by Andy Taylor
We got through the video shoot, but I think maybe we both lost a bit of our souls that night.
NO lessons were learned from what happened to John and no one talked to him about it. In Duran Duran we liked to identify something if it was causing us an external problem, like when Capitol refused to release “The Reflex.” But when it came to sorting out our own problems we didn’t connect. I wish I knew why that was but I don’t have an answer, we just came from different directions when it came to communicating, so it was often easier just to leave things unsaid. After the filming took place, we didn’t know what we had in the can or whether or not it would be of any use, but nobody kicked up a fuss.
My feelings toward John were very mixed over the next few days. On the one hand I felt enormous sympathy for him: he’d been through a horrific ordeal and he, more than anyone, had suffered the most from the pressures of twenty-four-hour attention. Being at the center of the circus was something that was starting to eat away at all of us, and it would eventually affect every one of us in a different way. For now, John was the one who was suffering the most. But besides feeling sympathy, though, I was angry with him, too, and there were moments when I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. It was the second or third time that something like this had happened to him, and I was beginning to lose patience. There were plenty of times when I had felt like punching our management but I’d held back, so I reasoned that John should have done more to avoid getting into bad scrapes.
“You don’t fucking do things like that at our age,” I cursed to myself.
Officially, the injury to John’s foot was due to an accident. All he said afterward was that he was drunk and dancing around his room when he accidently stepped on the vodka bottle. In my view drugs had been an aggravating factor—and it says a lot that the thing we turned to to get us out of the mayhem had been more cocaine. Sadly, the incident wasn’t the only time blood was spilled. There was more to come at our end-of-tour party. A lot more.
We had two or three more shows to do, and I was counting the days before I could go back to the UK to spend some time with Tracey. Our baby was due in August, and I was beginning to long for the peace and tranquillity of Shropshire. The madness of being on the road seemed never-ending, and despite the fact that the tour had started with such a high due to all the adulation we received, our moods started to dip. A rock-and-roll lifestyle has no structure. When you are young you don’t look back, but later on you realize it’s a series of highs and lows. You can get high on creativity as well as drugs, but what goes up must come down and it can drain your energy. “The Reflex” was about to go to number one, but in addition to the incident with John, there was more trouble ahead—and it would further take the shine off things.
As the tour had progressed, our schedule had become increasingly intense. We might have been physically fit, but the sheer number of shows we played left us feeling increasingly exhausted. When you are spending seven days a week in hotels and traveling constantly, it can start to wear you down. Apart from brief trips back to the UK, we’d been away from home almost full-time for ten months since the previous June. Every time we went in or out of a hotel we had to hustle through crowds. You start to believe that every minute of your life someone is trying to find you. It seems as if it is happening daily, monthly, yearly . . . and there’s a very real danger that it can make you agoraphobic and irrational. It’s easy to fall into a routine whereby after a show you get into a blacked-out limo, which whisks you straight to a private airport so that you can go back to your satellite hotel and sleep all day until 6 p.m. Then it’s up and off to the next gig, and often you don’t return to the hotel until two the next morning, where you stay up all night eating pizza and getting indigestion before the whole cycle starts over again at 6 p.m. You become divorced from reality, and tiny little niggles become magnified in your mind.
The friction between Nick and me continued to rumble and Julie Anne, who’d been with us throughout the US tour, continued to grate on my nerves. Tracey says that in a lot of ways Nick and I are total opposites, and even though I obviously respected him as a fellow member of Duran Duran, I guess she’s right. Certainly Nick and I had very different ideas musically, which had become increasingly apparent during the recording of the third album. I felt Nick always insisted on doing things Nick’s way, and he was increasingly dismissive of the contributions from John, Roger, and me.
“This is how it is fucking going to be,” he would insist when trying to argue a point.
Not even Simon was immune from his criticism; I used to joke that Nick was the head of the Lyric Police. I was also fed up with how pompous and dismissive he could be of people from outside the band.
I felt as if Nick’s attitude was always along the lines of: “I don’t like that. What the fuck is this?”
I wasn’t alone in noticing this, but, to be fair to Nick, we could all be a bit frayed at times, myself included. I could be just as single-minded when it came to music, so it was sometimes like the proverbial irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Nick and I had never really cleared the air since our big row over Julie Anne, and things were about to get worse over a practical joke that we’d decided to play on him on the last night of our tour. Our final gig was in San Diego, and all the people from Capitol Records and everyone connected with the tour were due to be there, including a big group from the sponsor, Coca-Cola, who were throwing a corporate party for us later that evening. There was a growing feeling among several of us in our entourage that Nick needed taking down a peg or two, so we decided to spice things up by secretly sending a stripper onstage to drape herself around him during the show’s finale. We knew he would squirm with embarrassment, and it was bound to cause fireworks with Julie Anne, so I asked a member of our entourage to make the arrangements.
“What I want you to do is to find the dirtiest, ugliest stripper you can get, right?” I said. “Then when we do the encore for ‘Girls on Film,’ send her out while Nick is playing his long solo.”
