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

by John Taylor

  He was enjoying the calm of life there with Giovanna and their young family, riding horses and working his farm. He seemed happy with the change of pace. I must have come at him like a freight train, assuming he would jump at the opportunity to play with Simon and Nick and me again, especially given the renewed enthusiasm the three of us had for getting back in the game together.

  But Roger wasn’t up for it. He was apologetic but there was no turning him. We drank up and parted ways.

  Walking across the pub parking lot, I found it almost impossible to imagine Duran without Rog, playing those songs without him on the drums. I had never connected with another drummer the way I had with him. The trust that came with the endless hours of eyeballing, the musical structure that he and I had built together, had come out of our friendship first.

  But as I hit the London road, I saw there was no place for emotion. I went into survival mode. Having made my decision to go back to the band, I had no intention of letting my plans be derailed by anyone else, even Roger.

  I couldn’t charm him, I couldn’t change his mind, and Simon, Nick, Andy, and I were just going to have to deal with it.

  We needed a new drummer.

  I had met an amazing drummer at the Power Station, an Englishman from Brighton named Steve Ferrone, who had been in the Average White Band and had become one of the great New York session drummers. Steve’s favorite joke about his band name was “They’re white and I’m average.”

  I used to joke that he was like Tony Thompson with time; he had the same big sound that I loved, but was much more disciplined. Also there was more jazz in Steve’s playing. I ran the idea past Simon and Nick, and we agreed to invite him to London to play with us as we started laying down the tracks that would form the basis for a new album.

  Once again I was going to have to alter my bass playing style in order to work with a drummer who wasn’t Roger. From a creative point of view, that was no bad thing. Playing with Tony Thompson had prepared me for anything. The parts I wrote for the Notorious sessions, jamming with Nick and Steve, or working off electronic loops that we had programmed, were not at all what I would have written with Roger. I did miss the easy chemistry with Roger, but without him I was forced to think differently, and that made me grow as a musician.

  Duran have often been applauded for “not making the same album twice,” but we could not have done so had we tried. All the albums that were made after Roger and Andy left had a different flavor, and most often the reason was down to the different personnel involved in the making of them.

  At the first Notorious sessions it was just Nick, Steve, and me. Simon would be joining us soon enough—he had committed to the new album—but it was becoming clear to us that Andy was playing a more elusive game. For now, I played a little guitar, like in the beginning, and my friend Gerry Laffy, Russell’s boyfriend from Sydney, played a little too. Nick and I, ever the cineastes, began naming these instrumental pieces after Hitchcock movies: “Rope,” “Vertigo,” “Notorious.”

  We had put it off as long as we could, but the management issue now had to be addressed, so we invited Mike Berrow to come to the studio. He put on a face of confidence, pretending to assume that business would go on as usual. I am sure he and his brother wanted things to go back to the way they had been, but that was never going to happen. There was too much resentment, bad feeling, unprocessed anger. It wouldn’t be long before a hard-line decision was made, and what we had all known for some time would soon be formalized in black ink. Our relationship with the Berrows was terminated.

  Now my thoughts turned to the missing guitarist. I knew Andy was in LA somewhere and set myself the task of bringing him back into the fold. I tracked him down in Malibu, and he arranged to meet me at LAX.

  On the curb, Andy’s driver took my bag and wordlessly gestured to the open car door, where Andy sat, deep in the back of the limousine, shades on, wreathed in cigarette smoke. It was like being picked up by Phil Spector.

  “Hey, mon,” he said, a wry grin appearing under the Ray-Bans.

  He never failed to put a smile on my face, that guy. The Whitley Bay fucker. He’d done all right for himself.

  “Dude.”’Cos he was.

  Before we even got to his house, I was so coked up I could barely speak in words of more than one syllable.

  I tried to make my case. “Andy, Andy, this album is going to be different.”

  I’d said exactly the same things to him at the studio in Sydney, and that had led to The Power Station, a Top-10 album around the world.

