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

by John Taylor

  Seven and the Ragged Tiger is a beautifully textured record, but it didn’t hit you viscerally in the way the earlier albums had, so live shows became an opportunity to compensate for that. We were playing fantastically well, in spite of the drugs and the hangovers. The guitars got louder. The tempos got faster. I was wearing my bass lower on my hips, fucking the audience hard, harder than the virgins out there would have ever been able to handle.

  Offstage, Janine and I were now officially a couple, and she would come out onto the tour whenever she could. The relationship wasn’t the calming influence I had hoped it would be, however. It was often tempestuous, and more hotel furniture was smashed. The whole scene was just too fucked-up to try to establish some idea of happy, homespun marital perfection.

  That didn’t stop us trying. In a rare moment of peace, we got engaged.

  That ring would be on her finger for less than three months, which did not feel good.

  • • •

  Next stop was America, where everything had changed since we played MTV’s New Year’s party at the end of ’82. Both Rio and the reissued first album had gone platinum, and Seven and the Ragged Tiger was on its way up the charts.

  We had become superstars.

  We made the cover of Rolling Stone, with the heading “The Fab Five,” and the night the magazine came out on newsstands we played our first date at the Seattle Center Coliseum. It was our first headlining show in a US basketball arena—not a style of venue we were familiar with, close to British arenas like the NEC and Wembley but much, much bigger. Tiered sides that reached the roof, 110 feet in the air, and a floor in front of the stage reserved for general admission that, every night, was a heaving mass of teenage female bodies. Even before the lights went down, girls were being stretchered away and treated for panic attacks and dehydration.

  It was like that date in Brighton in the summer of ’81, when we got screamed at for the first time. But this time, it was 18,000 American teenagers, screaming, crying, losing themselves in a Duran-provoked frenzy. It was like somebody had given the entire audience drugs. We couldn’t hear the monitors. We couldn’t hear ourselves play.

  It was awesome, but it was also kind of awful. Scary. We were very, very lucky on that tour not to have any fatalities. Many nights we would have to stop playing, Simon pleading with the kids to move back, to relieve the pressure on the fans at the front who were being pushed up against the wooden barriers that had often been only haphazardly set up. There had been several well-publicized crowd disasters—The Who in Cincinnati, David Cassidy at White City—and we were all well aware of the potential for calamity. We would get extremely angry with management and local security if we felt safety issues weren’t being handled appropriately.

  Although we had gotten used to the mayhem and the mania that surrounded us, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, whenever we were on tour, that first date on the US tour in Seattle stunned us all over again.

  This was the tour we had been dreaming of back at the Rum Runner office, back when we were telling those record label reps, “We want to play Madison Square Garden by 1984.” And we did. But it had grown way, way beyond our control. Be careful what you pray for.

  • • •

  The madness was always a micron below the surface, kept at bay only by our shared sense of humor. We all knew to keep any anger, frustration, or fears we may have had away from the cameras, the journalists, and the microphones. Only Andy would make reference now and again to the sourness that he felt was beginning to creep into the experience, to the fact that we were not in control of our own destinies anymore, that we were rats in a gilded cage, subject to the whims and directives of the managers, agents, and corporate brand consultants.

  We were being sponsored by Coca-Cola.

  I crossed a line when I started getting high onstage. I had always remained sober for the duration of the show, as I wanted to give my best and did not want to compromise my talent so publicly. But now I couldn’t wait for the performances to end. I wanted to take back control of my life, and getting high felt like that—at least by giving control to the drug, I was taking it away from all these other forces that I felt I was being controlled by. I was anxious to get to the end of the main set, head for the backstage bathrooms, and snort up a hundred dollars’ worth of coke through a rolled-up hundred dollar bill. It felt so “big-time,” so “rock star.” And I would tell myself it gave me the capacity to absorb all the incredible energy that the audience was hurling at me. I WAS A MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Or so it seemed.

  Once we were done with our encores, I was really ready to let rip. Show me the way to that hotel party suite, and not just after the special shows—weekend shows, big cities—but every night, after every show. Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta.

  • • •

  When we got to New York, we flew out all of our parents. My mom had never been on a plane before, nor out of the country, and had to get a passport. We put them up in the band’s hotel. They went around as if they were a band themselves on that trip. They went up the Empire State Building together. They rented two station wagons and drove to Disney World in Florida together. They went everywhere together.

  It was the most profound experience my parents had in their later years. They never stopped talking about it. We were fortunate to be able to give our parents that kind of gift.

  We had committed originally to a six-week run across the continent, but the offers just kept pouring in. It’s amazing how quickly the novelty of a basketball dressing room will wear off—cold, antiseptic, institutional—but no one could say no. This was the moment of getting rich, and that was part of the plan too.

  Was it fun? Sometimes. It was dark and light at the same time. The tragedy of it for me, looking back today, was that by the time we got to the Garden, I had left the room. When that moment hit, instead of really taking it on board and appreciating the moment for what it really was, I was too busy making sure my roadie was scoring for me.

