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

by John Taylor

  One of the benefits of our newfound glory was a cab account, and either Nick or I would call and order a pickup. As we sat in the backseat of the Maypole minicab service, you would have been troubled to find two more delighted, excited, and happy-to-be-who-they-were-just-at-that-precise-moment-in-time individuals on the planet.

  It had been less than a year since we first walked into the club, but the changes we’d experienced since that moment had been staggering. One of the things that had changed was that we didn’t have to wait in line anymore: a nod from doorman Al and hostess Elayne, and the velvet rope was raised to let us pass. There was no need for us to count out our change, as we had at Barbarella’s a few years previously; Margaret, looking up from the cash register, smiled a welcome and gestured us to go on through. This was privilege.

  The lines were longer tonight than they had been a year ago, because the Rum Runner’s star was rising along with ours. It seemed that more and more of Birmingham’s night people wanted to play among the MirroFlex and oak-barreled booths.

  Paul had appointed a new club manager to allow himself more time to work with the band. Smoking a cigar, he smiled and beckoned us forward. We checked our coats and walked past the steps to the empty bar—which lay dormant now that our gear was properly flight-cased and stored, ready for the new year’s studio sessions—and into the sound, the pounding rhythms of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Grace Jones, and Bowie. The pink neon lights told us we were home. Like all great nightclubs, just being in the Rum Runner made you feel special. One of the chosen ones. I guess that’s the beauty of the velvet rope. As long as the velvet rope chooses you.

  I had a new girlfriend. Roberta Earl-Price. A lovely brunette, whom only a few months ago I would have considered out of my league. She had been dating one of the city’s flashier fashion-conscious gents, a man whose cool was known and acknowledged by all, and yet she left him for me.

  I still couldn’t quite get my head around that. But who cares?

  Here she is.

  “Hey! Hi! Johnny!”

  We kiss. She smells good. Of perfume, hairspray, and alcohol. I inhale her. We walk arm in arm to the bar. It’s the last day of 1980, so it must be a glass of chilled white wine.

  The club is packed and it is barely ten o’clock. There is no one here who has not given a lot of time and effort into the way they look. How would they have put it in Cabaret? “Even the straights are beautiful.”

  It is the hyper-fashion-conscious stars like Patti Bell and Jane Kahn leading the way, who raised the sartorial temperature, taking dress to a new level of outrageousness and modernity. Adam Ant is an influence on some—he’s definitely in the house—and Gary Numan: black tie, black shoes, peroxide hair. Then there was the lacy, frilly, stretchy, corkscrew-haired girls, adherents to the church of Vivienne Westwood. And the punks attempting to change it up—not too late, a little rockabilly with quiffs and grease—and it all fucking works so well together.

  At three minutes before midnight, the kick drums and synth basses take a break. It’s time for Sinatra. “New York, New York,” a club anthem. Everybody on the dance floor, singing, toasting, happy, joyous, and free.

  Roberta and I were right there in the center of it, and the music never sounded better.

  26 Manic Panic

  At the beginning of January, with barely time to get over the Rum Runner’s New Year’s Eve party, Duran Duran hit the ground running, and we were back in the studio with Colin, recording the rest of the songs that would make up our debut album. At Red Bus, we cut the bass and drum tracks for “Careless Memories,” “Night Boat,” “Anyone Out There,” “To the Shore,” “Faster than Light” (which we would use as the B-side to “Girls on Film”), “Tel Aviv,” and what would become “Khanada.”

  Colin’s plan was to complete the basic tracks of sequencers, bass, drums, and rhythm guitar, along with “guide” vocals (quick vocal sketches that help everyone keep the song’s arrangement in mind), then move into Chipping Norton Recording Studios, a live-in studio environment in Oxfordshire, to work on keyboard parts, guitar overdubs, and final vocal tracks. The rhythm-section recording sessions for Duran Duran took about ten days in all, including the time before Christmas we had spent recording “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film.”

