Wild Boy (12 page)

“Well, come round and we will have something to eat,” I said. Then, because I’d had to learn how to cook a bit when I was younger, I added: “I’ll cook, or you cook, you know, like out of the way of everybody.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I’ll bring something round to eat,” she said.

When Tracey arrived she brought along a homemade spaghetti Bolognese in a Tupperware container. It was delicious, but I later found out her mum had secretly cooked it for her. And that’s when I knew she was the one.

I thought,
Oh good—at least she must want to impress me, and if she wants to impress me she must like me.
She couldn’t cook very well herself at that time, but she wanted to present something nice. If a girl makes an effort to bribe you like that, it has to be a positive sign. She did that trick a couple of times, and it was deliciously devious because it made her appear very thoughtful.

Tracey loved riding, and her father owned a horse sanctuary on a farm out in Shropshire, where he had a herd of three or four hundred rescued horses. She had two horses of her own, called Bobby and Daniel, and she used to talk about them all the time.

“Why don’t you let me come with you the next time you go out to the farm?” I asked.

She agreed and after that we used to go down there every Sunday and whenever else we could. It was nice getting away to the farm in the summer. Tracey was a county champion at Side Saddle. We’d be trotting around and she would gallop off into the distance, but I couldn’t even canter. Sometimes I’d even have to hang on to a gatepost to try and stop a horse because I couldn’t control it! We’d share funny moments like that, which had nothing to do with my life in rock and roll. It was fantastic and it gave our relationship balance, because it wasn’t just about me being in Duran Duran.

I soon discovered that despite our differences, we had a lot more in common than I realized. Like me, Tracey’s parents were divorced and she had not had a normal childhood. We’d been at the same age when our respective parents had split up, so she’d also been through some acrimony. Maybe some of Tracey’s experiences when she was younger made her think twice about getting involved with me. I think she saw where it could go wrong and knew what it could cost, the same as I did. But she was a very calm person, and she brought stability into my life at a time when I could easily have slipped into a different lifestyle that I would have later regretted.

By the time I was twenty, I’d played hundreds, if not thousands, of gigs in different countries, but for the first time I had something worth sharing in life. The first Duran Duran album and the tour were a success, and we were now on increased retainers from the record company that were worth the equivalent of a couple of grand a week. For the first time, everyone in the band could afford to think about doing things that we couldn’t afford to do before, like buying cars and houses. It felt brilliant. I can remember buying a beautiful new BMW—it was a blue 325, and I showed it to my uncle, who was an old car fanatic. I couldn’t even drive officially, but I took him out for a spin in it and he was terrified. A lot of girls started to flock to us because they needed what we had, but Tracey didn’t need any of it. She had her own business with her brothers, she had her own income, and she had her own car. Tracey had a little Citroen 2CV, and her brother Mitchell had worked his backside off to own a Jag. A few weeks after we started dating I invited her to come to New York, but she was really nervous about the sleeping arrangements.

I was being a gentleman at this point, and I think I did actually say, “You don’t have to stay in my room if you don’t want to.”

Tracey accepted. I flew her out to America with Giovanna, and they came along to Studio 54 when we met Andy Warhol. We stayed in a really nice hotel near Central Park. It was as if I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, because things were going so well. We played several small shows, which were sold out, and suddenly there were a lot of emotions running through my life.

Music is an emotion, it’s a passion that’s about being confident and projecting yourself onstage. But the biggest emotion of all is love. I was beginning to realize that if you don’t have a partner to share things with, then everything else seems to have less value.

AFTER
we came back from the States, Tracey and I started seeing each other regularly and we became very close before I went down to London with the band to record our second album,
Rio.
Tracey’s brother Mitchell had a small house out in the countryside that he wanted to sell. Tracey and I went to see it and we decided to buy it. I think the house cost in the region of £27,000, and I was able to pay for it in one go, which was a nice feeling. One of Tracey’s family hair salons was just around the corner, so it was an ideal location for her and it wasn’t too far from Birmingham for me. Tracey was officially living with her dad, but she was mostly staying with me in Moseley.

