Post by Taylorholic78 on Aug 1, 2005 13:30:03 GMT -5
observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1083285,00.html
In their own words
Duran Duran reveal all: the drugs, the models, the highs, the lows and the comeback
Michael Odell
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer
'When we formed,' says Nick Rhodes, 'we decided we'd be playing Madison Square Garden within two years.'
For a bunch of blokes working behind the bar in a Birmingham nightclub, it was a lofty ambition. But Duran Duran made the New York venue of legends within four years of donning their girlfriends' make-up and fusing glam-rock with punk and funk.
By the time 'Hungry Like the Wolf' became a global hit in 1983, they were the right boys in the right shade of rouge at the right time: MTV was just starting, asserting the primacy of 'look' over technique. Duran Duran obliged by stuffing their videos with chicks, beaches, cocktails and yachts. After that, it was as if they couldn't hear the director screaming 'Cut!': They ordered supermodels over the phone, played Live Aid, formed rival bands, made Princess Di even more doe-eyed, went crazy, raised chickens, bought a Picasso on credit, recorded Grandmaster Flash's 'White Lines' with a straight face and fell to pieces.
Now, amid an insatiable nostalgia for all things Eighties, Duran Duran's original line-up has re-formed for the first time since saying 'Cheerio' to one another backstage at Live Aid in 1985. After a box set of singles and a recent, frenzied British date, a new album and a reunion tour will follow. 'But first,' guitarist Andy Taylor points out, 'we had to see if we could sit around a table without vomiting on one another.'
'I see this as part two,' warns lead singer Simon Le Bon.
Hold Me, Pose Me (1978-1981)
Birmingham, 1978: Nigel Taylor and Nick Bates are school friends drinking at the Hole in the Wall pub. They discuss starting a band and decide a makeover is immediately necessary. Taylor begins using his middle name, John, and then persuades Bates to adopt the last name Rhodes. Together with friends Stephen Duffy and Simon Colley, they form a band briefly known as RAF. However, when John Taylor sees the 1968 psychedelic sci-fi movie Barbarella, he suggests the band name itself after Milo O'Shea's character, Duran Duran.
Stephen Duffy (original singer): I met John, who was then Nigel, at art school. He was completely Nigel then. We got together in Nigel's parents' house in Birmingham. I passed the audition, so then we got together over Nick's father's shop - Bates's Toy Corner. Above the shop was this storeroom with lots of dolls and things. Nick got his synthesiser out and John played the guitar. We had songs called things like 'Hold Me, Pose Me', which was what it said on the side of a doll box.
Nick Rhodes (keyboards): We were very much an art-school band. It was rhythm units, synthesizers, two bass players, John on guitar, and a clarinet and vocals.
Duffy: We used to wear strange old clothes from charity shops, quite nice 1950s fitted jackets. Nick was worried about the makeup. I said: 'Don't worry, Nick, in six months' time all men will look like this.' I was wrong - in six months only he looked like that.
Boy George (singer, Culture Club): I think it was Marilyn Manson who said Bush being elected was a bad day for humanity but a great day for art. It was the same with Margaret Thatcher in Britain. I hated the bitch, but in that sort of climate of misery and repression, people expressed themselves in an underground way.
Duffy: Nick wanted to be successful and famous, whatever it took - he said that once, and I didn't think I'd heard him right. I didn't think you said that sort of thing.
Duffy decides to leave the group, thinking they're too commercial. Simon Colley follows him. (Duffy later forms the Lilac Time and also has a solo hit, 'Kiss Me', as Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy.) Drummer Roger Taylor (none of the Taylors is related) joins and John takes up bass. Peter and Michael Berrow, the owners of Birmingham's Rum Runner club, give them use of an upstairs room to practise. Among their first songs is 'See Me, Repeat Me', which later becomes 'Rio'. They also have a chorus remnant that features the refrain 'Girls on film!' The two Taylors and Rhodes form the core. Singers and guitarists come and go. Finally, Andy Taylor answers an ad for a guitarist and travels down from his hometown, Newcastle. He cooks burgers in the Rum Runner. Meanwhile, Simon Le Bon, a first year drama student at Birmingham University, is recommended by his girlfriend, Fiona Kemp, a waitress at the Rum Runner. He turns up for the audition wearing pink leopard-skin pants, pointy boots, a suede jacket and sunglasses.
Andy Taylor (guitarist): My initial reaction was how out of touch I was dress-sense wise, but how shit they were at playing. But they had a hell of a lot of ambition... and the chorus to 'Girls on Film'.