  So what is Madison Square Garden, the apex of fame, the place I had fantasized about in the suburbs of Birmingham, really like?

  MSG has the biggest ego of any venue in the world. From the moment we arrived in New York, every driver, every concierge, every shop assistant was referring to it: “You guys are at the Garden, right?” It was Garden this, Garden that. We had to really try to keep our feet on the ground in the run-up to the performance there.

  Selling out two nights at the Garden was an undeniable achievement; the band had come so far in so short a time. The dollars-per-head merchandising sales set a record, unbeaten for over a decade.

  On entering the building, we were conducted through a dizzying labyrinth of tunnels and corridors that form the backstage zone, where members of the New York unions slouched against the walls as we rushed past them, conveying a splendidly singular lack of enthusiasm. They couldn’t have given a rat’s ass.

  There was also a curious sense of menace. I never felt more like a pawn in someone else’s game than backstage at the Garden that first night, because the music business was there in person, wearing expensive suits and flashing cigars and letting us know that they had a lot of money invested in this and they really couldn’t afford for us to fuck it up for them.

  I had never been happier for the lights to go down, so I could get out and do my job. Stepping out onto that stage that first time, it was impossible not to be awed by the size. It was the height above all else. The seats were stacked tier upon tier to the height of a skyscraper, accommodating 20,000 fans.

  Nile Rodgers joined us onstage for an encore of “Good Times.” Afterward, we had a long meet-and-greet line in one of the Garden’s many corridors. Nile was keen to introduce us to a girl singer he was working with. She was tiny and didn’t seem to give two fucks about me. That was the most vivid impression I had about meeting Madonna.

  47 The Remix

  I first heard Nile’s remix of “The Reflex” in Roanoke, Virginia, at a hotel dayroom between sou
nd check and show, when Paul Berrow handed me the phone for a listen. He was ecstatic, could barely contain himself. “We’ve got ourselves a monster bloody hit here, John. I can feel it in my bones.”

  The moment I heard the opening bars, I had to agree. Nile had created something extraordinary, beyond our wildest imaginings.

  But our label, Capitol, did not get it at all. They did not want to release it. Paul would have to go and work on them, guns blazing.

  I argued that the video should be of our live show. I wanted to put aside all the conceptual filmmaking for a moment and show what a great live band we had become. But with style. With Russell Mulcahy directing.

  Any interview we did usually started out, “So you guys are a video band, right? That’s what you do, make videos?”

  After months spent writing and recording, months on the road fine-tuning our live set, people outside the organization thought our priority was the video. The one aspect of what we did that we had not seized complete control of. It was a sign of how big the music video phenomenon was getting, now MTV was coast-to-coast.

  And we were getting sick of it.

  The one aspect of our video story that we could have capitalized on, but didn’t, was the Grammy Awards nominations we received that year. It was the first year the Grammys recognized video, with awards for both short- and long-form videos. We were nominated in both categories. And the night of our Pittsburgh show, we won. Both.

  We watched the ceremony on the television in the dressing room, fuming. We should have been there.

  A few days later, Russell Mulcahy and his crew flew in to Toronto, where we shot the video for “The Reflex” over two days on the stage at Maple Leaf Gardens.

  Looking at the schedule for the year, I find it extraordinary that within ten days of the US tour staggering to a close at the San Diego Sports Arena, we were back at the good old BBC filming an appearance on Top of the Pops.

  Mike Berrow was there, and he had been given the unenviable task of raising with me a subject he knew would not be met with a great deal of enthusiasm.

  “Obviously, there is going to be no new album this year, we know that, John. Everybody understands that. And that is absolutely fine. What they would like, though, is to put out a live album . . . with one new song. That will get us through ’til Christmas. . . .”

  Boy, and how! The Arena project would be the biggest merchandising vehicle any band had ever undertaken, and our biggest-selling album of all time.

  But first, we had to get that one new song cut.

  • • •

  The previous year in Sydney, I had spent a lot of my downtime at Russell’s marinaside apartment, which he shared with his boyfriend, Gerry, getting high and playing Trivial Pursuit.

  Russell, Gerry, and I would meet in the evening at La Strada for an Italian dinner that would inevitably get cut short by a line or two. Then we would take the party back to the harbor flat.

  Russell had optioned William Burroughs’s book The Wild Boys for a potential full-length feature film. I had not read the book, a homosexual fantasy about the “Wild Boys” who continued the human race by artificial insemination and gave birth to “a whole generation . . . that had never seen a woman’s face nor heard a woman’s voice.”

  Quite anti-Oedipus, and not my style at all. But I liked the sound of a Burroughsian project, and Simon felt the same way. One particularly convivial evening, we both got excited and insisted to Russell that we should be allowed to compose the title song for his movie.

  Talking to Russell in Toronto, it was clear he had invested a lot of time and energy in the Wild Boys project. Apart from the script, he had developed the visual ideas and special effects. He was dying to get started. But the film had failed to get off the ground.

  That was no reason we couldn’t write the song.

