By then we really felt like we were back in the groove. It was a relief for all concerned. Mainly, though, for me and Rick. The band was now the band. But it was Rick and I who were now fronting everything. The band was so good as a unit Rick and I began to enjoy ourselves onstage again like we hadn’t done for years. We had spent the summer touring football stadiums and Britain and Europe as special guests of Queen and Rod Stewart. The idea was to reintroduce us to the world with as big a splash as possible and it certainly did the trick. In the middle of the three-month tour Rick and I were invited to take part in a special show at Wembley Arena to celebrate the Prince’s Trust tenth anniversary. It was billed as the Prince’s Trust Rock Gala, and the idea was that we would become part of an all-star line-up including Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, George Michael, Elton John, Tina Turner and others – with Paul McCartney singing up front – performing a set of three songs by the Beatles: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Get Back’. It was a great night and the show was filmed and later shown on TV. The main thing I remember about our actual performance, other than standing next to Rick doing that Status Quo dance we do, then seeing the other guitarists lined up next to us doing it – Midge Ure on Rick’s left, Mark King from Level 42 on my right. Next thing, there’s Mark Knopfler doing the same thing standing next to Paul McCartney. Sorry, lads, it must be catching!
What I do remember is being introduced again to Prince Charles, who was lovely as usual. And to his wife, Princess Diana, who most definitely was even lovelier, and quite stunningly beautiful, much more so in person even than on camera. What did we talk about? That would be telling. Mainly I just remember staring into her gorgeous blue eyes.
On the final day of the three-month tour we managed to do shows in three different countries in one twenty-four-hour period. We started with an early morning appearance – 12.30 a.m. – at a festival in Denmark, before flying to London and making our way to the Knebworth Festival, where we were special guests for Queen. We then flew straight to Switzerland, where we headlined the Seepark festival.
Two months later, with the ‘In the Army Now’ single riding high in the charts and the album having similar success, we set out on our real ‘comeback’ tour: fifty-two shows in nine countries, including eight nights back at our old home-from-home, the Hammersmith Odeon in London, with the final night on Christmas Eve 1986. It really was just like old times. Multiple nights at big venues everywhere we went. At the start of 1987 we kept up the pace. Beginning in February we did another twenty-four shows in just thirty-one days, finishing with shows in Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. This was genuine new territory for the band. We had played a few shows in the UAE the year before to see how they would go down. The answer was: spectacularly well. We loved it there, too.
It really felt like there were whole new worlds now opening up to us. The other thing that made this new on-the-road life much easier was that with the new line-up I no longer had to battle with three other equal members to get my musical ideas across. The show was now being run exclusively by myself and Rick. It didn’t mean we didn’t listen to what the others had to say. We still wanted it to be a band. And on our next album, Rhino, Jeff and Andy would all get songwriting credits. I just wasn’t going to fall into the trap of having another strong voice in the band when it came to making any of the really important decisions. Everyone would have a say – but Rick and I would have the final say. End of.
Unfortunately, my personal life was far less simple to control. It was like trying to keep a row of spinning plates from toppling over. Just as I’d fixed things with the band again, I now found myself at the mercy of two unforeseen events in my life – though, in retrospect, they were pretty inevitable, one way or another.
The first concerned my health. Well, what a surprise. Rhino later told me that he was deeply shocked when he first began working with the band at how much coke Rick and I were doing. I would wake up sometimes on tour with the phone in my hand, halfway through a call back home to England. The phone bill would be more than the price of the room. Rick was the same.
Awake I wasn’t that different, sitting in my hotel suite with the curtains drawn, living in a kind of permanent midnight, either doing coke or trying to score more coke. Now at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, after nearly ten years of doing mountainous amounts of cocaine every single day throughout the whole of that time, my nose broke. That is, my septum – the thin partition that separates the channels of your nose – began falling out. Bit by bit.
I was in the shower at the time. I’d already had a snort of the white powder just to get me out of bed and into the shower, as I did most mornings. By now I’d taken to ‘washing’ my nose in the shower. Getting the showerhead and pointing it up my hooter, jetting hot water up there in order to give it a bit of a clean. My nose had been slowly disintegrating for a long time. I had taken to pestering my doctor for all sorts of different nasal sprays and gels to help it stop hurting, help it recover from the abuse it was getting from my constant cocaine use. Recently, I’d been shoving a vitamin E capsule up before I went to bed, with the ridiculous idea that it would have a soothing, efficacious effect on my nose while I slept – which was about the only time I wasn’t snorting coke up there.
God knows why I thought showering my nose was a good idea. It wasn’t the coke residue left in my nose that caused me problems, it was the coke that had already been absorbed into my bloodstream. Nevertheless, I had got it into my head that this was a good ‘healthy’ thing to do every morning. Give my poor old nose a clean – ready for me to start shovelling more stuff up there again.
This particular morning I was standing there, pointing the showerhead up my nose, when I suddenly heard an unexpected sound. A little thunk: something landing at my feet. I looked down and there was the bloody membrane of my septum, like a chunk of chopped liver on the floor of the shower. I realised what it was immediately – or, rather, I had no idea what it was, just that it had come from my nose. I reached down and picked it up, gave it a quick rinse under the shower and tried to shove it back up my nose. Then – thunk! It plopped out again. I tried again. Same thing – thunk! Then another little piece. Then another …
Oh dear.
