In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran

by John Taylor

The auditions continued.

  20 The Poetry Arrives

  Until we found a singer, we were restricted to the rehearsal room. And I wanted to get back out in front of an audience. Despite the bonhomie and champagne, I was ready to resent Paul Berrow for not getting along with Jeff Thomas. But I couldn’t get hung up on that for too long. Securing Andy was a major step forward, and we weren’t wasting time. The band sound was finding its groove.

  We offered the vocal job to Gordon Sharp from the Freeze, who had come down from Edinburgh and looked and sounded the part. I called him from my parents’ phone in the hall and asked him when he planned to return to Birmingham.

  “I’ve thought long and hard about it, John, but I am going to stick with my own band.”

  Another blow.

  The Berrows had more ideas about who could fill the vocal role, but on this subject they were clueless. The answer would come by way of an angel, a student at the university who worked part-time at the Rum Runner on weekends.

  She knew what we were up to and suggested to her roommate that he come down and meet us.

  Simon Le Bon (his real name), grew up in Bushey, an outer suburb of London, the eldest of three brothers. We never did find out what his father did for a living. “Dodgy things in Whitehall” was the most anyone could get out of him. But his mother and his mother’s mother had both been dancers on the stage, and Simon had been encouraged to follow them into the limelight.

  As a child, he had acted on TV and been given small roles in commercials. He had gotten caught up in the punk euphoria as we had, and had sung in several bands. The one of which he was most proud was called Dog Days.

  He had chosen to go to university to study the dramatic arts, so he had put his music-making on hold. Thankfully for us, he was offered a place at Birmingham University.

  He was two years older than me, and our relationship, as it developed, would often feel to me like I was one of his younger siblings. But at that first meeting, what struck me most violently about Simon was his presence. He was tall and well spoken, and there was something noble about him. His Huguenot blood perhaps.

  And then there was that name. Quite fantastic.

  Hair cut short, bleached dirty blond; it gave him an edge. I can’t forget what he was wearing for our first meeting, as it’s become part of band legend: skintight leopard-print ski pants with loops under the boots. Undoubtedly a dubious look, but, you know, he was studying Shakespeare. In fact, he could have easily been Shakespeare’s idea of a rock star. You knew he’d look good in a doublet. He was lean and he was punk and he was ready to move on up, like the rest of us.

  We didn’t play together the first day he came by but talked about music, working each other out. Simple Minds had just released their second album, Reel to Real Cacophony, which John Leckie had produced. It was an important album to us, and it was on Simon’s radar too. I remember that as being significant.

  He returned to the club a day or two later, bringing with him a battered blue book, his Dog Days lyric book, which was filled with lyrics and ideas for songs. That book contained the basis for many of our future compositions, perhaps most notably “The Chauffeur.”

  The four of us plugged in our instruments and played Simon a track that best represented the sound we had been working on. It started with a synthesizer sequencer and a “four-on-the-floor” disco drumbeat. After eight bars Andy, Nick, and I came crashing in together: the workingman’s guitar, fat and no-nonsense; Nick’s delicate, melodic keyboard riff; and my tightly honed New York bassline. It was all too much, but it fitted together like sex and leather. Simon knew where he wanted to be. He sat and listened as we played the song through a few times, making notes in his book. Then he stood up, all six feet two of him, sauntered over to the mic, book open, and began to sing:

  I’ve been in this grass here for the last ten hours.

  My clothes are dirty but my mouth isn’t dry.

  How does it happen? Does it fly through the air?

  Oh, I gave up asking days away.

  And now I’m lying here waiting for the Sound of Thunder.

  I wrote in my diary that night, “Finally the front man! The star is here!”

  The poetry had arrived.

  21 The Final Debut

  We set a date to play downstairs in the club under the neon lights and MirroFlex-covered walls; Wednesday, July 16, 1980.

  Everyone worked with the same determination and enthusiasm. Simon had one acting commitment left, an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival. Upon his return, he dropped out of his university course altogether to focus on the band full-time.

  Typically, musicians are not the most verbose of creatures. They are at their most articulate when they are playing music well with others. We hadn’t—yet—become a band of huggers (I had to move to LA to get that habit), and back in the summer of 1980, acknowledgment and praise of each other, as we all contributed to this great forward-moving musical project, was made by way of the slightest nods, winks, and half-smiles.

  There was no leader. Despite the fact that Nick and I had been through so much and, together with Roger, had carried the Duran Duran banner around Birmingham for several years, we never told any of the others what to play, what to sing, or what to wear. The notes, the beats, the rhymes came out of everyone’s individual soul.

  That is how it should be, everyone holding down their own corner. No bosses. No one needing to be told what their gig is by another. I had to work on my basslines; every note I played had to be stronger and better than the last. No one needed to tell me what to play, and we all approached the work the same way. Work and play.

  Our sense of equality was apparent in just how rarely we commented on each other’s contributions. Bands rarely have that GOAL! moment where one person scores and everyone jumps on top of him. You play a song together well, and everyone knows it. You don’t, and the only acknowledgment of that comes by way of no one looking back at you. I hadn’t ever been a team player, but right then and there, everything we were doing felt good to me.

