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

by John Taylor

  Ever since “Planet Earth” reached number 1 on the Australian pop charts in the New Romantic spring of ’81, Duran Duran and the Aussies had a special relationship. The concerts on that tour, at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion in particular, were the biggest-selling concerts we had played to date. Just as importantly, we had friends down there.

  Alex and I rented a gorgeous twin-bedroom flat in the upscale George Street Apartments. Rumor had it George Harrison was also in residence there, but we never saw him. High above the city, with north-facing views of the ferry terminals, the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge, it was, in Bryan Ferry’s words, “penthouse perfection.” I rented a silver 7 Series BMW to get around in, intending to take full advantage of this town.

  EMI owned studios in Sydney, which was convenient. They were named Studios 301 after the address on Castlereagh Street. It wasn’t as sophisticated a setup as AIR, but it was better than the mobile setup we had endured in France. Any technical problems or breakages could be resolved in-house, quickly.

  We had an album’s worth of basic tracks cut, so it was now a question of getting lyrics written and recorded. I chose to give Simon plenty of space. You can’t have five or six guys sitting around staring at Simon, expecting him to deliver lyrics to order.

  I would get out and about and take care of public relations.

  I was a tiger loosed from the cage. A little ragged, appropriately, but a tiger nonetheless.

  And I discovered a new drug.

  MDA. Methylenedioxyamphetamine.

  MDA would find more traction in the marketplace in a slightly different form and under a different name. Ecstasy.

  44 Unlimited Latitude

  It’s Saturday, midnight, the peak of the weekend. I’m at a nightclub. Music plays. Grace Jones. Something familiar, something comforting. An hour ago, I took a small white pill that had been passed to me under the table at the restaurant I had been eating at. The effects of the pill are coming on. I’m warming up.

  In fact, I have never felt so warmly comforted. I am opening up, open to everyone and anything, awake, receptive. My touch sense is exploding, gently. Touch me! Touch me again! The silk, the leather.

  I’m aswim in textures that are both holy and new. A girl dances next to me in a dress that is so soft I can put my fingers right through it. And the lights are dancing too, and so deeply, deeply seductive. Non-destructive, creative. Pulsing profoundly like molten gold. Everyone in this room is in love with me and I am in love with them.

  I have lost my self at a Sydney nightclub thousands of miles from home and it feels so good. Almost all my inhibitions have drained away. I have unlimited latitude. Lying on my back on the floor, a beatific smile on my face, I am surrounded by a hundred starry dancers.

  The music over, I scrape myself off the dance floor, head for the exit, and climb behind the wheel of the BMW, accompanied by my new best friends, my soul mates. Set the controls for York Street. My last coherent thought before falling asleep hours later is, “This MDA is incredible. I have to tell everyone about it.”

  • • •

  Fact is, I had never been one for hallucinogens. I liked speedy, chatty party drugs that kept me up all night and randy. There aren’t that many of them. I had never gone in for the slower, introspective buzz that could be had from hash, which always made me want to retch, or pot, and certainly not LSD or any opiates.

  The MDA had broken down my walls. It was the closest a drug had come to giving me a feeling of complete relaxation and oneness with the universe. It had brought me closer to God.

  The following day, I was like the Mad Hatter on a mission. Beginning with Alex, who of all people I figured should be sympathetic to the transcendent spiritual qualities of my discovery, I worked my way around the band like a missionary as we came into contact throughout the day, some of us taking a late Sunday lunch out at Doyles fish restaurant, and back at the apartment afterward.

  “It’s amazing, you have to try it,” I insisted. “The music, the lights. It makes our lives up until now feel like a black-and-white movie. Last night I went into Technicolor, in turbo power.”

  Andy, you at least could dig that, surely?

  What was wrong with my own reality that I was so desperate to change it? None of the others seemed bothered; life was working well enough for them. And I can’t have done too good a job as a salesman, because when I headed back out into the Sydney night that evening, determined not only to replicate the experience of the evening before but to build on it, maybe write a book about it, I had none of my bandmates on the ride with me.

