Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  “I had to watch my brother go, knowing that I might not see him again. I also knew that if I didn’t see him again I would be dead,” confided Simon.

  Thankfully, Jonathan had made it, and he’d been able to help rescuers pinpoint exactly which part of the hull Simon had been trapped in. Unfortunately, just like The Drum, Duran Duran was now almost beyond salvage.

  We made one last attempt to find a way forward. I had to go to London to sort out some business and the four of us—Simon, Nick, John, and I—all met at a loft flat I owned in Wanstead. There had been a lot of legal wrangling and I had disingenuously given the others the impression that I was willing to carry on because I couldn’t be bothered to have it out with them. I wanted to avoid a confrontation, but I knew it was very unlikely we would work something out.

  It was a fairly friendly meeting, but we were just propping things up. Simon and Nick wanted to carry on with plans for a new album, but I argued we should take a rest. In my mind, I ran through where each of us was in life. Nick was locked in an unhappy marriage (given that he later divorced) and his long-term finances were far from healthy due to his lavish lifestyle. In 1994, the mansion he shared with Julie Anne in South Kensington was repossessed by Coutts bank. Meanwhile, I’d been close to a nervous breakdown and had nearly lost my wife. John was in danger of slowly killing himself through drugs, and Roger was no longer there. Only Simon seemed unscathed, thanks to the renewed vigor he’d been given by Yasmin, but even he seemed to have a death wish for crashing boats and motorbikes. I thought to myself that the band had only existed over the last year for the purpose of propping up Simon’s boats, propping up Nick’s new debts, and propping up John and me with drink and drugs.

  Despite my feelings, the meeting ended amicably, but things were still unresolved. Eventually, Simon and Nick called in Nile Rodgers to play on the new Duran Duran album, Notorious. There was talk of legal action against me if I refused to also take part and eventually I agreed to come to the studio and play on a few tracks to make the transition a bit smoother.

  When I arrived at the studio on a Saturday morning, as arranged, there was no one there apart from a French sound engineer.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was Grace Jones’s birthday party last night so they are probably still sleeping it off.”

  Great. I go to the trouble to come here and help out against my will, and no one can even be bothered to turn up because they are all out partying with Grace Jones (who was the girl of the moment after starring in A View to a Kill).

  I opened up a guitar case in the studio and out fell a bag of cocaine.

  That just about sums things up, I thought. I plugged in my guitar, played a few tracks with the French engineer in order to honor my contractual obligations, and then I left to phone my lawyer.

  It was over.

  So what was it that caused Duran Duran to split in 1986? Booze and drugs? Creative tension and personality clashes? Legal arguments with the Berrows over cash? Our relentless schedule and the pressures of twenty-four-hour attention? All of these played a part, but in the end it boiled down to two things: we had stopped communicating with each other and we were exhausted.

  Our dissolution wasn’t caused by people. It was caused by the circumstances that we found ourselves in.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Beyond the Power Station: The LA Years—Ooh La La

  TRACEY and I moved to a beautiful little house in Los Angeles, and it felt like we were slowly letting out the air that we’d been bottling up over the previous two years. It was our way of making peace with ourselves after all the stresses and mayhem of having to hustle through crowds of camera crews and screaming fans every time we went out in public. Of course, I was still recognized everywhere we went, but I soon discovered that in LA you can find a man to solve any problem. In a town full of Hollywood stars there’s always someone to talk to who understands your needs and who has probably been through similar experiences to your own.

  I was out walking one day when I found this wonderful wooden house in Malibu on the top of a hill, facing out across the ocean. It was a beaten-up old property that would need a lot of love and attention, but the view was exquisite. As I sat there, on the top of the hill looking out across the beautiful blue waves of the Pacific, I thought: Wow—this is perfect.

  Tracey and I had a child to think about now as well as ourselves, and I sensed that living in the United States would give us the breathing space that we needed. We’d been grateful for the help and support of Tracey’s family back in the Midlands in the UK, but if you’re trying to cope with being trapped in the glare of the international spotlight, there aren’t many people who can advise about that sort of thing in Wolverhampton. America was the natural choice for us to make.

  I’d taken Danny Goldberg’s advice to speak to Don Johnson and Michael Des Barres about how to take stock of things, and they both helped me throughout this period in my life. Don was a very interesting guy and I learned a lot from him. He was by far the biggest TV star in America at the time due to his role as gun-toting cop Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, but he seemed to just naturally cope with all the attention that he created, and he accepted it all with good grace. Don was a little bit older and wiser when it came to taking things in his stride. He was fascinated by the music industry and we became good friends.

