by John Taylor
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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First printing, October 2012
Copyright © 2012 by John Taylor
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Intro: Brighton, July 29, 1981
PART 1: ANALOG YOUTH
1 Hey Jude
2 Jack, Jean, and Nigel
3 Sounds for the Suburbs
4 The Catholic Caveat
5 A Hollywood Education
6 In Between and Out of Sight
7 Junior Choice
8 My Moon Landing
9 Side Men
10 The Birmingham Flaneur
11 Neurotic Boy Outsider
12 Shock Treatment
13 Barbarella’s
14 Ballroom Blitz with Synthesizers
15 Everybody Dance
16 Plans for Nigel
17 Legs for Days
18 Enter the Eighties
19 Music Never Sounded Better
20 The Poetry Arrives
21 The Final Debut
22 Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Rhodes, Le Bon
23 Bidding Wars
24 Divine Diplomacy
25 Divine Decadence
26 Manic Panic
27 Perfect Pop
PART 2: HYSTERIA
28 The Whole Package
29 All Aboard for the Promised Land
30 Memory Games
31 Legal Age
32 Dancing on Platinum
33 Bird of Paradise
34 The Pleasure Habit
35 Music Television
36 Down Under and Up Above
37 Incongruous on a Yacht
38 Theodore & Theodore
39 Coffin Sex
40 Jacobean
41 The Year of the Geographic
42 A Caribbean Air
43 Resentments Under Construction
44 Unlimited Latitude
45 Anticlimax to Reflex
46 Exploitation Time
47 The Remix
48 Megalomania at the Wheel
49 Shelter and Control on West Fifty-Third Street
50 Nouveau Nous
51 Guilt Edge
52 The Wheel World
53 The Model
54 Burnout
55 Is This the End, My Friend?
PART 3: DIGITAL TRUTH
56 Dead Day Ahead
57 In the Dark
58 Notorious
59 Surfing Apoplectic
60 Chasing the Wave
61 Tabloid Fodder
62 Wedding Spaghetti
63 Take Me to LA
64 Paranoid on Lake Shore Drive
65 A Million Tiny Seductions
66 Tucson
67 Day 31
68 A Fine Bromance
69 Gela
70 A Different Kind of Profound
71 The Reunion of the Snake
72 Osaka Time
73 Learning to Survive
74 Coachella, Indio, California, April 17, 2011
Acknowledgments
More Photographs
Permissions
To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye,
to restore it, and to render it the more fit
for its prime function of looking forward.
—Margaret Fairless Barber
But I won’t cry for yesterday,
there’s an ordinary world
Somewhere I have to find
And as I try to make my way
to the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
—Duran Duran, “Ordinary World”
Crisis = Opportunity
—Chinese Proverb
Intro:
Brighton, July 29, 1981
It’s a Monday night at the Brighton Dome, two weeks before our third single, “Girls on Film,” is due out. It’s a month after my twenty-first birthday.
The lights go down and “Tel Aviv” strikes up. We have chosen the haunting, Middle Eastern–inspired instrumental track from our new album to function as a curtain-raiser, to let the audience know the show is about to begin.
But something strange is happening. None of us can hear the music. What is going on out there? The sound of an audience. Getting louder. Larger. Chanting.
Screaming.
And then, out onto the stage, behind the safety curtain we go. A frisson of fear. We look to each other with nervous glances. Faces are made. “Is that for real?”
We plug in; bass working, drums beating, keyboards and guitars in tune.
Ready.
“Tel Aviv” reaches its coda. Here we go.
And the curtain rises on our new life.
The power of our instruments, amplified and magnified by PA stacks that reach to the roof, is no match for the overwhelming force of teenage sexual energy that comes surging at us in unstoppable waves from the auditorium.
The power of it is palpable. I can feel it take control of my arms, my legs, my fingers, for the duration of the opening song. It is unrelenting, waves of it crashing onstage.
There is no way we can be heard, but that doesn’t matter. No one is listening to us anyway. They have come to hear themselves. To be heard. And what they have to say is this: “Take me, ME! I am the one for you! John! Simon! Nick! Andy! Roger!”
As our first song grinds to a hiccupping halt, we turn to each other for support. But the next song has already somehow begun without us. We are not in control anymore. Seats are smashed. Clothes torn. Stretcher cases. Breakdowns. It is a scene out of Bosch. Every fe
male teenager in Britain is having her own teenage crisis, simultaneously as one, right now, vaguely in time to our music. The frenzy is contagious. We are the catalyst for their explosions, one by one, by the thousands.
