by Andy Taylor
I can hear him now: “Let’s get a bloody pole, grease it up, and have a couple of dirty birds on it.”
I remember thinking, Oh yeah—what’s going on in your mind?
But Paul was determined to pursue his endeavors as a producer, and a lot of his ideas probably helped to make the “Girls on Film” video so memorable. We thought the whole idea was great, and we certainly weren’t going to argue with spending two days at Shepperton Studios while being surrounded by beautiful models. As far as the band was concerned, it was all a right laugh, and some of the band spent most of the time trying to get the girls to give us their phone numbers. During the mud-wrestling scene we were stood next to the models, and although we were lip synching the lyrics for the cameras, John and I switched our amps on and we played for real at that point to add to the atmosphere. We knew the sexual imagery was so strong that most of it would never get shown. We just thought: Great! We’ll do another cut eventually, but initially the BBC won’t be able to play it and it will cause a furor.
Aside from the sexual content, it was the first video in which we wore suits designed by Anthony Price, who became one of our favorite designers because his suits were so sharp. Roxy Music, who influenced us, also wore Anthony Price suits. The video also showed us doing feminine things, like using hair spray and having makeup put on us. It was suddenly as if the styles of the sixties and the seventies had fused. We took the glam fashion of the seventies and inserted the suits, which had been the uniforms of the sixties and the Beatles.
Just as we predicted, the BBC immediately banned the “Girls on Film” video, but that only served to boost our credibility. People thought we’d done something outrageous, like you might have expected from the Stones. It was strange, because from out of what initially seemed to be nothing more than someone’s sexual fantasies we’d managed to create a great marketing tool! The song itself was great, but it wasn’t written as one piece of work. It was really just a concept about attractive females appearing on camera, which had originally been part-written by Andy Wickett. Then Nick and John had made their contribution to it before Simon and I came along and added our bits. Simon was the only one who could make the lyrics work—and the video exploited his words to the full. As I said before, it’s the music and the pictures together that work so well. It was things like this that made it so special. No one else did it. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the video, “Girls on Film” might have been regarded as just another great bubblegum pop song of the early eighties. As it turned out, the video helped to immortalize it as a classic.
PERHAPS our most memorable video is “Rio”—and Russell Mulcahy was at his very best when we came to shoot it. The concept itself was very much John’s creation—he came up with the title based on the idea of it being the name of a beautiful girl. John’s always been a little bit of a visionary like that. So when we did the cover sleeve for our second album we decided to create the face of Rio on the sleeve. We didn’t want to appear on the cover ourselves, because we thought it might look overcommercialized. Our faces were everywhere by then, and although the label advised it would go down well if we went on the cover, we decided our photographs would appear on the inside sleeve instead. It was our way of saying, This is also about art, not just marketing.
The painting itself was a great piece of work that we commissioned especially by the American artist Patrick Nagel, who was an illustrator for Playboy. It worked brilliantly, because it’s one of the most recognizable images connected with Duran Duran. Whenever we showed it on a big screen onstage, even when we were playing stadium gigs twenty-five years later, the crowd would always go wild because they knew immediately which song was coming next. The original piece of artwork was quite a big painting, and we bought it off Patrick for about £9,000. I haven’t got a clue where it is at the moment, although I wish I knew because as a piece of pop art it must be worth millions—and I still own one-fifth of it!
When we came to do the video, it was natural that we would bring to life the girl in the painting. This gave everything a great continuity forward from the lyrics that Simon sang about the girl with the “cherry ice cream smile.” EMI opted to shoot it all in Antigua in the Caribbean, and the model they found to star in it looked exactly like the girl in the painting. I was the last member of Duran Duran to travel to Antigua because I often tried to squeeze in an extra day at home—so I was the first to meet “Rio” as by coincidence she was traveling out of Heathrow on the same day. No one in the band had even seen her photo at this stage, but it was immediately obvious to me why they had cast her.
“Oh—you don’t half look like her,” I said, as we boarded the same flight.
Her real name was Reema, she was half-Lebanese, and she was on the books of the Models One agency in London. We talked a bit on the flight, and she sounded very posh and sophisticated. I was convinced Simon and John would soon be competing for her attentions but that neither would stand a chance! I think she’d been told by her agency not to get mixed up with any of us, and she was a very straight girl.
When we got to Antigua everything was a rush (as it always was), and because I’d left a day late there was no time to catch up on the jet lag. As a backdrop for the video, the island was perfect. It was completely unspoiled and still very raw in the early eighties, so a lot of the local bars were really interesting. They used to serve some wicked rum and, if you got to know the right people, some very heavy-duty ganja.
We filmed over three or four days in several different locations, including Shirley Heights, Miller’s Beach, and also out to sea off the coast from English Harbour. The most spectacular scenes showed us all in our latest Anthony Price suits aboard a breathtaking yacht as it skimmed through the waves, with Simon singing his heart out on the bow. There were lots of James Bond overtones, with beautiful girls walking out of the sea, but Russell put lots of humorous touches into it to keep our feet on the ground. The idea was that we were supposed to be these guys who were trying to act dead cool, but part of the storyboard was that something stupid happens to each one of us: I got dragged up in a net, and various things happen to the other band members throughout the video.