  “Trust me one more time, dude,” I said, chopping out another huge line of coke.

  Andy watched me laying out the drugs. Andy’s habit was not as heavy as mine. He did not see a man who inspired confidence. Not this time.

  It was dawn by the time I got around to playing him the tapes.

  “Listen to this drum sound, man. Come on, it needs you!”

  I went back to London under the impression I had reeled Andy in. I told Simon and Nick that Andy would be showing up. We continued to work as a trio with Steve Ferrone, writing new songs. Nile Rodgers agreed to produce, so even if Andy didn’t appear for a bit, we still had a blinding fill-in guitar player available in the shape of our producer.

  We were in AIR Studios, working on “Notorious,” happy to be allowed back in the door at our favorite London studio after the arguments in Montserrat. We got a call from guitarist Warren Cuccurullo.

  The studio receptionist took the call.

  “Tell them it’s their new guitar player,” said the voice on the phone. “Tell Duran I’m the perfect guitar player for them. Have them call me.”

  When the receptionist told us what the voice on the phone had said, we all cracked up.

  “Cheeky fuck, we’ve got a guitar player,” I said.

  “He’s just not very good at returning phone calls,” Simon added.

  But the receptionist had more to report. “Well, apparently, you don’t. This guy Warren says Andy has formed a band with his rhythm section.”

  Turns out, the little bastard had formed another band, out in LA, with the rhythm section of Warren’s band Missing Persons and Steve Jones, of the Sex Pistols. Andy had effectively broken up Warren’s band and was playing around the LA area looking for a recording deal.

  Can you imagine that happening now and not knowing about it? I would be getting video clips on Twitter before Andy had finished playing his first number. And yet, back in those dark ages, we really were in the dark.

  Simon, Nick, and I became closer than we had ever been before. Our relationship moved to a whole new level, because now we were just three, fighting to survive. Like one of those soccer teams down to ten men—stronger, more determined, more focused. Less can be more. That was the silver lining.

  In 1984, you would never have imagined that the three of us could have gotten as close as we did in 1986.

  58 Notorious

  The new slimline Duran family—John and Renée, Simon and Yasmin, Nick and Julie Anne, along with Steve Ferrone and his girlfriend, Jackie—moved to Paris. Steve and I rented an apartment just off the Place Victor-Hugo. We moved the band gear into Studio 1 at Studios Davout near the Porte de Montreuil in the east end of the city. We continued to write, still not knowing for sure if Andy was in or out. But we were determined the show would go on, and according to our timetable, not Andy’s.

  We were able to add vocals to the Hitchcock titles—songs now—as Simon was in the house, writing lyrics as quickly as we could write the music.

  Musically, change was in the air again. Guns N’ Roses, Jane’s Addiction, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the bands breaking out; music seemed to be getting darker and harder. The big albums of ’86 were all by veterans who had found a way back into the zeitgeist: Peter Gabriel, Steve Winwood, Robert Palmer; mature work by mature artists. Would we be able to reflect that level of maturity ourselves?

  There was self-doubt, of course. Sometimes it seemed like the whole
world was against us. Anthony Burgess, of all people, the author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote an incredibly mean op-ed piece in The Sun about the cheek of pop stars who expect more than their five minutes of fame. It was actually about Boy George, who had just been arrested, but he used it to take a dig at us. I took it personally.

  • • •

  The second half of the eighties, from a pop culture standpoint, was characterized by two defining ideas; the first, brought about by Bob Geldof and the Live Aid phenomenon, was that a conscience was now required of everyone in pop. It was no longer enough just to be able to write fun or romantic songs that made people want to dance or escape—you had to take a position. Pop became political.

  I went to the Amnesty International concert in Paris in 1988 and watched Bruce Springsteen get an education in political correctness from Sting and Peter Gabriel, who both delivered sets that spoke of global awareness. Their music was inherently political; both of them had managed to metamorphose out of the first act of their musical careers into second acts as spokespersons for third world nations and rain forests.