I got out, towelled down, then went and chopped myself out a few more lines of coke, snorted them and sat there on the edge of the bed wondering what to do next. I rang my manager. Of course I did. I was a rock star and anything – anything at all – that went wrong for me, I called my manager. But when I told him what had happened he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Eventually, he said, ‘We better get you to the doctor’s. Sit tight. I’ll come and pick you up.’ Then added: ‘Have you still got them?’
‘Got what?’
‘The bits of your nose that fell out?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘In case the doctor can sew them back in or something.’
That’s when I knew my life had reached a level of farce bordering on tragedy.
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.
So I went to the doctor’s, and from there to the hospital, where I learned what every other dickhead rock star with a heavy-duty coke habit has learned the hard way. You can’t actually ‘fix’ what was politely referred to as a ‘deviated septum’. You just have to live with it. These days it’s become a parlour trick for me. Showing how I can thread a cotton-bud in one nostril and weave it straight out of the other nostril. It looks gross because it is gross. It always used to make Rick gag. I have done it for the children of friends who want to demonstrate to their kids just what a rotten idea cocaine really is. I’ve even done it on telly a couple of times to really make the point. Don’t try this at home, kids – or at school or at play or anywhere else in the world.
Oh, and you really do have to stop shovelling snowploughs’ worth of coke up your poor ruined nose. Or rather, you really should stop. You would have thought your hooter falling to bits might have been some kind
of major turning point. In fact, I still hadn’t quite learned that lesson yet but it was coming.
The other lesson I hadn’t learned yet was how to keep my dick in my trousers. I’m not talking about one-night stands on the road. This was far more serious than that. This was the real thing.
It began when Rick and I had done those few ‘evening with’ shows on the road a couple of months after Live Aid. We were booked to do one of these shows in a big room at the Portland Hotel in Manchester, where we were also staying the night. They were odd occasions, these shows. Huge fun with the real Quo fans. But there were always a few nutters asking the most obscure, bizarre stuff. There were always a few overexcited women in the audience too, mainly middle-aged ladies throwing bras and panties onstage. Usually at Rick, it has to be said, who enjoyed all that thoroughly. I didn’t mind, as I wasn’t looking for that kind of action.
After the show, Bernie and I, who was along for the ride, went into the bar at the hotel to have a drink. As soon as we walked in my eyes lit on this incredibly beautiful young woman sitting with a friend at a table. When I say incredibly beautiful, I don’t just mean good-looking or sexy or yum-yum-yum. I mean that to me, at that moment, she looked like the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. She was Indian, with glowing skin the colour of golden cocoa butter. Dark flashing eyes like mysterious beacons. The face and body of a goddess. I found myself being pulled toward her like a magnet at the North Pole. Her name was Page Taylor and my life was about to change again and I knew it. I sensed it would not end well. You can’t wake up in heaven and not know there is a hell around the corner. But I didn’t care. All I knew was that I wanted to be with her and that suddenly nothing else mattered. Not even half as much. I was gone.
The friend she was sitting with was also stunningly attractive, and blonde. Thankfully, Bernie couldn’t take his eyes off her – leaving Page for me to talk to and get to know. I just walked straight over to their table, introduced myself and Bernie, then sat down and ordered champagne. We drank that, then ordered another. Then after that we all went out for dinner together. I don’t remember where we went. I just remember being unable to take my eyes off Page. I had always had quite a thing for beautiful Asian women. Page had been born in Delhi but her family had emigrated to Manchester when she was a child. The offspring of immigrants – just like me. With a strange tangle of different accents – just like me. If you haven’t guessed yet, I was talking myself into what I was already convinced would be the perfect, ultimate relationship before I’d even taken my shoes off.
By the next morning I’d already made up my mind. Hell, I’d made up my mind the moment I first laid eyes on her: Page was the new love of my life. And my relationship with Liz, and by extension our daughter Bernadette, was over. I’m shaking my head in shame as I write this. What a dickhead!
So began another episode in my life that I don’t look back on with any pride. Indeed, the guilt and shame I would feel when it finally arrived, as I knew it would eventually, was so intense it nearly finished me off. None of which was of any help to Liz. I was baling out. We had always promised each other that if either one of us ever met someone else we would always tell the other, be upfront and honest rather than cheating. The pain of losing someone was bad enough without all the lies that usually go with it.
But when I sat Liz down to tell her about Page, she was absolutely furious. That’s when I realised that certain lies can actually help ease the pain. I should have found a way to lessen the blow. Made her feel, perhaps, that it was probably just a fling, not something so big it would destroy our own relationship. I never, ever wanted to hurt that woman. The truth is, although I was head over heels about Page, a part of me knew it was probably not going to be a lifelong relationship. But another part didn’t. I told Liz everything and when she saw how smitten I was she exploded. She handed in her notice with the band, took Bernadette, and not long after she moved to Canada and understandably refused to have anything else to do with me.
