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

by John Taylor

  We were a finely tuned machine, bringing out the best in each other, raising each other’s game, note by note, track by track. We had become the perfect band.

  And by God, those managers were not hanging around either. Paul came across Patrick Nagel’s work in Playboy magazine. He commissioned Nagel, who was based in Santa Monica, to create an image for the album sleeve. Nagel provided us with the cover art, rendered on translucent plastic; there she was, the girl who was dancing on the sand.

  The final painting Nagel delivered to us was a fully realized canvas. It was massive. Five foot by five foot. The acrylic paint is graphic and eye-catching. Of course, it doesn’t say “Rio” across the top. Malcolm Garrett, returning Nagel’s powerful serve with a well-judged backhand, added that, as he did the burgundy surround.

  That painting has a story to tell. Years later, with the band down to three original members and not on talking terms with Paul and Michael, Simon, Nick, and I were at the BBC, recording for Top of the Pops. “I Don’t Want Your Love,” maybe?

  Suddenly we remember the painting, which we have heard is hanging on the wall at Paul and Michael’s management company in Covent Garden. The three of us jump into our stretch Mercedes, taking security guy Jim Callaghan for support, pull up outside Tritec Music, and march in while everyone’s at lunch.

  “It’s our turn with this,” say we, carefully unhooking the sizable canvas from the wall.

  “If Paul and Michael want it back, have them call us.”

  They never did.

  Is Rio the greatest album cover of the eighties? Discuss.

  The photo of the band on the inside cover was taken by Andy Earl on the roof of the BP tower, with St. Paul’s Cathedral and the City of London spread out beneath us. We are on top of the world.

  And we are wearing new clothes, naturally, mostly by Antony Price. Malcolm Garrett smartly picked up on the colors of Nick’s and Andy’s suits—lavender and pistachio—and brought those hues into the design, effortlessly creating the new-wave color palette that would echo around the pop culture world for the next twenty-four months.

  34 The Pleasure Habit

  I had time on my hands in London, once again. Only now, I was a little more connected. I had good friends living in the capital, and I was spending a lot of time with our agent, Rob, often sleeping over in his Kilburn flat.

  The place we most frequently went for after-hours amusement was the Embassy Club on New Bond Street, owned and run by an ex-guardsman, Stephen Hayter, with whom Rob and I got along well. The Embassy has a place in London’s club folklore for a number of reasons, among them the fact that for several years, Motörhead’s Lemmy was welded to the Space Invaders machine to the left of the main bar.

  It was like an art installation; just add amphetamines.

  It was understood that no one should attempt to interrupt him; he had far too many scary tattoos, and his interest in the Third Reich was well documented. I never saw him buy a drink or use the bathroom. He was an iron man on that machine.

  Less of an iron man was Limahl, whom Nick discovered one night working at the Embassy at a fairy-and-princess party, or something equally daft. Seeing Nick, Limahl—fetchingly dressed in a white silk bodysuit and wings—ran up and slipped him a cassette tape. On it, Nick heard “Too Shy” and recognized it for the hit song it was. He would in due course take Limahl and his band Kajagoogoo into the studio and produce their debut album with Colin Thurston. “Too Shy” was Nick’s first number 1 record, preceding Duran’s first UK number 1, “Is There Something I Should Know?”

  One night, Rob and I were working the club restaurant when Stephen beckoned for us to join him in his inner sanctum.

  “You’re gonna like this. Follow me.”

  In his office sat David Bowie with his friend Sabrina Guinness. I was almost struck dumb.

  “Hello, boys,” said David. Turning to me: “I’ve heard about you.”

  “Oh, thank you, yes, we covered ‘Fame,’” I tell him, “and Colin Thurston is our producer,” trying to find some common ground with the Thin White Duke.

  “Ah yes, dear old Colin. How is Colin?”

  I hadn’t met many legends at this point in my career. David was the perfect gentleman, and we spent the rest of the evening in his and Sabrina’s company. When Rob and I finally declubbed, we were on cloud nine as we traipsed back home.