Paul Berrow (Rum Runner owner and Duran Duran's first manager): My brother and I were importing all the new Giorgio Moroder-style records from New York. We'd been to Studio 54 and heard how dance music was changing. The Duran aesthetic was influenced by that.
Roger Taylor (drums): We rehearsed in the Rum Runner on Monday nights with a jazz-funk night going on in the next room. Somehow all that got into the music.
John Taylor (bass): In 1978, it was the year of 'disco sucks', and I felt I should be at a therapist saying, 'I have this guilty love of disco.' I thought Chic were fantastic. That's why I became a bass player.
Simon Le Bon (singer): The first day I turned up, Roger was outside the Rum Runner painting a wall. The band was a bit of a laugh at first. I didn't know I'd leave college and give my life to it.
The Berrows brothers make Duran Duran the Rum Runner house band and mortgage their house to buy them a support slot on a nationwide tour with Hazel O'Connor. It costs them £12,000. The band earns £10 a week. On the tour, EMI A&R man Dave Ambrose, who signed the Sex Pistols, sees Duran Duran and signs them for £42,000. Quickly, they record their debut album, Duran Duran. In the UK, success with 'Planet Earth' is immediate. 'Girls on Film' opens with the sound of Paul Berrows's Nikon camera. Le Bon thinks it's a powerful critique of the exploitation of women in advertising. He will be sorely misunderstood. By 1981 they are touring clubs in America. Rock America, a programming service for clubs and bars that feature video screens, is playing the long-form video for 'Girls on Film', and word is spreading.
Dave Ambrose: When I saw Simon Le Bon, I saw him as another Elvis Presley, although he was a little bit overweight.
Rob Hallett (agent): I became friends with John after getting the band's early shows. They went through this period of being famous but the money hadn't come in yet. So he used to stay at my flat in Kilburn. It was the hottest bachelor pad in London. John was the best looking man in Britain and got the most amazing girls. I hung round for the leftovers.
Doreen Dagostino (US national publicity manager, Capitol Records): They had no profile in America, but the 'Girls on Film' video gave them a little notoriety. Older writers were a little shocked by the ice cube on the girl's naked breast. But in the hip clubs people were like, 'Hey, it's art!'
Rhodes: Our first US date was on Long Island, at the Spit Club in 1981. Our publicist said, 'What do you wanna do?' I said, 'Go up the Empire State [Building] and meet Andy Warhol.' She called the next morning and said we're going up the Empire State and then going to Andy's studio. We're like, 'Whaaat?'
Dagostino: I rang Andy up at Interview magazine and said, 'This English band wants to meet you.' I might have mentioned one was in lipstick. Nick and Roger came, and Andy asked Nick if he shared his girlfriend's lipstick. After that, Nick and Andy became friends - you'd see them in the DJ booth at Studio 54.
Roger Taylor: The Warhol thing went over my head a bit. He actually wanted to do an album cover, and we were like, 'The Stones have done it... no, thanks.'
John Taylor: I was such a baby. At JFK airport I couldn't fill in the address bit on the immigration form. I put 'Holiday Inn, Long Island'. The guy said 'I guess if we need to find you, we'll put out an APB for a faggot with purple hair.'
Duranmania (1981-1985)
The band return to London and record their second album, Rio. In America, the Berrows and Ambrose sense that a newly launched cable network that airs music videos is the key to success. They fly the band to Sri Lanka to make videos for 'Save a Prayer' and 'Hungry Like the Wolf', and to Antigua to film 'Rio'.
Rhodes: The record company said, 'Do you wanna make a video to go with the song?' and we were like, 'What's a video?'
Le Bon: When you're 19 and someone says, 'Do you want to make a video on a yacht in the Carribean?' you don't say 'Hmmm, what kind of statement are we supposed to be making here?' It was, 'Girls, boats - yes, please!'
John Taylor : It seemed like such a stupid idea. But Simon was a drama student, so he pulled it off.
Roger Taylor: Some of the crew were annoying the elephants, trying to imitate their calls. I'm riding on one when it gets startled by all the noise and takes off down the river with me hanging on for my life.
Nick Rhodes: I refused to go to Sri Lanka before Rio was absolutely finished. The other four went, and I stayed up all night at Air Studios in London. I was wearing a leather outfit and went straight to the airport from the studio. After 16 hours in my leather suit, I get off the plane into a wall of heat. I stagger around the airport saying, 'Where's the limo?' and this guy takes me to a flatbed truck. I'm thinking, '20 minutes to the hotel'. It was five hours on a dust track to the beach location.