It was while we were discussing buying the house together that I began to think about asking Tracey to marry me. Call me an old traditionalist, but I decided to propose to Tracey on the night of my twenty-first birthday. It was 3 a.m. and I’d been out to celebrate at the Rum Runner while Tracey had stayed at home because she had a cold.

“Wake up, Tracey, I’ve got something to ask you,” I said. “Look, you know it’s my twenty-first birthday. I have had a few drinks, which, er . . . you know, has given me the courage to ask you an important question. Will you marry me?”

I paused as I waited for her response, but just as she’d done when I originally pursued her for a date, she kept me holding on for her answer.

Tracey rolled over sleepily. “Okay—I’ll tell you in the morning,” she said, and went straight back to sleep. Charming!

The next morning Tracey awoke and said yes straightaway . . . and I couldn’t wait to share the news with Simon. I went down and saw him in the kitchen, where there was always a big pile of dishes in the sink waiting for someone to clean them, just like you’d find in any other house shared by young people.

“Well, that’s it, mate,” I said. “I’m getting married.”

Simon didn’t say a word, apart from “Oh, really?”

I think what he meant was “Are you sure?” It must have all seemed very sudden, but with Tracey I just knew by human instinct that I’d found the right person. Later on that morning I went back downstairs again, and out of courtesy Simon wished us well.

“It’s great, if that’s what makes you happy,” he said.

In those days it was very common to get married by the age of twenty-one. Back in the North East, you were expected to be working by sixteen, you were voting at eighteen, and you were a full-fledged adult by twenty-one. In fact, in Newcastle all my mates were married by twenty-one. I was brought up not to put life on hold and my dad was pleased for me. All our parents had been married by that age, and, after all, having a partner is the most important thing in life. If you find someone whom you love and trust, why wait just because you are young and living in Moseley? It turned out to be the right decision because Tracey and I have now been happily married for over twenty-five years. In media interviews, I’ve often described Tracey as my soul mate, and part of being in a successful relationship is that there is one person whom you can talk to about anything. Someone who will see things from a unique perspective and who will consider you a little bit more than other people. For me that person is Tracey.

AFTER
I proposed, there was a small matter of a Duran Duran tour and a new album to get out of the way before Tracey and I could tie the knot. We’d started writing our
Rio
material in Birmingham. I was in the office at the Rum Runner one morning when I heard Nick playing a little sequence on the keyboards downstairs. It was the opening notes of what was to become “Save a Prayer” and my first reaction was, “Bloody hell—that’s good.”

Nick didn’t have it perfect at this point. Roger and I started working out the notes with him and counting out a beat, and suddenly we had something special. Nick, Simon, and I later finished it off together in the basement at EMI using a drum machine, although Roger was so precise in his playing that it was never as easy when he wasn’t around. We had a budget of around £65,000 from the record label to record the
Rio
album, which was about double what we’d had for the first album. It took about eight weeks to record; we rented apartments in London so that we could be close to Air Studios, where we were mixing it.

It was while we were working on the album that we first discovered the delights of the Embassy Club, which was in Old Bond Street. It was owned by Stephen Hayter, the flamboyant party host who socialized with the likes of Princess Margaret and Freddie Mercury. The club itself was very hedonistic and packed with celebrities, and we started hanging out there with Pete Townsend, whom we’d met previously at the Rum Runner. Roger Taylor from Queen was a regular there, as was Lemmy from Motörhead, who would always be downstairs playing on the Space Invaders machine.

We were quite disciplined in our approach to work. We’d written and rehearsed all the songs and we knew exactly what we wanted to do in the studio. It’s fair to say, though, that we’d developed a few London habits that would come back to haunt us in future years. John and I spent a lot of time at the Embassy—particularly John, who became the absolute star of the place. When you record an album the bass player and the drummer are usually the first to lay down their material, and they often end up with time on their hands while the other band members record their contributions. Roger had done his bit during our first couple of weeks in London, and he went back to Birmingham to be with Giovanna because he was quite anchored with her, but John stayed on in London and partied almost every night. He was starting to get a staggering amount of female attention, much more than the rest of us. The record company had deliberately pushed him into the spotlight because of his looks, and I think all the wild partying was his way of letting off steam.

