by Andy Taylor
The loss of all these people made me realize what a high price can be paid if you live life at such a fast pace. After all, you can’t ignore issues about lifestyle when your friends are dying from it, and I am thankful that I slowed down when I did in 1986.
THE first time I’d met Bernard Edwards was in New York City. As I explained earlier in this book, in Duran Duran we were all in awe of the Chic guys. They exuded a certain confidence that was as natural as their seemingly endless string of hits. In fact, I believe that Bernard Edwards, Tony Thompson, and Nile Rodgers were a serious little trio who changed the sound of modern record production in their time. It would take a whole book to explore all the contributory factors, but for the purposes of this writing I’d like to tell you a little bit more about what they were like as people.
Getting to know these guys gave me a very unique experience of New York. It was their town, and they had a network of great musicians, sound engineers, studio owners, and nightclub bosses. Among the three of them there wasn’t anything that they could not specialize in. Amid all the heat and frenzy of New York, they created more great music than Timbaland or Dr. Dre. Bernard always remained the anchor. He had an exceptional gift for organizing music; he could take apart an idea and strip it down to its essential elements, rearrange the tune, and then figure out what part everybody else would play in it. You always had to be at the top of your game to work with him, but he never gloated about his gift or rubbed it in on those who were less talented. He just gave it to you straight and he always respected the artists (well, at least to their faces!).
As well as being a great musician himself, he truly understood that the role of being a great music producer was to support others to help them do better things. I enjoyed working with Bernard because his watertight attitude suited me perfectly. In music, you often find that your best ideas come together within the first five minutes of trying something new, and he had an instinct for hearing quality straightaway within something that you were trying to shape. He also had the ability to dig you out of a creative hole on the days when you were struggling.
I didn’t realize how much I was learning subliminally at the time when I worked with him, but later in life, as I came to understand his methods I attempted to apply them in my own work. He wasn’t easily intimidated and he never suffered fools gladly. I doubt we would have ever finished “A View to a Kill” if it wasn’t for Bernard having a big enough heart and the right character to see it through.
I can always remember Rod Stewart’s reaction when he first heard Bernard and Tony play together in the studio. I had invited them to LA to record an album with us called Out of Order in 1987. Rod just stood there, stunned.
“Fuck me, Andy. I didn’t realize they were that good,” he said, and Mr. Stewart isn’t the easiest to please in that regard.
Between them, Bernard and Tony produced a body of work that defined the times they lived in. They dominated the music scene from 1977 to 1987 and beyond by constantly challenging themselves and pushing each other to the limit. Chic are now probably the most sampled disco act in house and dance mixes, and their collective hit machine runs into hundreds of millions of sales. The four major projects that I worked on with them (“A View to a Kill,” the Power Station, Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love/Riptide album, and Rod’s Out of Order album) collectively accounted for around 25 million albums, and as Rod once said, “What an awful lot of alcohol!” As well as working with Duran Duran, Bernard wrote, played, and produced records with Blondie, Bowie, Luther Vandross, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Madonna, the Isley Brothers, and Earth, Wind & Fire—all massive mainstream acts.
Bernard had an endearing quality of bringing you down to earth with a bump if ever you needed it. I recall that at one memorable session in LA, I arrived at the studio after getting trollied on booze the night before. I was convinced that despite my alcohol intake the previous evening, I had recorded what I thought was the mother of all guitar solos. I pushed up the volume and played back my work as loud as I could, trying to convince myself that it sounded fine. After it finished, Bernard’s voice filled the studio.
“You call that a motherfuckin’ guitar solo, Andy?”
Ouch!
As well as all of his achievements I have listed above, he was also in my opinion the greatest bass player ever, and that alone would have been enough to carry him to the top. I think the definition of legend is well served by this man’s contribution to music.
In memory of Bernard Edwards, Robert Palmer, and Tony Thompson. Why did you have to go so soon?
I’VE been lucky enough to work with many great people in my career, and another one of those was Colin Thurston. He was Duran Duran’s first producer and arguably the most instrumental. His contribution to Duran Duran was fundamental because he produced both our first album, Duran Duran, and Rio.
It was Colin who first opened my eyes to the potential of the recording studio and my potential within it. I was nineteen when I first met him; he had already worked with seminal artists such as David Bowie and the Human League. With Colin’s help I recorded nearly all the guitar work on our first album during two evening sessions—all the parts for the entire album in two nights—and he made it sound great.
What I remember most about him was what a nice bloke he was: he was very clean-cut, he didn’t drink, and he had very neat handwriting! I believe John Lennon once said that to succeed in the music business you have to be a bastard, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth (or something like that!), but Colin was the exception. He made our early time in Duran Duran very fulfilling, which can’t always have been easy. Sadly, he recently passed away. Thanks, Colin, because without such a solid, professional beginning . . . who knows?
