by John Taylor
Bob announced plans for two concerts to take place simultaneously on Saturday, July 13, one at Wembley Stadium in London, the other at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.
Duran Duran would be one of the main attractions.
Whatever infighting was going on, there was never any question that all five of us wanted to appear at Live Aid together. As a generous concession to the Power Station, Bob offered Andy and me a spot in the Philadelphia show in addition to Duran Duran. The American bill featured Madonna, Bob Dylan, a reunited Led Zeppelin, Tina Turner, and Mick and Keith.
Andy and I met up with Simon, Nick, and Roger at our hotel in Philadelphia two days before the event. We had some rehearsing to do, never having played “A View to a Kill” live onstage before. There was a nervousness in both camps; our relationships had not gotten any better since Paris. If anything, things had gotten worse. And yet, in that ugly, stinking downtown rehearsal room, away from the media and the bright lights, the girls and all the wedges that had come between us, the tensions melted away.
Playing with Duran was fun. I had forgotten how much.
More fun than the Power Station.
Had I come to that realization too late?
On the day, there were faces everywhere. In our dressing room, Rupert Everett babysat Jade Jagger. As Led Zeppelin took the stage, with my friend Tony Thompson on drums, I made my way stage-side, passing Jack Nicholson on the way. I had never seen Zeppelin before and would never forget them. Their opening song, “Rock and Roll,” was the highlight of the event for me. Mick and Tina created showbiz magic, perhaps the glitziest ten minutes of the day, then it was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, introduced by Jack, then Dylan, who played a seriously ramshackle set with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
Following that: Duran Duran.
Before we took to the stage, we posed for one more photograph with Ken Regan, then we were rushed out onto the boards at prime time, opening our set with the number 1 song in America that week, “A View to a Kill.”
Onstage, we played as hard as we knew how, but when the curtain fell on our performance—twenty minutes and how many million TV viewers later—none of us had any idea that the curtain was falling on the first act of our career, and our lives together.
It would be eighteen years until the five of us would take the stage together again.
• • •
As the lights went down on the biggest event in the history of live music, and the trucks rolled away from Philadelphia, Andy, Tony, Michael Des Barres, and I rejoined the Power Station tour, which continued to rumble on, rather painfully, for the rest of the summer.
Live Aid had been a moment of transcendence, and for all the pains and process that being in Duran Duran required, the Power Station US tour was now revealed to me for exactly what it was—a vanity exercise that had run out of steam. Despite the great songs we’d recorded, I couldn’t wait for it to end.
However, I was soon reminded just how unmanageable the Duran machine had become. A week before the Power Station’s final gig, in Massachusetts, Simon’s yacht, Drum, capsized off the coast of Cornwall during the Fastnet Race, a rehearsal for the Whitbread Round the World race.
The keel of the boat sheared off and the boat flipped. Simon was trapped underwater in the cabin with several of his crewmates, the water gradually rising. They were there for over an hour before frogmen got in and freed them.
Simon and I were completely out of touch with each other at the time of the Drum accident. Nobody called Andy or me to say “Something terrible has happened.” The news first came to us as a rumor, one that gathered in tempo and credibility. But we didn’t truly appreciate the enormity of the accident—and how close Simon had come to dying—until we read about it in People magazine a week after it happened.
How fucked-up is that?
Andy never had a problem expressing anger, and for him, this was the final nail in the coffin of his relationship with the Berrows. He blamed them for encouraging the whole sailing adventure.
Nick was angry about it too, but he didn’t express it as directly as Andy did. He was still working with the Berrows—the Arcadia project, as it was now named, was being managed by them—so officially, they were still a team.
The boat’s keel got fixed, and Drum went on to complete the Round the World race, with Simon on board. Knowing Simon as I know him now, he was there because he wanted to be there, not because anyone had talked him into it.
But Andy was right about one thing—that was the end of the Berrows managing Duran Duran.
PART 3
DIGITAL TRUTH
56 Dead Day Ahead
The evening started innocently enough with an offer of dinner at a fashionable restaurant in uptown Manhattan. Renée was out of town on a modeling assignment, so I gladly accepted.
My friend Jonathan Elias was seated already, waiting for me at a table right in the middle of the room. At another table, Sabrina Guinness was chatting to Michelle Pfeiffer and the actress Lois Chiles.
I stopped at the table and spoke to Sabrina, who introduced me to her friends, before making my way over to Jonathan. He was grinning broadly.
“I thought you were going to bring them over,” he said.
“Even I know my limitations, Jonny Boy,” I replied.
I sat down and we both pretended to be interested in the menu. This was supposed to be one of the best restaurants in New York, but I don’t know how anyone could tell. It was 1985, and nobody ate that year.
Michael Des Barres had turned me on to a superhot film project, 9½ Weeks, when we had been on the road in the summer. I had drafted in Jonathan—a producer, programmer, and composer who had worked with us on “A View to a Kill”—to help Michael and me realize what would become the theme song to 9½ Weeks: “I Do What I Do.”