In 1982, Duran tour the US again, this time supporting Blondie. They meet Chic guitarist Nile Rogers for the first time and bond 'in the bathroom'. Thanks in large measure to the round-the-clock support of MTV, by February 1982 'Hungry Like the Wolf' is number three on the US charts.
Les Garland (senior executive vice president, MTV): We had our weekly meeting to hear new music on Tuesdays. Back then it was a fledgling industry: We'd get maybe 10 videos a week, and everyone would gather and sit through them all. I remember our director of talent and artist relations came running in and said, 'You have got to see this video that's come in.' Duran Duran were getting zero radio airplay at the time, and MTV wanted to break new music. 'Hungry Like the Wolf' was the greatest video I'd ever seen.
Rhodes: Our first US gigs were crazy and culty. But when we came back after 'Hungry' was a hit, it was mayhem. It was Beatlemania. We were doing a signing of the 'Girls on Film' video at a store in Times Square. We couldn't get out of the store, the cops sealed off the streets. It was scary.
Le Bon: We'd become one of the biggest bands in the world and then went back to these tiny apartments or bedrooms in mum and dad's house in Birmingham. We hadn't had time to spend any money, to buy a house...
Rhodes: I went back to my bedroom at my parents' house. My mum calls up and says, 'There's a Michael on the phone...' It was Michael Jackson. We'd been leading this crazy life in America with David Bowie and Warhol, and there'd been some talk at some party about working with Michael Jackson. Then he calls me at my mum and dad's in Birmingham. I thought it was one of the crew winding me up, and I'm going, 'Sure, Michael...'
Andy Taylor: I can remember my first check for £1 million. I was only 20. Fifty per cent went to Mrs. Thatcher, but still...
In America, the boys are feted: ET star Drew Barrymore attends their shows; tennis ace Vitas Gerulaitis invites them 'to the bathroom'. In England, their fame is such that even Princess Diana is a fan.
Le Bon: The Di thing was a bit naff. It was something your mum and dad liked, so there was a part of me that bristled at it. Every time we opened the dressing-room door, there she bloody was - under the table trying to get an autograph. It was like, 'Can't your husband keep you under control?'
Boy George: Duran Duran were selling a lifestyle: the yachts, the girls. In spite of their looks, Duran were very straight. It was a time when wearing a bit of make-up could get you girls. Culture Club would get girls and their mums. Duran got everyone.
Rob Hallett: On the first Japanese tour in Nagoya the girl fans used to leave the venue early and wait for the band in taxis. The band got in a car and left. Suddenly there's 20 or 30 taxis chasing us through the streets. I remember the band starting singing Joan Jett's 'I love rock'n'roll!'. They loved it...
By 1983, Duran Duran have enjoyed Top 20 US hits with 'Hungry Like the Wolf' and 'Rio'. However, fame leaves them creatively bereft. Now millionaires, they are in tax exile from the U.K. and decide to record their third album abroad. Sessions for Seven and the Ragged Tiger begin in a French chateau. But John Taylor gets bored and spends his time getting drunk in Cannes. So they head for Air Studios in Montserrat, but producer George Martin's swimming pool proves too distracting. So they head for Australia, where a tour looms. But alas, there are bars and girls in Australia, too...
Rhodes: There were Spinal Tap moments. I bought a Picasso on AmEx in the South of France. Just a little one, but still.
Denis O'Regan (official band photographer): Nick published an art book entitled Interference. It was Polaroids of static on TVs - brilliant if you can get away with that. I wasn't that impressed.
John Taylor: I was going into Cannes and having a party every night. As a bass player time-management is a problem, because your work is done in a matter of days.
Rhodes: If we needed John to do a bass part, we'd just ring a bar and ask for him.
Le Bon: I didn't even think Seven and the Ragged Tiger was a particularly good title. The seven were us and our two managers. The ragged tiger was supposed to be 'luck'.
Rhodes: That title... I don't know how I ever let that through. I still just call it the third album.
The Power Station, Yachts and Madness (1984-1985)
The remix of 'The Reflex,' produced by Chic's Nile Rogers, becomes a number 1 US hit. Rogers almost repeats the feat with 'Wild Boys' (number 2), and then his Chic partner Bernard Edwards tops the charts with the James Bond theme 'A View to a Kill'. The band is at its creative and commercial apex.
