by John Taylor
In London, at the Daily Mirror Rock and Pop Awards, the forerunner to the Brits, we won everything that was going: best album, best group, best male singer, and “Daily Mirror Personality of the Year.” “Is There Something I Should Know?” went straight into the UK charts at number 1 in March.
I heard the news at the same time as the rest of the country, Tuesday lunchtime, listening to Radio 1 in Janice Hague’s office in Manchester Square. It was a fantastic result, although our level of cocksureness was so high, it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Still, hearing those words spoken over the airwaves undoubtedly had a real magic: “And we’ve got a new number one this week, and it’s a new entry, its first week on the charts, and they’ve made it. Duran Duran are number 1. Congratulations, boys!”
You could hear the champagne corks popping on every floor of the building.
The video for “Is There Something I Should Know?” was a conscious attempt to strip away the artifice; it was anti-location, anti-style. We all wore blue uniforms more befitting Winston Smith from 1984 than New Romantics.
In February we were on the TV and the radio every day.
EMI released our first video album, a fifty-five-minute review of the first two years of our existence, featuring eleven of our most popular songs. It was unprecedented.
The fan club, based in the Rum Runner, was now receiving hundreds of letters and cards from all around the world every day. A team of staff had been hired to cope with the deluge. There was no longer any possibility of us handling our fan mail ourselves; replies to fans were now made photostatically. Some staff members became adroit at simulating our signatures for photographs.
My parents were both energized by the success of their son. Dad, having been in a malaise since his enforced retirement, was now on top of the world, having fun with it all, and someone in the neighborhood.
The third act in their lives had begun.
• • •
The first of the year’s geographics was made on the orders of Paul and Mike, who decided we should write and record the third album outside the United Kingdom. They also ended our relationship with producer Colin Thurston. It was one of many decisions that were made on our behalf without too much consultation. They just felt they knew what was best, and the record company must have felt the same way. Our feelings didn’t come into it. We were too busy to process it anyway.
We were tempted away from Colin in part by the suggestion that we could produce ourselves. “Is There Something I Should Know?” was produced by the band, with the help of Ian Little, who worked with Roxy Music on their Avalon album. The song was a smash, but for the album we were about to begin, the band were not going to produce. We would keep Ian Little on board, but to augment Ian’s skills, we also took on Alex Sadkin, who had worked on the Grace Jones albums and with Robert Palmer and Bob Marley. Alex’s credentials were impeccable, and it was his task to freshen up the sound for Album 3.
Employing Alex Sadkin was a statement of intent. We were not about to stand still creatively. We all knew that meant death. The vultures were circling. None of the critics thought we could follow Rio.
The South of France was chosen as a suitable relocation. Management found a château for rent in Valbonne, twenty-five kilometers north of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur. It was beautiful and sophisticated.
One of the appeals of the move to the South of France was getting to drive down there. It was an opportunity to live out one of my James Bond fantasies.
Bloody James Bond, making it all look so damned effortless; the way he travels, checks into hotels, orders champagne in foreign restaurants, drives on the left, drives on the right.
• • •
Weeks earlier, I had finally made the time to take my driving test.
As a kid, I always knew that there were not going to be any of the problems with my learning to drive that Mom had. Just riding fairground bumper cars gave me a hard-on. In regard to automobiles, I was Dad’s prodigy. Cars were for guys; that was obvious. Women were meant for the passenger seat. There was always something a little inappropriate when a friend of mine had a mother who drove, like Nick’s mom, Sylvia. Suspicious.
Dad had given me practice lessons on and off since I was sixteen, and I always rose to the occasion. I knew what the clutch was all about.
However, the fame thing had created a bit of a complication in the plan to get my license. I had been sure I would be driving at nineteen, or twenty tops, but Duran had taken over and I had not had time to learn how to drive.
The test was on February 22.
In that way that the British have of reminding one to not get above one’s station, the gray-suited examiner took a moment before the test and began to address me.
“Now, Mr. Taylor, I want you to know that I know who you are. In fact, my daughter has pictures of you all over her bedroom wall. But this will not influence me in any way. I hope you understand that. Now, pull away smoothly in your own time and follow the road ahead.”
I passed.
I had already decided exactly which car I wanted, and later that day it was delivered. A Volkswagen Golf GTI. Seven and a half grand. Twelve thousand dollars. Brand-new, color scheme carefully selected to match my Duran wardrobe: black bodywork with red pinstripes, two-tone gray interior.
I named her Suky, after her license plate, SUK 437Y. To celebrate our engagement, photographer Denis O’Regan shot us on the top floor of the Moor Street station parking garage in Birmingham city center for the Japanese fanzine Viva Rock.
One eighties icon for another.
• • •
Driving Suky aboard the Seaspeed hovercraft to cross the English Channel, with my license less than two months old, wasn’t quite the James Bond experience I had hoped for. And those winding roads that looked so joyful to navigate in Goldfinger were bloody hard work. The final destination took some finding. As I drove up the château driveway, I was exhausted.