  And there were no more auditions. Thanks be to God.

  The five of us would now meet every day around two, play through the afternoon, then retire to the Rum Runner office to plot and strategize. We never once doubted that we were going to make it. Whatever confidence Nick, Roger, and I had, it was now reinforced substantially by the confidence of Paul and Michael, Andy, and now Simon. We were getting to know each other personally and musically, and building trust and intimacy.

  The club would wake up around seven. The Berrows had given us all part-time jobs to help justify the cash outlays they were making. As I was still living at home, a job also helped quiet my parents’ concerns. I got a twelve-month extension to my home-stay plan.

  Simon and I worked the door some nights, and sometimes we were behind the bar with Roger. Andy donned an apron and worked in the kitchen, cooking up the locally famous club chili. Nick got the best gig; he got to DJ.

  What was he playing? Let’s have a look:

  Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Computer Games”

  Mick Ronson: “Only After Dark”

  The Psychedelic Furs: “Sister Europe”

  Roxy Music: “Over You”

  Iggy Pop: “Nightclubbing”

  John Foxx: “Underpass”

  Wire: “I Am the Fly”

  Siouxsie and the Banshees: “Hong Kong Garden”

  Grace Jones: “Pull Up to the Bumper”

  Kraftwerk: “The Model”

  Donna Summer: “I Feel Love”

  The Cure: “A Forest”

  Lou Reed: “Walk on the Wild Side”

  Japan: “Gentlemen Take Polaroids”

  Magazine: “Shot by Both Sides”

  Bowie: “Always Crashing in the Same Car”

  Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: “Electricity”

  Bryan Ferry: “The ‘In’ Crowd”

  Public Image Ltd: “Public Image”

  The Human League: “Being Boi
led”

  Marianne Faithfull: “Broken English”

  Joy Division: “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

  Years later, Nick and I would make a mixtape CD of all these songs, which we named, “Only After Dark.”

  • • •

  All these influences were coming at us thick and fast. On top of which, each band member brought something particular, something unique, from his own experience. Andy was not a member of the Glam & Punk Rockers Club. His influences came by way of heavy blues-rock, like AC/DC and Van Halen, as a result of which our sound leaped forward, and that would be the reason why, when every other English band of our peers was getting held up at customs, we cracked it in the Unites States.

  But that was to come.

  Right now, we had to finish the songs we had started before Simon had come along, and write some new ones too.

  The template for our songwriting modus operandi had been set, to some degree, that first day.

  Jamming, coming up with grooves, chord progressions, melodies. The songs started to develop quickly.

  I’m fast. As a band, we all are. When we start writing a song together, we almost always hit on something interesting quickly. At this point, it’s all just pure energy. And it’s exciting, because every idea has the potential to become something fabulous.

  “Sound of Thunder” had written itself that first day Simon had sung with us. Other songs, such as “Night Boat,” were suggested by technology, built around Nick’s drifting keyboard sample and Andy’s enthusiastic use of his new Roland guitar synthesizer. We introduced Simon to the “Girls on Film” hook, which we had never let go of, and he immediately set to work rewriting the verses.

  As mid-July rolled around, we were right on target. We had a short but perfect set of songs with which to introduce the latest and hopefully final incarnation of Duran Duran to the people of Birmingham.

  Standing on the edge of the quay

  No lights flashing on the water for me

  Fog in my mind darkens in my eyes

  Silently screaming for a distant sound

  Ripple river yellow’s rising for a breath of breathing and drowns

  Stillness overcomes me in the night, listen to the rising water moan

  I’m waiting, waiting for the Night Boat

  “Night Boat” was the first song we played live with the definitive Duran Duran lineup, and we played it exactly as it would appear on our debut album.

  It was a remarkable development from our previous public appearance. Andy and Simon had brought with them a supreme level of cool, ability, and musical creativity. And they were both so different. They expanded the band sideways, as it were. Simon’s post-punk intellectualism and Andy’s raw but well-wrought playing style multiplied the band’s appeal by any number of degrees.

  They made us a million times more interesting, and we knew it.

  The audience at the Rum Runner were a pretty cool lot, that was the vibe, so we didn’t expect roars of applause; a cool appraisal with a positive look was the most that could be hoped for. And that was what we got. But looking out at them I could tell that we had something now that we had not had last time.

  Call it the X factor.

  We followed “Night Boat” with “The Sound of Thunder,” rolling out the stomping four-on-the-floor rhythm section that would define our sound. Roger had never played live this way, like a New York session drummer out of Parliament-Funkadelic or something. His friends in the audience were aghast.

  We were nervous, and there was even less acknowledgment of one another onstage than there had been in the rehearsal room. But cool detachment was so 1980.

  My nerves were not helped by the fact that it was my first time onstage without glasses. I had just about gotten used to the contact lenses, but I still felt like a toddler swimming without his water wings.

  Simon addressed the crowd.

  “We’re Duran Duran, and we want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops. This is ‘Late Bar.’ We wrote it for you to dance to.”

  Roger counted it off: “1-2-3-4.”

  And in we went.