  It made perfect sense to invite Nile Rodgers to London to help us work on this new project. We met up at Nomis rehearsal studios in west London and started hammering out some ideas. Either the room had gotten smaller or we had gotten bigger, but it was a tight squeeze getting all those egos into the space. Nile, thankfully, was the perfect producer for this moment. None of us had a problem with him being in charge, as we all had equal respect for him, and he was up to the task.

  We wrote the basics of two songs in two days. The first was called “Don’t Look Back,” the second, “Wild Boys.” There was no doubt in Nile’s mind which was the song with the most potential, so we moved over to Maison Rouge studios in Fulham to lay down the basic tracks.

  “Wild Boys” was as potent and driving a track as we had come up with yet. Once again, Nile was working his Synclavier magic, editing the groove, retuning Simon’s vocals to create something otherworldly, taking the song we had written to another level.

  It felt like a big boys’ song.

  It’s not easy producing a band like Duran, all strong musical personalities with something to say. Our best producers (Nile, Colin Thurston, Alex Sadkin, and, decades later, Mark Ronson) all discover eventually that each and every one of us needs to be heard if we are to make our songs—three and a half minute pop singles, yes, but also symphonic—really work.

  The recording of “Wild Boys,” made in July 1984, is a perfect example. It’s possibly a little incongruous, plopped on the end of side one of the Arena live album, but it does advance the band’s sound, the British pop dance style we had developed over the first three albums.

  “Wild Boys” had to be more than just a hit. It had to be an event. We already had a concert film in the can, shot mostly in Oakland, and Paul’s newest obsession was to turn it into a feature-length movie that could be shown in theaters. I’m not sure why, but it seems as though there comes a point in every great music-manager’s career when he begins to dream of Hollywood. It had happened to Brian Epstein, Colonel Tom, and Malcolm McLaren, and now it was happening to Paul Berrow. We had been shown test footage of the live material one morning at the Odeon Leicester Square. We kind-of-sort-of agreed to call the concert film either As the Lights Go Down or Burning Bright. We were certain we wanted to call the album Arena.

  Next would be the ten-minute extended Wild Boys video, which would benefit from all the ideas and fantastical characterizations Russell had developed. With the movie of Wild Boys on ice, Russell wasn’t about to waste the work he had done. He just had to find a way to drop in his five pop protégées. I took inspiration for my cameo from Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who had himself crucified on the back of a Volkswagen in a piece of performance art entitled “Trans-fixed.” Simon’s love of water got him into a lot of trouble when the windmill to which he had been strapped (what’s with all this sadomasochism?) got stuck while he was underwater. When the windmill was finally freed, and a gasping Simon was brought to the surface, the cameras were still rolling. It made for scintillating viewing.

  The Wild Boys video, which had the largest budget of any music video to date, felt at the time like a massive exercise in self-indulgence, as if the organization—and management in particular for approving such a crazy expenditure—had gotten way out of control. But today, I do actually think it was justified. Wild Boys was more than just a video, it was an amalgamation of musical, music video, and cutting-edge remix, with a production design that rivaled any Hollywood movie. And besides, we had to fight back against one man who was chasing our tails and was hungry to take the video-king crown off us: Michael Jackson.

  But it was way out of control and spoke volumes about where the Duran Duran organization—and I personally—was going.

  48 Megalomania at the Wheel

  On July 27, 1984, Roger and his girlfriend of three years, Giovanna Cantone, got married.

  Roger chartered a 727 jet and flew band, crew, and parents down to southern Italy for the wedding.

  We were that tight. A happily dysfunctional family.

  After the ceremony at the Capodimonte basilica—a photo op if ever there was one—we embarked on a celebratory boat ride around the
Bay of Naples. My dad got violently ill on the salmon mousse.

  While Roger and Giovanna honeymooned on the Nile, the rest of the guys wisely took a vacation. But I had become so addicted to the ride that the last thing I wanted was time off. The party had become the work and the work had become the party. They were totally indistinguishable, and it was a formula that was working for me.

  I had gotten used to traveling at a stratospheric pace, being at the center of this tremendous energy, and far from wanting to escape it, even for a moment, I never wanted it to end. I had no idea what to do with free time. Sitting in the living room of my newly purchased Knightsbridge house and “watching the telly” or “having friends over for dinner” was too banal a reality for me to contemplate. Plus, there was a twenty-four-hour fan encampment outside the house, so whatever time I got home at night or, worse, in the early hours of the morning, I would be greeted by excitable fans squealing and snapping their cameras.

  Whatever time I woke up, the first thing I would hear would be the chatter of the fans outside. I would crawl stealthily to the window and peek through the curtains, trying to get a sense of how many there were and what I was in for, without them seeing that I was up.

  If they didn’t know I was awake yet, I might at least be able to run a bath and get dressed without having to hear “Save a Prayer for me now, John” drifting up from the street. Was this their idea of a Romeo and Juliet moment?

  Fans were coming from all over the world, so the noise from the cobblestone street was a multilingual one. Numbers ranged from six to thirty at any given time. Some of the kids I was on first-name terms with. For some, it might be their first time at the house.