I parked Suky behind a Ferrari that turned out to be Mike’s new ride. That didn’t seem quite fair. I had been perfectly happy with my VW until I saw the manager’s Ferrari!
By choosing to drive instead of fly, I was the last to arrive, so I got allocated the only bedroom left, a poky corner room the size of the single bed that furnished it. Simon, meanwhile, had set himself up in regal splendor in a beautiful master-bedroom suite that looked over the grounds. Paul’s room was not dissimilar.
It was a fantasy, just not mine.
Once we started working though, things leveled out. Making music straightens out the bullshit. That’s always the way with musicians. Well, almost always the way. We had to move the sound forward—that’s what Alex was there for—and develop our songwriting and musicianship further. For me, that meant choosing to play far fewer notes.
The bass playing on the first two albums had been characterized by a busy, syncopated style, as I put my new-wave spin on the funky disco sound that was coming out of America. In trying to create a sense of musical maturity, I wanted to find a way of saying more by playing less. Basslines were getting less busy, as synths were now being employed to double bass-guitar parts, so the lines were getting simpler but fatter, as exemplified by the low-end work on “Thriller” and Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”
The drums and amps and keyboards that had been driven down from London were set up in a bright, sunlit, top-floor room that was unfurnished and unused. It was a pleasant enough room and it had a veranda, but there was no power in the wall sockets, so the engineer had to run cables down three flights of stairs to the generator and recording equipment, which were located in a truck parked on the driveway. We all had to get used to the inconvenience of running up and down the stairs—up and down, up and down—trying to make sure that the sounds we were making upstairs were getting to the tape machines downstairs.
It was a frustrating experience. We had a lot of ideas, but we weren’t getting them down on tape. There were too many snags with the gear, the power, the stairs, the whole fuc
king old house basically. And then we learned, to our dismay, that when a piece of equipment broke or needed replacing, the new parts had to be flown down from London.
Cue lots of pool time, French food, and trips to the La Croisette in Cannes.
We got a handful of tracks going—the basis for several songs that are on Seven and the Ragged Tiger: the groove that would become “New Moon on Monday” was given a working title of “Spidermouse,” and we had “Of Crime and Passion,” “(I’m Looking for) Cracks in the Pavement,” and “I Take the Dice.”
A Philly Soul–type groove we worked up became “Seven and the Ragged Tiger” after Simon dashed down some vocal sketches. Simon reimagined us as a twisted Enid Blyton creation; the five band members plus Mike and Paul were the seven, and the ragged tiger was that intangible phenomenon that was beginning to swallow us up—fame. The song did not survive, yet strangely, the title did.
Paula Yates and Jools Holland came down to shoot a special for the UK TV show The Tube. We contrived a big barbecue party for the folks back home to see us living it large and getting work done.
Except we weren’t getting as much work done as we made out.
Without fear of contradiction, I can state for the record that this was Duran’s smoke period. There was rarely a time when a joint was not being rolled or smoked. This engendered a lot of philosophical conversations and considerations, spoken in a hashish hush, as if the Bhagavad Gita were being discussed rather than the snare-drum sound or a guitar part.
After a few weeks of that, despite being on the French Riviera, we were all getting restless and talking about making a move.
It was time for a geographic.
The BBC had made a documentary of The Police recording Synchronicity at AIR studios in Montserrat, and it looked like they were having a lot of fun and making great music, which was the combination we were looking to achieve also.
I was given the task of announcing this plan to the world in the April issue of the Duran Duran fan club newsletter, along with other news that I delivered with very specific attention to detail: “I am very happy to announce that on Pan Am Flight 98 on Tuesday 19 July at 7:35 A.M., Terminal 3, we shall be returning to England. Rah Hooray! Why is this, I hear you ask? Well, what some of you will know is that on 20 July we shall be playing at London’s Dominion Theatre for Charlie and Di for the Prince’s charity trust. What you don’t know is that on Saturday 23 July we will be playing an outdoor concert for Greenpeace, at some venue yet to be confirmed, so for the thousands of you who won’t be able to go to the Dominion, there’s one for you.”
I had always enjoyed answering fan mail at the Rum Runner, loving the feeling of connectedness I got from the back-and-forth with our most enthusiastic followers. Now, I didn’t open any of the envelopes, read any of the letters, or reply to any of our fans directly. Taking it in turns, we would formulate a monthly missive that would then be reproduced by the thousand in color on glossy paper and disseminated by our fan club organization. Something was definitely lost in the expansion program, but what else could we do?
I never again felt as connected to our network of fans until I surrendered to the social networking media of Twitter and Facebook in 2010. Now, once again, I see identifying traits before I read the comments, but this time they are icons and usernames, not handwriting, and I know instantly who they are, where they live, and where they sit in the Duran stratosphere.
A member of our road crew offered to drive Suky back from France. I flew back with the boys. Months later, I would get a summons for an unpaid parking ticket in Torquay. Torquay? It near drove me crazy trying to figure that one out. Had I driven there in a blackout? Then the penny dropped. After getting back to London, dear K___ had used my car to take a family vacation on the south coast.
