Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  When I arrived home my temper overheated and I threw a full bottle of beer across the courtyard of our villa, watching it shatter against the old walls. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever thrown something like that in anger and Tracey could see that I was close to the edge—it felt like we were back in Germany in 1982. She was right: I began to question in my mind whether my row with Simon was the beginning of something bleak and irreversible.

  With the fact that we’d now been working on the album for three years and it was hardly flowing like a river, I realized that touring with Duran Duran was also becoming less and less fun. It was still exciting to receive so much attention, but we no longer had any sense of togetherness when we came offstage. We were all different people now (not to mention much older) and we didn’t go off to clubs to drink together after our shows like we did in the old days. None of us were doing drugs this time around, nor were we sharing much else in common. We were five separate individuals, and it felt to me as if the band didn’t seem to have any collective soul of its own. Even all the fine wine we carried around with us tended to be consumed away from each other with our respective friends or family when they visited us on the road. I felt that the only bit that was really enjoyable was the part where we were playing together onstage.

  We carried on recording but it continued to be laborious work. Some of it was done in London and then the rest was completed while we were in the States doing promotion for the forthcoming but as yet unfinished album. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I was getting the distinct impression that we were not getting the benefit of much good advice from our recently appointed New York–based management.

  All the time we were doing promotional interviews on the radio I could tell the record wasn’t really kicking in: it was just spin, spin, spin—but with no real substance. One of the things you learn very quickly in music is that you can’t win by cheating—you can’t fake inspiration or great songs. Just simply seeing how it’s done isn’t enough; there are some fundamental skills and instincts beyond basic PR. I began to wonder whether or not we should wait until the New Year to give us more time to get it right, but Sony were keen to go ahead.

  Eventually, our new album Astronaut went on sale in late October 2004. I was happy enough with the music itself. I’d written a very large amount of the material myself and, despite all the ups and downs, I had worked very closely with Simon, but I didn’t like the way we had mixed and finished it. We’d had no time to sit on it and tweak it for even a couple of weeks, which is often necessary in order to clear your ears and listen to it with a fresh perspective for one last time. I can never understand the almost hormonal rush for attention and cash flow that occurs with a record release.

  We got the American chart result for the first week of Astronaut on the same day we appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show in the States. Ellen was a great host, a really fabulous woman, but despite the pleasant experience of going on her show, no sooner had we blasted off when our sales figures soon brought us down to earth later that day. Astronaut sold 51,000 albums; it went in at number fifteen in the US chart and it made number three in the UK chart. It was a respectable start but hardly the huge comeback fanfare we’d been working for. Our management tried to put a positive gloss on it, but I wasn’t willing to be fooled as the next week’s shipping figures were already down by 50 percent.

  “We’ve sold eighty million records in the past,” I said. “This is fifty thousand.”

  To create any real momentum we were hoping for 200,000, or at worst 150,000 as a start, but as November hit, the album was actually moving down the charts—in total Astronaut sold about a million copies worldwide. It was enough to ensure that we didn’t lose any money, but it didn’t really create enough of a buzz to give us any focus on the radio. We probably sold more concert tickets in most areas than we did albums. Yes, there was still plenty of demand for nostalgia shows, but the album had been a laborious plod commercially.

  To be fair to the others, I probably wasn’t always the easiest person to be around during this period, and I can remember some ridiculous rows between us. We were traveling in a car when I had a huge rant at some of the others when they proposed playing a gig in China. I gave them a twenty-minute lecture on why I didn’t want to go there because of the political situation. I began to enjoy winding them up. It was my way of intimidating the others to drop the illusion that we’d made the best of our collective endeavors.

  One other very important fact was that I was on the way to suffering from depression. I lost my rag with Nick while we were in a car together in Europe doing some promotional work. We didn’t have any security with us, and there’d been a few crowds that had jostled us for autographs as we went in and out of hotels. I’m normally happy to sign things for fans, but I was starting to feel twinges of the agoraphobia that I’d experienced twenty-five years ago. I was also quite snappy with people over our overexposure; some band members thought we were U2 and attempted to emulate them. Nick was sitting in the car with me droning on about something or other when I suddenly snapped.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I screamed at him. “This is the real world, Nick, there are so many real things in life that are more important than what you are going on about.”

  We continued the rest of the journey in silence. I think some of the others could see I was under strain, because afterward John and Roger came and sat down with me in a room and we talked about it. Roger had made no secret of the fact that he’d found things mentally tough in the past and John, having been in and out of rehab, had also struggled with many demons. John knew what it felt like to come up against a big hump in the road that you can’t seem to get around, which was the way I was beginning to feel. I explained that I’d never been one who liked struggling through crowds, and maybe the fact that the album had flopped had taken a bit of a toll on me, compounded by my father’s illness.

  “We need to start taking good care of ourselves,” I said. “We shouldn’t be at a boiling point all the time.”