Naturally, John and Andy Taylor are dissatisfied with Duran Duran's direction. John is dating Bebe Buell, Liv Tyler's mother. He decides to remake T. Rex's 'Get It On' with Buell on vocals. However, before recording, the pair have a falling-out. Robert Palmer steps in for Buell. The Power Station is born. Not to be outdone, Rhodes and Le Bon take up residence at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and form Arcadia, whose self-titled album features guest spots from Sting, Grace Jones and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, among others. Rhodes decides they will have an 'artist in residence' at their French studio. Fumes from oil paints threaten millions of dollars of recording equipment, but they proceed nonetheless. Roger Taylor can't decide his allegiance and plays on both projects.
Rhodes: Arcadia and the Power Station were commercial suicide... but we've always been good at that.
Paul Berrow: After a couple of years of that 'All for one and one for all!' mentality, wives and girlfriends come along. At first it was military - videos, documentary, tour, album, tour - but what do you do when you get there? Get a girlfriend - and a demanding one almost certainly. And then the whole entity changes. The band comes together just for work and goes away again to new sets of friends. There is conflict among the band of merry men.
Denis O'Regan: I remember Nick and John having a discussion over which of them had the highest-ever hotel bill. One of them had run up a $30,000 bill - and this was 15 years ago, an outrageous amount.
Boy George: I lived next door to John Taylor in New York. A friend and I would find John's girlfriend crying in the hallway. We'd bring her in and give her a cup of tea and get all the gossip. John's was the most rock and roll place I'd ever seen.
John Taylor: The Carlyle Hotel was getting a little expensive, so I bought a place on the 27th floor of the Park Belvedere on Central Park West. Boy George was next door. Inside it was black lacquer and all about the Eighties: a beautiful place to go mad! We both lost parts of our minds on that 27th floor. Fame was having its way with us. There was a courier service that would bike round bags of pot with little flags of the country it came from on the sachet. At Christmas they did party bags - that was useful.
Peter Martin (Smash Hits journalist and friend of John's): I was asked to write sleeve notes for the Power Station album, so I spent five days with John Taylor over Thanksgiving. Boy George and his friends were going apeshit on heroin at the time; they had the whole London crowd over at his flat. Me and John crashed a party of theirs. We went in, and Boy George was trying to fill himself up from a tap he thought he was a kettle, which I thought was very creative of him. It was a gang of clubby, post-New Romantic people all on smack. John was quite horrified. He was quite happy in the coke/being Axl Rose-type scenario, but suddenly it was getting a bit dark.
John Taylor: Cocaine was my drug of choice. And ecstasy and valium. Downers, too.
Rob Hallett: John's apartment had two beautiful things in it. One was a parrot. No cage. Just a parrot on a perch that wouldn't stop talking. The other was John's girlfriend Renee Simonsen. She was an absolute sweetheart. He really messed that up...
Nile Rogers: That was the life: girls, drugs, wild parties. It was a way of life, and it was every day. There was never, 'Oh, my God, it's Sunday, let's not do that today.' We were limited only by supply.
O'Regan: It was great. There were a lot of girls. The phrase pig in shit comes to mind.
John Taylor: Look, Exile on Main Street wouldn't have happened without Keith Richards's heroin addiction. Young Americans wouldn't have happened without Bowie's cocaine addiction. Alcohol played a big part with Vincent van Gogh. You need that edge. The trick is to find the edge without killing yourself.
The Power Station tours with B-lister Michael DeBarres on vocals. John and Andy have lost contact with Simon and Nick. Then an angry Irishman calls them and says Duran Duran must reconvene for Live Aid. It's the last show they will play with their original line-up.
Andy Taylor: Robert Palmer had failed to turn up for the Power Station tour, so we'd battled on alone. Then we get a call from Bob Geldof asking us to do Live Aid. I remember we put the phone on speakerphone and just listened to this Irish voice going, 'You're fockin' doin' it!'
John Taylor: When Simon, Nick and Roger flew in, we were in different teams. Andy and I had grown our hair and were doing the US rocker thing. They were doing the esoteric European artistic thing. It was all in the haircuts. The writing was on the wall.
Andy Taylor: There was a two billion-strong TV audience and we're helping save the world, and then... anticlimax. Roger's leaving.
Roger Taylor: I didn't have a breakdown. I was just exhausted. I bought a farm in Gloucestershire, had kids and did normal things. We lived the life of landed gentry for a few years. A bit Spinal Tap, I know. We had chickens and horses. I just completely disappeared. I had tabloid reporters looking for me. I was in bed one morning and there was a knock. Giovanna [Cantonne, Taylor's wife] said, 'It's the postman,' and I went down in her pink nightie. It was the Sun , and they said, 'Hello, mate, we want to know why you left the band.' I just shut the door on them but the next day on page five there I was, unshaven and in a pink negligee.
