Wild Boy

by Andy Taylor

  IN addition to the “Rio” video that we shot in Antigua, “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” also had great videos to accompany them, both of which we filmed in Sri Lanka prior to going to the Caribbean. Sri Lanka was a whole adventure in itself. It was chosen as a location because Paul Berrow had been there on holiday and had become obsessed with the place, to the point where he hatched a madcap scheme to build his own temple there! He’d been impressed by all the Buddhist monuments and wanted to plow some of his newfound millions from Duran Duran into creating something in a similar vein. I don’t know whether it was purely a moneymaking scheme or something that he wanted to do for aesthetic reasons, but by this stage I didn’t care. The management were beginning to irritate me a little bit with their daft brain waves.

  “Chaps! Chaps! It’s bloody fantastic out there and I’m going to build something huge,” boomed Paul, before outlining his plans in detail.

  “Check this out,” I said to the other band members. “He’s building a temple in Sri Lanka. I wouldn’t let him build Lego with me, let alone a temple. And he has the cheek to say everyone in the band is mad!”

  Simon had a bit more sympathy: “He’s just eccentric and creative.”

  That’s our job, I thought.

  Judging from Paul’s contribution to “Girls on Film,” it would have turned out to be a Temple of Love, but whatever it was that he started to construct got destroyed in the civil war that began in Sri Lanka soon afterward. But a happy by-product of Paul’s obsession with Sri Lanka was that he met a production crew out there who could make all the arrangements we needed in order to shoot there. They arranged all the film permits and were responsible for navigating us around; they even hired a herd of elephants. It was amazingly cheap—and the results were breathtaking.

  Simon, John, and Roger initially traveled to Sri Lanka together, while Nick and I stayed back in London doing the final mixing for Rio and finishing some B sides. We went to join the others about three days later, having left the studio at 4 a.m. and grabbed just a couple of hours’ sleep before getting up to catch the plane. We had a quick bit of breakfast at the airport before flying with our good old Indian airline again in the cheapest seats. In all the rush, Nick hadn’t really put much thought into dressing comfortably, and he was wearing a pair of tight leather trousers. We assumed there’d be a nice air-conditioned limo to meet us at the other end, but we were in for a nasty surprise.

  “Fucking hell, it’s hot,” said Nick as we stepped off the plane.

  It was like walking into a wall of heat.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be in the hotel bar enjoying a nice cold beer very soon.”

  Wrong again. The others were all in a faraway town called Kandy, and the only way to catch up with them was by taking a four-hour taxi ride across dry scrubland on a bumpy road in 100-degree heat. The vehicle was a clunky old sedan that looked like it had been built in 1958 and it had no air-conditioning, so it acted like an oven in the baking heat. I could see Nick wilting next to me as he sweated it out in his leather pants while we were rattling and rolling along.

  “Fucking hell. This place is horrible. They’re bastards for bringing us here,” moaned Nick.

  As we watched the dusty landscape pass by, it dawned upon us that we were entering a very different world from the one we were used to.

  There were beggars everywhere and many of them had limbs missing. The level of poverty was shocking. In the few shantytowns that we passed there was no sanitation, just raw sewage running down the street. We saw many sights like that during our stay in Sri Lanka, and even now I can remember vividly how shocking and humbling it was. But despite the hardships they faced, the local people were warm and friendly and greeted us with eager curiosity.

  All the way along the roads, children would spill in front of the vehicle and stop us, offering us watermelons. There would be ten-year-old kids, and even five-year-olds, offering to chop off the top of the fruit with machetes so that you could drink from them. Then they’d gesture for something in return and we soon cottoned on to the fact that what they wanted from us most of all were any Biro pens or pencils that we had with us. If you gave them a Biro they would react as if to say, Phew—fantastic, because it meant they had something to learn to write with.

  I remember thinking: How long will that last them and where will they get another one from?