We have become idols, icons. Subjects of worship.
PART 1
ANALOG YOUTH
1 Hey Jude
I am four years old. Confident and shy. Hair blonder than it would be in my teen years. In shorts and sandals, a young prince of the neighborhood, the south Birmingham suburb of Hollywood. How perfect.
Ten o’clock in the morning on any given weekday in 1964, and I have stepped down off the porch and wait, kicking at the grooved concrete driveway, watching as Mom pulls the front door closed, locks it up, and puts the key in her handbag; she puts the handbag in the shopping bag, and off we go. Left off the drive and up the hill that is the street on which we live, Simon Road. Our house is number 34, one up from where the road ends.
We walk together along the pavement, counting down: 32, 30, 28. On the left side of the street are all the even-numbered semidetached houses, single buildings designed to function as two separate homes (ours is twinned with number 36). Across the street, the odd-numbered houses are detached, each building a single dwelling, all much larger than ours, and so are the back gardens, which are long and tree-filled and bordered at the bottom by a stream. The driveways are slicker too, with space for more than one car.
Later on, when I started to become a little status-aware, I would ask my parents, “Why didn’t you pay the extra six hundred quid that would have got us a stream at the back?”
I hold Mom’s hand, remembering the Beatles song that is so often on the radio, as the incline gets steeper. We reach the crest of the hill, where Simon Road meets Douglas Road, and turn right.
We pass a twelve-foot-high holly bush, the only evidence I have found that suggests where the estate got its name. We march on, crossing Hollywood Lane in front of Gay Hill Golf Club, an establishment that will assume mythical proportions in my imagination as a venue for wife-swapping parties, not that anyone in my family ever set foot in the place. There was no truth in the rumor.
Cars flash by, at twenty or even thirty miles an hour. We make it to Highter’s Heath Lane, another main artery of the neighborhood, which must be taken if you’re visiting the old Birmingham of grans and aunts and uncles, recreational parks and bowling greens. It gets traversed a lot by the Taylor family at weekends. It must also be used by mother and son if we are to reach our destination today—St. Jude’s parish church.
All this walking. We’ve been doing it together for as long as I can remember. Mom doesn’t drive and never will. At first, I’d be in my pushchair, but now that I’m old enough, we walk side by side, which must have come as a relief to Mom. There’s no complaining from me, it just is and ever shall be. Amen.
She’s sweating now in her woolen skirt and raincoat, keen to get there. We walk past the Esso filling station where, in 1970, I will complete my set of commemorative soccer World Cup coins. One last left turn and we are on the paved forecourt, upon which sits, in breeze-block splendor, St. Jude’s parish church.
I would go to many beautiful, awe-inspiring churches when I was older—St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue, St. Peter’s in Rome, Notre-Dame de Paris—but St. Jude’s on Glenavon Road was the most pragmatic people’s church anywhere in the First World. Built in the post–World War II years, St. Jude’s was intended as a temporary structure, not meant to last more than a few years. It’s coming up on twenty now and yawning with cold air and aching joints. Single story, with windows every six feet along its length, and a roof of corrugated iron.
Its crude purity enhanced the idea the St. Jude’s faithful had about being the chosen ones. Why else would we gather together in this cold, ugly place unless it was an absolute certainty that we would benefit from it?
Father Cassidy’s great fund-raising scheme of the seventies eventually resulted in a new St. Jude’s church. This was no small achievement. None of the congregants could be considered rich or even well-off. Everyone had to count their pennies. Getting the money to build a new church from his parishioners took a great deal of persuading.
Fortunately, he had God on his side.
A communal sense of readiness sends us through the small lobby where, on raw wooden tables, literature is offered; some for sale, some for free. Textbooks, Bibles, songbooks, and other merchandise, including rosaries, crucifixes, and pendants of St. Jude (the patron saint of hopeless cases, really).
On into the nave, where there is a smell of sweat and yesterday’s incense. It’s usually cool in here, sometimes warm but never hot. A tall redheaded man plays a rickety-looking organ, quietly piping sweet music that is barely there. Eno would call it ambient. Candles burn lazily with a holy scent.