In their own words
Duran Duran reveal all: the drugs, the models, the highs, the lows and the comeback
Michael Odell
Sunday November 16, 2003
The Observer
'When we formed,' says Nick Rhodes, 'we decided we'd be playing Madison Square Garden within two years.'
For a bunch of blokes working behind the bar in a Birmingham nightclub, it was a lofty ambition. But Duran Duran made the New York venue of legends within four years of donning their girlfriends' make-up and fusing glam-rock with punk and funk.
By the time 'Hungry Like the Wolf' became a global hit in 1983, they were the right boys in the right shade of rouge at the right time: MTV was just starting, asserting the primacy of 'look' over technique. Duran Duran obliged by stuffing their videos with chicks, beaches, cocktails and yachts. After that, it was as if they couldn't hear the director screaming 'Cut!': They ordered supermodels over the phone, played Live Aid, formed rival bands, made Princess Di even more doe-eyed, went crazy, raised chickens, bought a Picasso on credit, recorded Grandmaster Flash's 'White Lines' with a straight face and fell to pieces.
Now, amid an insatiable nostalgia for all things Eighties, Duran Duran's original line-up has re-formed for the first time since saying 'Cheerio' to one another backstage at Live Aid in 1985. After a box set of singles and a recent, frenzied British date, a new album and a reunion tour will follow. 'But first,' guitarist Andy Taylor points out, 'we had to see if we could sit around a table without vomiting on one another.'
'I see this as part two,' warns lead singer Simon Le Bon.
Hold Me, Pose Me (1978-1981)
Birmingham, 1978: Nigel Taylor and Nick Bates are school friends drinking at the Hole in the Wall pub. They discuss starting a band and decide a makeover is immediately necessary. Taylor begins using his middle name, John, and then persuades Bates to adopt the last name Rhodes. Together with friends Stephen Duffy and Simon Colley, they form a band briefly known as RAF. However, when John Taylor sees the 1968 psychedelic sci-fi movie Barbarella, he suggests the band name itself after Milo O'Shea's character, Duran Duran.
Stephen Duffy (original singer): I met John, who was then Nigel, at art school. He was completely Nigel then. We got together in Nigel's parents' house in Birmingham. I passed the audition, so then we got together over Nick's father's shop - Bates's Toy Corner. Above the shop was this storeroom with lots of dolls and things. Nick got his synthesiser out and John played the guitar. We had songs called things like 'Hold Me, Pose Me', which was what it said on the side of a doll box.
Nick Rhodes (keyboards): We were very much an art-school band. It was rhythm units, synthesizers, two bass players, John on guitar, and a clarinet and vocals.
Duffy: We used to wear strange old clothes from charity shops, quite nice 1950s fitted jackets. Nick was worried about the makeup. I said: 'Don't worry, Nick, in six months' time all men will look like this.' I was wrong - in six months only he looked like that.
Boy George (singer, Culture Club): I think it was Marilyn Manson who said Bush being elected was a bad day for humanity but a great day for art. It was the same with Margaret Thatcher in Britain. I hated the bitch, but in that sort of climate of misery and repression, people expressed themselves in an underground way.
Duffy: Nick wanted to be successful and famous, whatever it took - he said that once, and I didn't think I'd heard him right. I didn't think you said that sort of thing.
Duffy decides to leave the group, thinking they're too commercial. Simon Colley follows him. (Duffy later forms the Lilac Time and also has a solo hit, 'Kiss Me', as Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy.) Drummer Roger Taylor (none of the Taylors is related) joins and John takes up bass. Peter and Michael Berrow, the owners of Birmingham's Rum Runner club, give them use of an upstairs room to practise. Among their first songs is 'See Me, Repeat Me', which later becomes 'Rio'. They also have a chorus remnant that features the refrain 'Girls on film!' The two Taylors and Rhodes form the core. Singers and guitarists come and go. Finally, Andy Taylor answers an ad for a guitarist and travels down from his hometown, Newcastle. He cooks burgers in the Rum Runner. Meanwhile, Simon Le Bon, a first year drama student at Birmingham University, is recommended by his girlfriend, Fiona Kemp, a waitress at the Rum Runner. He turns up for the audition wearing pink leopard-skin pants, pointy boots, a suede jacket and sunglasses.
Andy Taylor (guitarist): My initial reaction was how out of touch I was dress-sense wise, but how shit they were at playing. But they had a hell of a lot of ambition... and the chorus to 'Girls on Film'.