We were quite happy to send ourselves up a bit, so I suppose it was a case of life meets art. There’s even a bit where Simon is shown on the telephone trying to chat up the girl in the video! It was as if we were saying, We know everyone thinks we can pull any birds we want—but we’re not too big to have a good laugh at ourselves!
The whole look, feel, and location of the “Rio” video made a statement about the sort of lifestyle that we aspired to, complete with the designer suits, the yachts, and the beautiful models. We were just starting to become really successful, and here we were on-screen in the first throes of the materialistic image that we would become associated with. Travel to fabulous locations and enjoying a wealthy lifestyle might seem like obvious things to aspire to today, but this was the early eighties and it wasn’t necessarily an obvious route to go down at the time. Punk had consciously shunned anything materialistic, but as the rock writer Dave Rimmer said around that time, it was suddenly as if punk had never happened. A whole new fashion was emerging, and out of everyone in the band John and Nick were the most focused on it. I’d originally avoided the fashionista thing like the plague, probably due to my working-class roots in the North East, but as I started coming into a bit of money I admit it felt nice to be able to walk around a shop and afford things. In a way, the whole country was about to go through a similar transformation, because by the late eighties it was a dominant part of popular culture to aspire to be successful.
During the filming of the “Rio” video, Simon and Roger took to being on the yacht immediately. When you watch the video, you can see they’re having a great time as we sailed along. John and I were more than happy to go along for the ride, too, but Nick looked distinctly uncomfortable, probably because he was seasick most of the time.
In fact, Nick later told an interviewer how much he dislik
ed the whole thing. “God, I hated that boat, wrecking my Anthony Price suit with all those dreadful waves splashing everywhere,” he said.
As far as Nick was concerned, yachts were things best left moored in the harbor so that people could drink cocktails on them. Mind you, he might have had a bit of a point, because we nearly got into some terrible scrapes. Simon hurt himself very badly when he had to pretend to fall into the crystal blue waters from the end of a pier.
“Just act as if you’ve lost your balance and fall backward into the sea,” advised Russell.
Unfortunately, Simon misjudged things and caught himself on the jetty as he flipped over and didn’t break his fall properly. If you watch the video closely you can see that instead of tumbling backward into the sea, Simon actually lands full square on his back on the platform and scrapes himself before going over the edge. It looks as if he meant to do it that way, but he ended up with a very badly bruised back. He refused to let it interrupt the rest of the shooting, but I can assure you that when Simon gets an injury it becomes a major piece of theater and he’ll demand “this tablet, or that tablet” to ease the pain!
Later on we shot a hilarious sequence in which each of us individually played a saxophone while trying to keep balance on a wobbly raft as it bobbed about in the sea. Only Nick and John are shown in the final cut of the video, but you can see Nick’s having a real battle to stay upright. I think we all went into the drink several times over, sometimes with alarming consequences. During the footage of when we were all on the yacht, with Simon singing at the front, you can see John and me on the left at the back of the boat. You can tell from the spray and the wind in our hair that we were really hammering along. I think we were doing about thirty knots and most of the time we were simply hanging on for dear life. We’d been given a bit of a talk about safety by the captain beforehand, which included all the usual stuff about the sea being full of dangerous currents and riptides and warning us not to mess about on deck. But it fell on deaf ears—particularly with John, whom we’d nicknamed JT by now. I can remember we were in midshoot when I tried to stand up and get my balance on deck, and I felt a shove from John and . . . “WhoaAAHH!”
Splash. Suddenly, I was in the middle of the ocean gulping saltwater and bobbing up and down as the yacht zoomed away from me at full speed. I’m not the strongest of swimmers, and for a second I felt a twinge of fear: what had the captain said about dangerous currents? A rope trailing off the back of the yacht was connected to a launch that was following about forty or fifty feet behind, so I knew there was a good chance the launch would come crashing into me if I wasn’t careful. I could feel I was in a spot of bother already, so I tried to catch hold of the rope as it rushed by at great speed.
Ouch! I soon realized that a wet rope slipping through your hands hurts like hell, but I managed to hold on with all my strength. Don’t forget, I was wearing an Anthony Price suit instead of a life jacket. My options then were either to do the sensible thing and get into the launch and sit out the rest of the shoot, or to try and haul myself back onto the main yacht. Of course, I chose to rejoin the fun, but it took every bit of energy to pull myself back onto the main boat. In hindsight, it was a crazy thing to do. As I hauled myself back on deck, gasping and wheezing, I could see the skipper was far from happy.
“Fucking hell, man! Do you realize what you have just done? That was ridiculous,” he screamed at me, before turning his attentions to JT, who was now laughing hysterically. “You could have fucking drowned him. There are dangerous jellyfish out there and it could have been serious.”
Then it was my turn to be screamed at again: “Seriously, if we’d have been forced to turn around to come and get you it would have screwed everything. That was bang out of order!”
These days, record companies build clauses into contracts which forbid artists from taking part in dangerous water sports. I suppose they might have a point—but when I fell into the sea it looked good in our video!