We had gone out to California together looking for more film work. At Universal, we met with one of the music supervisors.
“You know what? Maybe you guys could help us with this other film. We’re struggling with it. It’s great, but there’s something wrong with it. Let me arrange a screening for you.”
We returned that night and watched Brazil, unfinished and uncredited, at the Alfred Hitchcock Theatre on the Universal lot.
Within minutes, my heart was pounding. What I was watching was a masterpiece. I had no idea what the hell it was, but I wanted in.
When the last reel ended, I was ready to say anything to get a chance to contribute.
Jonathan and I threw some ideas at the executive, who reacted warmly and suggested we should go into the studio and make some musical notes. When I got back to my hotel, I called Russell Mulcahy.
“Don’t touch it! That’s Terry Gilliam’s film. He’s in dispute with Universal over control of it.”
I was utterly deflated. There was no way I would want to side with the studio over the artist. However, even though that experience led nowhere, it was encouraging in that it showed us what might be possible for a young British pop musician in Hollywood.
I got two tapes of the film in the mail a few days later. It was such a gorgeous looking work of art, I kept it on my TV for weeks on freeze-frame.
Jonathan and I had an unlikely friendship; I had my self-taught background in British pop, he was a Juilliard scholar with a breathtaking expertise in classical music, a polymath who also just happened to run one of the city’s most successful advertising firms. We had wildly opposing tastes in almost everything.
After not eating dinner at the hip uptown eatery, we thought we might go to a club, or maybe someone was having a party—but we decided first to go up to my apartment in the Park Belvedere, which was not too many blocks away, up on Seventy-Ninth and Columbus, right behind the Museum of Natural History. I lived in apartment 27a with Renée. Boy George had moved in down the hallway, into 27c.
It was hard to tell which apartment partied harder, although we didn’t party together. One morning, Renée opened the front door to find a silver tray piled high with
white powder outside our door. It was sugar, a Georgian joke about my lifestyle, but Renée was not amused.
She believed there was more interplay between George and me than there was. Although George and I had known each other way back, in Birmingham, before either of our bands had record deals, our stories had differed wildly since then. Right now, we had nothing in common and would not have dreamed of hanging out together.
The views from the apartment, now safely behind tinted glass windows, were truly spectacular, especially at night, when the twinkling city would wrap itself around the living area. It was easy to sit on my black leather sofa and think I was the center of the universe.
Jonathan sat down and rolled a joint, and I went and mixed us drinks. Let me see, 1985 . . . Planter’s Punch? And cocaine, of course.
I took the drinks back to the table and chopped out a few lines.
Outside, a storm was gathering. Rain slammed against the windows. Visibility across the park was low. It was enough to make us turn on the TV news channels to get more information. What was going on out there?
The wind grew wilder. On the streets below, trees were whipping in the rain, and we could see people running for shelter. It was starting to feel safer to stay indoors.
Let’s have a little more.
Music?
Under Jonathan’s tutelage, I was becoming passionate about classical music. Jonathan was convinced that the most important cultural event of the twentieth century had been the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This was news to me. I wasn’t sure I agreed but I was interested in the conversation. And the cocaine was helping the conversation. Lightning lit the sky across the park.
It felt like the weather was spurring us on to do something, something creative. I had a black upright Steinway piano—I still have it—and Jonathan sat down and started playing. He knew all the intricacies of harmony and counterpoint and had technique for days. I was the opposite. My knowledge of music theory was nonexistent, but my instincts were good.
I have no doubt, looking back to that night, that there was madness present. I felt that, together with Jonathan, I was on the verge of some extraordinary breakthrough that would change music forever. But messed up as I was, it was like trying to gather dust particles wearing boxing gloves.
Then it was 4:00 A.M., then 5:00, and music had not been changed forever, although the building was still rocking. Jonathan remembered that he had a 9:00 A.M. session, and left.
Me.
Alone.
Which I was never very good at, particularly when I was wired to the back teeth.
Why didn’t I call Renée? Because she would have had no sympathy for me in the state I had gotten myself into. I didn’t need to hear from her, “You just need to go to bed.”
I needed someone or something to engage with on a profound level. I couldn’t perform the pyrotechnics that Jonathan could at the piano, but I stayed at that keyboard for at least another three hours, and an idea began to germinate in my addled mind: What I needed was spiritual salvation. A talk with God. Maybe I could have that conversation through music.
Jonathan had introduced me to the term chorale—a simple but emotionally charged style of composition made for performance in church, created and offered up by the composer as a gift to God.
St. Jude’s filled my mind, filled my imagination. I had to write a chorale for Father Cassidy!
The idea crept up on me as the dawn rose. The storm had passed. Was that the sun rising on my new life? It rose like a livid orange scar over JFK, up, up across the park, lighting the living room, tinting it with an autumnal glow. Did the colors have a mildly accusatory aspect? Or was I being paranoid?
On the table, among the unfinished drinks and overflowing ashtrays, were scatterings of powdery cocaine crumbles.
It was a circular chain-link fence; cigarettes, drink, drugs, each causing me to crave the others. Once I had started on the one, the system took over, clamped me in its jaws.