One thing that Colin must have been aware of was that although the five members of Duran Duran were all very different, we shared a set of common musical influences. Colin was the filter that allowed us to come together as a whole. Everyone in Duran Duran was born within a few years of each other, so we all went through school at the same time and we all listened to Top of the Pops and Radio One. We all read New Musical Express and Sounds and listened to the same concert tours as they went into either Newcastle, Birmingham, or London.
That’s why I recognized the musical influences in the advert that the others placed in Melody Maker when they were looking for a guitarist. It listed Mick Ronson and Steve Jones, and I think the other person named was Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. I recognized what they were trying to say straightaway, so we connected through our idols and influences. Going to concerts as teenagers laid the foundation for how we understood each other. Nick and I were always the two who enjoyed being in the studio, and we worked well with Colin as teenagers. With his help, we recorded all our own beats on the first album—all our own chords, all our own melodies, and all our own lyrics.
When I look back, the thing I ask myself most is, “How did we do it all so young?” But it didn’t seem like we were young at the time because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, we were in an age when you went out to work full-time at sixteen and you were married by twenty-one. We didn’t feel like a young band, we felt like a young man band. Like all musicians, the way we learned was through listening and watching all the great artists who were our idols and influences.
I think if you are interested in music at a young age, then when you listen to records you start to take them apart in your mind to figure out how all the different sounds fit together. In those days, as far as I was concerned there was only one type of hero, and that was a guitar hero. So I’d watch Top of the Pops and try to work out where you needed to put your fingers on the fret board to make a certain sort of guitar sound. I’d get my chord books out and try to copy it, but there was no easy and simple solution to fixing it quick; the only way you could really see what a guitar player was doing was to go and watch him live. I developed a trainspotter-style fascination for watching their fingers.
One of the first things
I discovered was the blues scale for playing lead guitar twelve-bar blues. I can remember watching Angus Young in concert with AC/DC and thinking, Are his fingers doing that scale? I realized that all the great guitar players, like Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and Pete Townsend, all played the blues, so I wanted to learn to do the same. I found that Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” was relatively easy to play, and I soon progressed from there. Once you discover you can conquer one bit of what a guitarist does you look further to the next level: chord structure and riffs . . . the movement of the guitar part. Soon I was aggravating the neighbors, playing along to the records, things like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” over and over until I knew it by heart. After you get used to copying riffs you can start to twist them around and experiment on your own.
All the great guitarists in the world were at their prime during the late sixties and early seventies. People like Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Gary Moore were all from the same golden age of guitar heroes. In fact, the last great guitar riffer, in my opinion, was Steve Jones, who could have played in any band, not just the Sex Pistols. He was a rock riffer, not just a punk riffer.
So, basically, I ended up learning to play lots of riffs—I had always said I wanted to be in a band like AC/DC, but fortunately I was either astute enough, or skint enough, to join Duran Duran! Originally, I had no desire to be in a band that seemed so light compared to the heavy rock of the seventies, but the times they were a’changing very quickly, then the eighties and technology arrived. Things moved on from the Pistols and evolved into a very austere electrosound that came from the likes of Kraftwerk. It was the beginning of New Romanticism, but it was still very cold and had yet to become hedonistic. Suddenly guitar didn’t seem so central, and electronic keyboards began to take a leading role in the emerging music scene.
As far as idols go, David Bowie was probably the artist whom we collectively admired the most. Had there been a Duran Duran maypole that we all danced around, David Bowie would have been the person tied to it. His Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory albums were hugely influential records that we all grew up listening to and admired, probably our first collective influences.
By the eighties, even though the guitar was less dominant, it was still a crucial component for writing songs. If you listen to a hit like “Save a Prayer,” even though the keyboard line is more dominant, all the chords and the basic structure come from guitar. If we couldn’t have sat down and strummed an acoustic guitar, that song couldn’t have come to life. Similarly, without the synthesized keyboards that Nick brought to life so well, it would have sounded like a poor imitation of the Eagles.
Unlike a lot of other New Romantic bands, in Duran Duran we realized that even though things were changing rapidly, we didn’t want to lose the ability to have the punch and the edge that guitar could give us. We wrote with guitar and keyboards—and that was a fundamental part of our success. Simon has the ability to sit with a guitar and find things because he has a great understanding of music (which he needed in order to deal with the other four of us!).
Along with keyboards, the other driving force of the times was disco. Everything started with the dance floor and the Studio 54 experience. The dance floor was very powerful in those days as a medium for records to break. And that was where Duran Duran came to life—the crossover between the Pistols and Chic: guitar music with a disco beat, which turned out to be an unstoppable hybrid. Even though I was more of an AC/DC fan, I could see the magical potential of Duran Duran because we weren’t one-dimensional like a lot of our contemporaries.