WE released “Rio” as a single in the UK in November 1982. Sadly, the videos that accompanied our next three singles weren’t quite up to the same standard. “Is There Something I Should Know?,” “Union of the Snake,” and “New Moon on Monday” were all hits in their own right, but somehow the videos didn’t seem to have the same continuity with the songs as our earlier work.
The video for “Is There Something I Should Know?” was shot in London before we’d started work on our third album. It went straight in at number one, which was a momentous achievement (and I’ll tell you about the party we had to celebrate later on). But the video didn’t seem to follow any overall concept, apart from paying tribute to the Beatles in certain places. Just like the way the song existed in isolation and wasn’t part of an album, there was no theme to the video. Consequently, there were a lot of pointless sequences in it, such as all the strange men who seem to be measuring trees. It was very polished and photogenic, but a bit meaningless.
The “Union of the Snake” video, in my view, wasn’t much better. It was shot in Sydney, Australia, but strangely Russell didn’t do it; I assume he was tied up with something else. Simon had tried to explain to me what the lyrics of the song were all about, but I have to confess it sounded like a load of waffle to me—something about how we are all descended from lizards. Simon’s very well read, but I’m not sure that even he knows where his lyrics come from sometimes, although the directors of the “Union of the Snake” video fell for the lizard stuff in a big way! The video certainly has a reptilian theme, but amid all the footage of lizards chasing people there are lots of meaningless images, too, like the juggler who suddenly appears for no apparent reason. For all I could see it might just as well have been about wandering around with a stiffy!
There was worse to come. “New Moon on Monday” was our least favorite video of all. Everybody in the band hates it, particularly the dreadful scene at the end where we all dance together. Even today, I cringe and leave the room if anyone plays the video. We shot it just outside Paris on the third of January 1984, and we were all miserable because we hadn’t had a long enough Christmas holiday. Our management had convinced us to theme it on the French Revolution, and it also had historic references to the French Resistance—but, to be honest, it was just a load of gibberish. The set was dark and cold, and we spent most of the day drinking alcohol. By the time we were dancing at the end I was half cut. It is one of the few times I’ve seen Nick dance (watch his shoulders moving up and down if you ever get another chance to see it!). We were very uncomfortable with the whole thing. After “New Moon on Monday,” we all thought, Bollocks—let’s now do something that’s fundamental and solid.
The answer was a spectacular live video in the form of “The Reflex.” We also did epic shoots for “Wild Boys,” during which Simon was strapped to the water wheel, and “A View to a Kill”—but I’ll tell you about those three videos later in the book.
WHEN it came to establishing a foothold in the States, there’s no doubt that our videos gave us an edge over other British bands. We had a strategy for doing well in America and we believed we could make it there, but it involved a lot of commitment and hard work, and we knew we had to make more effort than any other band. It involved touring in as many American cities as possible and we were careful to always try and keep the American media on our side. Video was at the heart of our success. We couldn’t have done our first American tour if it were not for the MTV following that we established. During ’81 and ’82 we broke into markets in the rest of the world, but initially it was very hard to get radio airplay in America. But we were consciously aware that lots of nightclubs there had TV screens in them, and as our videos took off in the clubs it created a talking point around us. “They might not be big, but they are big everywhere else and look at this video of them,” was how the American media reacted. No one else had the videos so it made us larger than life. Because we were British, the US audience seemed to be willing to accept us even though we did risqué things like wear
makeup and film sexually explicit videos, which might have caused a bit more shock if we’d been a band made up of all-American college boys. In particular, it was the videos that were shot by Russell Mulcahy and which accompanied our Rio album that first stirred things up in the States. We’d written the album mainly in London and had recorded it at George Martin’s AIR Studios on Oxford Street on the sixth floor of the building where Top Shop stands today. They were called “air” studios because they were built on hydraulic stages that created an air gap between the studio and the rest of the building in order to prevent noise from leaking into the building below.
We were doing a lot of partying in London at the time and one of the girls who started to hang around with us was Paul McCartney’s oldest daughter, Heather. I worshipped the Beatles, so I was delighted when she invited me and some of the other band members up to her family home in St. John’s Wood one afternoon to look at some of her dad’s memorabilia. It was no accident that Paul wasn’t home at the time, and she showed us lots of his old clothes and things.
“Me dad would hate me hanging out with you lot. Don’t ever tell him,” she warned us.
A few weeks later Heather came into AIR Studios.
“Don’t tell Dad that I took you up to the house and all that sort of thing, but he says he’s recording in one of the other studios round at the back and would you like to meet him?”
We were all unanimous. “Absolutely, yeah.”
Then all of a sudden he just walked in. Now in 1982, shortly after Lennon had gone, if a Beatle walked into your studio it felt like God himself had just arrived. We were in complete awe.
“All right, boys?” he said. “I’ve been listening outside over the last few weeks to what you’ve been doing. There’s a track called “Rio” . . . That’s a hit song, that.”
We were openmouthed. I thought about that copy of Sgt. Pepper my cousin gave me in 1967. Art had met life in a spectacular way.