  “I c-c-c-can’t believe it,” Rob kept saying, in his stuttering south Londonese. “Us and David Bowie.”

  • • •

  The Embassy really was it, the Rum-Runner-on-Thames—no problems at the door and free drinks as standard. And it was also a place I could score in.

  I would sometimes get angry when work interrupted a binge. Along with the late nights came more hangovers, increasing in frequency and intensity. I got a call from Colin that I was needed in the studio one particularly sore morning, and my immediate reaction was, “What a drag!”

  A drag? Wasn’t this my dream job, my fantasy? Duran Duran was succeeding on every level, and I wanted to spend my free nights watching Lemmy play Space Invaders at the Embassy?

  I had broken up with Roberta at Christmas, not because I had a particular replacement in mind but rather because I assumed that the girl-pulling powers I was enjoying on the road would continue when I was at home. This turned out not to be the case. There’s something about being in a touring band performing onstage most nights of the week that acts as an aphrodisiac. Maybe it’s all the strutting and preening, maybe it’s being in a city for just twenty-four hours; the girls that want you have to act fast.

  But back in London, Rob and I struck out most nights. We would start out the evening reeking of aftershave, hairspray, and optimism, but our “failures to launch” became something of a running gag. Years later, Stephen Hayter would tell Rob at least part of the reason we found it so hard to get the girls: “We all thought you guys were gay.”

  35 Music Television

  In New York the previous year, Paul and Michael had met with a group of executives at Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment who were trying to get a national music television channel together. They were calling it MTV. The problem was, they didn’t have much sexy content. The rock acts that filled the daytime FM radio slots did not make videos. What they really wanted, they told Paul and Mike, was “sexy, exotic travelogues, like James Bond movies.”

  Paul knew just the place.

  Sri Lanka.

  We could stop off there on the way to Australia, where our Rio tour was due to begin in April.

  We staggered our departures from London. Simon left with the advance guard. Russell Mulcahy, Eric Fellner, Paul, Mike, and I followed a few days later. Nick was the last to leave, not wanting to miss out on any of the final mix decisions Colin was making.

  On the Air Lanka flight, on the last day of March, I wrote Mom and Dad a postcard.

  “Hi Ma, Hi Pa, the first of many, flight seems good. Food and stuff great. Anyway it’ll be 8am when we arrive so I am going to try and spend the day doing nothing. Love John XXX.”

  On arrival, I checked into a rather rustic hotel in Galle, on the southern tip of the island.

  Sri Lanka seemed totally at odds with who we, as a band, thought we were. Simon, however, was entirely comfortable with it. He also had the most to do, being in the majority of the scenes that Russell Mulcahy was filming. Eric Fellner, who would later have Oscar successes with Working Title, produced the six-day shoot, in which we managed to film the videos for three songs.

  We shot on videotape. The budget was tiny: £30,000.

  Hungry like the Wolf had shades of Apocalypse Now as Simon chased model Sheila Ming through the rain forest. Was she real? Was she a hallucination? Russell planted his fedora on Simon’s head for a touch of Indiana Jones. It would move onto my head for the filming of Save a Prayer, in which the entire band, barefoot, took its only spiritual journey of the year, to a Buddhist temple in the Sri Lankan highlands of Kandy. That hat stayed on my head for the rest o
f the year.

  The band made fun of me for being the one to receive the full force of an elephant’s hosing while sitting atop the beast at a jungle water hole. But I didn’t care. I loved it. It is one of my most treasured memories.

  Andy had less happy memories. He developed a recurrent stomach bug after the trip to Sri Lanka, which he believed was a direct result of shooting that scene in the muddy water, and he blamed the Berrows for putting him there ever after.

  “We’re a fucking rock band. What the fuck were we doing out there poncing about on elephants?” he’d say.

  We also shot some footage sitting on top of processional elephants riding through the ancient city of Colombo several nights later. It was a breathtaking experience, but the footage was never used.

