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

by John Taylor

  When that was the case, there was a strange ritualistic moment that would play out when the other fans, the familiars, would offer the new girl forward to me as if she was a sacrificial virgin.

  “It’s her first time, John. Be gentle with her! Can she have a photograph? Sign her album for her; she’s too shy to ask.”

  At which point the virgin might say, “Is true! I am shy. But I love you, John!”

  For the most part, they were great kids, and I am still in touch with some of them now. But I didn’t like it when one of them had gone through my trash and come out with some journaling, some writing that I had been doing in an attempt to process my feelings. This girl then became obsessively worried about my state of mind. I was more concerned about hers.

  It was a truce though, generally. The fans would try to contain their excitement before midday, especially if I had been witnessed coming home around dawn. As the day went on, the excitement and the noise would grow, and I knew that sooner or later I would have to make an appearance, whether I had plans to leave the house or not.

  Similar scenes were taking place across London: in Little Venice, chez Taylor; in Chelsea, chez Rhodes; and in Putney, chez Le Bon. My situation was not unique.

  • • •

  I went with Janine to a party Michael Caine was having at Langan’s in honor of that year’s Wimbledon tennis final, and I recognized Cubby Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, sitting at a table.

  Janine introduced me and we got to chatting.

  I said, “When are you going to have a decent theme song again?”

  He said, “Well, do you want to write the next one?”

  I said, “Absolutely.”

  When I got home, I called the guys, told them, “I think we have a crack at the next Bond film.”

  I went to Cubby’s office on South Audley Street in Mayfair the following afternoon. From behind a huge desk, Cubby called John Barry, the composer who wrote the James Bond scores, at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island.

  John Barry was an idol of mine and I was excited to talk to him. He had a deep, drawling Yorkshire accent. “Hello, Cubby.”

  Cubby said, “John, I want you to meet John Taylor from Duran Duran; he’s here in the room with me.”

  “Hello, John.”

  “Hi.”

  “John, I want you to work with Duran on this new film.”

  “Uh-huh. All right . . .”

  John didn’t sound particularly overjoyed, but Cubby was firm about it. “I want you to make this work, John.”

  John and I made a tentative date to meet the following week in Manhattan.

  But it still wasn’t enough. I wanted more. Megalomania was at the wheel.

  • • •

  I had wanted to do a side project since Bebe Buell was going to sing “Get It On.” Nick had had tremendous success with Kajagoogoo, and Andy and I now started talking seriously about forming a breakaway faction, another band. Something “funkier and more organic” than Duran. Louder guitars.

  In Paris for a press and promo trip, we booked some studio time on the Sunday to get things going. But Saturday turned into a hard-core all-nighter.

  I felt like I was his best man all over again when Andy woke me at 6:00 P.M.

  “What you doing, man? You got to get up. We’ve got this fucking studio time booked!”

  “Oh God, do we have to?”

  “You started this thing, now come on, man, get your fucking arse down to the studio. I’m waiting.”

  Why did I say I’d do this? What was I thinking?

  But, as usual, once we started making music, things fell into place, making sense. We came out of the studio at 4:00 in the morning with a cassette and two ideas, one of them the main groove of what would become the first Power Station single, “Some Like It Hot.”

  49 Shelter and Control on West Fifty-Third Street

  In July, a pink envelope arrived in the post at my parents’ home, with a return address delicately embossed in silver deco type: “Mr. and Mrs. William Friedman Jr., Woodland Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa.”

  Inside, on a pink-and-silver card, Mr. and Mrs. Friedman requested the presence of my parents at the wedding reception of their daughter Julie Anne and Mr. Nick Rhodes.

  Holy shit! Now Nick was getting married? I thought we were married!

  Since having met Nick out on the water the day after our Greek Theatre gig in Los Angeles, Julie Anne had rarely left his side.

  Their wedding, at the Savoy, was one of the defining pop culture moments of the 1980s, perhaps the most divinely decadent event of a divinely decadent decade.

  The press had a field day.

  Groom wears more makeup than bride!

  Live pink flamingos!

  Exclusive photos by Norman Parkinson!

  It was a fantastic night.

  Marriages and honeymoons do presume a certain hiatus, but not for me. I followed the master-tape trail to New York and the Power Station studio, where Jason Corsaro, Nile’s engineer on “The Reflex,” was sorting through the live recordings made on the US tour that would become Arena. My justification for being there was that at least one band member should be at the desk, making sure that the mix was right.

  And the bass was loud enough.

  The Power Station, after which Andy and I would name our new band, was a disused Con Edison plant in Hell’s Kitchen on West Fifty-Third Street that had been turned into a recording studio. I was soon spending all my waking hours there, completely bewitched by the scene. Chic had made all of their records there. Bruce Springsteen recorded Born in the U.S.A. there. The Power Station was where it was at, the absolute acme of the recording industry in 1984.

  Dylan was down the hall, but I never saw him. Mick Jagger was much more approachable, working on his first solo album away from the Rolling Stones. He would come up and check us out, and he was happy for me to go into his studio to listen to what he was doing.