  I think Roger and John sort of understood, and I was grateful to them for listening. Like I’ve said before, over the years being in Duran Duran had given us enormous highs, but it sometimes took an unforgiving toll on all of us.

  AS I jetted back to Ibiza toward the end of 2004, it was as if my own personal dark cloud was still gathering above me. The fact that my dad was battling cancer was still weighing heavily on my mind. The news of his illness had come off the back of Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson passing away the previous year. I’d been enormously close to both of them. Tony was in his forties, Robert in his fifties, and my dad was in his sixties. Suddenly death was within the range of my life force, and there were some big empty chairs in the musical family.

  I used my time in Ibiza to spend a few quiet days with my family before I was due to travel to the States to do some more promotional work. I got up on the morning I was due to depart, with the intention of catching a plane to London in order to travel on to the States to do a TV appearance and a radio interview. At about 5:30 a.m. I went into the kitchen to have a cup of tea and a smoke—then a weird thing happened. I lay down on a big wooden bench as the kettle was boiling. Then the whistle went off, but I just couldn’t get up or move from the bench. It felt as if someone was pushing me back down, physically pinning me to the wood. Suddenly I felt uncontrollably emotional and all heavy—what I envisage drowning must be like. I wasn’t exactly having a panic attack, but I just broke down and I couldn’t get up.

  Tracey found me in the kitchen. I guess she wasn’t surprised, because I think she’d already noticed that something was out of kilter within me. My dad had terminal cancer and she was concerned that part of me was blaming myself for not spending enough time with him, always being away, feeling selfish. I recognized that the signs were not good: I felt as if I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  Tracey urged me not to go the States. She didn’t meet any resistance and I agreed to stay at
home.

  We tried to explain things to the rest of the band—I am not really sure that all of them completely understood how low I was. Looking back, I’m glad I’d at least explained things to Roger and John as best as I could.

  I took a few weeks off, and I saw a couple of different people with a lot of wisdom about this sort of matter. I’ve always had a practical approach to the unexplained. Let’s begin to explain it and start figuring this shit out, I thought, not exactly realizing what “this shit” was. Thankfully, the rest and peacefulness of being with Tracey and my family helped to calm down and relax me, but deep inside I knew there was still more to come.

  WE were playing at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas in March 2005 when I received a text message telling me I needed to return to England immediately: my father had fallen into a coma. I got the first flight that I could the next morning and traveled back to Newcastle alone, praying that I would make it in time. When I finally got there he was heavily sedated with morphine and he had been unconscious for almost seventy-two hours. I could see that the illness and the effects of the morphine had taken a heavy toll on him. I spoke to him softly, and when he heard my voice he woke up for the first time in three days. He could see me and he was awake for about ten minutes: it was as if he had been waiting for me.

  He had just enough strength left to break through the morphine and whisper good-bye to me in a tiny voice. I could barely hear him. Then he closed his eyes and he never opened them again. There was no pain at the end. He had a dignified death.

  I thought of all the things he had done for me when I was a child. How he raised my brother and me after our mother abandoned us. How he stood silently weeping alone in the kitchen on the day she moved out, and how he always held things together with that strange Northern resilience that kept him going. I thought about all the conversations we’d had about my life in the band over the years. How I’d called him in excitement the first time we’d appeared on Top of the Pops. I recalled the quiet pride in his eyes when I helped him pay off his mortgage.

  The cancer had finally claimed him and I was going to miss him.

  It was the hardest good-bye.

  I didn’t grieve properly at first. There was a strike of council workers in the North East, so there was going to be a ten- or eleven-day delay before the funeral could take place. I went back to the States to continue with our tour in the meantime, but my heart wasn’t in it. After an awful journey, which involved a very difficult transfer between Gatwick and Heathrow, I went back onstage with Duran Duran in Detroit. I wore my dark sunglasses onstage as normal, and after the show I received an e-mail from a fan who had seen the tears rolling down my cheeks under the shades. Duran Duran later played a gig at Boston University while I was back in England for the funeral, and Simon dedicated his rendition of “Ordinary World” on stage to “absent friends!”

  It was a very sad time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  History Repeats: Why I Am No Longer in Duran Duran

  I could feel the pressure building up in Duran Duran for a long time. I was tired of going over and over the same old creative difficulties and financial tensions, and I was fed up with having blazing rows with our management over what I perceived to be our lack of clear direction. But when things finally came to a head and we parted company, it was actually all over a simple travel visa.

  I was getting ready to fly to New York to be with the rest of Duran Duran in September 2006 when I discovered our management had failed to organize a visa to allow me to enter the US to work during this time period. I suppose in the grand scale of things this might not seem like the end of the world, but as far as I was concerned it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After month upon month of arguing about money, and the implosion of our latest plans to record an album, what chance did we have of getting things right if our management couldn’t even organize a simple visa? It meant I was stuck on my backside in Ibiza, while a very expensive session involving the rest of the band took place on the other side of the Atlantic. I was furious, and I fired off an angry e-mail to our management and copied it to Simon Le Bon.