42 A Caribbean Air
Packing for the West Indies, I realized I was going to need a new wardrobe for the climate there. The five members of the band always had a strong collective consciousness when it came to putting a look together for a photo shoot, a video, a tour, or a working vacation like this.
I expressed this idea in an interview with Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker: “I don’t think there was anybody in the band who wasn’t skeptical about going to Sri Lanka. Our manager had been there for a holiday, and came back talking about this amazing, Utopian island. Durans go back to nature? How’s my lip gloss gonna go in this? But when we got there, it just happened so naturally, the hair was let down without anyone consciously doing it.”
Duran arrived in Montserrat with an entirely integrated new look, wearing pale earth tones, pastels, pale blue and pink, cream and white. No black, no leather, no military! The staff of the studio were delighted to welcome us and made commemorative T-shirts. I rented a red Suzuki jeep and had fun getting to know the island, racing along the beaches in and out of the surf. Another Bondian fantasy brought to life. Somehow I acquired a postcard of the Vue Pointe Hotel signed by Stewart Copeland, Andy Summers, and Sting.
One concern before departure had been the lack of entertainment on Montserrat, particularly after work hours. So we had personal flight cases built, like those old steamer trunks you sometimes see in Louis Vuitton ads, except ours were built to road standard by the company that made the flight cases for our stage gear. You could drive an articulated truck over them and they wouldn’t break, according to the brochure. The cases housed our clothing and personal effects but—most importantly—new Sony Trinitron television sets and brand-new multiregion videocassette players. We all stocked up on VHS movies and planned to swap and trade titles throughout our stay.
These monoliths weighed a ton. It took the entire road crew to get mine into place in the rented villa I was sharing with Andy.
At last, we got a couple of groovier tracks going. “The Reflex” came into life on my birthday, June 20, after some celebratory champagne, and a day or two later we hit on “Union of the Snake.” I loved cutting tracks in the studio, then taking off my guitar to do a running dive into the perfect blue of the studio swimming pool.
But there were problems in Montserrat, just as there had been in the South of France. Andy was not at all happy with the studio speakers, and the tape machines didn’t seem to be running properly. There were breakages too, and now it took even longer to get the replacements flown in from London.
We did fly in two of Chic’s superstar singers, Michelle Cobbs and B. J. Nelson, from New York. It was great having their energy around. They contributed the “na na na na”s to “The Reflex.”
But the moaning and whining gathered momentum, leading to a major ruckus with the technical staff. They were like, “It’s you guys. You guys are not working. Our studio is perfectly fine.”
They thought we were delusional.
Maybe we were.
Things eventually got heavy with AIR, and payment of bills was questioned on both sides. We received a stern letter from AIR London telling us we were no longer welcome at their UK facilities.
But looking at photographs of us taken on the island, either together or individually, we all look happy and relaxed. Maybe we were bored, as in my case, or frustrated, as in Andy’s, but we still knew how to put on a show. No cracks could be seen in the images we chose to put out of ourselves.
We escaped Montserrat to fly back home to play the UK dates I had announced in the newsletter from France.
The Prince’s Trust gig was held at the Dominion Theatre. Duran Duran, who were apparently Princess Diana’s favorite band, were billed alongside Dire Straits, who were Charles’s. We played for about an hour. There’s a bootleg of the show called Di’s Big Date, which I would not recommend. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or the perfume, but I had tuning problems throughout and played horribly.
The performance was of little importance, however. It was all about the photo op. The picture of Simon and me with Diana, our hands entwined, went around the world. It was Mom and Dad’s favorite of all the photos taken of me. I only took it off the living
room wall after Dad passed away twenty-five years later.
The outdoor concert was held at Villa Park football ground in Birmingham, home of Aston Villa. In a stroke of marketing genius, all of our merchandising for the event was in claret and blue—Aston Villa’s colors. We gave a press conference at the Dorchester on Park Lane with four of the five Durans wearing Villa scarves and Nick—reluctantly—holding up a Villa rosette, aware of betraying the loyalties of his dad, Roger, a serious Birmingham City fan.
Robert Palmer and his band flew in from touring the United States to open up. We partied at the Rum Runner like old times. After that, I made the cover of the Aston Villa match-day program, photographed with my bass in the Villa colors for their game against Sunderland in August. I am the only non-player or coach to have had that honor.
43 Resentments Under Construction
Where would we go now? We had intended to go to Compass Point in Nassau, Alex Sadkin’s home base, but we were now completely turned off the idea of “getting away from it all.” We wanted to get to it.
Like pop’s General Patton, I carried a large-scale wall-map of the world with me wherever I traveled. I could monitor where we were selling well and where we could tour. If we really had to move again, to another country and another damn studio, if this exile was to continue, then let’s go somewhere fun, for God’s sake. I peered at the map and considered the question.
Where did we have the best time on tour last year?
Australia.
Or, more specifically, Sydney.