  Perhaps there was work to do.

  “Expectations are resentments under construction.” One of my favorite lines from the addiction recovery program I now follow. I loved it the first time I heard it and use it the whole time. It has entered the family vernacular, and the band all use it too.

  When I went out into that Sydney night for a second run at the MDA mountain, I was loaded with expectations of what was going to happen and how it was going to make me feel when that small but powerful pill took effect.

  I dropped it, with no alcohol. I had understood from the night before that the effect I wanted, what MDA was about, didn’t need alcohol. That aspect would appeal to the ravers in a few years’ time, when the drug hit big-time. You would see them in their thousands, in fields in the middle of nowhere, out of their minds on acid and Ecstasy, with bottles of Evian. This was a better buzz than booze could offer.

  Waiting, waiting for something to happen. When is that shit going to kick in? This club is boring. It was so much more fun last night.

  I need some space. Go to the bathroom and check my face. Tired. Bedraggled. Not a Jackie magazine face. Eyeliner up double-quick.

  Return to the table. Who the fuck are these people? They aren’t my friends; they’re stragglers, hangers-on, waiting for something from me. I am their prey.

  Somewhere to the left of me, a reptilian tongue flickers, catches a fly that flew too close. Closer still, that record executive has a tail—I hadn’t noticed that before—a piece of scaly dinosaur meat that is thumping the leather banquette steadily, patiently, like a windshield wiper stuck on slow. It does not surprise me.

  One fast move and I’m out. Angry now; where is that fucking buzz? This city is nowhere, man, it’s too far from anywhere, no fun at all. Am I now just a bad actor who has forgotten his lines, onstage in a poorly written play that no one is watching anyway? The universe comes down hard on us sometimes. If this is the way you want it, John, raw and uncooked, here it is. Truth is as black as it is white. Last night was a gift but you want to make it a habit. That is going to be expensive.

  I surrender, Lord. Send the servants home. Let’s have an early night, just the two of us, like the old days, a front-row pew at St. Jude’s. Let’s watch some bad TV and go to bed. I’ll toe the line, Daddy, I promise, just let me rest.

  But the trip will not stop, and alone in my high-rise Sydney fuck pad I am teetering on crazy. Slide the glass back on the balcony and take some air. Whoa! It’s vertiginous! If I could find the phone I would use it, but who would I call? I don’t even know.

  I can’t get out of my head and my head is three feet thick. Where is last night’s poetry? Because this is a fucking nightmare.

  I am crying, “Stop it, God, make it go away.” But there is no relief to be had, and the clock runs onward to another wasted dawn.

  • • •

  In the studio we were burning out everyone around us. We’d been on this album a long time. So when Alex announced one morning that some changes had been made to one of the arrangements (“Seven and the Ragged Tiger” was becoming “The Seventh Stranger”) and I was required to go down to the studio and make some alterations to my bass part, I freaked out.

  I was in the bathroom shaving. In yet another moment of overreaction, I picked up a heavy glass and threw it at the shower door, smashing it into a million pieces.

  “Fuck, Alex, this is bullshit! That song
was finished! I’m finished! I’m done!”

  “It’s not such a big deal, John,” said Alex gently. “It will be easy. Sometimes these things take time.”

  Andy and I did our last overdubs on the Seven and the Ragged Tiger album that afternoon. He was fed up too.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’m having no more of this. I’m off.”

  The thought of Andy leaving Duran was horrifying, and it snapped me out of my complacency. The balance that made the band great would be lost, along with our edge.

  Maybe a side project could enable us to let out the pressure?

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We will do something different next, something tougher.”

  It was the beginning of a rift that would deepen over the next two years; Andy and I on one side, Simon, Nick and the Berrows on the other. Roger did a balancing act between us.

  Even worse than Andy not being part of Duran was the thought that Andy might not be part of my life. He was the only one I could comfortably get wasted around.

  Alcohol and drugs were beginning to take control not just of decisions and choices I made but also of who I hung out with.