The Embassy was definitely an interesting place, but, unlike John, I was never that impressed with it. I didn’t mind having a bit of fun, but I didn’t want to sit there all night talking rubbish with people who’d overindulged in certain substances. Hayter, who later died of AIDS, had an office at the back of the club behind a bulletproof door. For a select few who were in the know, there would be mounds of cocaine on the table in the office after the club closed, and people would go there to party until morning. But I have never been a fan of sitting there trying to put the world to rights when you won’t even be able to remember what you were talking about the following day.

The guys from Spandau Ballet were based in London, as was Steve Strange, and it was through the Embassy Club that John and I first encountered Robert Palmer. We went back to Steve Strange’s house in Notting Hill one night and Robert was lying there on the bed, giggling away in a world of his own. He was behaving as if he had taken acid, just laughing his head off, until he came round a bit and we introduced ourselves. He was a proper partyer, but he
always
wore a suit and tie.

“I’ll never look out-of-date like this,” he used to explain.

Robert loved being around different people and going out to dinner with them. He drank wine and whiskey—the grape and the grain—and he had a great routine that involved getting up for lunch and having some wine before going to work and never dropping a beat. After that, he would go out to dinner and then go back to work again. But he never let his lifestyle interfere with his work. He was a great singer, lyricist, and all-round musician.

TRACEY
and I had planned to get married in April or May 1982 in the Midlands, but after we finished recording
Rio,
the band had to shoot our videos in Sri Lanka and Antigua before playing in Japan and Australia. By the time we got back to the UK, I was exhausted and laid up with a stomach bug I’d picked up in an elephant lagoon (I’ll tell you about that in the next chapter). It turned out to be a very nasty virus. At one point I was in Wolverhampton General Hospital with a temperature of 103 before Tracey and her dad persuaded me to transfer to the private hospital.

Our plans for a spring wedding had been well and truly spoiled, and now we were due to play a series of gigs in the States. Capitol Records, EMI’s American division, had promised to put a lot of backing behind us if we remixed the
Rio
album for the States, which we did with the help of an American sound engineer. It gave the album a smoother, cleaner sound that went down better with US audiences, who are used to slightly more precise sound than we’d developed in the UK. We were in agreement, because we realized we needed to change our sound for the States, where the music industry spends far more time and money on mixing material. Not that we had much choice.

“Remix it and we’ll support you; don’t do it and we won’t,” said Capitol.

It was good advice, but the American tour left Tracey and me with no choice but to rethink our wedding plans again.

“Okay, if we can’t get married now, let’s do it in the UK in the summer after the US tour,” I suggested.

It sounded like a good plan, but after we went on the road the record label announced they’d managed to book us on a second US tour with Blondie, which would immediately follow our own. We were due to play the last date of our US tour at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on July 27 before joining Blondie’s Tracks Across America Tour in Kansas City on August 2. It meant there would be no time to go back to the UK to organize the wedding—and our families back home were beginning to wonder if we’d ever go through with it.

“Well look—in between our tour and the Blondie tour let’s get married in LA,” I said. “It will cut out all the headache of trying to organize things with our families, and if anyone wants to come they can get themselves an air ticket.”

Tracey agreed and we booked the wedding for July 29, 1982, at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. It wasn’t just the timing that made America the best location to get married, because back home Duran Duran were starting to get an enormous amount of press attention. “Hungry Like the Wolf” had been released in the UK on May 15, and we were chased by screaming girls wherever we went. Getting married in the States would create less fuss than a wedding back home. John, in particular, was still being heavily pushed by the record company as a single man who made an ideal teenage pinup. I’d never really played up to the same image, so it wasn’t as if the media were going to react by saying, “The single guy in Duran Duran has gone now, girls.” But even so, there were a few paranoid people at the record company who feared that the first Duran Duran wedding might damage our image as available young men.