well, I need to get out of the lifestyle, at least,” I said.

  Danny was a very intelligent guy. He helped me to unravel things and he gave me a lot of advice. He’d been Led Zeppelin’s publicist for many years and he had traveled with them, so he was a seasoned old pro (he went on to represent Kurt Cobain). Danny was currently managing Don Johnson and Michael Des Barres. Don was very clean-living and he knew Steve Jones. Steve, my Sex Pistols pal from LA, had now decided to quit the bottle.

  “Talk to Michael and Don,” advised Danny.

  From that point on, Danny helped me with lawyers and everything that I needed to extricate myself from Duran Duran. Of course, as far as the rest of the world were concerned, Duran Duran were still a group and we were at the height of our success, but behind the scenes things were now too badly fractured for the five of us to carry on together. John and I were still in the middle of the Power Station tour (we’d had to cancel a couple of gigs at a cost of around $250,000 in order to do Live Aid), so I still had a bit of time on the road ahead of me before I could go to LA to sort things out with Danny. It felt strange to be sober and on tour. Up until now John and I had been living on a diet of Jack Daniel’s, cocaine, and fast food. I’d become cut off from the real world, and I had very little idea of current affairs or even about what was going on in the world of football back home, which was previously something I’d always kept in touch with. Being in Duran Duran had become like being sucked into some weird alternative reality in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

  I was getting ready to go and do a sound check for a Power Station gig in the States when I turned on the TV news in my hotel and got a bizarre shock. There on the screen in front of me was footage of a yacht floating upside down in the sea.

  “. . . And once again the latest shocking news . . . A yacht belonging to Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon has capsized in rough seas. The singer is believed to have been on board.”

  At first I was a bit numb. This isn’t real: that can’t be Simon’s boat, I thought. I rang John in his room.

  “Put the television on,” I said.

  The news bulletin didn’t have any more details. Was Simon still alive? Was he still missing or had he been rescued? Who else was on board the Drum when it turned over? A million questions were going through my head, and any differences between Simon and me were obviously forgotten at this moment in time. The sea looked dangerous and stormy in the grainy television images, and I knew from my background in a fishing village that nobody could survive for very long in seas like that. Our staff began calling Europe to try and get more information, and we began to make plans to cancel that night’s show. Hell, if Simon was dead we’d cancel the whole tour and be on the first flight back to the UK. Fortunately, news reached us fairly quickly that he had been rescued. You were stupid to go out to sea, Simon, but thank God you are safe, I thought.

  In a funny sort of way the Drum incident was just another example of how the lifestyle threatened to destroy all of us. In fact, I was convinced that someone would end up dead if we all continued the way we were going. Another one of our nine lives had been used up. After the tour ended, I told John how I felt while we were in a car together in LA.

  “You know, one of us is going to die,” I said quietly.

  “What are you talking about?” said John.

  “If we keep going like this we are going to die. It could be a drug thing, it could be an alcohol thing, or it could be something else. Simon nearly killed himself on a fucking boat.”

  John didn’t seem to grasp what I was saying.

  “Look at us,” I said. “We’ve been living on a diet of cocaine and Big Macs. You should quit this lifestyle and be an actor. It doesn’t agree with you.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, I should be an actor?”

  “You should give up being in Duran Duran and be an actor—it’s what you are good at. How many more times does something bad have to happen? Car crashes, bad drug comedowns, arguments, drunken bust-ups . . . How many more do you need before one of us goes all the way?”

  When you are sober, you come out of denial, and I knew that we were close to losing everything. It wasn’t just people in the band who were living on the edge, it was those around us. Sooner or later someone was going to pay the ultimate price. It could have been Nick’s wife falling off a balc
ony, or it could have been my wife through postnatal depression. Or what would have happened if the next time there was a stabbing at a party the knife went through someone’s heart or lungs? What if one of us got alcohol poisoning or ran out of luck the next time we were racing to a gig and a tire blew? Up until now the booze and drugs had prevented me from seeing any of this, but we’d reached a crossroads and it was time to change direction. Simon nearly proved my point a few months later when he crashed his motorbike and spent six days in the hospital with bruised testicles. Ouch. Yet another one of our nine lives gone.

  Roger, meanwhile, seemed to have reached a similar conclusion to mine near the end of the year. EMI had been anxious to keep a lid on things, so officially all five us were still in Duran Duran, but in December Roger announced he was quitting. He was suffering from severe anxiety and, unbeknownst to the rest of the band, he had become very ill. He was just burned out by the whole thing and he was later quoted in the New York Times as saying “I’d been on a thousand airplanes, but I didn’t know how to get on one as an individual. I had to relearn life.”

  Only Simon and Nick seemed to want to soldier on. As well as Roger quitting, the other major event in December of that year was that Simon married Yasmin. As far as the press were concerned it was a marriage made in Heaven: the pop star and the gorgeous Persian model. I think his newfound love probably saved Simon from the sort of demons that the rest of us were facing. He’d always stayed positive, and in Yasmin he’d found a very smart girl. Years later (after we patched things up) I became friends with Yaz, and Simon won’t mind me telling you that she’s the one with the balls in the Le Bon household. She’s super-intelligent and always argues her corner very well if you’re debating something with her. Simon was later quoted as saying that he first spotted Yasmin’s photograph when he was flicking through a model agency book with John. He was besotted from the moment he saw her and later managed to track her down and ask her for a date. He chose very well because as well as being a famous supermodel, she is sharp, witty . . . and a great cook. Their ceremony was a grand affair and it was nice to be going to Simon’s wedding when we could so easily have all been going to his funeral. Simon told us how he’d feared his oxygen would run out while he was trapped in the upside-down hull of The Drum with his brother Jonathan, who is a very fit lad and a strong swimmer. Jonathan volunteered to swim underwater through all of the oil, shit, and ropes that were thrashing about in the sea in order to get help.