Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  “There are five good-looking young guys in town from a great band who want to meet you—and they wear makeup,” she told him.

  Sure enough, we were invited down to Studio 54 on a Sunday night to meet him. There was a huge queue to get in because as an underground club it was still coming to the end of its heyday, but nobody told us that Sunday night was gay night! It was obviously a huge honor to be seen with Warhol and it caused quite a stir. He latched onto us immediately, and I remember him saying to me over and over again, “Oh, Andy, you’ve got to wear pearls. You gotta wear pearls, Andy!”

  Then it was Nick’s turn.

  “Oh, I like that Nick and I got a photo at home to prove it!” screeched Warhol.

  I kept thinking, Wow! It’s Andy Warhol and he knows all our names. I was flattered because Warhol was an icon and I knew that David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground had all been heavily influenced by him. I could see the beauty in what he did, but I wasn’t really from that school—unlike Nick, for whom Warhol was a real source of creative energy. At times it seemed as if Nick was obsessed with him. The fuss caused by our meeting with Warhol was huge, and the association never really wore off. Studio 54 was amazing with all the lights and the great atmosphere, and I could see that the Berrows had tried to style the Rum Runner on it. But I couldn’t really immerse myself in the New York gay scene, and I found all the hunky boys in shorts a bit too much. Having said that, New York would eventually become a great playground for us, particularly John and I—but that was all still in the future.

  We did a lot of traveling during 1981, and places would seem to go nuts for us whenever we went there for the first time. Paris was one example of this, when we played a gig there in September 1981, a few weeks before we went to New York. We’d hit upon the idea of taking two coachloads full of fans from the Rum Runner with us to France, just to ensure the party went with a swing. EMI agreed to spend £20,000 to pick up the tab. The plan was to turn the whole evening into a big stunt for the press.

  When we got to Paris we held one hell of a party in a club at a grand old Parisian ambassador’s residence, which had opulent works of art adorning all the walls. They took one look at our crowd and nearly didn’t let them in. We were lucky to even get into France at all, because earlier in the evening the border guards had seen our buses and wanted to put us back on the ferry. Everyone had put on their most outrageous New Romantic gear, which meant the gays all had huge feathers and the girls had virtually nothing on; they were just scantily clad in underwear with a pair of angel wings on their backs. Some of the men wore SS uniforms, which were accepted then as part of the fashion and not meant as a political statement. It was just a way of looking cold and austere. Back then, it wasn’t considered as an insult to victims of the war—we’d beaten the Nazis and to us they were figures of fun. You have only to look at the furor caused by Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform at a party to realize how much things have changed.

  We knew we’d make an impact in France because nothing like that existed in Paris. “Impact” turned out to be an understatement. The party got so wild that we damaged some seats and the toilets were awash with drugs. Worse still, someone drew a funny moustache and comedy glasses in lipstick on one of the oil paintings. It caused a right old stink because it was an expensive work of art and EMI were forced to pay thousands to have it restored.

  But the evening served its purpose and the party got loads of media coverage, more even than the gig itself.

  The word was starting to spread . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rio: Love & War

  I danced with a gorgeous blond girl during our trip to Paris and I soon found myself falling in love with her. Her name was Tracey Wilson, and the following year she would become my wife. Tracey was a hairdresser who managed a salon where Duran Duran used to go to blag free haircuts and she was part of the regular crowd at the Rum Runner. Unlike some of the other girls, she didn’t drink or take drugs—and at first she wasn’t impressed by my advances. In fact, prior to going to France, whenever I approached her she usually made it quite clear she wasn’t interested and at one point I was horrified to learn that Simon had started to take an interest in her.

  “You can ’eff off, there’s plenty more fish in the sea,” I told him. “She’s mine.”

  It was almost a year since Duran Duran’s first album had come out. Simon and I were still living together in the flat we shared in Moseley. The album had got to number three on the charts and it was still selling well, so we were getting a lot of attention because of it—although strangely in Moseley most people continued to ignore us. Being a red-light district, there were cars crawling everywhere—but they weren’t looking for us. There was a curry house if you went in one direction from our flat and a corner shop if you went the other way. It was a funky place to live and we’d walk past chilled-out Rastafarians with boom boxes in order to get our groceries, but at nighttime we’d avoid the bus and always get a taxicab straight to the door.

  When I’d moved to Birmingham to be with Duran Duran, finding a partner hadn’t exactly been part of my plans, but those long Sunday afternoons that I used to spend alone while the rest of the band were with their families left me wanting to find a decent girlfriend. The first time I’d seen Tracey had been in the Rum Runner. Her brothers, Sean and Mitchell, ran a string of salons and I was mates with them because they were part of the crew that used to hang out in the club. Mitchell was Tracey’s younger brother and he had movie-star looks just like her. He did a bit of photography and took some photos of the band at the salon. Sean, the older brother, was as mad as a fish, but he was also the one with the brains, and together they were a very entrepreneurial family. Tracey was close friends with Giovanna, who was still working in the cloakroom and dating Roger. She was also friends with Nick’s girlfriend at the time, Elaine Griffiths. The three girls all used to dress dead sexy.

