by Andy Taylor
Finally, after all this, the others eventually agreed to hire a producer. We were rehearsing for two corporate shows in June when we met with a well-known musical producer called Youth. He had a great track record. He’d just finished doing an album with Primal Scream, and I was intrigued by how he’d handled it. When we sat down with him I asked how they’d worked together and he said they’d done the whole thing in three weeks.
“We got up, we did the track, we did the vocals, we had dinner, and we finished it every day,” he said.
In other words, you organized the band and they respected you for it. I felt he kind of understood what we needed. Everyone in the band was happy to work with Youth. We had a couple of gigs to play over the summer; one was a corporate gig for Deutsche Bank in Barcelona, and the other was a charity concert for the Royal Family in Monaco, after which we planned to begin working with Youth at his studio in Spain in September. I was confident he’d be able to listen to our sound and work out which bits were the most important and how to make all the various components work together as a whole. Sony were also very happy with this arrangement.
Around this time somebody came up with the idea that we could also do some work with the American producer, Timbaland. Although I was happy with Youth, I could see it made sense to look at this, as Timbaland was currently the top dog in the States, and producers can have a very positive effect on a record if their name is hot. I don’t have a problem with the proposal, I thought, as long as he just does one or two tracks with us and the whole thing doesn’t turn into a million-dollar circus. Later I got a phone call informing me that Timbaland needed to bring his session forward to September for scheduling reasons.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the show in Monaco was the last time I would ever perform live with Duran Duran.
I was tidying up a few bits and pieces in the garden at home when I received a phone call from someone in our office.
“How do you feel about working with Justin Timberlake?” they asked. I wondered what this added take on the Timbaland sessions was all about. Was this the reason they had been moved to September from October, forever looking for the Big Stunt? I remembered my conversation with Justin at the Brits, but I wasn’t convinced he was the right solution to our problems. He’s an accomplished and very successful artist, but we needed a strong producer, not a show business extravaganza.
“Oh, but Justin is part of Timbaland’s team,” argued a member of our management.
“What fuckin’ team? All we need is a producer,” I said.
“Well, the Black Eyed Peas use a team.”
I couldn’t believe this. We are the team, I thought. We just want an Alex Ferguson to coach us. If, as I feared, marketing reasons were behind it then we were well and truly sunk. Either way, if it was destined to fail it wasn’t for purely musical reasons. I just didn’t get it. Maybe I was just not celebrity-oriented enough anymore?
IT was around this time that I looked at my passport and discovered that my American visa had expired four months previously. This sort of thing had always been handled by our US management company, so about three weeks before we were due to travel to the States to meet Timbaland I contacted our management in New York. Did I need a visa for this trip, I asked, and if so, were permits for all the band and crew in the process of being sorted out? Yes, it’s all in hand, I was informed. Unfortunately, it turned out that my working visa was in hand, but only for the original October dates that we’d arranged with Timbaland (not the new September dates). It made me feel as if our management were now making the most basic of errors. The problem is that with today’s security requirements you just can’t blag your way into the USA like a naive English nanny. You must be legal and documented, and there is no slack allowed if you mess it up.
It was amid all this that life suddenly took an unexpected turn when I received the sort of phone call that every parent dreads.
“Hola, Señor Taylor?” asked the caller.
It was a doctor from the local hospital in Ibiza.
“I have your daughter, Georgie, here.”
Zoom! A gazillion thoughts raced through my head.
“Is she okay? Why is she there?”
I listened as the doctor told me Georgie had been in a car accident while at the wheel at 5:20 p.m. She was badly shaken and had injured her leg, but fortunately she was sober and okay. She had been a very lucky girl. Thank God, I thought.
Georgie had an American passport because she was born in the USA, and the plan had been for her to come to America during the Timbaland trip to keep me company. I rushed down there to discover she’d damaged some ligaments in her leg and in her foot. It meant that she would need to be on crutches during the journey to the States, so I phoned the airline to make special arrangements. When we got to the airport a few days later I remembered that my visa situation still hadn’t been resolved. It had been nagging away at me but because of all the last-minute disruption and panic caused by the accident I’d never got to the bottom of whether or not I could enter the US to work.
“Well I don’t need a visa, Dad, because I’ve got a US passport,” smiled Georgie at the airport.
As it transpired we couldn’t have traveled to America that day anyway. Our flight to Madrid was postponed by three hours, and it meant we would miss our connecting flight to New York. A lot of rubbish was subsequently written about me later, claiming that I’d deliberately walked out on the band by refusing to go to New York, but that was never the case. The Sunday Times published a correction to this effect on May 4, 2008, which stated that I was “unable to get a US working visa to attend the New York recording session because of administrative failures by the band’s management.” I used the extra time we had in Ibiza due to the postponement to get onto the Internet and check out the exact situation regarding my visa, with a view to flying out the following day. I went ahead and confirmed the next day’s flights along with wheelchair assistance for Georgie.