It had been a few years now since I had been able to control my using. One line and I was gone, off to the races. I was no longer managing the chaos.
Take this day that was dawning. At some point, I would remember that I had made plans—a studio date perhaps, or a photo session. Whatever it was, it would have to go. The day ahead was dead.
What was left of last night’s supply waited in its crisply folded white envelope, red on the inside, like a warning.
I could measure how long a night had left to run by how much powder was inside those envelopes. There wasn’t long.
I had to speak to Father Cassidy immediately. I picked up the phone and called my mom.
“4742163.”
“Mom. It’s me.”
“Hello, John, where are you?”
“New York, Mom, at the apartment.”
“That’s nice. Your father’s gone to get the paper.”
“Mom, I need Father Cassidy’s number.”
“What for?”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes, Mom, everything is fine. I want to write a piece of music for the church.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Yes, it’s a great idea. I want to perform it at the church.”
It was daylight now. The morning news was on. It was another day. There’s always something a bit sobering about daylight.
I sighed into the phone. “Look, Mom, it’s late here. Can you just give me the number?”
She gave it to me.
“Your dad’s just walked in. Do you want to say hello?”
“No, Mom, not now, I’ll call you back later.”
I had just enough coke left to get me through this next call.
57 In the Dark
Father Cassidy didn’t pick up, thanks be to God.
A few weeks later, Nick came to New York to visit, bringing Julie Anne with him. Together with Renée, the four of us had dinner.
Afterward, we retired to the apartment. There would be no cocaine that night.
We didn’t talk about the past. We rarely do anyway, but in 1985 it would have been completely verboten. Nick wasn’t happy about the Drum disaster, and the issue of new management would have to be addressed in due course, but his priority at the moment was not getting hung up on details. It was all about how to move the band forward, if that was what we both chose to do.
Nick brought me a belated birthday present, a beautiful Matisse monograph, in which he inscribed, “Let’s just mix . . . cocktails.” I proudly played him the video I had just directed, albeit simplistically and with plenty of assistance, for “I Do What I Do.”
“That’s great, Johnny,” said Nick. “But we can do so much more together, don’t you think?”
Getting the band back together? Maybe it wasn’t a conversation with God that I needed after all. Maybe I just needed to hang out with the boys in the band and make another fucking brilliant album.
Maybe that could fix me.
“In Paris?” I inquired.
“Paris, London. We could come here, if you really want.”
Nick and Simon really wanted this. Would Andy and Roger be in the mix? Andy was in LA. Roger had taken to the country life.
“We’ll see,” said Nick.
“I’ll go and see Rog over Christmas, see what’s going on with him,” I said.
Renée said she would be happy to move to Paris. She could get plenty of work if we chose to go and live there. She decided then and there to take French lessons. But first I made a promise to meet Nick in London.
• • •
The “I Do What I Do” solo John Taylor single was released and did well in both the United States and the United Kingdom. I did a lot of promotion for the song and learned a lot about myself. I wasn’t a solo act. I could not carry the weight of the entire operation on my shoulders. I just didn’t want it badly enough. I made a particularly embarrassing appearance on Saturday morning TV after an
all-nighter hanging out with Freddie Mercury and Queen in their studio (another of those nights when I had a morning call and should have been a good boy). I showed up a complete mess, slurring my words and clearly out of it, and I managed to insult the entire population of Birmingham when a caller asked me sweetly if I had gotten back there lately and I replied, “Have you been there lately?”
My head just wasn’t screwed on right.
Backstage in the greenroom, Bryan Adams suggested I needed help.
“Hey, man, are you OK?”
“Yeah, yeah, I just got in from New York. Jet lag.”
“You need to look after yourself, John.”
The concern was so sincere. I hated him for it.
• • •
Back at Mom and Dad’s for Christmas Eve, I got a call from Simon. He and Yasmin were to be married in three days’ time in Oxford. I was invited, but attendance was not compulsory, he stressed. Yasmin. Yasmin Le Bon, née Parvaneh. A few years back, Simon had been leafing through some models’ cards, looking for someone who might look good on his arm at a film premiere he had been invited to. Yazzy got the call. Another cynical beginning, but they have been together ever since. Their romance has proved to be extremely resilient. Simon was just nuts over Yasmin, and she, who is simply one of the loveliest girls you could ever hope to meet, loved him right back. She had been his rock during the sailing scare, and they had found a tempo that they have since shared. They were very good for each other and had decided now was the time to put a ring on it. They would become the couple I was closest to. Simon and Yasmin would shelter me in many hours and days of single lonely-heartedness, inviting me to join them on family vacations, and I would spend many a night in the guest quarters at their London town house. But I did not make the wedding. Strange choices were being made.
One right choice I made was to get back on board with Duran. It would be as creative as anything I could do alone or with any other collaborators, and a whole lot safer. In the new year, I drove down to Gloucestershire, to Moreton-in-Marsh, the village to which Roger had relocated. We had a drink at the local pub.
