Wild Boy (13 page)

“The fans will see the wedding and wonder who is going to be next,” they said.

I had a bit more respect for our fans than that, and I argued that it was better for them to aspire to marry one of us than to just sleep with us, but in any case Tracey and I wanted to keep the day low-key, which probably suited the way the record label and our management would have preferred things if they’d had a say.

DURAN
Duran were really starting to take off in the States by the time the big day of the wedding arrived. We’d made our first major appearance on US television in Philadelphia when we went on the dance show
Dancin’ on Air
and “Hungry Like the Wolf” was beginning to get major airplay on US radio. Our videos were getting great exposure on MTV and we were being constantly played on TV screens in nightclubs, which helped to raise our profile all the time.

Meanwhile, we were working our butts off and played gigs across America and Canada, which included shows in New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco. We’d travel from city to city by train, which was a strange feeling because even though we were being mobbed in public by fans in the UK, in the States we could still travel by public transport without being recognized. Our record sales were starting to earn us serious sums of money, but we still weren’t at the point where we could afford to travel everywhere by private jet, so the train made sense for accounting reasons as well. But we were starting to enjoy our growing financial freedom, so we’d check into the most luxurious hotel we could find whenever we were in a major city. When you are newly in love, there’s nothing nicer than checking into a palatial hotel and getting a nice room, perhaps with an open fire, and living off room service. Tracey and I did a lot of that, and it was a nice bit of sanity away from the huge amount of fuss and attention that was beginning to surround the band.

Two days before Tracey and I got married, Duran Duran sold out the Greek Theatre. Eight thousand people saw our show there. It was the first glimpse of what was about to happen across the United States—and it was fantastic. Until then we’d been opening for a couple of other bands and playing to audiences of 3,000 to 4,000, but with every show interest was growing. We’d seen what had happened in the UK, so we had a sense of where it was all going. Our attitude was “Wow—it’s about to happen here, too.”

For the wedding, everyone in the band had checked into their own bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. Tracey and I took one of two special apartments that stand on the top of a hill within the hotel grounds. It had its own garden, a big lounge kitchen, and three or four bedrooms, so there was plenty of room for entertaining. It was the ideal place to spend your wedding day—although the atmosphere at the hotel was slightly strange because the actor John Belushi had recently died in the bungalow next door. The
Blues Brothers
star had been found dead from a drug overdose in March, but the whole place was still covered with police tape, and all his cars were being examined by cops in the underground car park. The police were actively investigating his death, so there were lots of forensic people coming and going, but we didn’t allow it to spoil things.

There was a little tree close to our bungalow and we arranged to be married there by the Dean of UCLA. The day before the wedding I went into town to organize all the wedding suits while the other band members went off to a yacht party. We all planned to wear gray top hats and tails; one of the security guards and I had to try and get everyone’s sizes correct.

“Don’t worry—everything is going to be perfect,” I whispered to Tracey that night.

The only problem the next morning was that we nearly didn’t wake up! The others were supposed to come and rouse me to ensure I didn’t oversleep—but it must have been a great yacht party because they were all still out of it from the night before. Luckily I woke up just in time, and I went around all the other bungalows knocking on their doors, starting with John. He was still asleep so I had to wake him.

“You look dreadful. Fancy a livener?” I smiled.

So we downed a Jack Daniel’s and Coke each, put on our suits, and off we went. But despite all the hangovers, the ceremony itself was very private and lovely. It was attended by about thirty close friends. We released a couple of nice photos of Tracey and me to the media through the record company. We also had some pictures of the five band members together in our top hats drinking champagne. Then we had a huge wedding cake and lots of pizza. Afterward, Tracey and I sipped more champagne together and relaxed in the sunshine on the beautiful grounds of the hotel.

It was a perfect rock-and-roll wedding. To cap it all, things were going great in the band and there didn’t seem to be a cloud on the horizon. But although we had no way of knowing it on that day, as a band we were about to face some problems later that year.

In fact, we were about to face a whole lot of trouble.