  One of the worst effects of this was that I didn’t want to be around Nick anymore, my oldest friend, simply because he never supported my using. Nick was just not a drug user, so it was uncomfortable for me to be around him when I was high. Andy was an easier playmate.

  More and more though, I was keeping away from anyone connected with the group when I was using, seeking out lower companions. Instincts on rampage balk at investigation.

  I didn’t want to be challenged on my behavior, and outside the group and management, there was no one who would challenge me. Quite the opposite. Everyone wanted to party with me. But behind the party face, I was caught up in a vortex of fear, arrogance, loneliness, and extraordinary popularity.

  45 Anticlimax to Reflex

  On October 17, “Union of the Snake,” the first single from Seven and the Ragged Tiger, was released in the United Kingdom. We had a barbecue at Paul and Michael’s villa in the swanky Sydney suburb of Vaucluse, where we awaited the phone call from London. The champagne was on ice. We were all expecting another “Straight in at number one, it’s Duran Duran” moment, but it didn’t happen.

  “Union of the Snake” went in at number 3—and that was immensely disappointing, which gives some indication of the pressure we were under and the expectations we had for ourselves.

  The burgers on the grill cooled as the ice in the coolers warmed.

  But at least after all the time, energy, and air miles, Seven and the Ragged Tiger was finished. Nine songs.

  “The Reflex” opens the set, followed by “New Moon on Monday,” which would be picked out as the second single. Side B of the album begins with “Union” and continues with “Shadows on Your Side,” a song about the darker side of the fame we were all living through. Then comes the instrumental, “Tiger Tiger,” and the album closes with “The Seventh Stranger.”

  We flew in Rebecca Blake, the New York–based fashion photographer who had shot us for Rolling Stone the previous year. In the film Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye Dunaway’s character is based on Rebecca, and her work appears throughout the film. She shot through the night, preferring the drama that only artificial light can provide.

  The shoot was certainly dramatic. A full-size, hot-blooded tiger was brought onto the set at the State Library of New South Wales. The clothes choices are decidedly uptown—back to black. Nick has the most gorgeous black lizard suit, with tight black boots and black tie, Roger and I are both in evening dress, and Simon and Andy are more casual-looking in expensive suede and leather. We all looked like successful, wealthy young men; still available.

  Once again, Malcolm Garrett had the job of giving the photograph a graphic framework, this time placing it into an art-deco board game frame filled with symbols and ancient runes. The Aston Villa colors remained on the logo.

  The video for “Union of the Snake” didn’t work too well; it was too high-concept, overstaged, and overdressed, and it lacked direction. After the immediacy of Rio, Seven and the Ragged Tiger would take some getting used to. In fact, I’m still just getting used to it now. It made number 1 on the UK album charts, but it was still somehow anticlimactic.

  We made plans for what was to be our biggest world tour yet, and it made sense for the tour to begin in Australia.

  • • •

  Right before we left Sydney for opening night in Canberra, I met up with Janine Andrews, Andy’s old flame from Birmingham, who had a part in the latest James Bond film, Octopussy, and had come to Sydney to help promote the movie. It was good to see her and spend time with her. We both felt a connection but didn’t jump right into bed, which was odd, as at that moment in my life I was jumping into bed with anything that moved. Perhaps this could be something more? Janine and I made plans to get together again in Birmingham over Christmas.

  I drove back from my last night out at a dive in North Sydney, crossing the harbor bridge as the morning rush-hour traffic gathered. I parked the BMW in the underground garage of the apartment building, leaving it for the rental agency to collect. As I slammed the door shut, the fender fell off.

  The Seven and the Ragged Tiger world tour kicked off in Canberra on November 12. From there, we flew back to Sydney, opening up the city’s new Entertainment Centre. The decibel level reached by the roar of the crowd as we took the stage was judged to be a record. Our loyal Aussie Duranies made The Guinness Book of Records.

  David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour played Sydney that same night, and afterward both bands partied together in David’s hotel suite. On drums with Bowie was Tony Thompson, “Theodore” from Chic. I told Tony that I would love to work with him one day. Tony nodded sagely. “I would like that very much, my good man. That would be smoking.”