On the strike of eleven the service begins. The priest enters smartly, followed by a pair of young men in white robes—the priest’s team, his posse—one of whom swings a silver chalice from which more incense issues. The air in the church needs a good cleansing before the good father can breathe it.
He wears elaborate clothing, a robe of green-and-gold silk with a red cross on his back. Beneath the cloak, ankle-length turned-up trousers reveal the black socks and black brogues of any other working man.
The music surges in volume and we all stand. The red-haired man leads us in a song we know well, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” I open the hymnal to read the words. I like this one but, like Mom, I’m too embarrassed to sing out loud. I wish I could; I just don’t, but I like the feeling of togetherness that comes from everyone in the room singing the same words.
Once the song is over, the priest walks to the dais. He glances down at his Bible, opens his hands wide, and says, “Let us pray.”
2 Jack, Jean, and Nigel
Church just was. Like electricity, heat, or black-and-white TV—something that just existed. I assumed everyone went five times a week. I didn’t know I was one of a subset, a species. A Roman Catholic.
You don’t question things like that when you’re little. I never questioned why Mom and I went to church almost every day or why, when Dad drove us on Sundays, he just dropped us off and picked us up afterward.
My parents grew up in Birmingham’s inner city. Mom had been born in Liverpool, but when she was a toddler, her family, the Harts, moved to Birmingham, to Colemeadow Road, where they occupied a large detached family house on a corner. They needed the space: Mom was one of five, until her sister Nora gave birth to Trevor, who the family raised, which made six. Mom’s dad, Joseph, who died before my birth, spent his working life in labor relations; he worked for the shipbuilding union in Liverpool originally, but moved to Birmingham for a better job. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham would go to his funeral. Up the street from the Harts, the dwellings were smaller; tight Victorian terraced houses that were well built, small but proud, with the toilet out back.
The Taylors lived in one of these, at number 10.
My dad, Jack, was born John in 1920, which made him, age nineteen in 1939, prime meat for the Second World War. He was shipped out to Egypt, where he was given an administrative posting—clerking and driving trucks and officers around the base. One weekend, he was due to be on leave in Cairo but he traded his time off with another soldier. This good deed would not go unpunished. That weekend, the German army seized the base on which Dad was stationed and he, along with many others, was captured. The British prisoners were then transported up through Italy to Germany, where they were interned in Stalag 344.
Dad would spend the remaining three years of the war there. He was forced to live off raw potatoes, watery soups, and the occasional Red Cross food parcel. At least he didn’t smoke, so he could trade in his tobacco ration for a few extra spuds.
Mom used to say to me confidentially, “Your father had a terrible time in the war, but he’ll never talk about it.” Dad’s wartime experiences were the khaki elephant in our living room. No one could talk about it, but we were a
ll living with it, still, twenty years later.
It’s clear to me now that Dad had post-traumatic stress disorder and what he really needed was some therapy—which he would get these days. The most anyone could ever get out of him on the subject, if he was pushed into a corner, would be: “I had it easy compared to George.”
George was Dad’s brother. Their father had died when Dad was five and George was ten, so George became like a surrogate parent. Dad idolized him. George did his soldiering in Burma and had been taken prisoner by the Japanese. George had been in a mine near Nagasaki, mere miles from the site of the atomic bomb, and felt the explosion.
When Dad got back to Birmingham after his war, amid the celebrations of VE Day, his mother, Frances, and his elder sister, Elsie, were of course overjoyed to see him. But anxiety still ran high in the household, as no one had heard from George or even knew if he had survived, and this cast a shadow over Dad’s return.
Almost a year later, in a scene that could have been directed by Steven Spielberg, Dad was waiting for a bus to take him to work, when he vaguely recognized a figure coming down the street toward him out of the morning mist. It was his brother George, free since VJ Day, but emaciated and exhausted not just by his captivity but also by his long journey home by way of the Pacific, then across the United States by train.
I’m sure Dad looked different to George too. But they were stoic, each with his overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and no tears would have been shed between these men. A handshake for sure, possibly a hug. Dad might have let a few buses go by, but I doubt very much that he took the day off work. Any tears shed would have been female tears.
This story was so hard for my father to tell that he didn’t share it with me until he was in his eighties and I was in my forties.
The Second World War was omnipresent growing up in England in the 1960s. It was this enormous event that had affected everybody. In spite of Dad’s reluctance to go there, nobody else could stop talking about it. It dominated TV and the movies.