  When Bruce took the stage, he looked out-of-date in his denims and lumberjack shirt.

  The other transformative aspect of late eighties culture lay in sobriety. Arguably the two greatest artists of the moment, Prince and Madonna, made it quite clear that they were not users or abusers. They both famously ran clean tours. If you wanted to work for Prince or Madonna, you couldn’t use, period.

  The seventies were most definitely over.

  We went back to London to finish off the new album, when Nile arrived and immediately raised the ante.

  He began working on the tracks that we had laid down so far, funking them up, bringing a new energy to the sound.

  When Prince came to London for a run of shows at Wembley, we all trotted along to see him. Afterward, he gave an impromptu performance at the Roof Gardens in Kensington, and one of his roadies asked me if I would like to join him onstage.

  I knew better. “Not tonight, thanks.”

  Eric Clapton took the bait. Watching Eric on the tiny stage, the Purple One behind him, now on drums, now on keyboards, now on guitar, I was glad I had resisted. Eric didn’t know what was going on. It was Prince’s room.

  We all got caught up in Prince fever that week. Nick asked Nile for a lesson in minor sevenths, the funk chords made famous by James Brown and now being reinvented by Prince. The lesson was most fruitful, with the two of them building the basis for the song “Notorious.”

  Simon responded with a lyric about why we were doing this again. Going for it again. Chasing the fame monster.

  Nile applied more magic with the Synclavier—a most fantastic sampling device that enabled him to perform tricks with the music, to cut and paste sounds the way you can cut and paste text on a word processor—as he had on the “Reflex” remix and “Wild Boys,” and when we heard it booming out of those massive studio speakers—“No-No Notorious”—we knew we had something special.

  Because of the physical restrictions of the building, Studio 2—located over Topshop, high above Oxford Street—had low windows that rose from the floor to knee height. From a standing position, they gave a perfect view down onto Oxford Circus.

  There was something romantic and exciting about working in that room in the early hours of the morning. Music never sounded better. To hear something you had written pumping out of those speakers while you looked down on the city below made you feel not just like a master of the universe but also like a master of your trade.

  The music we were making with Nile felt like the right music for our time. Nile wanted to mix the record in New York and as there was still quite a bit of singing for Simon to do, the two of them went to work in Skyline Studios in Midtown Manhattan.

  It had been decided that Andy Taylor would make a contribution to the album as part of the divorce settlement. It was official. He wanted out. In New York, we met up with Warren Cuccurullo and invited him to take part in the album also. Strangely enough, I know what solos Warren contributed to the album, and I know what parts Nile contributed, but although Andy is credited beneath Steve Ferrone, I am damned if I can pick out where he is playing. I think we felt that the sooner we learned to live without Andy, the better, so we buried his parts. Warren was the new guitar player.

  59 Surfing Apoplectic

  Notorious was a hit. The numbers were not as big as they had been in 1984, but we justified that to ourselves by saying, “Well, there’s only three of us now.”

  Three-fifths of the success. We conditioned ourselves to that idea. But Notorious was certainly big enough to support another massive world tour.

  Would someone please explain

  The reason for this strange behavior

  In exploitation’s name

  We must be working for the skin trade

  The Notorious world tour of 1987, named the Strange Behaviour Tour, brought us for the first time in front of live audiences in Italy. We had been there before as a five, but only for TV appearances and press. Now we would play seven concerts there: Palermo in Sicily, Bari on the heel of Italy, Cava de’ Tirreni near Naples, Rome, Modena, Milan (at the San Siro stadium), and Florence.

  In the late eighties, Italy became “fame rehab” for us. There could be no denying, no ignoring the waning of Duranmania as a phenomenon in the markets that had been most supportive to us. We still saw healthy ticket sales, and Notorious would achieve platinum disc sales in the United States and Great Britain (for 1,000,000 and 100,000, respectively), but the madness and the mayhem had most definitely abated.