I
was in a dreamy sleep cuddled up in a hotel bed next to Tracey in October when I slowly became aware of a distant commotion that seemed to be happening somewhere far away. Slowly, as I began to wake through the fog of sleep, I could hear voices shouting outside in the corridor. For a second I thought I heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass, then things grew quiet again.

“What the hell was all that? Did you hear it?” I asked Tracey.

“Ignore it and come back to bed,” she replied, sleepily.

But somewhere inside me little alarm bells were ringing. It was autumn and we were on the road in Germany, having finished touring the States with Blondie a few months earlier. I had arranged for Tracey to be picked up from the Munich airport earlier. We’d spent the evening eating pizza together in bed at the hotel, while some of the other members of Duran Duran went off to a nightclub. They’d planned to meet Bryan Ferry there; the Roxy Music guys were big in Germany and they were out there at the same time. Intrigued by all the fuss I’d heard outside my room, I got out of bed to investigate.

“It’s John. Don’t worry—it’s all right, he’s gone to bed,” said one of the crew. I could see from the expression on his face that things were far from all right. “There was some trouble at the nightclub,” he explained.

We were all checked into hotel rooms that had doors connecting to the same corridor, which was lined by glass light fittings that were spaced high up along its walls. I could see that one of the fittings had been smashed, and beneath it was a dark smear of blood.

I was torn between investigating further and going back to bed. Things seemed to have quieted down, so I decided to return to my room to be with Tracey. But try as I might, I couldn’t sleep. A couple of hours later I got up and went to John’s door, where I could hear muffled voices coming from inside.

“It’s Andy. Let me in,” I ordered.

The door swung open and there was John, surrounded by some of our crew members. I could see he was in a terrible state. His right hand was wrapped in a huge swath of bandages, and he looked pale and distraught.

“What the hell happened?” I demanded.

“They came at us with baseball bats in the nightclub and beat the hell out of us,” explained one of the crew.

Only then did the full horror of what had taken place begin to unfold. John and Roger had been part of the group that had gone to the nightclub in Munich along with several of our entourage, including our bodyguard, Simon Cook. The group had met up with Bryan Ferry as planned and the evening was going well. No one could explain exactly what had happened next, except that they’d been sitting around a table downstairs in the club when a group of men armed with baseball bats rushed over. The vicious attack that followed had been premeditated and nasty.

“It was too coordinated to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. They came at us very quickly and they knew where we were,” the crew explained to me.

Roger had taken the worst of it. He’d been beaten close to unconsciousness after being smashed over the head. He had a nasty bump on his skull and he was probably lucky to be alive. A full-scale war had then broken out between the attackers and our own security. Simon Cook had taken a real pounding, but despite that he’d never stopped punching back while he tried to defend the band. He was a brave bloke, and he even managed to briefly drag a few of the attackers back down the stairs as they made their escape. He was a good friend to all of us, so it was upsetting to hear he’d taken such a nasty beating on behalf of Duran Duran.

It was John who had sustained the bloodiest injury. The wound to his hand would keep us off the road and force us to scrap the rest of our dates in Germany. Ironically, the wound hadn’t been sustained during the fight in the club. John had actually cut his hand at the hotel by putting it through the light fitting that was now shattered and dripping with blood in the corridor. He’d suffered a deep, nasty wound, and there was no way he was going to be playing bass guitar anytime soon.

I discovered that during most of the fight, John and Bryan Ferry had been hidden away in the toilets. I suspected that by the time John got back to the hotel, he was overcome by the fact that he hadn’t done anything to help the others. Band of brothers? Forget it. In my view, when he’d punched the light fitting he’d been lashing out in anger at himself. Perhaps he felt bad and wanted to punish himself for what he rightly or wrongly perceived to be his own failure to be able to join the fight? There was no need for John to feel that way. He wasn’t a coward—it was just a human reaction. But I was torn between having sympathy for him over his plight and being angry with him because I knew his injury was going to cause us a lot of problems. I think you can forgive anything when someone is suffering, but in my view John had either meant to punch the light, or he’d been so out of control that he’d done it by accident—and either way he needed help.