  Later on, Don took me down to Miami, and it was like hanging out with a king because everyone in the city respected him so much. I can remember stopping at some traffic lights with him there while he was driving an open-topped Beemer. Suddenly, all the cars around us started to sound their horns in order to say hello: beep, beep, beep! We were quickly surrounded by well-wishers . . . but nobody banged on the car or tried to ransack the vehicle, like they’d done when Tracey was in a car at Heathrow. Instead, it was just hilarious. Everywhere we went there were cries of, “Hey—it’s Sonny Crockett!” I thought I’d experienced it large up until now, but this took things to a whole new level. What was all the more amazing was that Don didn’t always have twenty-four-hour security around him. Often he just dealt with it on his own. Of course, he was sober and together enough to be driving and looking after himself—something which I hadn’t been for quite a while. At times in Duran Duran I’d have struggled to remember my car keys, let alone be in a fit state to drive—had I ever learned to drive in the first place!

  Don did everything he could to accommodate me. He and I spent a lot of time talking about music because he was keen to learn how things worked in the industry.

  “Andy, I am interested in how you approach making an album,” he told me.

  “Well, that’s good, because I am interested in how you cope with things so well,” I joked.

  I soon discovered that Don was planning a solo record of his own and that he actually had a very good singing voice. Later on I did a bit of guitar playing for him on his album, but for now the immediate concern for Tracey and me was to set up our new home together. After completing the Power Station tour in LA, I had arranged for an extension to my visa in order to stay on in the States. Prior to finding the house in Malibu, Tracey and I stayed with her mum at the Chateau Marmont, where we had previously gotten married. We then moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel for a couple of months. During this time there was no booze, no drugs, and no need for things like the vitamin boost jabs that had helped to keep me going while I was on the road. Instead of bingeing on cocaine and Big Macs, I was living on salad, soup, and chocolate pudding, surrounded by a strange quorum of friends who formed a sober triangle, consisting of Don, Michael Des Barres, and Steve Jones (although it wouldn’t last for long). It was around this time that I found the little wooden house in Malibu while Tracey was temporarily back in the UK to visit friends. When she got back to the States I couldn’t wait to show it to her. At first she hated it!

  “I don’t like this, it’s horrible—look at the state of it,” she said.

  Tracey had a point. The house
had been built in the fifties and it looked like it hadn’t been decorated ever since.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I reassured her. “I am sure we could find the right decorators to help us to make it exactly how you want.”

  Although it would eventually take a small army of workers to achieve this, Tracey agreed to give it a go. Sure enough, we found some designers to help us fix up the place. They charged me the earth, $200,000—but it was worth it because in the space of about ten days we transformed the house so that it felt like the biggest hotel suite in Malibu. We had parts of it rebuilt, and by the time it was finished it had everything, including our own private pool looking out across the Pacific Ocean.

  We’d bought our freedom.

  We discovered that just up the road from us in Malibu there was a little fish-and-chips shop. I realized I hadn’t done anything as normal as eat fish and chips, or even been around a chip shop, for five or six years. It’s still there to this day and it serves excellent grub.

  The sense of freedom was enormous. There was no Duran Duran to worry about, just Tracey, Andy Jr., myself, and our plethora of new friends. I realized that life in a band, the thing that had once been so special in my life, had turned into something that I didn’t enjoy as the business side overrode the creative. That was the dilemma: you have Music and then the Music Business. It’s a slimy old game, so the job that I loved had become something that I resented. Quite frankly, some of the people you have to deal with you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. There’s very little by way of example to guide you, and no university where you can study dodgy rock-and-roll economics or how to spot a scallywag in business. No, you have to pick it up as you go and take the blows on the way. It can sometimes be a very corrupt business, but it’s the only one we have (barely).

  So, taking a break was exactly what I needed. Tracey and I shared a lot of laughter as we immersed ourselves in our new world. For the first time in ages we could go out in a car and look in the rearview mirror and see nobody was following us home, so there was no more need for crazy maneuvering tactics to shake off a bunch of cars, fans, or paparazzi. The police in Malibu were great, and an officer popped round to greet us soon after we moved in.

  “If you’ve ever gotta shoot an intruder, Andy, make sure it’s inside the house, ’cause it’s legal if they are inside the house and you kill them,” an officer advised me.

  He makes it sound so easy, I mused. “I haven’t got a gun, never owned one,” I said.

  “You don’t have a gun? I can tell you how to go and get one,” he offered.

  I decided I’d make do with an alarm system in the house instead, although we did arrange for a security company to provide an armed guard to patrol outside twenty-four hours a day. Thankfully he was never needed (although on one occasion we were awoken by a gunshot in the middle of the night when he shot a prowling hyena). Life was very comfortable, and we began to appreciate that America has a great service ethic—particularly in LA, where there was a great restaurant scene (unlike London, which hadn’t had its social makeover at this point). We soon settled into a little routine of eating at our favorite hangouts, and I found that I was tremendously well received everywhere we went.

  I can remember Tracey and me being round at Don Johnson’s house on Thanksgiving Day with Don and Michael, their wives, and the actor Philip Thomas, who played Don’s partner in Miami Vice. Michael, whom I obviously knew from the Power Station, was a lovely guy and he was also a bit of a thespian himself. We ate a traditional American turkey dinner together, drinking Pepsi and Diet Coke like a normal family. I had never been in such a conservative environment before, so it took a bit of adjusting to get used to this “well-behaved” scene. But it was good for me to be around intelligent, sober people for a change, and I am still very grateful for all the support they gave me at this time.