  One would think we might have been grateful. For the first time in years, we could take regular walks outside of our hotels, go shopping, or visit museums, without a mob scene developing. We were now shown to the guest elevators, and we could exit through the lobby like civilized folk instead of using the stinky kitchen exits. And we were grateful, for the most part, to have these freedoms restored. We certainly kept telling ourselves that.

  However, I had a nagging fear that this was only the beginning of what could be the end. Who knew how low things could go? A total and all-out end to sales of any kind? Surely not, not with the decent catalogue of hits we had already written.

  But then, Italy arose like a knight to defend the honor of the virgin princess! It would protect us. It drew us to its heart, held us tightly, and would not let go. The audiences and media there warmed to us even more as a trio than they had to the five, maybe because the super-Catholic Italians related to us more easily as a (holy) trinity?

  • • •

  Ciao Italia!

  It was beautiful, bellissimo, the support our Italian fans gave us in the late eighties. They took us to their bosom, and we surrendered to them.

  Our visits there were characterized by a manifold craziness that relished its exclusivity. The Italian fans realized how important they had become to us, and they were proud of that. A weekend in Rome, ostensibly for a Sunday afternoon TV playback appearance—hardly work at all, in my view—was in fact a forty-eight-hour piece of living theater in four acts: ARRIVAL, STRUGGLE, SURRENDER, and RETREAT.

  It was all of that Tokyo madness, turned up to eleven: taxicabs loaded with flash-snapping, screaming, teary-eyed teens; dozens of scooter-riding mercenaries known as paparazzi, weaving in and out of our motorcade, engaging in madcap rides around the city like it was the national pastime. It would leave us breathless and barmy. How did no one get hurt?

  Italy was only just becoming a legitimate stopover on the international touring circuit. In the seventies and early eighties, it had been the Wild West. British and American bands toured Italy at their peril. Violence and riots were rife wherever crowds gathered, and you could lose your shirt, your truck, and most definitely your amplifiers if you were not careful or ran afoul of the corrupt officialdom in place there. Just ask Genesis or Van der Graaf Generator. When Lou Reed played Italy, the building was firebombed.

  Promoter David Zard approached us
with promises of propriety, honest book-keeping, tip-top security, and a lot of fun. We signed on for the seven-date tour of football stadia. The potential for chaos was high. “It was the tour they said could not be done,” Simon would tell the end-of-year fan club magazine.

  In order to announce the dates, we arrived in Rome, and from there we drove to the coast and boarded a private motor yacht that took us to the Isle of Capri. The level of security was intense, mean eyes beneath mean peaked caps following us as we walked up the hill from the dock to the hotel. In black leather boots and armed with guns, the guards were quite rough—we could see that—with the kids who had lined up to welcome us. We gratefully sought the sanctuary of our rooms, checking in just before midnight.

  The following morning there was to be a press conference. Italy had a variation on the standard press conference rules: Whereas in every other country the press would act out the roles they had seen played by the press in films of Beatles press conferences, in Italy we all acted out the press conference scene from La Dolce Vita, which takes place in Anita Ekberg’s hotel suite. Of course, there were variations; unlike Anita Ekberg, we would rarely answer a question about what we most liked in life, “Love, love, and more love,” but I’m sure we did it once or twice.

  “How do you find Italy?”

  “Which do you like better, English or Italian girls?”

  One has to be diplomatic answering questions such as that one, particularly when one is a guest in the country.

  More work for the interpreter, who seemed to have his translations prepared in advance. How do they do that? Perhaps it was the work of Mr. Zard.

  After the formal Q and A session ended, we were led outside to a garden that looked out over the Mediterranean. On a giant half-shell sculpture, evoking the beauty of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, sat the great Italian actress Sandra Milo. “She knew Fellini, she was Fellini’s greatest creation,” we were told.