  Bryan Ferry was mixing his Boys and Girls album there, but I hadn’t seen him because we were working different shifts. I bumped into him as I came out of the elevator at the Carlyle hotel one evening around seven. I was heading out as he was coming in.

  I loved the giant speakers recording studios had back then, which could be cranked up so loud that any listener would be pinned to the wall. I have always enjoyed making music at fuck-off levels of volume and have not appreciated the move into the era of the workstation, where recording studios use Yamaha NS10s not much bigger than an iPhone. I get cranky about it today in our studio: “Can’t we get it any louder? I can listen to it this loud at home!”

  The Power Station had the best sound system of all. Urei speakers, monsters the size of a double bed.

  Plus, I’d never seen more drugs in my life. The access to cocaine was unlimited.

  It wasn’t like the recording of Rio or Ragged Tiger or the first album, where I had been out of the picture for weeks while Nick and Andy pondered their next overdubs. This time, it was me at the desk, and I relished that. There was nowhere I would rather be than in the safety and security of the studio, poised between shelter and control, totally coked out of my brain.

  I didn’t actually listen to the finished album all the way through until twenty-five years later, in 2011. Whenever we finish an album, I do not want to listen to it. I can’t. I need time to get perspective on it—although, even by my standards, twenty-five years is excessive.

  What struck me about it when I did finally listen to it is how low in the mix the audience is, considering how loud they were. There is a sense of detachment between the band and the audience. It’s almost like we are in different dimensions. The band sounds really tight, terrific in fact, and you can tell that there is an audience, a big audience, but they are way, way over there. On some live albums, you can hear an audience member going, “Nick!” or “Play ‘The Chauffeur’!” but there’s nothing like that on Arena. It’s distant. There’s a sense of us wanting to play down the teeny, screamy thing.
We’re trying to be grown-ups.

  Was the bass loud enough? Definitely.

  50 Nouveau Nous

  The only way any of us can clearly remember the date and day we began work on “A View to a Kill” with John Barry is because it was Beaujolais Nouveau Day, which always falls on the third Thursday in November.

  The plan was to work on the top floor of my Ennismore Mews house, where I had installed a white grand piano à la Lennon. We met at the pub at the end of the street at lunchtime and drank the fresh French grapes.

  By five o’clock, we were all quite satisfied that we had the beginnings of a song. At least the first verse. The rest of the track would be built at Maison Rouge, now under siege as every fan in the country knew we were working there.

  It wasn’t an easy song to write.

  Nick and John Barry didn’t click. They found it hard just being in the same room. They were both stubborn and had very specific visions of how things should get done. I was caught in the crossfire: friend to Nick, adjutant to John. Many times I received late-night phone calls from John, admonishing me to “sort out this bloody bullshit.” It was a negotiation, and I did what was required in order to get my dream realized. I did not want the Bond collaboration to fall apart.

  But how could I keep both Nick and John on the field?

  The answer came in the form of Bernard Edwards.

  Bernard (“Nard” to his friends) was Nile’s partner in Chic, and it was his playing on the bass guitar that had inspired me to play bass in the first place. Tony Thompson, who was now on board with Andy and me in the Power Station, insisted that he was the man who should produce the project. Meeting him at the Le Parker Meridien in New York City was a trip; the man was such an influence, an icon, but he was never grandiose.

  We knew enough about Bernard to know that he could bring the Duran/Bond project together (Nile had a previous commitment that kept him from doing the job, a missed opportunity he regrets to this day). Bernard was a firm hand at the tiller, which we needed because the weather was rough.

  We got the band’s parts recorded eventually. The tapes went back to New York for mixing, along with John Barry’s orchestral arrangements, recorded in London, which were then layered on top to create the rich, sumptuous textures that were obligatory for a James Bond title song.

  I could not have been happier with the end result. I thought it was our best record so far, on every level.

  51 Guilt Edge

  In November, Simon got a call from Bob Geldof: “Have you seen this shite about Ethiopia? We’ve got to do something.”

  When Simon relayed Bob’s idea back to us, I wasn’t sure at first, but then I hadn’t had Bob’s voice ranting in my ear like Simon had. Simon had no doubt that the Band Aid project was something we had to be involved in.

  It was Saturday night in Dortmund, and we were doing some schlocky TV show, lip-synching to “Wild Boys.” Spandau Ballet were there, so was Billy Idol and the Thompson Twins, and we were all on the same plane back to London the next day, having all been up all night, again, of course.

  At the airport, the Spands were like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got to do that thing of Geldof’s too.”

  We came off the plane and got driven straight to the studio.

  It was a mob scene; kids, film cameras, journalists everywhere. Suddenly it was like, “Oh, wow, this is big,” and of course, it was. The biggest deal in a year of very big deals.

  Who was there? Everyone. Sting. U2. Phil Collins. Boy George. George Michael. Paul Young. Status Quo and Kool and the Gang. A real hotchpotch of talent.

  Sting and I both played bass.