Paul Berrow (Rum Runner owner and Duran Duran's first manager): My brother and I were importing all the new Giorgio Moroder-style records from New York. We'd been to Studio 54 and heard how dance music was changing. The Duran aesthetic was influenced by that.
Roger Taylor (drums): We rehearsed in the Rum Runner on Monday nights with a jazz-funk night going on in the next room. Somehow all that got into the music.
John Taylor (bass): In 1978, it was the year of 'disco sucks', and I felt I should be at a therapist saying, 'I have this guilty love of disco.' I thought Chic were fantastic. That's why I became a bass player.
Simon Le Bon (singer): The first day I turned up, Roger was outside the Rum Runner painting a wall. The band was a bit of a laugh at first. I didn't know I'd leave college and give my life to it.
The Berrows brothers make Duran Duran the Rum Runner house band and mortgage their house to buy them a support slot on a nationwide tour with Hazel O'Connor. It costs them £12,000. The band earns £10 a week. On the tour, EMI A&R man Dave Ambrose, who signed the Sex Pistols, sees Duran Duran and signs them for £42,000. Quickly, they record their debut album, Duran Duran. In the UK, success with 'Planet Earth' is immediate. 'Girls on Film' opens with the sound of Paul Berrows's Nikon camera. Le Bon thinks it's a powerful critique of the exploitation of women in advertising. He will be sorely misunderstood. By 1981 they are touring clubs in America. Rock America, a programming service for clubs and bars that feature video screens, is playing the long-form video for 'Girls on Film', and word is spreading.
Dave Ambrose: When I saw Simon Le Bon, I saw him as another Elvis Presley, although he was a little bit overweight.
Rob Hallett (agent): I became friends with John after getting the band's early shows. They went through this period of being famous but the money hadn't come in yet. So he used to stay at my flat in Kilburn. It was the hottest bachelor pad in London. John was the best looking man in Britain and got the most amazing girls. I hung round for the leftovers.
Doreen Dagostino (US national publicity manager, Capitol Records): They had no profile in America, but the 'Girls on Film' video gave them a little notoriety. Older writers were a little shocked by the ice cube on the girl's naked breast. But in the hip clubs people were like, 'Hey, it's art!'
Rhodes: Our first US date was on Long Island, at the Spit Club in 1981. Our publicist said, 'What do you wanna do?' I said, 'Go up the Empire State [Building] and meet Andy Warhol.' She called the next morning and said we're going up the Empire State and then going to Andy's studio. We're like, 'Whaaat?'
Dagostino: I rang Andy up at Interview magazine and said, 'This English band wants to meet you.' I might have mentioned one was in lipstick. Nick and Roger came, and Andy asked Nick if he shared his girlfriend's lipstick. After that, Nick and Andy became friends - you'd see them in the DJ booth at Studio 54.
Roger Taylor: The Warhol thing went over my head a bit. He actually wanted to do an album cover, and we were like, 'The Stones have done it... no, thanks.'
John Taylor: I was such a baby. At JFK airport I couldn't fill in the address bit on the immigration form. I put 'Holiday Inn, Long Island'. The guy said 'I guess if we need to find you, we'll put out an APB for a faggot with purple hair.'
Duranmania (1981-1985)
The band return to London and record their second album, Rio. In America, the Berrows and Ambrose sense that a newly launched cable network that airs music videos is the key to success. They fly the band to Sri Lanka to make videos for 'Save a Prayer' and 'Hungry Like the Wolf', and to Antigua to film 'Rio'.
Rhodes: The record company said, 'Do you wanna make a video to go with the song?' and we were like, 'What's a video?'
Le Bon: When you're 19 and someone says, 'Do you want to make a video on a yacht in the Carribean?' you don't say 'Hmmm, what kind of statement are we supposed to be making here?' It was, 'Girls, boats - yes, please!'
John Taylor : It seemed like such a stupid idea. But Simon was a drama student, so he pulled it off.
Roger Taylor: Some of the crew were annoying the elephants, trying to imitate their calls. I'm riding on one when it gets startled by all the noise and takes off down the river with me hanging on for my life.
Nick Rhodes: I refused to go to Sri Lanka before Rio was absolutely finished. The other four went, and I stayed up all night at Air Studios in London. I was wearing a leather outfit and went straight to the airport from the studio. After 16 hours in my leather suit, I get off the plane into a wall of heat. I stagger around the airport saying, 'Where's the limo?' and this guy takes me to a flatbed truck. I'm thinking, '20 minutes to the hotel'. It was five hours on a dust track to the beach location.