  What first attracted me to Tracey was that she had a certain dignity and pride in herself. She was one of those kids who the first time she had one gin and tonic too many she hated it so much that she never really drank again. I was leading a fairly hedonistic lifestyle at the time, so it was appealing to see someone who was so different to me in that respect—plus, of course, the fact she didn’t seem interested in me at first just made me all the keener!

  “I’ve seen you. You’re in the band with all them lot and all those who party in the club,” she told me dismissively in one of our early conversations.

  No matter how hard I tried to impress her, I got nowhere for weeks. It was as if she was thinking to herself, Hmmm. I am not sure if I want to mess about with him. He is always on the road.

  Giovanna, who remains a good friend of mine to this day, didn’t help matters to begin with. “Ooh, you want to watch him. He is a right womanizing bastard,” she said to Tracey. Thanks, Giovanna—like most guys in a band I had my fair share of female attention, but it was hardly a fair description! I’d been in bands for several years, including in Germany where I had my share of fräuleins (including one incident where I got caught with a German girl in the back of the Streak by her father!).

  A few nights before our gig in Paris, Tracey was in the Rum Runner celebrating her twentieth birthday, so I spent the evening trying to chat her up. It was my way of saying happy birthday! Although she was initially quite cool toward me I sensed I was starting to make some progress and we ended up flirting together by squirting each other with a soda siphon. At one point she flung up her arm and it knocked the siphon into my face and chipped one of my front teeth. Ouch! At the end of the night I sidled up to the bar and explained how much I’d enjoyed her company and joked that at least she’d knocked only one of my teeth out—but when I looked round I was talking to someone else who looked a bit like her. I was so drunk that I’d been chatting to the wrong girl for the last ten minutes!

  Tracey was part of the group who traveled to France with us and I must have made a good impression on her birthd
ay because she agreed to dance with me in Paris, and this time we really hit it off. Getting a girl to dance with you was significant in those days, and it had a certain charm about it. It counted for something because there was still an air of innocence about the female population. I can’t ever remember seeing girls rolling about in the gutter or comatose through booze: frat school behavior for women was still a thing of the future. Somebody took a photograph of Tracey and me while we were dancing and it appeared in the papers in the UK the following day. The picture caused a bit of a stir because the press believed I was loosely seeing another girl back home, and the newspapers kicked up a bit of a fuss. After Paris, Tracey went straight back to Birmingham on the bus, but the band were scheduled to do some more gigs in Europe, so we had to go back on the road. Suddenly I found myself calling her whenever I could from a call box, and when we got back to the UK I asked her to come to dinner.

  “Well, come round and we will have something to eat,” I said. Then, because I’d had to learn how to cook a bit when I was younger, I added: “I’ll cook, or you cook, you know, like out of the way of everybody.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll bring something round to eat,” she said.

  When Tracey arrived she brought along a homemade spaghetti Bolognese in a Tupperware container. It was delicious, but I later found out her mum had secretly cooked it for her. And that’s when I knew she was the one.

  I thought, Oh good—at least she must want to impress me, and if she wants to impress me she must like me. She couldn’t cook very well herself at that time, but she wanted to present something nice. If a girl makes an effort to bribe you like that, it has to be a positive sign. She did that trick a couple of times, and it was deliciously devious because it made her appear very thoughtful.

  Tracey loved riding, and her father owned a horse sanctuary on a farm out in Shropshire, where he had a herd of three or four hundred rescued horses. She had two horses of her own, called Bobby and Daniel, and she used to talk about them all the time.

  “Why don’t you let me come with you the next time you go out to the farm?” I asked.

  She agreed and after that we used to go down there every Sunday and whenever else we could. It was nice getting away to the farm in the summer. Tracey was a county champion at Side Saddle. We’d be trotting around and she would gallop off into the distance, but I couldn’t even canter. Sometimes I’d even have to hang on to a gatepost to try and stop a horse because I couldn’t control it! We’d share funny moments like that, which had nothing to do with my life in rock and roll. It was fantastic and it gave our relationship balance, because it wasn’t just about me being in Duran Duran.

  I soon discovered that despite our differences, we had a lot more in common than I realized. Like me, Tracey’s parents were divorced and she had not had a normal childhood. We’d been at the same age when our respective parents had split up, so she’d also been through some acrimony. Maybe some of Tracey’s experiences when she was younger made her think twice about getting involved with me. I think she saw where it could go wrong and knew what it could cost, the same as I did. But she was a very calm person, and she brought stability into my life at a time when I could easily have slipped into a different lifestyle that I would have later regretted.