  Nick and I shot another scene on the beach with me in a pink pastel suit strumming a guitar and Nick playing some local panpipes. This was a long way from Birmingham. But we were all quite comfortable with the surreality of it all.

  Judging by another postcard I sent back home from Kandy, I was confident that the work we were doing was going to have a powerful effect: “Videos are going to blow the world apart. They are so FANTASTIC! John XX”

  On our last night there, we filmed the band reunion scene for Hungry like the Wolf in a downtown Kandy hotel lobby, happy to be back in our Antony Price glad rags. Normal service was about to be resumed. We had been in Sri Lanka just eight days, but we had filmed iconic footage that would define Duran Duran—the eighties?—for a generation.

  36 Down Under and Up Above

  The next day, we boarded a flight to Australia, our first visit to the country that had been so supportive since giving us our first number 1 hit. We touched down at 8:20 A.M.—to be met by hundreds of screaming Aussie fans.

  Now back on the road, and with tours planned to the end of the year, I felt like I had made a sensible decision at Christmas to part ways with Roberta. I wanted to be footloose and fancy-free, and it seemed impossible to have a relationship going honestly with a girl back home.

  Although being single wasn’t quite the pathology that it would become later—when I truly believed I could not have a career and a relationship simultaneously—in Australia I came to appreciate the rather strange phenomenon of meeting a girl in the hotel lobby upon check-in and being in bed with her less than an hour later.

  What services those girls performed! It certainly helped dispel the homesickness. What I didn’t realize was how much I was giving. I thought I was just taking. In fact, I tended to fall in love at the drop of a hat, and I fell in love a lot in 1982.

  I didn’t see these microromances—some lasting a few days, some just hours—as emotional crutches; rather, it was just part of the life we had created for ourselves. Sex addiction? What was that? I would have had to take a real stand, ethically and morally, not to get laid a lot that year.

  None of us were monks, but not all the other guys were as comfortable sharing their beds as often and with as varied a cast of actresses as I was—Andy’s marriage was coming up in three months. However, my behavior didn’t strike me, or any of the others, as compulsive.

  I loved Sydney, the air, the people, the food, the ocean. Australians struck me as Brits without the inhibitions.

  The postcard home from Melbourne reads, “Absolutely unbelievable. Just like the Beatles. Screaming kids. Had to get a police escort from the radio station and we were on the news as the amazing new sensation. FABBO!! John XX”

  I was sad to leave Australia. It had been a very funky sandbox to play in for two weeks. But then so was our next destination on the Rio tour—Japan.

  Bands had been going out to Japan since the seventies, and the hunger there for western music was insatiable. On our arrival at Narita airport, we were once again met by hordes of young fans. The journey from the airport to the city takes almost two hours, and the band cars were trailed by a column of taxicabs filled to bursting with excited, giggling, crying Tokyo teens.

  In Japan, we became familiar with service elevators and the mechanics of exiting through the kitchen. Everywhere we went, we were hustled, smuggled. It was exhilarating but exhausting.

  Tokyo was a sensory overload, a trip, a sci-fi fantasy; Godzilla, Blade Runner, and Thunderbirds all rolled into one hallucinatory daydream—neon-lit frozen faces, the morning mists of Hokusai, and our first Sony Walkmans.

  The language barrier was the most formidable we had encountered to date, a whole other level of trying to get ourselves understood and understanding what was required from us. From the moment we stepped off the plane, we had a team of interpreters. Everything that we said had to be filtered through them.

  I didn’t like that. Still don’t. I often found myself saying testily, “That’s not what I meant,” like a bad-tempered Henry Kissinger.

  The Japanese processed us. The promoters needed to control the experience, as if we were a potentially dangerous substance that must not be allowed to contaminate the calm and order of Japan. They were happy we were there, but they would be even happier when we left.

  Compared to the freedom of Australia, it was almost as if we were under house arrest. The moment we tried to step or speak out of the prescribed boundaries, a siren went off and we would be firmly escorted back into the appropriate cultural holding bay.