I then logged onto the Web site for the US Department of Homeland Security—and it confirmed my fears: it would be illegal for me to enter the States for work purposes without the appropriate visa. In the heated circumstances I was beyond angry with our management for letting the situation slide, and I tried to imagine what would have happened if I’d have arrived in New York without the correct paperwork. There was no way I’d be willing to lie and pretend I was not working. Logically, if any band members or any of their road crew had no work visas, then the sessions in September 2006 should never have been booked, period. In my view, there was just no excuse for not sorting this out and for allowing me to be put in this position.
I knew that after so much friction between me and some of the other members of the band over lyrics and money, they might interpret the fact that I couldn’t travel as a sign that I no longer wanted to be in the band, but I felt I had no choice.
I later fired off the furious e-mail to our management that I copied to Simon, the one in which I said I was “fuckin’ seriously unhappy.” Unquestionably, everyone should now have been aware of the problem, or had at least been informed.
IN the days that followed there were several phone conversations between various parties on different sides of the Atlantic. I was still very angry and I could feel the weight of everything that had happened over the last year or so bearing down on me: my father’s death, the constant arguments within the band—it felt as if I’d been trapped on a derailed runaway train. If I had believed I could legally travel to the States, then I would have already been in America, but the way things stood I no longer knew whether or not I wanted to continue in Duran Duran. It’s one thing to deal with your brother’s crap, but way too much of a stretch to accommodate management issues too. Once these start to interfere with the workings of the band it feels like they’re trying to strap on some cheap new turbo to an old classic. If new parts aren’t made with the same quality or class they will eventually fail.
The stress of everything was taking a
heavy toll on me, just as it had done in 1985. I could feel that same weird sensation that I’d previously felt of being disconnected from the real world, and I remembered my recent conversation with Roger and John about how we all needed to take more care of ourselves.
Perhaps it was time to see a doctor, I thought. Part of me was thinking, Don’t be stupid, look at everything you have got. How can you be so down about things? But life has its own way of unwinding and sometimes you have to adjust to it. So I saw a doctor and explained the way I felt and the context behind my circumstances. He sent me for a series of medical tests, including blood tests to check everything physical in case I had a thyroid problem or something of that order. The results came back clear and I was given a clean bill of physical health, apart from needing a small vitamin boost. Part of the problem was that my father’s death was still taking a heavy toll on me.
“If you cannot control your grieving after a year then things have gone a bit further than they should have done,” the doctor advised me. “The problem is that you haven’t even stopped to think about it, you’ve just tried to carry on as if nothing has happened. You haven’t taken any time to deal with this and it is having an adverse effect on you. Your work is unusual, and although many people suffer from problems at work, yours are of such a unique nature that you need to step back and address this with your business partners.”
If only, I thought . . .
We had two concerts lined up for the near future, one of which was in Hong Kong. I understood that my lawyer had agreed with our management that I would not need to attend. I wrote a letter to the rest of the band, explaining that I wasn’t feeling too great and that I’d been advised to take some time off, but that I was willing to attend our show in Warsaw. I suggested that I bring the doctor along and that he would be able to explain everything more fully to them, so I was offering to share some very private information with them.
I suspected I’d be able to gauge whether or not they wanted me to continue in Duran Duran by the tone of their response. The e-mail I got back from the rest of the band told me not to bother going to Warsaw and suggested that they come and see me instead. That wasn’t the deal, I thought to myself. The e-mail read as if it had been written by the management rather than the band, and soon afterward my exit from the band became public.
“[Andy] has a virus and his doctor says he would be ill advised to travel,” said a report that was posted on the Internet.
There never was any virus—that information was false—but in the end, in late 2007, I was finally diagnosed as having suffered from clinical depression. The doctor suspected the root cause had been a delayed reaction to my father’s death. I didn’t take any medication, but the explanation made perfect sense. The stresses and strains had once again taken their toll.
AFTER parting from Duran Duran, I was now slowly starting to feel less depressed as I had the time and space to heal, although I can tell you that there were times when only a small part inside of me kept holding on, that tiny inner voice that reverberates to the famous chorus of “Don’t let the bastards grind you down!”
I learned that depression is very common. It’s not life threatening; it’s something that given time you can get over. It’s not something that I’m ashamed to admit to, because it can affect any and all of us, and it helped to explain why I’d been feeling so low at times. The one positive consequence is when you recover it makes you feel stronger inside and you find yourself running to places where you once feared to tread. You can take a battering in all different walks of life, and rock and roll is no different. So the doctor simply advised me to rest and he explained that the burnout I’d been through was mental and not physical. Ever wondered where you would be without your health? Well, now I know. Once again, it was time to slowly let out the air, just as I had done in 1986.
