In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran

by John Taylor

  “4742163.”

  “Mom, it’s me.”

  “Hello, luvvie.”

  “Mom, I’m in New York. What time is it there?”

  “Oooh, are you? It’s almost six o’clock.”

  “I’m in the hotel, standing at a window overlooking Central Park. It’s amazing.”

  “There have been a lot of fans here today. Your dad’s been talking to them.”

  “We’re playing tonight, at the Ritz.”

  “That sounds fancy. Do you want to speak to your father?”

  “Sure . . .”

  After I’d hung up, Richard called to tell me to be in the bar downstairs at 8:00 P.M. and reminded me, not for the first time, to change my watch.

  The ground-floor lobby bar of the St. Moritz still lives in my memory as the most beautiful, sexy, suggestive drinking establishment I have ever ventured into. The smell of perfume and cigars, dollars, furs and jewels, glittering glasses brimming with the romance of highballs and cocktails. The pianist played Cole Porter. I sat on a bar stool and ordered a rum and Coke, helping myself to the snack nuts.

  One by one, the band gathered. Everybody was buzzed. There was a great sense of occasion. If you want to know what we looked like that night, what we were wearing, look at the Girls on Film video. Simon had taken to wearing military-style suits by Antony Price—he had one in blue and one in beige—and a scarf tied around his head as a headband. Actually, everyone was wearing headbands. The blue-and-white-striped matelot shirts that Roger had started to wear had caught on; now three of us were wearing them. The suede pixie boots were still working, with trousers tucked in. Sleeves rolled up. (Antony Price hated that we did that, although Michael Mann would notice it when he was styling Miami Vice.)

  Everybody was high on the energy of the scene. Outside, two white Cadillac limousines waited for us, paid for by our American label, Capitol. This gesture would endear them to us for the next five years. Was there a more fabulous moment in the band’s history than stepping into those cars that warm, fall Friday evening in New York? I don’t think so.

  The five of us got into one car, label and management into the other.

  It was a decent drive downtown to the venue on Eleventh Street. One straight line, I noticed, then one left. It seemed as if somehow the ambience of the bar had been transferred into the limousine. Have you ever sat in an American stretch limousine? The crystal decanters—whiskey, vodka, gin, with plenty of mixers on ice—and a TV set tuned to the local news, always with awful reception. There were neon pinstripes pulsing along the interior roofline. It was less a car, more a nightclub on wheels. We loved the buttons that pushed up the dividing wall between us and the driver’s cabin. Spinal Tap got that right.

  The Ritz had played host to U2’s American debut the previous year and would do the same for Depeche Mode in ’82. There was a balcony around the main dance floor and the club boasted a thirty-foot video screen, which made it our perfect venue.

  It was like we were home from home. Like at the Spit, the kids in the crowd knew all the words. The difference here in New York City was the higher level of fashion consciousness.

  These kids looked like us.

  I wrote a postcard home to my parents. I was clearly having the time of my life:

  “Well, what can one say? I’d stay here forever. Yesterday Simon and Garfunkel did a reunion gig in Central Park in front of 500,000 people. Ridiculous!”

  30 Memory Games

  The cities and venues we played on that first US tour will entertain us for hours years later, when we’re on boring drives during the reunion tour. By then, many conversations will have been reduced to memory tests.

  “What was the name of that place we played in Washington?”

  “The Bayou?”

  “That’s right!”

  “And the place with the pole down the center of the stage?”

  “The East Side Club.”

  “In Philadelphia?”

  “Remember Boston?”

  “The strongest pot ever . . .”

  “Oh God!”

  “And where was the girl with the red Corvette?”

  “It wasn’t red, it was pink.”

  “Little pink Corvette doesn’t have quite the same ring about it though, does it?”

  “Artistic license.”

  “Pink or red, it was Montreal.”

  “The worst hotel, ever?”

  “Detroit.”

  “Great gig though.”

  “At the Clutch Cargo.”