  It certainly put things into perspective: here we were as young pop stars looking forward to our glamorous forthcoming tours of Japan and Australia, yet all it took to make these people grateful was a Biro.

  When we finally reached the hotel in Kandy, Nick gingerly climbed out of the car, dripping in sweat, with his trousers virtually melted onto his skin. We’d certainly never been to a place like this before and we were anxious to get into the cool behind the mosquito nets.

  “You can’t eat anything but cheese sandwiches,” was the first thing the crew said to us. “There’s too much of a risk of food poisoning and we can’t let anything jeopardize the shoot.”

  Nick was bright pink by now, and we must have looked a bit of a sight together. “Fucking hell, where the hell have they brought us to?” I asked myself.

  But things were about to improve. I could spy a swimming pool in a courtyard at the back of the hotel. Nick and I finally got a cool beer as we watched the sun go down. The sunset was amazing; the whole sky turned a deep red color above us while we sipped our drinks.

  THE poverty that we witnessed in Sri Lanka was something that moved us all, particularly when we reached the capital, Colombo, where the conditions seemed worst of all. There were crowds of children on every street corner.

  “Mister, you want drink? You want smoke? You want woman?” they would shout to us. I remember following directions from one of the street kids to a shanty bar in order to buy some weed—so much for sticking to cheese sandwiches! They even had bootlegged copies of our own album for sale. But Sri Lanka was a series of contrasts, and it was also immensely beautiful. The beach scenes in the “Save a Prayer” video showed the coastline exactly as it was; we didn’t attempt to change anything for the cameras. The sands were unspoiled and completely deserted, apart from the odd fisherman sitting on a pole in the sea just as you see them in the video. We didn’t have to do anything to create a stunning backdrop because it was all just naturally there. Even the locals whom you see in the videos are ordinary people who just wandered by. Some of the interior scenes were shot inside the hotel foyer where Nick and I had collapsed after our four-hour taxi ride from hell.

  Russell and his storyboardist, Marcello Anciano, had been out to Sri Lanka to check things out beforehand, and they had shown us some of their plans while we were still in the studio. We’d never really seen or understood anything like that, but in hindsight it’s obvious that Russell understood the value of having a leading man in the videos—not just a lead singer but someone in a leading role, which was Simon. When you watch the Sri Lankan videos now, you see that what he did with Simon was really effective because most of the scenes are pure Le Bon, with the rest of us only appearing in bits and pieces, which suited me fine. Simon was Film Boy, John was Poster Boy, and I guess I was Wild Boy!

  “Save a Prayer” was our attempt to do a ballad, and the Buddhist temples were a perfect setting for the song’s spiritual overtones. The historic monuments that we filmed around were truly magnificent. But unfortunately, the choice of location nearly got us lynched by four thousand angry monks! We tried not to cause offense, and we always took off our shoes to show respect, but you could see that the monks were uneasy about us being there. The Berrows had persuaded us to go to Sri Lanka in the first place, but what they hadn’t told us was that the whole country was on the verge of civil war at the time! Feelings were running pretty high because of the political situation, so I guess the last thing the religious leaders were in the mood for was Duran Duran turning up at their most sacred temples with a load of cameras. They had no problem with us visitin
g the holy sites, but it was the fact that we were filming there that upset them.

  One of the temples we visited was guarded by shaven-headed monks in orange robes, who stood to attention just like the guards outside Buckingham Palace.

  “Don’t try to look them in the eye, because if you do, something will happen to you,” one of the locals warned us.

  Apparently, local folklore maintained that the guards could hypnotize you with their eyes and force you to see visions of their choice. I thought, Oh, really? and I remember coming face-to-face with two of them at the gates to one temple, and they were looking straight ahead and standing motionless. I tried not to look at them, but of course curiosity kept making me take the odd peek.