  In Melbourne, our old friend and media ally Molly Meldrum threw us a party at his house in the suburb of Richmond; it was filled to the ceiling with Egyptian artifacts and rock and roll memorabilia. On the wall of the kitchen was a signed copy of The White Album: “To Molly, love John and Yoko.” Molly claims to have been the first to break the story of the Beatles splitting up and that John and Yoko had even told him before the rest of the band.

  On the record player was a song that caught our collective ear.

  I lifted the disc off the turntable. It was a prerelease copy of INXS’s new single, called provocatively “Original Sin.”

  The credits on the label read “Produced by Nile Rodgers. Engineered by Jason Corsaro.” Now this is how I would like to hear our sound moving forward. And we were all equally excited by it, playing it over and over again.

  We all felt there was more to be gotten out of “The Reflex” than the version we had submitted to the album, and that the song had potential to be a big hit.

  What if we were to ask Nile to do a remix of “The Reflex”?

  Molly’s memory of that night is that we got Nile on the phone in New York right there and then although we don’t remember it quite that way.

  By December we were back in the United Kingdom.

  • • •

  Having been away for most of the year, we were a little uncertain how we’d be received. We needn’t have worried. The December tour was phenomenal. Tickets were like gold dust. We played two gigs at Birmingham’s brand-new National Exhibition Centre (NEC) Arena and five nights in Wembley Arena.

  Janine Andrews and I did reconnect over the Christmas holidays. We both wanted a romantic experience, having both been through the mill in our own ways—different but similar. Each had a yearning to settle. Again, it wasn’t perfect but it was perfect for right then. After all the cosmopolitan adventure, I appreciated her Brummie accent and attitude. She exuded glamour with her long blond hair and beloved fur coat, but underneath it all she was an down-to-earth Brummie homegirl.

  46 Exploitation Time

  It was 1984, and it was exploitation time. We were the biggest band
on the planet. The momentum was powerful, unstoppable, and in the Republic of Durania the focus, as the New Year arrived, was on how we, they, everybody could make the most out of our meteoric success.

  Even though Seven and the Ragged Tiger had not checked all the boxes that Rio had checked, and we were not all completely satisfied with it musically, the band was getting bigger and bigger regardless. “New Moon on Monday” was the current single, but to half the fans, that wasn’t relevant, because reissues were now coming out, meaning that new fans who got turned on to us only at the time of Rio were going back and getting the debut album.

  After a two-day video shoot in Paris for a long-form 12-inch video version of “New Moon on Monday,” the tour started up again in Japan. Freezing cold temperatures, chaotic and often snowbound. It was hard to get around.

  The venues on this tour were considerably bigger than on the previous tour and included the Budokan indoor arena in Tokyo, usually home to martial arts championships—the Madison Square Garden of Japan. I knew it from the many live albums that had been recorded there, most famously Bob Dylan at Budokan.

  That was a big deal.

  The shows were nuts. In Fukuoka for a Sunday-afternoon matinee gig, the roadies used brooms to continually sweep the stage, vainly trying to keep it clear of cuddly toys, flowers, bouquets, and other gifts that were being showered on us by the crowd.

  I had another altercation with an inanimate object on that Japanese tour. Drugs were out in Japan. The penalties for getting caught with any illegal substances were just too severe, so it was all drinking, and that meant things could get violent. I took my room apart after that show in Fukuoka.

  Why was I so crazy? As much as anything, it was due to lack of sleep. The daily workload of press interviews, photo sessions, and generally being a superstar on four hours’ sleep was taking its toll.

  One place where the energy level was not lacking was onstage. For those two hours every night, we amped our performances up to the max (even when we were wading through six inches of cuddly toys). It was our way of pushing back against that teenybop thing that was threatening to envelop us. Whenever we walked out onto the stage now, we had something to prove: that we were not who they thought we were, that we were louder, angrier, more aggressive, and darker than they could possibly allow themselves to imagine.