“I mean, it’s a fucking wall, there’s lots of places you can punch. Why go for the most painful bit?” I said to myself.

“Right—we’re going home in the morning,” announced Simon the bodyguard. Despite the terrible beating he had taken he was still being the most rational of all of us. “We’ve got to get flights and get out of here fast. No one has got to know about this. We’ll pay the hotel bill, no fuss. Dead quiet. We’ll catch the earliest flights we can get.”

We knew he was right, and the next morning we caught the elevator down to reception in silence. The hotel weren’t very happy with us, but we were all determined to keep quiet as we checked out. Then it was quickly through the hotel door, looking straight ahead, and onto our tour bus. By now, John was out of it, half asleep with his hand wrapped in a giant ball of bandages; a doctor had dressed his wound during the night. Every one of us felt tired and ragged.

Getting married earlier in the year had been the nicest thing that had happened to me, but getting beaten up in a nightclub was the nastiest thing that had happened to the band so far. I think that some of what occurred that night got bottled up inside John and Roger, and it may have had a bearing on how things unfolded in the future. I can’t believe something like that doesn’t have an effect on you. Roger had been the victim of terrible violence, and John was powerless to help. We weren’t a violent bunch of people, but everyone now knew what it felt like to be a target. Suddenly it was as if a whole new negative dimension had become part of the equation, and it was a turning point. Our reaction was, “Okay, we better have more bodyguards in the future.” It was also a turning point for me personally, because I was on my way to becoming regarded as the king of hedonism for always being up for a party. As I’ve mentioned I had a reputation for having hollow legs when it came to putting away the booze, and if the mood took me, I happily stayed up all night drinking—and I was out most nights. I also continued to use cocaine from time to time. But on the evening of the nightclub incident, thankfully, I’d opted to have a quiet night in with my wife.

THE
pressure had been building up on us all since the Blondie tour, which had been fantastic, but it was also a time during which early frictions began to form within Duran Duran for the first time. Before we got to Germany, things started to change over the summer with the arrival on the scene of Nick’s new partner and future wife, Julie Anne Freidman.

A few days after Tracey and I got married, Tracey went back to the UK and I met with the rest of the band at the LA airport to fly off to meet with Blondie elsewhere in the States.

“Nick’s got someone with him,” said one of the crew in the departure lounge. “Who is she?”

It was Julie Anne, who introduced herself as a model and the heiress to the Younkers department store fortune in the States. Nick had met her at the yacht party the day before my wedding and he’d clearly been enthralled by her. The rest of us were slightly bemused, because an outsider had never been allowed to travel with us before. We were always very organized and respectful; we knew that whenever we came together to travel it wouldn’t just be a free-for-all. You have a certain routine of how you do things on the road, and any disruption to that routine can cause havoc. I’d sacrificed having a honeymoon and sent my new wife home so that we could go on the road, yet here was Nick bringing his future wife with him. He had broken the unwritten band rule that said you didn’t bring your girlfriend on the road. Simon Le Bon, who had become very close to Nick, seemed very surprised. He picked up on it straightaway and approached Nick by saying something along the lines of “What the fuck is going on?”

“I’ve met her on the boat and she’s coming with me,” was all that Nick said at the time.

“Yeah—you’ve not been laid for ages,” one of us joked back.

Nick’s romance with Julie Anne was the first relationship to come into the band that would start to fracture our unity, because it was the first time an outsider was allowed into our inner circle. Most of the other relationships we’d all been involved in up until then had already been in place since our days in Birmingham. Tracey and Giovanna had been part of our circle since the beginning. John could be a bit mad with the girls, but even his relationships were mostly with people whom we knew from the Rum Runner. Simon’s girlfriend at the time, Claire Stansfield, was Canadian, but she was someone we knew from the UK, too. But as for Julie Anne, I remembered something that Paul Berrow had told us before we’d left for the States. “Ooh, when those bloody American birds get hold of you, you won’t catch your breath,” he warned. “Different set of values.”