  “I’d rather not have to get into this with you, but I am fuckin’ seriously unhappy,” I told Simon in a covering note.

  Within a few weeks the Duran Duran Web site announced that I would no longer be playing with the band when they appeared at a forthcoming gig in Hong Kong. So how had things become so bad that we had to go our separate ways?

  I’D gone back on the road with Duran Duran in America after my father’s funeral. For a while I thought that I’d dealt with the grief, and I hoped that I would put the disappointment of Astronaut behind me. The summer of 2005 saw our old friend Mr. Geldof orga-nize Live 8. I was interested to see what the chemistry would be like between Geldof and Simon, because during the nineties there’d been some bad blood between them over Paula Yates’s affair with Michael Hutchence. Geldof knew that Simon and Hutch had been good mates for years, and he phoned Simon up and furiously demanded to know whether or not Simon had known about Paula’s affair while she was married to Bob. I wondered if there was any potential for further fireworks, but in the end we opted to play at the Rome leg of the show and I don’t think they ever came face to face.

  The day itself was a bit of a nightmare. Our management had a row with the promoter behind the scenes over something or other, and at one point we threatened to pull out. Our performance eventually went ahead but Live 8 felt strangely subdued compared to the original Live Aid in 1985. Afterward, we had to rush off to play at the Roskilde festival in Denmark the same evening, so the travel arrangements were very hectic. I nearly got stranded in Denmark thanks to a mix-up over the air tickets. Additionally there was a lot of fraying around the edges with other band members, and JT lost it after the Roskilde festival—totally lost it. The European tour had been up and down, which reflected in sales, and we had struggled to sell out certain markets, so I guess all this had taken its toll on John and he just erupted. He did the same song and dance I had run through in Germany the previous winter: he just lost his temper about nothing in particular, uncontrollably sober.

  Even though our album sales had been a bit of a disappointment, we were still making reasonable money from touring. Donnie Ienner at Sony agreed to go ahead with a second album. I was surprised because he could easily have decided to walk away after Astronaut; nevertheless, he stood by us and repaid our faith in him. I was pleased, and despite the problems we’d been through I slowly started to feel positive about going into the recording studio again. Perhaps we’ve turned the corner, I thought, and the cloud is lifting. With every album you should get the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start again (unless you’re Duran Duran).

  One of the highlights of the year came when we were invited on a private tour of the White House on the day we were due to play a gig in Washington. We’d never been particularly political as a band, so unlike a lot of other acts at the time we hadn’t really spoken out about the war in Iraq. I think the military do a fantastic job, and hanging out with the forces in my younger days had given me respect and an insight into that life. Even though life on the road in a band can be cruel, it’s nothing in comparison to what these boys and girls are asked to do. I felt they were given an impossible task in taming Iraq—but it was a viewpoint I kept to myself, as we never pontificated about politics in Duran Duran. We’d always stayed away from controversy in that respect, and I was delighted when we got a call from the White House inviting us up for a private tour.

  Nick, Roger, and I accepted. In the morning the three of us went up to the White House, where we spent some of the most memorable hours of all my time in Duran Duran. The security, as you can imagine, was very impressive, but the Secret Service men were all incredibly polite and they showed us from room to room. President Bush was away at the time, but just to be able to walk around the famous old building was an honor. The three of us even posed together for a photograph at the White House podium, and
it’s now one of my favorite pictures. The American people always made us feel truly welcome whenever we were in the States, and the photo symbolizes that for me.

  There was an embarrassing postscript to our White House visit. When we performed that evening in Washington, for some reason Simon took it upon himself to break our silence about the war while he was onstage. Simon was normally devoid of any political opinion apart from the fact that he didn’t like President Bush, and he chose the worst possible time to share it with the crowd. Scores of Secret Service men had come down to watch the concert after they’d made us feel so welcome at the White House, and here was Simon being disrespectful to their glorious leader. I think he said something along the lines of it being a shame that Bush was in the White House for another four years. He may have been correct, but he didn’t stop to think where we were, in the most political environment in modern history—Bush’s Washington. As soon as he started talking, I feared it would go down badly with the crowd, so I flicked my cigarette at him from across the stage to try and distract him, but it was too late. The crowd got riled, and in support of Bush they started chanting, “Four more years! Four more years!”

  Aghh, Simon. Just fuckin’ shut up and sing “Rio”! I thought to myself. He hadn’t made a gaffe like that since we were young, but it made me laugh. I guess if you get a chance to piss in the Bushes’ backyard, you may feel compelled to take it. And no, I didn’t steal anything from the White House, not for the want of trying but because the Secret Service watch you like bloody hawks—they must have heard about thieving young Geordie lads!

  WE played a lot of gigs and we made some good money that summer, but at times I felt as if we were just treading water after almost twenty-five years together. The old creative frictions within the band were still there, and it struck me that we’d never actually sat down together to lay to rest the problems and arguments that we’d had with each other for various reasons the first time around.