  But the real problems started to occur when we were filming the main temple sequence in the video, the one where you can see some hills in the background. We were doing our thing when we slowly started to notice more and more monks in orange robes gathering around at the foot of the hills. What we didn’t know was that a political rally connected to the growing civil unrest was about to take place. The monks were gathering because their leader was about to arrive by helicopter, so they took a dim view of Duran Duran prancing around miming a performance of “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf.” One of the crew came over to talk to us.

  “The crowd is going to get bigger, and in about half an hour we will have to leave. When we give the order, we will all have to go straight to the buses and leave,” he warned.

  By now there were thousands of monks surrounding us, and most of them were glaring at us intently in silence. Suddenly we could hear a helicopter overhead. One of the religious leaders came over and spoke to us through an interpreter.

  “You are causing offense. If you leave respectfully that will be fine, but you have to go,” he said.

  The message was clear. Either we got on our buses or they’d force us to leave—and with a civil war brewing it could have easily escalated into a very serious incident. I certainly wasn’t going to argue with four thousand angry monks with only the likes of Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes to back me up. We were on the buses and gone!

  ONE scene that none of us wanted to do was a sequence that Russell was keen on, in which a band member had to volunteer to writhe about while an elephant’s trunk squirted water over his bare chest. It was very homoerotic.

  “There’s no way I’m doing that gay thing with the elephant,” I said.

  For once even Simon was slow to volunteer to do something in front of the camera, and Nick and Roger were having none of it, either. In the end, John agreed—after all, he was the pinup, we argued. The resulting scene appears about halfway through the “Save a Prayer” video, and we ribbed John over it for many years to come. It was shot at a lagoon where the local crew had recently helped to film a Tarzan movie. Some of the scenes we did there were also used in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which featured Simon doing his best Indiana Jones impression. The lyrics to the song were very suggestive and parodied Little Red Riding Hood, except that the wolf is a guy who’s on the prowl for a lover. So the storyboard for the video was basically “Indiana Jones is horny and wants to get laid!”

  The water at the lagoon was very dark and murky and, as I later found out, it was full of bugs—no doubt because it was used as a latrine by the local elephant herd. The shoot got pretty wild at times. There was one big bull elephant that seemed to take exception to its handler. We were halfway through the shoot when we suddenly heard a deafening roar followed by a sequence of crashes. The angry bull elephant had gone berserk, splashed through the water, then charged full speed at its handler, who only narrowly managed to get out of the way before it went raging off into the jungle. Elephants are mostly gentle animals, but we’d been warned that if they get angry they can easily kill a person. Thankfully it was going in the opposite direction to where we were standing or we would have been flattened, but it caused a bit of a kerfuffle and we were worried that the rest of the elephants might turn upon us.

  By now the heat was starting to get to me, so I decided to keep cool by sipping on plenty of Jack Daniel’s and Coke throughout the day. Not a great idea. Although I’d refused to do the gay scene with the elephant, I was willing to trying riding on top of one. Everything was fine until it was time to get off. As the elephant began to lie down to let me off, my right leg snagged and started going under it. I managed to whip it out just in time, and I complained vehemently to the handler, but he was a little Sri Lankan guy who didn’t speak any English and so he couldn’t understand me. By now a lot of moaning was going on, and I admit I was one of the worst offenders, along with Nick.

  “What the fucking hell are we doing here? Which one of us is meant to be Tarzan?” I shouted. Little did I know it would soon be me falling out of a tree.

  I decided I was having nothing more to do with the elephants so I climbed up into a tree and perched on a branch about ten or fifteen feet above the water. It seemed like the perfect vantage point from which to mime playing guitar, but I hadn’t accounted for the effect of the Jack Daniel’s on my sense of balance. I wobbled and suddenly . . .

  Splash.