  Trevor Horn, the mastermind behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was in charge. It was his studio. But it was Bob running around with the lyrics to the song he had written with Midge Ure, called “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” saying, “OK, Charlie,”—to Simon—“we are going to need you for this line, and George! George, we are going to need you for this one.”

  After Bono had nailed his line, Trevor flicked the studio intercom on and said, “That one’s for the stadiums.”

  We all knew the song would go to number 1.

  What we didn’t know was how profoundly that song would affect the rest of the decade.

  People talk about the eighties as being a decadent, glamorous, fashion-conscious time, and in 1984, it certainly seemed that way. There was no reason to think the party couldn’t go on forever.

  But the eighties is a decade of two halves. Things that you could get away with in 1984, you could not get away with twelve months later. There was about to be an immense sea change in the culture, and the shift was started by Bob Geldof that cold December day.

  • • •

  Christmas for Duran fans worldwide came by way of a tremendous assault on their pocket money, thanks to the myriad deals Paul and Michael had made with merchandising companies. In addition to the autumn releases of musical product—the Arena album, the “Wild Boys” single in five different picture sleeves (one for each band member), and a video EP—there was also a full-length documentary video of the US tour and three books: Duran Duran: The Book of Words, Arena: The Book, and the Sing Blue Silver tour book with photos by Denis O’Regan.

  There was also a plethora of T-shirts—again, one for each band member—sweatshirts, scarves, headbands, group posters, individual band member posters, seven different packs of color photos, postcards, an attaché case, a board game, makeup bags, shower bags, batteries, notebooks, writing paper, ring binders, pencil cases, schoolbags, shopping bags—and even Christmas cards.

  I always looked forward to seeing the folks at Christmas. I never got over how Christmas felt at Simon Road. It was a chance to connect with the family privately. But I was under a lot of stress, and the idea of driving up to Birmingham, alone, was not all that appealing. For once, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to step out of the fame bubble, if I really wanted the reality check that an old-style family Christmas would inevitably give me.

  But by the time Christmas Day itself actually rolled around, I was looking forward to taking some time out from my Duran persona.

  Mom and Dad were so excited to see me, of course, but what had really blown their minds, and what they wanted to show me the moment I stepped out of the car, was four giant sacks of mail that the Post Office had delivered on Christmas Eve.

  Fan mail. Love letters. Pleading. Begging. Some weird. Some sexy. Who knew? Where could I begin?

  It was exhausting. I was struck by the idea that ten thousand people wanted to have a relationship with me and I could barely have a relationship with myself.

  And who were these two guardians of the mail sacks? They looked very like Mom and Dad. But they sounded like two fans who had somehow found their way into the house and inhabited my parents’ shells. Invasion of the Parent Snatchers! Help!

  The mayhem, the drugs, the guilt.

  I just couldn’t take it.

  I short-circuited.

  I emptied all the sacks in a rageful frenzy, dumping the contents violently on the floor, scattering the letters and cards all over the garage, frothing at the mouth, tearing up the envelopes unopened.

  My parents watched the rampage, their mouths agape.

  “Don’t you get it, you two? I don’t fucking care about any of this!”

  Confused.

  Crazy.

  Got to move.

  Got to get out.

  After a rather fretful turkey dinner, I drove off back to London and booked a plane ticket to New York for the next day.

  Hotel. Room service. Cocktail. A line or two.

  That’s better. That’s normal.

  Charlie was in New York too. On New Year’s Eve, at that year’s MTV ball, we jump onstage with a new band from Liverpool, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and sing along with one of the year’s biggest anthems, “Relax.”

  Relax? What a concept.

  52 The Wheel World

  In the autumn of ’84 I found myself on a plane with Robert
Palmer. We never knew when we were next going to run into each other, or on what continent it might be, but whenever we did, we always connected.

  I told him about the Power Station project Andy and I were working on with Tony and Bernard from Chic.

  “We’re looking for different singers to front the songs,” I said.

  At that moment, the plan was for us to provide a house band, like Motown’s Funk Brothers or the Stax house band, the MGs, to support a revolving cast of singers; men and women, young and old.

  Robert was enthusiastic and wanted to hear what we had been working on. I gave him a cassette tape of one of the songs we had just recorded at Maison Rouge. He popped it into his Walkman there and then, and after four or five listens, as the announcement to buckle up for landing played through the intercom, he handed me a tatty piece of paper, on which he had scribbled a rough lyric about our relationship:

  Airmail, cassettes, postcards, telex

  Drop me a line, be my grapevine

  I’m always trying to reach you

  Can’t get through

  Our communication

  Depends on me and you

  Got to stay in touch

  Even though we’re on the move

  Keep your lines open

  Say, what’s new?

  I loved it.

  We got Robert over to the Power Station for our next scheduled recording session. Tony vaguely knew who Robert was, but was skeptical. Bernard had even less of an idea. Robert wasn’t from their musical universe.

  What Robert was, of course, was one of the greatest blue-eyed soul singers of all time. When he stepped up to the mic, his manner altered perceptibly. He took on a different persona, changing from a slightly fey, ironically minded English gent who clearly thought about and spent too much on bespoke clothing and personal grooming products into an all-business vocalist.