  We also recorded an extended version of “Planet Earth” for the clubs. We rearranged the single, creating a lengthy four-on-the-floor bass drum–driven intro, and further extended the middle breakdown of the song to make it longer and more dynamic. We added over two minutes to the length of the song, taking it to six minutes ten seconds. Unlike dance mixes of later years, there was no cutting and pasting; we played every note live, and proudly so, in imitation of the great extended club mixes that had come out of New York, and particularly Chic. Colin brought in a horn section, the “Gosport Horns”—Andy Hamilton on sax and Spike Edney on trombone—to add bluster and funk. It was our first encounter with session musicians, an experiment with augmentation. Roger piled on layers of percussion. I added some slap bass. As the new version was intended for nightclubs only, we named it the “night version” and scratched “Duranies rock on” into the run-out groove, a little message from us to the world.

  We all got to appreciate another aspect of EMI’s munificence when marketing man Rob Warr introduced us to Perry Haines, the man-about-town go-getter who had just launched i-D magazine with Terry Jones. Haines’s i-D was to our scene what Sniffin’ Glue was to the punks. Warr instructed Perry to take us into London, buy us some clothes, and get us haircuts at Antenna, just off Kensington Church Street.

  I thought our haircuts were working just fine, but whatever. We had all been getting our hair cut and colored by a Rum Runner mate named Mitch Wilson, who ran a salon in Wolverhampton with his sister Tracey. This was a fantastic moment for hair color, as the Crazy Color and Manic Panic hair dye brands had been launched the previous year and had definitely helped us define our look. Simon was no longer a blond, he was now a brunette, which gave an opening for Nick to go all the way blond. Andy trailblazed the black-and-blond two-tone skunk look that Kajagoogoo’s Limahl would popularize, and Roger was adding blue to his black. I set up camp in the Bordeaux/Burgundy corner. I’ve always felt the best haircuts come courtesy of a devoted girlfriend, and Andy would marry Tracey eventually.

  Seriously, there was nothing London could teach us about hair, but Perry was a fantastic personal shopper. First stop was PX in Covent Garden, Spandau Ballet’s dressers, so we had to be careful in there. I picked out a musketeer shirt in deep red, another in white, and a scarlet-and-gray waistband out of Adam Ant’s closet. From there, Perry took us to Antony Price’s store Plaza on the King’s Road in Chelsea, immortalized by the Roxy Music song “Trash.” In contrast to PX’s historically skewed nostalgia, Plaza’s wares were ice-cold cool. In the window stood a single mannequin in a sharp gray sharkskin suit, slick hair, shiny shoes. Inside Plaza, the clothes were arrayed on chrome racks that lined each side of the store—one side for girls, the other for boys.

  I got away with the most fabulous butt-length, torso-hugging leather jacket, unlike any leather jacket I had ever seen. Roger and Nick got baggy suits in the forties Bogart style, in powder blue and lavender. The clothes we bought that day would form the basis of our wardrobe for the next few months.

  For our first EMI-sponsored photo session, photographer Andy Earl took us to the modern Milton Keynes building complex. This would be an important step in the initial branding of DD. The photos suggested something that was futuristic but also classic, romantic. New Romantic. We all look cool, calm, and confident. Arrogant even. Sexy.

  27 Perfect Pop

  BBC Radio 1 responded well to “Planet Earth” when it was released to the record stores on February 2. John Peel played it, Andy Peebles and Peter Powell played it. On Roundtable, Radio 1’s Friday-evening review program, Jonathan King remarked that it sounded like “someone had tried to make a Blondie record,” which was not too far off the mark. Local radio
picked up on it too, across the country: BRMB in Birmingham, which we had expected, but also Piccadilly in Manchester and Capital in London.

  The press release makes interesting reading.

  Nick says, “We wanted to pick out all the good elements of various musics, but focusing on disco where it’s just the total beat that counts.”

  “When we first formed,” says John, “what we were playing was very much avant-garde English music.”