A band like Duran Duran is a fusion of fashion, hedonism, and music. When you added the club scene at the Rum Runner to the vision that Nick and John had when they were kids at art college, which was influenced by Roxy Music and Brian Eno, it was a unique mix. The five of us just seemed to click, and we created the bones of our first album in the first six weeks that we were together. The guitar skills I had learned from watching my idols and from playing on the road in Germany allowed me to experiment in order to make my guitar work with Nick’s keyboards. He was doing something that nobody could really read at that point because only he knew what he was trying to achieve—but we found a clever way of working together in order to create something special. It was hard work at times, because you can be sitting there scrunched in a room going over each component of a song again and again, hour after hour. People often assume that bands write their lyrics first and then build the music around the vocals. But in Duran Duran it was the opposite. Ninety-five percent of the time it was the other way round: the music provided the basis for us to collaborate with our fusion of different styles; this in turn allowed us to create a magic carpet of sound for Simon to lay his lyrics over—and I’m very proud that I was able to be at the heart of that creative process.
Today, if I had to choose five albums to take to a desert island, the Beatles would top the list. No chapter about idols would be complete without paying homage to the Fab Four. My love for their work goes right back to that early copy of Sgt. Pepper that I was given by my cousin, and my interest in their music has never waned. In fact, if I were on my imaginary desert island I would have to cheat a bit and make my first choice the Beatles’ Anthology, because then I’d get everything!
Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix would be on my list because all the great rock bands of the sixties and seventies, from the Rolling Stones onward, were in awe of Hendrix and influenced by the blues. The first Oasis album, Definitely Maybe, would be there—you can hear all the classic components of the Beatles et al. working below the surface; they make an incredible sound for one large eyebrow. I’d also choose Hunky Dory by David Bowie, because it was one of the first albums that fascinated me in the early seventies.
And my final choice would be Ooh La La by the Faces. They were huge in the seventies—they should have been bigger than the Stones, but Woody left. The fact that the composition of our first single, “Planet Earth,” owes a tip of the hat to “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” shows that Duran Duran were all fans of Rod Stewart and the Faces. (Nick even wore the tartan scarf when he was a wee laddie.)
The one thing I wouldn’t take to my desert island would be any Duran songs. They’re great pieces of music, but I don’t know any artist who likes listening to his own work; it’s probably because you’ve heard it a thousand times over in the studio! Having said that, “The Reflex” is probably my favorite piece of our pop music. However, “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film” also gave me a lot of satisfaction because no one had ever sounded quite like that before, and it’s satisfying to think that we may have contributed to things changing. Those records helped to define the eighties, and I like to think that in our own way, Duran Duran helped to nudge the satellite of music into a new orbit . . .
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Duran Duran II: Roaring Back—Into the Tiger’s Den
THEY say (whoever they are) that time is a great healer, and sometimes it’s true. Simon and I didn’t have any contact with each other for six or seven years after the breakup of Duran Duran, and it wasn’t until the early nineties that we even spoke to each other again. Things had gradually thawed between us, and as the new millennium approached we were both older, wiser, and willing to let clear water flow under the bridge. To be fair to Simon, I’d fueled a lot of the public friction between us after we split in 1986, so it was only natural that sooner or later he would choose to react in print himself. But as the years had passed we’d tacitly agreed to let bygones be bygones.
I called Simon one afternoon in 1998 to let him know I’d be in London for a while over the summer. We’d moved back to the UK by now and were living in the Midlands. It was around the time of the World Cup Finals, and Scotland were due to play in the opening game against the holders, Brazil. As Simon and I both shared a passion for watching international soccer, he invited me down to stay with him and Yasmin at their house in the Home Counties. I discovered that Yasmin was
a great homemaker and a very good mother to their children. It was the first of several times that I stayed with them and at one point Yasmin put me on a weight-loss diet which consisted of lots of sweet potato and grilled tuna and it worked like a treat. Like Tracey, whom Yasmin had become friends with, she often needed to have the patience of a saint. I remember on one occasion Simon tried to put together a chair he’d bought from IKEA or somewhere. He glued all the parts together in the wrong way and then stomped about in a fury when he couldn’t rectify it. It was hilarious, but Yasmin would react to anything like that simply by raising an eyebrow!
It was a very different London to the one that had been our playground while we were recording Rio during the early eighties. The Embassy Club was still going strong, but the new in place where most of the young showbiz crowd liked to be seen was the Met Bar at the Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane.
The night before the Scotland game, Simon and I decided to go out on the town and get off our trolleys for old times’ sake. Simon wanted to go to the Met Bar, but I was a bit worried that I’d be like a fish out of water, because all the Brit Pop crowd liked to hang out there and I didn’t know any of them. Crowded clubs and bars were never my favorite hang. It had almost been impossible at one point in the eighties to really do that sort of thing, and although the madness of the times had passed and it was now possible to move around in public without getting screamed at, I preferred the less “on show” places to get bladdered. I didn’t want to be the bloke from the eighties trying to look young and hip again, but Simon was full of his usual enthusiasm.
“Come on, it’ll be all right,” he insisted. “It’s better than those shitholes in LA you been hanging at.”