“Great, he’s going to hate it,” he replied. “We’ll have to talk to everyone else to warn them so that it’s not a surprise for them, otherwise it’ll go wrong.”
Everyone was in agreement, and we had a bit of a debate about whose credit card we should charge the girl’s services to. I can’t remember who picked up the tab in the end, but at one point we were thinking of sending the bill to Coca-Cola!
When the time to perform the encore came, I could see Julie Anne standing at the side of the stage as the stripper was ushered toward us. Julie Anne copped to what was going on immediately. I don’t know how she knew but, fair play to her, she raised absolute hell to try and stop it! I could see her from the corner of my eye, just out of view of the audience, as she grabbed the stripper’s arm in a fury. A member of the stage crew had grabbed the girl’s other arm, and there was a violent tug-of-war going on to the side of me onstage. It was a bizarre sight, with the seminaked girl being pulled back and forth by a burly roadie and an angry American heiress.
Eventually the stripper managed to burst free and she darted onto the stage and went straight to Nick. At first he was totally bemused by it all and he tried to carry on with the show amid all the confusion. I was pissing myself with laughter, and by now the rest of the band was doubled up, too. Julie Anne, meanwhile, was fuming at the side of the stage, and I could see that she was now being held back from coming on to join us. I dread to think what would have happened if she’d succeeded in breaking free—she would probably have brained the stripper there and then onstage! Nick’s confusion soon turned to fury, and by the time we came offstage he was too angry to speak—unlike Julie Anne, who let rip with a tirade of abuse that would have made a Geordie coal miner blush with embarrassment.
“You bastards!” she screeched.
I felt a bit sorry for Nick afterward, but as far as a lot of us were concerned he’d brought it on himself with his high-minded ways and his withering put-downs of other people. Anyway,
I had other things on my mind that night. Coca-Cola were throwing a big celebration in Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont, and I had a limo booked to take me there. Our support band for that final gig on April 17 had been a group called Chequered Past, in which Michael Des Barres was the singer alongside Steve Jones, one of my guitar heroes from the Sex Pistols. I was keen to get to know Steve better, so I offered him a lift back from San Diego to Los Angeles. He was swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s all the way . . . and so was I.
“We are having a little end-of-tour party that Coca-Cola have paid for. Why don’t you come along to that?” I said to him.
Jonesy (as he’s known to his pals) readily agreed, and as the journey progressed he guzzled more and more Jack Daniel’s until he was completely out of it. I remember thinking, Blimey! I know he’s a Sex Pistol, but he’s really pushing it, even by my standards! When we got to the Chateau Marmont, Steve literally fell out of the vehicle and lay in the gutter with one leg still under the limo, bottle of Jack in hand. It was exactly what you’d expect from a Sex Pistol, and we laughed our heads off. When we got inside, Steve was all over the place while we had a drink with some of the guests from Coca-Cola in one of the suites where they were hosting the party. It was all behind closed doors, so it didn’t matter too much that Steve was staggering around, but eventually I sent him home safely with a driver because he was so smashed.
I was hanging around with the guys from Coca-Cola when we heard a commotion kicking off in the room next door. That was when things started to get very bloody again.
We rushed next door, where a violent struggle was taking place. I saw the flash of a knife and a group of people who were desperately trying to pull a man to the ground as he lunged forward with the weapon, screaming in fury. I soon worked out that someone had been stabbed, and our corporate party now looked like a scene from a Los Angeles gang fight. I recognized the man with the knife as one of our backing musicians, whom I’ll call Rick (not his real name). He was a brilliant musician, but he was also a proper little hard guy from the streets.
“Fucking hell, what’s happening, man?” I shouted at him.
It turned out that Rick had fallen asleep at the party while leaning back in one of the big comfy chairs at the Chateau Marmont. Somebody had apparently then gone up to him, and they must have done something to suddenly wake him. In his fuddled state, Rick assumed he was being robbed and that his assailant had gone into his pocket looking for money or drugs. Rick was a knife-carrying individual, and his instinct was to go for his weapon. He cut the person in front of him, and the whole thing had then kicked off.
Looking back, I think he would have killed someone if they hadn’t held him back. There were a lot of people in the party, and he just went at them and tried to stab them a few times. He managed to cut his main target, but fortunately it wasn’t a life-threatening wound, and the other guests managed to stop him before he could do any serious damage. Nonetheless, I was horrified—how could our end-of-tour private party end in a stabbing incident? I knew it was time to shut the party down—and quickly. This was LA and things were already seriously out of hand. We couldn’t afford for it to get any worse or we’d finish our tour by being locked up—and this was supposed to be the Land of the Free.
“Everyone’s got to go—the party’s over,” I said.
The very next day everyone decided not to stay in LA any longer but to go straight home. Tracey had gone back to the UK a few days earlier. I’d seen enough blood in America; there was no reason to hang around. Tired and dehydrated, I went to the airport and caught the first plane I could back to the UK. During the flight I wondered where it had all gone wrong. We’d conquered America, made the cover of Rolling Stone, and we’d been honored with two Grammy awards. Yet here I was, tired, stressed, and sweating on a plane while my ears whined with exhaustion and vivid images of John’s disfigured foot and Rick’s bloody knife flashed through my mind. Still, I consoled myself that I would soon be home with Tracey, back in the sanity of the real world. Little did I realize that there was still one last nasty surprise awaiting me when I got to England.