  There was a different set of social rules in LA. It was the first place I’d lived in where it was simply not cool to get smashed out of your head every night. As a major city, LA probably has the biggest concentration of reformed drinkers in the world, due to the dominance of the movie industry. Film and TV shoots are very expensive things, and they require people to be up early in the morning. Hollywood is full of tales about actors who have turned up late with a sore head and it has cost them dearly. It was against this background that the modern culture of going into rehab grew, although I always maintained that I didn’t need to go into rehab. I just needed to go home, preferably to my wife!

  I didn’t have very much contact with the other members of Duran Duran during this period in my life. It was like a clean break, but the funny thing was that none of us ever said good-bye. Roger was completely off the scene, trying to cope with the agoraphobia he’d developed, and John was in a different place for most of the time through booze and drugs. Nick and I had never really been close and had drifted totally apart, although he did come to my twenty-fifth birthday party, and somehow we’d managed to remain on civil terms. Simon and I never really stopped being friends, but the bitterness caused by our rows over the Berrows continued to linger between us.

  After I departed from Duran Duran in 1986, the Berrows sold their share of our publishing rights to a newly formed subsidiary of EMI called Gloucester Place Music. I was furious that they hadn’t offered the rights to us, as I’d found a backer to buy them out and I’d been intending to approach them. It meant that to this day we still do not technically own all the rights to our music; we are entitled to a share of earnings from it, but only after Gloucester Place has taken a cut.

  Simon and I eventually found ourselves engaged in a stupid and nasty public slanging match. I picked up the News of the World Sunday Magazine one morning to see the headline: HOW ANDY TAYLOR LET ME DOWN, BY SIMON LE BON. Beneath it was a long first-person article by Simon in which he accused me of using Roger’s illness as an excuse to back out of Duran Duran.

  “What Andy always really wanted was to be the centre-of-stage guitarist. He was bored—or not satisfied—being the guitarist in Duran Duran,” Simon wrote.

  This was pretty dumb, I thought, considering that I had already formed the Power Station with another singer and was still happy to be playing guitar, stage left. But in my view Le Bon does have a habit of acting like a politician when being interviewed, playing to the crowd of the moment, whatever gets you off the hook at the time. It’s also a little rich for any one member to so ferociously grab all the credit, even if it was predominantly from misguided boating trips at that time.

  The article went into detail about some of our arguments and even mentioned the evening when we met at my flat in London to try and patch things up. I’d previously admitted in an interview that I’d been very unhappy toward the end of my time in Duran Duran, and Simon had clearly taken it the wrong way. He accused me of being “like a slippery fish”—wasn’t he the one nearly sleeping with the fishes? I thought. Then he had the gall to criticize me for getting lawyers involved in my split from the band. He obviously forgot that I had to deal with the Berrows.

  “There was me, Nick, and John on one side, and Andy on the other,” Simon continued in the magazine article. He then proceeded to claim that everything about me—my looks, my clothes, my hair—were all just part of an image and he claimed the bottom line was that he felt I just didn’t want to be in the band anymore.

  I was flabbergasted. And from a man who pissed off on a boat for a year without any regard for the others; surely that was a very strong signal that he didn’t want to be in the band at that time? I certainly did not agree to his ill-fated attempts at sailing for a whole year.

  It was so out of character for Simon to get involved in something like that, and I foolishly decided to hit back. The following month I did an interview with the same magazine, in which I addressed some of Simon’s points, including why I had not been keen to play on Duran’s Notorious album.

  “Two fingers to him,” I blasted back. I couldn’t stand the fucking coke and bullshit
in the studio, and the erratic time-keeping that had become part of our existence.

  “I hope this article comes out on the day they start touring,” I was quoted as saying.

  I got out of Duran Duran because I was fed up, fucked up, and fucked off with the attitude of the management primarily, and in case no one noticed the band was in terminal decline and Roger was gone. Simon knew we needed to sort the management out. He may not have realized it at the time, but he was too close to the management and therefore compromised the ability of the band to deal firmly with the Berrows. I felt that by going off around the world with the Berrows, Simon had unwittingly left the five of us unable to be together to make collective decisions.

  “When all the lads wanted me to do the album Notorious, I didn’t do it straightaway because I couldn’t stand being shut in a room for three months just going through the same old drivel,” I said in the article.

  And the songs were suspect, relying heavily on Nile to come up with anything choppy—choppy being the operative word!!!

  I made the point that we were all approaching thirty and it had been time for a change. In hindsight, both of us were a bit childish for what we said, and a lot of our comments about each other were taken out of context. People misinterpreted me as saying Simon was too old and fat to be a star, which wasn’t the case either then or now. But in a funny sort of way, our public slanging match probably helped both of us to get things off our chests. We had no reason to speak for a long time afterward, but I’m glad that we eventually did get in touch with each other and we were able to become friends again. Simon can be infuriating—no doubt I can be, too—but he’s a decent person at heart, and I’ve always respected him for that and for his strong family roots.