In 1982, Duran tour the US again, this time supporting Blondie. They meet Chic guitarist Nile Rogers for the first time and bond 'in the bathroom'. Thanks in large measure to the round-the-clock support of MTV, by February 1982 'Hungry Like the Wolf' is number three on the US charts.
Les Garland (senior executive vice president, MTV): We had our weekly meeting to hear new music on Tuesdays. Back then it was a fledgling industry: We'd get maybe 10 videos a week, and everyone would gather and sit through them all. I remember our director of talent and artist relations came running in and said, 'You have got to see this video that's come in.' Duran Duran were getting zero radio airplay at the time, and MTV wanted to break new music. 'Hungry Like the Wolf' was the greatest video I'd ever seen.
Rhodes: Our first US gigs were crazy and culty. But when we came back after 'Hungry' was a hit, it was mayhem. It was Beatlemania. We were doing a signing of the 'Girls on Film' video at a store in Times Square. We couldn't get out of the store, the cops sealed off the streets. It was scary.
Le Bon: We'd become one of the biggest bands in the world and then went back to these tiny apartments or bedrooms in mum and dad's house in Birmingham. We hadn't had time to spend any money, to buy a house...
Rhodes: I went back to my bedroom at my parents' house. My mum calls up and says, 'There's a Michael on the phone...' It was Michael Jackson. We'd been leading this crazy life in America with David Bowie and Warhol, and there'd been some talk at some party about working with Michael Jackson. Then he calls me at my mum and dad's in Birmingham. I thought it was one of the crew winding me up, and I'm going, 'Sure, Michael...'
Andy Taylor: I can remember my first check for £1 million. I was only 20. Fifty per cent went to Mrs. Thatcher, but still...
In America, the boys are feted: ET star Drew Barrymore attends their shows; tennis ace Vitas Gerulaitis invites them 'to the bathroom'. In England, their fame is such that even Princess Diana is a fan.
Le Bon: The Di thing was a bit naff. It was something your mum and dad liked, so there was a part of me that bristled at it. Every time we opened the dressing-room door, there she bloody was - under the table trying to get an autograph. It was like, 'Can't your husband keep you under control?'
Boy George: Duran Duran were selling a lifestyle: the yachts, the girls. In spite of their looks, Duran were very straight. It was a time when wearing a bit of make-up could get you girls. Culture Club would get girls and their mums. Duran got everyone.
Rob Hallett: On the first Japanese tour in Nagoya the girl fans used to leave the venue early and wait for the band in taxis. The band got in a car and left. Suddenly there's 20 or 30 taxis chasing us through the streets. I remember the band starting singing Joan Jett's 'I love rock'n'roll!'. They loved it...
By 1983, Duran Duran have enjoyed Top 20 US hits with 'Hungry Like the Wolf' and 'Rio'. However, fame leaves them creatively bereft. Now millionaires, they are in tax exile from the U.K. and decide to record their third album abroad. Sessions for Seven and the Ragged Tiger begin in a French chateau. But John Taylor gets bored and spends his time getting drunk in Cannes. So they head for Air Studios in Montserrat, but producer George Martin's swimming pool proves too distracting. So they head for Australia, where a tour looms. But alas, there are bars and girls in Australia, too...
Rhodes: There were Spinal Tap moments. I bought a Picasso on AmEx in the South of France. Just a little one, but still.
Denis O'Regan (official band photographer): Nick published an art book entitled Interference. It was Polaroids of static on TVs - brilliant if you can get away with that. I wasn't that impressed.
John Taylor: I was going into Cannes and having a party every night. As a bass player time-management is a problem, because your work is done in a matter of days.
Rhodes: If we needed John to do a bass part, we'd just ring a bar and ask for him.
Le Bon: I didn't even think Seven and the Ragged Tiger was a particularly good title. The seven were us and our two managers. The ragged tiger was supposed to be 'luck'.
Rhodes: That title... I don't know how I ever let that through. I still just call it the third album.
The Power Station, Yachts and Madness (1984-1985)
The remix of 'The Reflex,' produced by Chic's Nile Rogers, becomes a number 1 US hit. Rogers almost repeats the feat with 'Wild Boys' (number 2), and then his Chic partner Bernard Edwards tops the charts with the James Bond theme 'A View to a Kill'. The band is at its creative and commercial apex.