  By the time I was twenty, I’d played hundreds, if not thousands, of gigs in different countries, but for the first time I had something worth sharing in life. The first Duran Duran album and the tour were a success, and we were now on increased retainers from the record company that were worth the equivalent of a couple of grand a week. For the first time, everyone in the band could afford to think about doing things that we couldn’t afford to do before, like buying cars and houses. It felt brilliant. I can remember buying a beautiful new BMW—it was a blue 325, and I showed it to my uncle, who was an old car fanatic. I couldn’t even drive officially, but I took him out for a spin in it and he was terrified. A lot of girls started to flock to us because they needed what we had, but Tracey didn’t need any of it. She had her own business with her brothers, she had her own income, and she had her own car. Tracey had a little Citroen 2CV, and her brother Mitchell had worked his backside off to own a Jag. A few weeks after we started dating I invited her to come to New York, but she was really nervous about the sleeping arrangements.

  I was being a gentleman at this point, and I think I did actually say, “You don’t have to stay in my room if you don’t want to.”

  Tracey accepted. I flew her out to America with Giovanna, and they came along to Studio 54 when we met Andy Warhol. We stayed in a really nice hotel near Central Park. It was as if I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, because things were going so well. We played several small shows, which were sold out, and suddenly there were a lot of emotions running through my life.

  Music is an emotion, it’s a passion that’s about being confident and projecting yourself onstage. But the biggest emotion of all is love. I was beginning to realize that if you don’t have a partner to share things with, then everything else seems to have less value.

  AFTER we came back from the States, Tracey and I started seeing each other regularly and we became very close before I went down to London with the band to record our second album, Rio. Tracey’s brother Mitchell had a small house out in the countryside that he wanted to sell. Tracey and I went to see it and we decided to buy it. I think the house cost in the region of £27,000, and I was able to pay for it in one go, which was a nice feeling. One of Tracey’s family hair salons was just around the corner, so it was an ideal location for her and it wasn’t too far from Birmingham for me. Tracey was officially living with her dad, but she was mostly staying with me in Moseley.

  It was while we were discussing buying the house together that I began to think about asking Tracey to marry me. Call me an old traditionalist, but I decided to propose to Tracey on the night of my twenty-first birthday. It was 3 a.m. and I’d been out to celebrate at the Rum Runner while Tracey had stayed at home because she had a cold.

  “Wake up, Tracey, I’ve got something to ask you,” I said. “Look, you know it’s my twenty-first birthday. I have had a few drinks, which, er . . . you know, has given me the courage to ask you an important question. Will you marry me?”

  I paused as I waited for her response, but just as she’d done when I originally pursued her for a date, she kept me holding on for her answer.

  Tracey rolled over sleepily. “Okay—I’ll tell you in the morning,” she said, and went straight back to sleep. Charming!

  The next morning Tracey awoke and said yes straightaway . . . and I couldn’t wait to share the news with Simon. I went down and saw him in the kitchen, where there was always a big pile of dishes in the sink waiting for someone to clean them, just like you’d find in any other house shared by young people.

  “Well, that’s it, mate,” I said. “I’m getting married.”

  Simon didn’t say a word, apart from “Oh, really?”

  I think what he meant was “Are you sure?” It must have all seemed very sudden, but with Tracey I just knew by human instinct that I’d found the right person. Later on that morning I went back downstairs again, and out of courtesy Simon wished us well.

  “It’s great, if that’s what makes you happy,” he said.

  In those days it was very common to get married by the age of twenty-one. Back in the North East, you were expected to be working by sixteen, you were voting at eighteen, and you were a full-fledged adult by twenty-one. In fact, in Newcastle all my mates were married by twenty-one. I was brought up not to put life on hold and my dad was pleased for me. All our parents had been married by that age, and, after all, having a partner is the most important thing in life. If you find someone whom you love and trust, why wait just because you are young and living in Moseley? It turned out to be the right decision because Tracey and I have now been happily married for over twenty-five years. In media interviews, I’ve often described Tracey as my soul mate, and part of being
in a successful relationship is that there is one person whom you can talk to about anything. Someone who will see things from a unique perspective and who will consider you a little bit more than other people. For me that person is Tracey.

  AFTER I proposed, there was a small matter of a Duran Duran tour and a new album to get out of the way before Tracey and I could tie the knot. We’d started writing our Rio material in Birmingham. I was in the office at the Rum Runner one morning when I heard Nick playing a little sequence on the keyboards downstairs. It was the opening notes of what was to become “Save a Prayer” and my first reaction was, “Bloody hell—that’s good.”

  Nick didn’t have it perfect at this point. Roger and I started working out the notes with him and counting out a beat, and suddenly we had something special. Nick, Simon, and I later finished it off together in the basement at EMI using a drum machine, although Roger was so precise in his playing that it was never as easy when he wasn’t around. We had a budget of around £65,000 from the record label to record the Rio album, which was about double what we’d had for the first album. It took about eight weeks to record; we rented apartments in London so that we could be close to Air Studios, where we were mixing it.

  It was while we were working on the album that we first discovered the delights of the Embassy Club, which was in Old Bond Street. It was owned by Stephen Hayter, the flamboyant party host who socialized with the likes of Princess Margaret and Freddie Mercury. The club itself was very hedonistic and packed with celebrities, and we started hanging out there with Pete Townsend, whom we’d met previously at the Rum Runner. Roger Taylor from Queen was a regular there, as was Lemmy from Motörhead, who would always be downstairs playing on the Space Invaders machine.