  Andy says, “My guitar isn’t a lead instrument, it’s not predominant at all. It just adds flavor and energy.”

  The press release goes on: “Unlike Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran love playing live. ‘We don’t see any point in not trying to get across to as many people as possible,’ says Nick. ‘What’s the point in being a group otherwise?’”

  The three pages of type end, “Today the Bullring. Tomorrow the world.”

  • • •

  The British love music and love novelty. That is why the UK Top 30 has always reflected the cutting edge of contemporary popular music better than any other nation’s chart around the world. When fifties rockers Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis first came to Britain, they received a greater welcome than they were getting in their home country. The same for the Motown stars. Jimi Hendrix came to Britain because his manager knew he could make it happen there. Britain created the Beatles, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. The list is endless.

  What succeeds in the United Kingdom carries around the world. Every other country that cares about modern music looks to what is happening there. Canada, Australia, the United States—anywhere, in fact, where there is a decent core of Anglophilia. It has less effect on mainland Europe: Germany, France, Italy—countries that have their own pop sung in their own language. But pop is an English-American phenomenon, sung in English, and progressive pop almost always happens in England.

  It is certainly far easier to have a hit in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States, which, because of its size alone, requires a campaign of military proportions to get a song into the Top 20. In the United Kingdom, a couple of half-decent reviews in the music weeklies and one or two plays on Radio 1, a TV appearance or two, and then, unless your song is “complete and utter gobshite” (as Bob Geldof might say), it will make it into the lower reaches of the pop chart.

  Which is when the work begins.

  On February 10 “Planet Earth” entered the UK pop chart at number 97, and the following day we filmed our first British TV appearance, on a now-defunct popular-culture show called Look! Hear! at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. The BBC sent a huge limousine to pick me up, which caused quite a furor on Simon Road.

  The day after that, we drove down the motorway and assembled at a studio in North London to make something called a “video.”

  Thanks in part to support from Molly Meldrum, “the Aussie John Peel,” “Planet Earth” was racing up the pop charts in Australia faster than in the United Kingdom. There was no way we could all fly down there to give it any help; that just wasn’t practical.

  One particularly interesting executive—who liked to sit provocatively on her office desk, showing off her rather nice legs—introduced Paul Berrow to the concept of the “promotional video.”

  “Artists are having a lot of success with them,” she said, encouraging him to look at the videos for Ultravox’s Vienna and the Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays.

  Consider Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody clip, she advised, pointing out what a fantastic job that video did of selling both artist and song.

  Videos, she continued, were quite inexpensive to make—certainly cheaper than five return flights to Australia—and, in the hands of the right director, could sell the band’s image much better than a conventional TV playback. There was quite a cottage industry building up around video production in London, and according to Terri, the best director working there, the man who would do the best job for Duran was Russell Mulcahy.

  Russell had come to London from Australia and had directed the video for “Vienna.” There was no denying how impressive that was and how well it worked, so Paul engaged him to direct Planet Earth.

  We met him at a TV studio in St. John’s Wood, not entirely sure what we were supposed to be doing there.

  Russell was a live-wire, compact sort of fellow, with great energy and an easy sense of humor. We found him very comfortable to be around, and he seemed to take to us equally well. I rented a red vintage Rickenbacker for the shoot, not even bothering to bring along my Aria Pro. I have had to explain many times to younger players since then that I did not use the Rickenbacker on the recording of “Planet Earth.”

  More wear for the new clobber, Simon choosing the white PX shirt that I had worn in the Milton Keynes photo shoot, me all in leather again. We brought Gay John and Patrick down from the Rum Runner to do the “New Romantic” dance—swinging arms, bobbing heads, side-to-side finger clicking—for the cameras.

  What was most impressive, we would discover, watching the results back a few days later, was the painted glass work—the revolving earth at the beginning and the crevasse that Simon appears to jump off at the end; cool special effects that none of us expected.