  “Well done! Good point . . . The Clutch Cargo.”

  “And Chicago, of course.”

  “Where Johnny and I got to go to the Playboy Club, didn’t we . . . and scored our first bunnies!”

  “Who came with me to see James Brown?”

  “I did.”

  “So did I.”

  “And we stayed at the Ambassador East.”

  “As seen in North by Northwest.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “San Francisco?”

  “The I-Beam on Haight Street, hard helmet night!”

  “Then home.”

  Home. The one word that has the power to reduce us all to silence. The game is over, for now.

  31 Legal Age

  One thing I discovered on tour in 1981 was that girls—in all languages—liked taking drugs with me. Even though I had a girlfriend back home, my horror of lonely hotel rooms meant I would go to any lengths to avoid sleeping in them alone. Coke, I was beginning to realize, was an effective insurance policy against that eventuality.

  I had been a nerd at school. I wasn’t a jock or an intellectual and had never had a regular girlfriend as a teenager. Now, I only have to wink in a girl’s direction in a hotel lobby, backstage, or at a record company party, and I have company until the morning.

  So what’s the problem, you might ask? Well, the trouble is—and I didn’t figure this out until I was almost forty—that there is something about an intimate encounter of that nature with someone you barely know that jars against the spirit. You want it, but it doesn’t feel quite right. And when you start doing it night after night, week in, week out, your ideas about love and sex begin to get somewhat distorted.

  And jumping into bed like porn star Johnny is not as easy as you might imagine, especially with someone whose first name you’re not even sure of. You feel awkward. Or at least I did. Maybe it was some residue of Catholic guilt? Plain old common decency? Hadn’t Mother taught me something about this? The drugs and the alcohol served to take away all those doubts, plus any inhibitions or insecurities I—or she—might have.

  I didn’t want to be lonely, and the drugs ensured I never was. I’m a pinup on thousands of bedroom walls, but the fear of loneliness is turning me into a cokehead.

  Of absolute necessity for any touring musician is the itinerary. It usually comes as a gift from the tour manager on the last day of rehearsal. Depending on the length of the tour about to be undertaken, it could cover any length of time between one week and two months.

  Page one lists the principals, the inner circle, and the crew who are going to get the show around the world. All the numbers to call if in trouble are listed there: the management, the agencies, the travel agents, the local promoters. Then follows a page-by-page account of the destinations: “October 3, Chicago. Band Hotel: Ambassador East. Crew Hotel: Crown Hyatt. Venue: Park West.” And so on and so on.

  I had not noticed right away that in the left-hand corner of each page of the US itinerary there was a number, usually 18, 21, or 20.

  It was months before I was let in on the secret. The numbers referred to the legal age for sexual intercourse in that particular state.

  The other necessity for the touring musician is the day sheet, usually slipped under the hotel room door while the occupant is still asleep. Regardless of the degree of befuddlement, the day sheet information was always quite clear:

  TODAY IS OCTOBER 3

  IT IS FRIDAY

&nb
sp; YOU ARE IN CHICAGO

  TODAY IS A SHOW DAY

  SOUND CHECK IS AT 4PM

  You almost expected it to say YOUR NAME IS: JOHN

  32 Dancing on Platinum

  For November 12, my diary entry reads simply, “Collect Discs.” Our first commemorative disc awards. At last, a prizegiving ceremony I was comfortable with, being able to share it with my mates and, finally, something for Mom and Dad to hang on the wall.

  The team assembled at Manchester Square in the office of the managing director, Cliff Busby. In the photo, we look like a veritable boys’ club, albeit one with a predilection for leather and frills; Terry Slater’s in there grinning like a proud father, Rob Hallett’s there, so too are Dave Ambrose, Mike and Paul and Colin Thurston.

  We are all happy and proud. Dancing on glass. Gold, silver, and platinum.

