Wild Boy (14 page)

That might have been a bit harsh, but culturally, we were all very English in our tastes and our outlook. Suddenly we found a brash American heiress in our midst. As time went on, I didn’t quite know whether or not to trust her. Today I joke that it was a bit like the famous scene in
This Is Spinal Tap
when the lead singer’s overbearing girlfriend arrives at the airport. Julie Anne was very pushy because of her social standing, and she was used to being at the top. She wasn’t a bad person, but we weren’t used to having an outsider in our midst. To me, her presence in the group was like a bomb. She’d met Nick on a boat and pretty soon she was rocking the boat.

BLONDIE
was huge across the States, but they were starting to come to the end of their run of success. The ticket sales on the tour weren’t huge—but it was the first chance we had to play at some really big arenas. We had to pay money to get on the tour because it gave us such great publicity. Under the circumstances Blondie could have been very aloof, but they were an arty band like us and they made us very welcome. We didn’t mix much with Debbie Harry, but Jimmy Destri, Chris Stein, and Nigel Harrison all knew how to party. Jimmy Destri shared a lot of substances with me; in fact, I think I still owe him on that score. My drug use wasn’t at the stage where I felt it was causing me a problem, but ever since I took cocaine in the camper van I had continued to dabble with it. Blondie also introduced us to a lot of other people in the States, including some of the members of the legendary disco band Chic, who would eventually play a big part in our story.

We were on a great run, but it had been an intense year that had already seen us filming videos in Sri Lanka and Antigua and touring both Japan and Australia. After we finished in the States, we had another crushing series of gigs in Europe. The constant attention was beginning to fray our nerves. We seemed to be living in a little bubble of our own, which involved marching in and out of hotels in a line while our security guards fought through the crowds. There would be one bodyguard at the front, then a band member, then another bodyguard, and so on.

Our ordinary fans were always adorable to us, but depending on where we were playing things could often get very dangerous. The first really heavy experience in that respect had occurred about a year earlier at the famous Paradiso Club in Holland. The stage was completely overrun and mobbed, and we had to go back to our dressing room while things calmed down. Initially it was just two or three fans who came onstage, and our security had managed to grab them, then suddenly there were ten or twelve of them, and after that they just kept coming. It was flattering, but often the venues would get trashed and it was becoming more and more common for us to be billed for “Damage to first 500 seats!”

So if the truth be told, by the time we arrived in Germany in October we were on the brink of exhaustion. The combination of everything we had done and the fact we’d been on the road for so long meant we’d just pushed things too far. Even if there had been no fight in the nightclub, there would still have been a lot of tiredness and unhappiness in Germany because we needed a rest.

In the end, it was John’s gashed hand that gave us a brief respite, because we had to scrap the rest of our dates until we could find someone to stand in for him. None of us were filled with much regret over canceling the shows, and we managed to play down the scale of the incident in the media. Today it would have been a huge international incident. Can you imagine the sort of fuss that would occur if Justin Timberlake were forced to cancel a tour due to a fight in a nightclub and a gashed hand? But at the time of the Duran Duran incident only a few lines appeared in the UK newspapers. A decade later, when Oasis got into a similar scrape in Germany, it was forensically picked over by the press. In 1982, though, the media were a very different beast, and our problems slipped by almost unnoticed.

They’d have never got into that fight had I been there,
I used to think to myself. I believed that I’d had the shit kicked out of me enough as a kid to know it’s time to get out fast when the odds are stacked against you. But with hindsight, if I
had
been in the club, the chances are I would have been at the center of things. Tracey was like a guardian angel who had prevented me from being there, because I had been back at the hotel with her.

There was no justification for the attack. If something like that occurred today, our lawyers would track down the people responsible and make their lives hell. Looking back, I think it affected our mental state in a big way, because it was the first time we encountered that kind of violent overreaction to the band. Roger and John didn’t pick the fight, they were targeted—but once that door is open it’s hard to close. Despite the fact that we were victims, we should have also realized our lifestyles were partly to blame. This was the first taste of the consequences of wild hedonism. We were starting to lose control, and we should have used the incident as a warning signal. Instead, we just went into denial about it.

So, was anything ever done? Did we ever sit down and talk about it? Was there ever any consideration of whether John or anyone else needed any help coping with the intense pressure of constantly being pursued?

The answer is no. We were just glad to get off the road. Deep down inside, it was the first time that we realized how fragile we were and how big the ramifications could be if any of us went off the rails. It showed us that if one of us did something stupid, then it wasn’t just the individual who would suffer. The whole crew would suffer, there would be a promoter to answer to, and thousands of fans would be let down.