Naturally, John and Andy Taylor are dissatisfied with Duran Duran's direction. John is dating Bebe Buell, Liv Tyler's mother. He decides to remake T. Rex's 'Get It On' with Buell on vocals. However, before recording, the pair have a falling-out. Robert Palmer steps in for Buell. The Power Station is born. Not to be outdone, Rhodes and Le Bon take up residence at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and form Arcadia, whose self-titled album features guest spots from Sting, Grace Jones and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, among others. Rhodes decides they will have an 'artist in residence' at their French studio. Fumes from oil paints threaten millions of dollars of recording equipment, but they proceed nonetheless. Roger Taylor can't decide his allegiance and plays on both projects.
Rhodes: Arcadia and the Power Station were commercial suicide... but we've always been good at that.
Paul Berrow: After a couple of years of that 'All for one and one for all!' mentality, wives and girlfriends come along. At first it was military - videos, documentary, tour, album, tour - but what do you do when you get there? Get a girlfriend - and a demanding one almost certainly. And then the whole entity changes. The band comes together just for work and goes away again to new sets of friends. There is conflict among the band of merry men.
Denis O'Regan: I remember Nick and John having a discussion over which of them had the highest-ever hotel bill. One of them had run up a $30,000 bill - and this was 15 years ago, an outrageous amount.
Boy George: I lived next door to John Taylor in New York. A friend and I would find John's girlfriend crying in the hallway. We'd bring her in and give her a cup of tea and get all the gossip. John's was the most rock and roll place I'd ever seen.
John Taylor: The Carlyle Hotel was getting a little expensive, so I bought a place on the 27th floor of the Park Belvedere on Central Park West. Boy George was next door. Inside it was black lacquer and all about the Eighties: a beautiful place to go mad! We both lost parts of our minds on that 27th floor. Fame was having its way with us. There was a courier service that would bike round bags of pot with little flags of the country it came from on the sachet. At Christmas they did party bags - that was useful.
Peter Martin (Smash Hits journalist and friend of John's): I was asked to write sleeve notes for the Power Station album, so I spent five days with John Taylor over Thanksgiving. Boy George and his friends were going apeshit on heroin at the time; they had the whole London crowd over at his flat. Me and John crashed a party of theirs. We went in, and Boy George was trying to fill himself up from a tap he thought he was a kettle, which I thought was very creative of him. It was a gang of clubby, post-New Romantic people all on smack. John was quite horrified. He was quite happy in the coke/being Axl Rose-type scenario, but suddenly it was getting a bit dark.
John Taylor: Cocaine was my drug of choice. And ecstasy and valium. Downers, too.
Rob Hallett: John's apartment had two beautiful things in it. One was a parrot. No cage. Just a parrot on a perch that wouldn't stop talking. The other was John's girlfriend Renee Simonsen. She was an absolute sweetheart. He really messed that up...
Nile Rogers: That was the life: girls, drugs, wild parties. It was a way of life, and it was every day. There was never, 'Oh, my God, it's Sunday, let's not do that today.' We were limited only by supply.
O'Regan: It was great. There were a lot of girls. The phrase pig in shit comes to mind.
John Taylor: Look, Exile on Main Street wouldn't have happened without Keith Richards's heroin addiction. Young Americans wouldn't have happened without Bowie's cocaine addiction. Alcohol played a big part with Vincent van Gogh. You need that edge. The trick is to find the edge without killing yourself.
The Power Station tours with B-lister Michael DeBarres on vocals. John and Andy have lost contact with Simon and Nick. Then an angry Irishman calls them and says Duran Duran must reconvene for Live Aid. It's the last show they will play with their original line-up.
Andy Taylor: Robert Palmer had failed to turn up for the Power Station tour, so we'd battled on alone. Then we get a call from Bob Geldof asking us to do Live Aid. I remember we put the phone on speakerphone and just listened to this Irish voice going, 'You're fockin' doin' it!'
John Taylor: When Simon, Nick and Roger flew in, we were in different teams. Andy and I had grown our hair and were doing the US rocker thing. They were doing the esoteric European artistic thing. It was all in the haircuts. The writing was on the wall.
Andy Taylor: There was a two billion-strong TV audience and we're helping save the world, and then... anticlimax. Roger's leaving.
Roger Taylor: I didn't have a breakdown. I was just exhausted. I bought a farm in Gloucestershire, had kids and did normal things. We lived the life of landed gentry for a few years. A bit Spinal Tap, I know. We had chickens and horses. I just completely disappeared. I had tabloid reporters looking for me. I was in bed one morning and there was a knock. Giovanna [Cantonne, Taylor's wife] said, 'It's the postman,' and I went down in her pink nightie. It was the Sun , and they said, 'Hello, mate, we want to know why you left the band.' I just shut the door on them but the next day on page five there I was, unshaven and in a pink negligee.