  I liked Simon’s Home Counties accent, the Cockney accentuated. We weren’t just a Birmingham band anymore. Between Simon’s origins and Andy’s north country background, we had unconsciously morphed into the perfect pop group of Old England, but it was so camouflaged by the nouveau hair colors and the makeup and the clothes that no one saw it. It would be our most potent secret weapon. When London was everything in the pop music culture of the United Kingdom, with only occasional nods to Manchester and Liverpool, we would become the Everyman band that the whole country could get behind.

  Looking at photos from that first gig, at those of us onstage and in the audience, I am struck by how eclectic and outrageous the scene was.

  Pretty standard for a Tuesday night in 1980.

  Everyone had dyed, styled, or shaved their hair. Most were wearing makeup. It was a fashion interzone between punk, Goth, and asymmetric forties makeovers that would between them define the next few years of pop culture style.

  • • •

  Nick and I were still neighbors, the Hollywood twins, so at the end of the gig we traveled home together in a taxi. Naturally, we spent the ride home talking about where the last few weeks’ work had gotten us. Although we would always remain the master planners, we had never been dictators. Despite some mockery from our peers, we had kept the faith.

  Now, as the dark streets of Birmingham flashed past the cab, we plotted an audacious goal for this band of ours that had so far written only ten songs: to headline shows at Hammersmith Odeon by ’82, Wembley by ’83, and New York’s Madison Square Garden by ’84.

  It was a plan that seemed perfectly achievable.

  22 Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Rhodes, Le Bon

  Shortly after that gig, we made a decision to split all our earnings equally. Every penny of every ticket sold and the proceeds of every album that we would make, every song we would write, we would split five ways.

  Just as importantly, every song was going to be credited “Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Rhodes, Le Bon,” a most fashion-conscious business partnership if ever there was one.

  It gave us all an equal stake in the band, and we each had to respect the others. It’s the reason we are still together today.

  There are very, very few bands that work that way. But Duran was always different. We had been formed by the sidemen—Nick and myself—working inward from the outside, rather than being built around a singer-songwriter, which is the more usual way bands come into being. So having that equality came naturally. Duran was a teenage democracy.

  When you are grinding out those hours in the studio, making those all-night drives from Philadelphia to wherever, everybody is equal. This is one of my basic beliefs. Anyone can come up with the germ of an idea, but it’s worth nothing unless you have a team that is prepared to push and develop that idea until it becomes something tangible. And then it has to be sold.

  This philosophy of equality was something we wore with pride. We were excited by the idea. It felt modern. I could imagine meeting record company people and saying, “Yeah, we write all the songs together and we split everything five ways. What are you gonna do about it?”

  The sound was evolving, as was the picture. Time for a logo. Something different. We met John Warwicker, who was also at university in Birmingham (he would later start the design company Tomato) and asked him to design some posters for us. He came up with something pretty spectacular, totally different and totally now. The posters were triangular, in neon blue and pink. The Rum Runner’s MirroFlex formed the backdrop. We went out at night with glue pots and covered the city in our new identity. Mike Berrow didn’t run fast enough and got arrested, further proof the Berrows were as committed as the five of us were.

  The arrangements we came to with Paul and Michael, including the percentages they would receive from our recordings, live appearances, and merchandise, would be the subject of many heat
ed debates in years to come. Some of us are still angry. Some of us are philosophical. Whatever decisions we made back then, however naïve it may seem with the perspective of thirty years’ experience, I tend to feel that what we did was cool, because it got the show on the road and motivated everyone. There were five stars onstage, and our managers were stars too. They were no schmucks put in place to simply follow our dictates. They were creative and they had vision, and that allowed us to concentrate on what was most important.

  They bought us time at AIR Studios, my first experience of a 24-track studio. One of my favorite bands, Japan, was working down the hall. We recorded our new version of “Girls on Film,” which was still not quite right, and a version of “Tel Aviv” that would also change considerably by the time it found its way onto the debut album.

  We were getting a look together so that when we walked out onstage, we (a) looked like a band and (b) didn’t look like any other band, so they brought us clothes, then organized and paid for photo sessions with big-name photographers.

  We got an agent in London, Rob Hallett at the Derek Block agency. He became our first champion in the capital, someone in the business talking up the band, and Rob had a big mouth.

  Rob had connections in Birmingham, as he represented both UB40 and Dexys Midnight Runners. He heard from Dexys’ manager that we were going to be the next success out of the city.

  An agent’s primary function is to book gigs. Rob got us a coveted spot at London’s Marquee club.

  Another Berrow investment was required to get us up and down the motorway to London in style. No Ford Transit vans for us. We acquired a late-seventies six-seater Citroën CS in French blue. Man, we nailed that accelerator to the floor once we hit the motorway.

  At the wheel would be Simon Cook, a friend of ours from the Rum Runner crowd who was now being employed by us as a driver and minder. He was a great spirit to have on board, and ex-army, so we would never again have to worry about encounters with aggressive soccer fans. The Citroën would cover a lot of miles, most of them up and down the M1 motorway. Our equipment would follow in a rented Ford van driven by another member of the growing team.