  Falling into the sea in Antigua was one thing, but the water in the lagoon was dark and murky. It had been a long drop and suddenly I was submerged and ingesting mouthfuls of the dirty black liquid. Believe me, falling into a lake that’s been used as an open toilet by elephants is not a pleasant experience. By the time I crawled out of the water I was coughing and spluttering and wondering what the effect on my health would be. I was worried about swallowing so much of the mucky water, so I thought it would be a good idea to empty my stomach by being sick. The only catering facilities on the set were these little stands that sold bags of fried red chillies, which looked a bit like potato chips. I thought if I ate enough of them it would help me to throw up, but in fact they were delicious. I ended up eating loads of them, washed down with even more Jack Daniel’s.

  When the shoot ended, I soon forgot all about falling in the lagoon, but it came back to haunt me with great vengeance about a week later, after we arrived in Australia to play a series of gigs. I was feeling hot and sweaty onstage in Sydney when I was suddenly doubled up by excruciating stomach cramps. I managed to play to the end of the set, but during the encore I had to quickly dash behind an amp, where I was violently ill. The next few days were agony, and I spent the whole time either throwing up or running for the bathroom. By the time we got back to England I was physically exhausted; no matter what I did I couldn’t seem to shake it off. I felt completely drained and awful, and for the first time in my life I was seriously worried about my health. Things took another turn for the worse when I broke into a fever. Eventually I was rushed to the hospital and placed in an isolation ward with suspected malaria. The doctors seemed completed baffled by it until finally I was persuaded to transfer to a private hospital. As soon as the medical team realized where I’d been, I was diagnosed as suffering from a nonspecific tropical virus that I’d picked up from the dirty water in the lagoon!

  IN addition to “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” we’d shot a third video in Sri Lanka, for a track called “Lonely in Your Nightmare.” We did the whole lot for about £55,000, which is much cheaper compared to what they would have cost if we’d shot them using old-fashioned film techniques. “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” are like mini movies in their own right, yet they each cost less than £20,000, which illustrates how video allowed us to do things that we otherwise could not have done. It helped us to connect with our audience a bit like the way the Internet helps new bands to do the same today. I guess the flip side is that a lot of people still think we spend all our time messing about on yachts. When it came to video, Russell surpassed everybody else. Loads of bands use video to bling things up today, but he did it back then . . . and on a tight budget.

  And as for the virus that I picked up in the lagoon: the private doctors managed to get rid of it almost immediately,
but I spent four days in the hospital before I was fit enough to leave. I suppose there’s a lesson there somewhere, along the lines of: “If you smoke dope and drink Jack Daniel’s in the tropical heat, don’t fall into a lagoon full of elephant’s urine and wash it all down with more booze and a bucket of chillies.”

  But I guess some people never learn.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Princess Diana’s Favorite Band

  IT was almost impossible to describe how beautiful Princess Diana was when you met her in the flesh. She possessed a rare aura and a timeless grace that you perhaps come across only once or twice in a generation—and we were lucky enough to be her favorite band. Diana never made it to the throne, but as far as the world was concerned she was already the queen of fashion and glamour and all things that glittered, so it was inevitable that the royal seal of approval would give Duran Duran an enormous boost. Unfortunately, it also made us a target for terrorists. Simon, John, Roger, Nick, and I didn’t know how close we would come to paying with our lives for our royal association.

  The IRA secretly intended to assassinate Prince Charles and his attractive young wife on the night of July 20, 1983. A huge bomb was planned to go off while the royal entourage watched us perform live onstage. The device was designed to cause maximum carnage. Killing the heir to the British throne and wiping out the UK’s most popular band in a single attack would have caused pandemonium and handed the Irish Republican Army its biggest-ever coup.

  I obviously would not still be around to tell the tale if the IRA plot had been successful, but it was only thanks to a remarkable piece of counterintelligence work by Scotland Yard and their colleagues in the Garda that the attack was foiled. It would be several years before we learned the truth about what was planned for that evening, but we now know that a man named Sean O’Callaghan was secretly sent to London with orders to kill. His mission set off an incredible chain of events that we knew nothing about, but which could so easily have ended in tragedy.