  I’ve never liked lip-synching. It’s all the work of a gig with none of the juice. But it was clear that at £10,000, the video was a good investment. It was shipped off to Australia immediately, where it helped “Planet Earth” reach number 1.

  Our first British headlining tour had been booked to help the single get attention. We returned to Aston University campus for the opening night, then on to Liverpool, Manchester, and London.

  That Monday, we got the longed-for call to appear on Top of the Pops, still the most important music television program in the country.

  An appearance on Top of the Pops wasn’t quite as simple as it looked. The Musicians’ Union had an agreement with the BBC specifying that all artists booked to play on the show had to re-record the song in front of union representatives and BBC officials, to make sure the musicians seen presenting the song on TV were the same musicians who had made the recording.

  The intentions may have been noble, but the reality was a serious drag for any recording artist who might take any longer than six hours—the BBC’s allocated re-recording time—to lay down their track. In particular, 10cc had gotten into a serious mess attempting to re-create “I’m Not in Love,” their multitracked Spectoresque masterpiece, one rainy Manchester Monday and had made their complaints public, exposing the lie, as it were. Reproducing days or weeks of work in one day was idiotic and frankly impossible.

  So a nefarious compromise had evolved between the artists, the label representatives, the BBC, and the MU. It went something like this: On a Tuesday morning, the producers and engineers would enter a London recording studio with their equipment and set up. The artists would take their places around midday, and at 12:50 P.M. the union rep would arrive in the company of the label rep. He would walk in on a scene that could not have been scripted more imaginatively by Kafka. Introductions were made. The band would wave through the glass and appear to be animatedly digging into their work.

  At 1:00 our label man would turn to the MU rep and say, “Fancy a spot of lunch?”

  “Good idea.”

  And they would disappear for a liquid lunch on the firm, to return, slightly pissed, around 4:00 o’clock, just in time for the producer—Colin, in our case—to play back the final mix of the “new recording” that had allegedly just been made, despite the fact that half the time we weren’t even miked up. Papers were signed and everyone went home happy.

  What a load of bollocks! This charade would go on for another ten years until the rules were finally relaxed.

  Wednesday was the big day. We had an eleven o’clock call at the BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush for the first of three rehearsals.

  The recording of the “live” show (where the “prerecorded” track would be played as we mimed over the top) would be broadcast the
following night—Thursday.

  We all knew it was an amazing break, but it couldn’t have been more badly timed, given that we had our first headlining London show that night. Somehow, we found the time to get over to the Sundown on the Charing Cross Road for a quick sound check in between rehearsals.

  Despite all the bullshit, actually being inside those studios was a real trip, after all the years of watching the show with Mom, or at Nick’s or Dave Twist’s.

  The Who were on—real big guns, old-timers now—and Soft Cell, new wavers from Leeds with an extremely cool presentation of “Tainted Love” inside a padded cell. I watched both their playbacks in rehearsal. There wasn’t a chat as we all gathered around the monitors, but there was some acknowledgment. The Who gave off a friendlier vibe than Soft Cell, but that was hardly surprising. The Who could afford to be magnanimous. We were hardly in competition with giants like them.

  It was all so pragmatic in reality; there was nothing in there that didn’t have a function. It was interesting how they got the show’s look, which had been fine-tuned considerably since Top of the Pops first aired in 1964, with an increasing role being played by the audience, who contributed as much to the color and currency of the show as the artists. The audience were herded between the three principal stages that made up the set and were given rigid guidelines on when they should applaud, when they should dance, and how much noise they should make.

  The show’s director sat in his control room, high above the studio, and his directives came down through the PA system as if from a higher power. The cameras roved around us, picking out our poses, accentuating the positive, mostly. Simon crimped his hair for the occasion. Roger was almost drowned in dry ice.

  It was hard to take seriously. Watching the playback on the monitor after we had been processed by the Top of the Pops machine was amusing. But we were in the club now. A bona fide chartbusting pop band.