  At the end of November, we embarked on yet another British tour, our third of the year, kicking off in Southampton. We rode a luxury bus down through Hampshire and parked it outside the Gaumont. It was a madhouse. In between sound check and concert, I sat on the bus and tried to collect myself. But with the chanting and the banging, it was impossible. By the time I hit the stage, I was a nervous wreck. And in all truth, trying to “collect myself” was an absolute impossibility at this point.

  A year earlier, we had been onstage at the Cedar Club in Birmingham, celebrating the recording of our first single, “Planet Earth,” by playing it twice. Maybe four hundred people present. Twelve months later, we were selling six thousand tickets over three nights at the Birmingham Odeon.

  Yes, we may have been cute, but no band ever worked harder than we did in 1981.

  My desk diary has more than a hundred and fifty phone numbers. Ex-girlfriends are all present, as are all ex–band members: Steve Duffy, Andy Wickett, Dave Twist. I wasn’t ready to let go of any of them yet. But next to them is a new cast of characters: agents, musicians, photographers, studio technicians, other celebrities, makeup artists and hairstylists, and more than a few phone numbers for girls with foreign prefixes. The handwriting is studied and deliberate, every entry carefully catalogued, like trophies.

  If an adult can be defined as someone with a reasonably full Rolodex, then I was on my way to becoming one. An adult, with a life and a career.

  And I wasn’t that messed up yet either, because fifteen minutes after midnight on January 1, 1982, I am back in my childhood bedroom at 34 Simon Road, soberly looking back over a year of achievement with extraordinary sincerity, almost like a prayer, writing my thoughts in my desk diary.

  “How can 1982 be better? Retaining one’s position commercially? Perhaps even improving?? Certainly socially, one would hope! How much must one change? So many questions one could not have dreamed of considering twelve months ago. Questions one hopes will be answered twelve months from now. At least before I could only go UP now for once I’m aware I could go DOWN. Most unlikely. Confidence (but never complacency) breeds results.

  “Writing this my heart races with excitement. My four best friends are still DD. Set sights higher still in all ways, enjoy rock & roll three C’s but not too much.

  “Thanks. I do realize how lucky I am.”

  33 Bird of Paradise

  As 1982 broke, after an intense year of roadwork and recording, we were ready to record a masterpiece.

  Does that sound arrogant? Hey, I’m only one-fifth of the story, one-seventh if you include the managers, one-eighth if you include Colin Thurston, still on board as producer for Album 2.

  But Rio was a masterpiece.

  In August of the previous year, we had been booked into EMI’s demo studio on the ground floor of the Manchester Square office block. We recorded four new songs: “Last Chance on the Stairway,” “My Own Way,” “New Religion,” and “Like an Angel.” These songs formed the backbone of the Rio album.

  That recording of “Last Chance” was identical to the version that would make the album cut.

  “New Religion” started out minus Nick’s gothic intro, which he would add during the album recording sessions. It was a little slower, more doomy, but confident. I felt the writers in us stretching out on this one, giving each other room to speak, which was just as well, because we all had something to say.

  “Like an Angel” was the lightest of the four tracks and would end up on the B-side of the next single.

  The version of “My Own Way” was as close to pure disco as we would get, sounding like something from the early Bob Lamb sessions with Andy Wickett.

  We were aspiring to the musicianship we were hearing on American R & B records, but our level of playing was not quite there. “My Own Way” would get a makeover, twice. The second, “single” version has more than a whiff of Michael Jackson as it would sound if played by a group of young punks. It would be our fourth single.

  During the percussion breakdown on the 12-inch dance version, Simon would ad lib, “I think I am going to Rio.”

  All of the songs on Rio, with the striking exception of “The Chauffeur,” were fully arranged before we returned to AIR Studios on Oxford Street in February to begin recording. We had already demoed “Hungry like the Wolf” at the Manchester Square Studios and “Save a Prayer” back at Bob Lamb’s in Kings Heath.

  Having been worked out in sound checks on stages around the world, the song “Rio” was ready to record.