I guess the lifestyle we led in the band took its toll on all of us over the years in one way or another. For me that toll led to depression, John ended up in rehab, and Roger had his battles with exhaustion and agoraphobia. Nick got locked in what must have eventually been a troubled marriage to Julie Anne, given that they later divorced. Even Simon, who found so much happiness with Yasmin, didn’t emerge unscathed, having been nearly killed on a yacht and landing himself in the hospital through a motorcycle crash. When people look at young stars today, like Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse, as they struggle to cope with life at the center of the circus, there’s a temptation to think it’s a new phenomenon. But we went through our own problems in Duran Duran—it’s just that things weren’t picked over in quite the same detail back in the eighties.
Shortly before we parted company in 2006, Nick had approached me one day at our rehearsals in June and he told me he thought he’d discovered a way of wrestling back ownership of all our early work from EMI’s subsidiary company Gloucester Place Music (the company the Berrows sold out to in 1986). It could have involved taking legal action, but we never got around to discussing it further. It might have made a difference, because we’d have retained ownership of all of our work. Each one of us might be worth tens of millions of pounds today, and money might not have been such a sore point. Simon and I would certainly never have run out of money at the cash machine!
But you learn to take life as it comes and today I can look back on my time in Duran Duran with fresh eyes, and I realize that what we enjoyed together was something very special. I’m totally back to my old self now, and I can look out across the beautiful rolling hills of the Mediterranean and reflect upon why we couldn’t make it work in 2006. I didn’t listen to all of Red Carpet Massacre, the album that the rest of the band eventually released through Sony, but I heard a couple of the tracks. The title song “Red Carpet Massacre” was something that someone like me would have tried to avoid, because in my view it sounds like it was written in a hurry and the chorus is very repetitive.
People have wrongly assumed that I didn’t want to be in the band, but the opposite is the truth. I always wanted to be in Duran Duran, but we’d ceased to function as a band; it was seriously dysfunctional. We’d returned to being five individuals pulling in different directions, just as we’d become in the eighties. When it came to sorting out our problems, just like before, we failed to connect. I don’t have an answer for why that is—I guess we were all just coming from different places. In hindsight, that was our dilemma from day one: we were always five very different individuals, but it was that very diversity that drove our success. Despite all our arguments, Nick and I needed each other just as much as we needed every other member of the band. It meant we all had the capacity to do things which were incredibly original and successful, but we also had a huge mechanism for self-destruction. Perhaps things might have been different if we had all sat down together and discussed the tensions that tore us apart the first time around, but that never happened. In fact, I don’t think I ever once went to dinner with Nick during the six years that we were back together. There was no cocaine the second time around, but in the end it was the similar tensions caused by internal disagreements that came bubbling back to the surface.
History really did repeat itself.
People sometimes ask me what was more fulfilling: Duran Duran during the eighties or our time together after our reunion? For me that’s easy. The excitement of helping to invent something for the first time and breaking it in in the eighties will always remain our greatest achievement. We still lived in a much more naive world in the early eighties, and it felt like a much bigger prize to play for. But the second time around was also enjoyable for the recognition that it earned us via things like the Brits and the MTV Awards. When we were younger we got an enormous amount of success, but we didn’t really get a lot of recognition from the music industry, at least not in the UK.
I will always remain incredibly proud of everything we achieved in Duran Duran.
But the one thing above all else that continues to make everything so worthwhile was the warm reaction of our wonderful fan
s both times around. I think they understand most of all that the secret of our success was our diversity. During the final stages of working on this book I received an e-mail from a woman who explained that Duran Duran fans love their roses and chocolates, but she said they also like steak and beer.
I guess that what she was trying to say was Simon and Nick were always very good at delivering roses and chocolate, but that I was the steak and the beer in Duran Duran.
I’m happy to settle for that.
EPILOGUE
Ibiza—2008
IT’S a telling moment the first time that you hear recorded music in the control room of a newly installed sound studio. The acoustics of every room are different, and when all the work and the wiring are finally completed it’s time to test everything and you know within the first few seconds whether or not you have it right. On the first day that I hooked up my equipment here in Ibiza, I grabbed the nearest mix CD to play on the studio speakers for the first time. It was a Trevor Nelson DJ set from Pacha in Ibiza, so I thought it would be funky and heavy on the bass, which are all good things to help judge the quality and resonance of the room. The CD had no track listing on it, so I skipped the first track, because on mix tapes the intro can go on for a long time, and I hit play on the second.
Boom.
“I’m Coming Out,” by Diana Ross, came on, which was produced, written, and performed by the late Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers, and the late Tony Thompson. Cool, and the room sounded good!!! The spirits are with me today, I thought. Out of all the tracks I could have randomly played, it was that one. Still, I think we all agree that a person’s influence can be as powerful in both life and death. The acoustics needed a tiny bit of fine-tuning, but since then I’ve never looked back. Many young bands have been out to Ibiza to record with me. Playing a great record is a very simple way to test a room, but I must confess that this particular experience was a bit more three-dimensional than usual and it still makes me wonder about things today.