It was a bad time. I was a complete arsehole to Liz. Although we were parents to our daughter, who I loved dearly, because of the life I was living – in Ireland one minute, back in London the next, on the road or in the studio again for most of it – Liz and I had never really lived as a so-called normal family with Bernadette. It was one of the things that I loved most about being with Liz while it lasted. The idea that we wouldn’t allow so-called norms to dictate to us how we should live. Liz was not a homebody. She’d been around, knew the scene, didn’t get on my case if I was doing coke or whatever. At least, that was what I had always told myself. I was so out of my tree 24/7 during those years I was telling myself all sorts of things that decades later I would sit and think about, and realise I had not been truly honest about. Not to Liz or to myself. Ultimately, Bernadette was the one that suffered. I don’t like regrets but that is something I do very much wish could have been handled better. On the other hand, I had just enough brain cells left to know her mother would always do a much better job of bringing her up than I would.
Liz was understandably deeply wounded by my abandonment, while I had disappeared so far up my own bum I simply refused to acknowledge it. Worst of all, I disappeared from our daughter’s life so completely that it would be many years before we were able to reach any kind of emotional and practical resolution. And I still regret that.
The fact is I had met Page and I couldn’t help myself. Not only was she staggeringly beautiful but she was unlike any woman I had ever been with before. Bright, wealthy in her own right, super confident and at the same time crazy – but in a good way. She wasn’t into drugs. But she was exciting, full of mischief and adventure, I never quite knew which way she was going to go on anything – and that made her unpredictable, dangerous even. I simply couldn’t get enough of her.
Page was a lethal combo to a frazzled old rocker like me back then. She wasn’t about to move in with me or even allow me to treat her as my ‘girlfriend’. When we were together we were totally together. But she made no promises she couldn’t keep. She was still only in her early twenties and settling down with one person was the farthest thing from her mind. She certainly wasn’t interested in my money. Her father was a very successful gold bullion dealer, and owned a big jewellery business. When Page went out with me on the town she was dressed to kill in forty-grand pearl necklaces and twenty-grand gold-and-diamond rings. And, of course, gorgeous as she was, when she came out on the road with me she brought more luggage than the rest of the band put together.
In some ways, she was with the wrong Quo frontman. With her couture-designer clothes, gold and diamonds, Page was more the sort of girl you pictured being seen in the tabloids on Rick’s arm than mine.
But she wasn’t. She was with me. It really shouldn’t have worked but for about two years it worked better than it had any right to. Nothing could go wrong.
Until one day it just did.
Chapter Ten
Deeper and Down
I admit it. I was lost. I’d gotten everything I wanted – a successful new line-up of Quo that I had complete control over; a drop-dead gorgeous young girlfriend, intelligent, wild, sexy; and all the cocaine and tequila I could consume without actually having a heart attack and dying. I was still rich, despite a divorce and four children by two different mothers. The only thing I didn’t have was the sense to know what to do with all this good fortune. I was a wreck. A walking, talking, singing, playing, permanently fucked-up mess. Deep down I knew it. But I still hadn’t gathered up the strength and courage to do anything about it. I still had my coke blinkers on. Anybody that tried to remove them from me was going to be in trouble. Anybody.
It was exactly the cliché they talk about in drug rehabs. That you have to get so low before you finally decide you have no choice but to help yourself out of the hole you’ve dug yourself. Except, I didn’t go into ‘recovery’. I just went mental instead. Let everything slide. My relationship with Liz: my relationship with the band; my ability
to tell fantasy from reality. I ran away from it all, hid in my darkened room with my best friends coke and Page.
You can see how far off the pace I was by some of the disastrous decisions the band made over the next year or so. The biggest fiasco was our trip to South Africa, in October 1987, for a week of shows at the notorious Sun City resort, the entertainment complex located in Bophuthatswana, one of ten South African Bantustans: tracts of low-quality land supposedly enshrined as independent black homelands that were in fact one of the struts of the apartheid regime. I write this now because I’ve since done my research but at the time we were talked into going I hadn’t the faintest idea about any of this stuff. No Google to look this stuff up on back then. And not enough brainpower left in my head to really care.
Back to my research: when the United Nations imposed a cultural boycott on South Africa in condemnation of apartheid, the organisers of the Sun City resort simply went out with truckloads of money and offered it to any entertainers willing to take it. Among the many musical acts before us that couldn’t resist the temptation to earn millions for a few shows were the Beach Boys, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Elton John and our old mates Queen, to name just the most famous. Most of them did their shows without anyone batting an eye. But Queen got pilloried in the press and ended up with a fine from the Musicians’ Union and inclusion on a United Nations blacklist.
Now this we definitely knew about. And it would have been hard to pretend we didn’t, seeing as Bruce Springsteen’s famous guitarist and my backstage mate from Live Aid, Steve Van Zandt, had just made Sun City the focus of his music-industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid. Dozens of big-name artists had appeared on his song, ‘Sun City’, pledging never to perform there while apartheid stayed in place.
I Talk Too Much Page 20