  The title was something I had thrown into the mix. Brazil still had the power to cast a spell, conjuring dreams of exotic calendar pictures from my bedroom wall as a child. Rio, to me, was shorthand for the truly foreign, the exotic, a cornucopia of earthly delights, a party that would never stop.

  Simon chose not to make “Rio” about the place but about a girl. His genius was infusing this girl named Rio with all the hedonism and romance of the Brazil of my fantasies.

  Moving on the floor now, babe

  You’re a bird of paradise

  Cherry ice-cream smile

  I suppose it’s very nice

  With a step to your left

  And a flick to the right

  You catch the mirror way out west

  You know you’re something special

  And you look like you’re the best

  The writing on the Rio album is fantastic, all out. Duran Duran in extremis. It is what can happen when a group of passionate, music-loving, fame-hungry guys are given some support, nurtured, and put out to work harder than any of them thought possible. Take note, twenty-first-century recording companies.

  Every one of us is performing on the Rio album at the absolute peak of our talents. That is what makes it so exciting. That doesn’t mean that everyone is playing as many notes as they possibly can. There is no showboating. Every part is thoughtful, considered, part of a greater whole.

  I had developed a relationship with Aria in Japan, and they were using pictures of me to advertise their products. They gave me a 1200—the more expensive one, with two pickups and active electronics—which was a step-up sonically and technically. It was also heavier. This now became my go-to bass for all the recordings on Rio, and the 600 got left behind.

  On the song “Lonely in Your Nightmare,” I experimented with fretless bass. I had held off playing that instrument as long as I could, as it is a far more challenging proposition than a fretted bass, almost like a classical instrument—a violin or a cello. But I had admired the fretless playing of Mick Karn, the bassist of Japan, for years and wanted to try something in his style.

  For the main verse part of “Lonely,” I used the fretted 1200, overdubbing a second part on a fretless bass, creating melodic lines that wove around the lead vocal. The chorus bass part was played entirely on the fretless bass. Played well, the sound of the fretless bass is smoother, and the instrument actually has greater melodic possibilities, since there are so many notes in between the notes, as it were. I was very pleased with the results I got from the fretless bass, but it would always be a difficult instrument to play live.

  The track we laid
down for “Hold Back the Rain” is almost ten minutes long—now that is confidence—and it’s never boring. The song was edited to fit on the album, which compressed the energy even further.

  And what about “The Chauffeur”? That was a curveball, created out of nothing by Nick during a studio all-nighter with Colin, Simon responding with lyrics out of the “Dog Days” book. “The Chauffeur” has become a gothic classic in itself and is one of our most covered songs.

  I first listened back to a mix of Rio sitting beside Paul McCartney, who was working in the next-door studio and, at my beckoning, came in to listen to what we were up to. His approval was denoted by a highly satisfying two thumbs up.

  We’d become friends with Paul and Linda’s daughter Heather. Paul could see the through-line from his old band to ours. On one occasion, we went to see him play in New York. Backstage, he was happy to see us.

  “’Ello, lads, what are you doing here? Long way from Birmingham!”

  I explained we were in the city to hang out.

  “Oh, John and I used to love taking trips like that. Sometimes you have just got to get away and have some fun, get some inspiration.”

  Rio was recorded following the same blueprint as the first album. Colin had recorded Roger and me playing along with Nick’s sequencer parts. Then came the guitars and Nick’s other keyboards, with Simon singing whenever he had a lyric ready to try out.

  The big ballad on the album, “Save a Prayer,” would be the biggest hit, reaching number 2 in the United Kingdom. A live version would make it to number 16 on the US charts in 1985. And that song began with Andy and Nick, who were probably the furthest apart from each other in terms of musical temperament, picking out chords together, building the most delicate and complex of our sequencer tracks to date. The rest of the song was hung upon that frame.

  Then there is “New Religion,” which would become another fan favorite; a rapping, schizophrenic Le Bon in conversation with a funky rhythm section. Now that’s a pleasure groove to play.