  On our day off, Roger and I went out of the hotel to the shopping area around Harajuku with our driver, Simon Cook, as well as the two Japanese secret service guys who had been assigned to our case.

  Tokyo is a madhouse at the best of times, and there are always crowds swarming around the tiny boutiques and markets in the lanes and streets of Harajuku. Roger and I thought we could get some gifts for our families—maybe some souvenirs—what’s the big deal?

  Well, the big deal was that we were big. As big in Japan as Gulliver was in Lilliput. There was no chance of not standing out, of having anything remotely resembling a normal experience. After an hour the whole thing got too unwieldy, and our guys with the walkie-talkies were getting nervous.

  The car had to be backed down a narrow side street, and we were manhandled into the backseat, the scene beginning to reach the point of hysteria.

  The following day, I wrote another postcard home. “Ma and Pa, Hi, had an awful day yesterday. The screaming hit fever pitch and I started to feel like a prisoner in the hotel. Then went to go shopping with Rog, and followed by 600 people. Back home Wednesday.”

  37 Incongruous on a Yacht

  Hungry like the Wolf” was in the UK Top 5. The significance of video for pop in general and Duran in particular was becoming increasingly evident, as now all anyone wanted to talk about with us was the videos.

  There is no doubt that the work we did in Sri Lanka created a huge shift in the way we were perceived by the global music-buying public. We were no longer just an urban club band, famous for our sharp clothes and snazzy haircuts. We were, thanks to that video, transformed.

  I can’t believe we got away with it. We had somehow morphed from city nightclubbers to backpackers who had just walked out of a Rough Guide. And it hadn’t been such a big effort for us to transition like that. Even though Sri Lanka hadn’t seemed like a natural fit for the band, it worked. So well received were the Sri Lankan videos that label and management would decide to capitalize on them sooner rather than later.

  Simon, Nick, Roger, and I decided to take a quick vacation in Antigua, in the West Indies, before the US tour started in June. We spent a week there on the beach at English Harbour and had the place almost to ourselves. Every morning, we would routinely trot out of our villas, one by one, like another Beatles scene or something out of Monty Python—“Good morning, Mr. Rhodes,” “Good morning, Mr. Taylor”—and set up our towels for a day’s suntanning.

  Postcard to “Dear Momsie and Popsie: You wouldn’t recognize your healthy blond beach hunk. Building up my muscles, trying to master the art of windsurfing.”

  A well-deserved vacation at a glamorous resort. Living the high life, o
nstage and off. We were making money now and didn’t have to consider, “Can we afford a vacation this year?” We had gone way beyond the lifestyles our parents had made for us. Family vacations with Mom and Dad had always been on English soil (Devon or Cornwall), while Wales and Scotland were considered holidays abroad. Now it was a given that I would be living my life as a member of the jet set.

  After a short week, as we were getting ready to leave, we got a call from Paul telling us not to pack, that he was on his way with Andy, Russell, and the video film crew. His plan was to film another two videos: one for “Rio” and another, if time allowed, for “Night Boat,” from the first album.

  The inspiration for the “Rio” video came from a book of photos that Russell owned, Foxy Lady by Belgian photographer Cheyco Leidmann.

  The photographs were provocative; jarring, high-contrast neon colors, surrealist images of girls on beaches with milky oceans, girls with razors and shaving foam.

  Once again, the Antony Price suits were in the frame—incongruous on a yacht, but on film it worked, giving an impression of bright and decadent sophistication.

  It was a surprisingly controversial, polarizing video. It became our most iconic video, making MTV’s all time Top 10, but it was also perceived by many in Britain as an arrogant portrayal of the worst traits of Thatcherite self-interest. There would be no going back to the underground after that one.

  But we had no political agenda. We just went with the energy. We were riding a wave, living a dream of our own making. We didn’t see what could be wrong with that.

  38 Theodore & Theodore

  In June, we were back in New York, back at the St. Moritz, getting ready for our second US tour.

  We were playing bigger clubs and theaters across the country, but first there were some festival-type bills organized up and down the East Coast—Philadelphia, Washington, New York.