Simon was with me on the plane. Despite his normal cheery optimism, I think he was just as shocked and disturbed as I was over all the events during the last few days of our tour. We were too tired to discuss things in any detail, but I think we both realized we were increasingly finding ourselves in situations we didn’t want to be in, and which were also completely out of control. I mean, staff pulling knives! Why the hell was anyone near us carrying a knife in the first place, let alone using it in a fight? Until now, my feelings about this sort of thing had been along the lines of, Ah well, this sort of shit happens when you are on the road. But I was beginning to think, This sort of shit shouldn’t happen. It’s unacceptable and I don’t want to be around it.
After we finally touched down at Heathrow, Simon and I trudged wearily through Customs. Look on the bright side, I thought, at least Tracey would now be waiting for me outside the airport in a car.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. This way, please,” growled a uniformed Customs officer with a gruff voice.
There were two Customs and Excise guards based at Heathrow who were well known for taking a great delight in searching incoming rock stars. Aside from the IRA, there wasn’t much by way of international terrorism in those days, so I guess they had nothing better to do. Simon and I didn’t know it, but we were in for a very tough time. In the States we’d each been presented with an electric guitar as a gift by the Novation guitar company, and in the rush to leave the country we had failed to declare them to Customs. We were coming home after months on the road, and we had about a gazillion pieces of luggage, and the guitars had slipped our minds. It was a simple oversight, and we’d have been more than happy to pay the import duties, but the officers weren’t going to miss an opportunity like this to humiliate us.
“Oh dear, what else have we failed to declare, gentlemen? I am afraid we are going to require a strip search,” said one of them, whom I’ll call Mr. Gruff Voice.
“My wife is five months pregnant and waiting outside in a car,” I protested. But they insisted in frog-marching Simon and me into separate rooms. I don’t know why; maybe they thought one of us had an amplifier stuck up his backside that he’d also failed to declare.
It was a horrible experience. I was made to strip naked and bend over, although thankfully they spared us a full internal search. We were then interrogated for four hours. Where had we been? Did we have any drugs? What else had we failed to declare? We might have been famous pop stars from Duran Duran, but as far as Mr. Gruff Voice was concerned we were going to get the full treatment. All the time I was with him I had a sick feeling in my stomach about Tracey waiting outside. Did she know where I was? Would she be panicking?
My fears were correct because while I was in that dingy holding room, Tracey was actually going through a far worse ordeal. She’d been waiting outside with a driver to pick me up from arrivals when the car had become completely surrounded by a baying crowd. Word had leaked out that Duran Duran were flying in, and thousands of screaming fans were now trying to ransack the vehicle. Until you’ve seen mass hysteria sweep through a crowd it’s difficult to understand how dangerous it can be, but believe me, it is very dangerous and very frightening. If you’re stuck inside a vehicle at the center of it all, then it’s absolutely terrifying. The noise is deafening and you are surrounded by an endless sea of faces squeezed up against every piece of glass until the light gets blocked out. All the time there are people banging—and I mean really hammering—on the car roof. The fans at the front start to panic because of the crush, and the mood soon turns very nasty. People start to faint, and before you know it lives are at risk. It had started to happen to us a lot, and I was shocked at how aggressive the crowds could be. It was as if a mob mentality took over and they were in pursuit of a strange emotion called hysteria. I guess they are just trying to get your attention, slamming on the glass to say, Look at
me.
For a pregnant woman to be caught up in it all must have been completely terrifying. When I was finally freed by Customs, Tracey was shaking like a leaf and white with shock. She’d been trapped in the vehicle during what amounted to a small riot, helpless for at least fifteen minutes before the police had finally managed to control the crowd. These days they would have thrown a protective cordon around the car to begin with, but the ferocity of the crowd had taken even the police by surprise. I felt powerless and guilty for keeping Tracey waiting in such dangerous circumstances. I was also furious with Mr. Gruff Voice and his sidekick. If the same thing had happened today I would have sued them. But all I cared about at this moment was Tracey. It was bad enough when things like that happened to members of the band, but it’s worse when it starts to affect your family. Thankfully we employed an aging Cockney driver, Old George, who had been with Tracey in the car and he’d done what he could to try and keep her calm.
“It’s okay, it’s safe now. We’re going home,” I reassured her when we eventually reunited.
As the car pulled away from London, it finally felt as if we were leaving all the chaos behind. As we drove around a newly opened section of the half-built M25, I held Tracey tight and she began to calm down. By the time the car reached the M1 and turned north toward Shropshire, I could feel the pressure beginning to lift from my shoulders. The blood-drenched hotel rooms, the fights and arguments in the band, and the booze and drugs—all seemed to be left behind as the car sped through the darkness toward the comfort of home. All I could think about was how much I loved Tracey and how glad I was to be briefly away from the madness of life on the road.