We had to understand that none of us could afford to have a bad day, and from this point on there could be no more days off.
Ever.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Birth of the MTV Generation

ONE
of the things that Duran Duran will probably always be remembered for is all the great videos that we appeared in. They were enormous fun to make—even if it nearly killed us at times. I’m not joking! Several of us risked being drowned, we narrowly escaped being trampled by a crazed elephant, and we were forced to flee one shoot after being threatened by four thousand angry monks. At various stages while filming, Simon was strapped upside down to a water wheel and submerged in icy water, Nick risked severe dehydration during a four-hour taxi trek through the jungle wearing leather trousers in 100-degree heat, and I spent four days in the hospital after falling into a muddy lagoon and being struck down by a tropical stomach bug. But we also got to visit some of the most exotic and beautiful locations in the world . . . and most of all we had a truly fantastic time. It was as if we had nine lives and nothing could harm us. Most of the incidents occurred while we were filming the videos for “Save a Prayer” or “Hungry Like the Wolf” on location in Sri Lanka or “Rio” in the Caribbean, but the studio could be just as hair raising, as Simon found out on the set of “Wild Boys.”

I remember when the record label called us in to discuss making the video for “Rio.” “We want to film everything on a yacht in the Caribbean, and we’ll be flying out some models to appear alongside you,” they said.

“Sounds about right. What’s the general idea?” I asked—although, to be honest, we weren’t too bothered about the finer points of the video’s storyboard.

“Girls, boats—yes, please!” was how Simon later described our attitude. In hindsight, letting Simon near a boat wasn’t such a great idea.

Today, releasing a single and a video go together in the same sentence, but back in ’81 and ’82 video was a completely new medium that nobody had fully exploited. I suppose that as five young lads, we were a band that always had the potential to look good on camera, but there was a lot more to it than that. For us the music always came first, but we quickly understood how effective our sound could be when it was played to moving images. It worked alongside pictures because it was exotic and different and uplifting. It’s like when you watch a movie and a piece of music comes along and the music and the image complement each other perfectly, and suddenly everything works together, although sometimes it’s by accident if not by design.

We were in the right place at the right time. When we came onto the scene, video was emerging as a very cheap format that was an alternative to expensive film-based productions. The marketing people at EMI were very aware of this and had been talking to their counterparts in New York, including a guy named Ed Bernstein, whom our own management also had a lot of contact with. Ed drew their attention to the potential of using video on a new cable station called MTV, which back then was only just in the process of being formed in the States. It meant you could shoot material for broadcast for a lot less money. Also, there were a great number of talented young filmmakers who wanted to use the exotic new format to make three-minute music videos. In those days, the record labels were big moneymaking concerns that employed the best and brightest people, who soon realized what videos could do for artists. Not only could they get you an infinite amount of airplay, but people could see you, too, without the need for you to travel everywhere. And of course, who better visually was there to show on your gleaming new MTV station than Duran Duran?

We were helped by our management, the Berrows from Birmingham, who secretly fancied themselves as movie producers. They loved everything about New York and had modeled the playlist and styling at the Rum Runner on Studio 54, so they were naturally receptive to MTV. We had successfully managed to boot Mike Berrow out of the band for his dreadful sax playing, but I think he and his brother, Paul, secretly saw video as a way for them to stay involved in the creative side of things. To be fair to Paul, he certainly understood the power of imagery, even if some of his ideas about how to make a video sexually appealing turned out to be a bit wild.

So our entrance on the video scene was due to a mixture of EMI spotting the potential of MTV and the Berrows seeing themselves as movie moguls. Having said that, even though the Berrows helped, I still believe we would have found everything without them. Everyone at the record company took one look at us and realized we were perfect for the format, particularly Simon. He had been to drama school and had even starred in TV commercials as a kid. We used to joke that you could talk him into doing anything as long as there was a camera there, and the rest of us wouldn’t have done half the things he did in the videos.

Nick and John were also very visual in their whole outlook, which initially was based as much on fashion as it was on music. I think John always fancied himself as a bit of an actor, and Roger is actually very photogenic, too. I was probably the least enthusiastic about appearing on video, although at times Nick wasn’t so comfortable, either. I guess it helped a lot that the record company believed we all looked good on film.

The first video we made was for “Planet Earth.”

“We’ve got some fantastic show reels to show you by an Australian director called Russell Mulcahy,” said one of the A & R men at EMI. “He’s streets ahead of anybody else.”

The people at the record label were right. Russell turned out to be the Steven Spielberg of video, and I have to give him credit that a lot of our best videos were driven by his genius. Russell had directed the video for the Buggles hit “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which was the first music video to be shown on MTV. He also went on to become a very successful moviemaker and he directed the
Razorback
and
Highlander
films. Our first meeting with him was very frantic, and he seemed to have an attention span of only four minutes, but he had amazing ideas. We worked with other directors from time to time, but all of Russell’s material for us was consistently strong—and it included the videos for “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” “Rio,” “The Reflex,” and “Wild Boys.” Russell would take our basic ideas from the songs and turn them into a whole storyboard—and it nearly always worked. There was no premeditated way of doing the music; Russell just somehow managed to marry the two mediums together.

The record label wanted to make sure that there were plenty of New Romantic overtones on “Planet Earth,” so we all wore frilly shirts and we invited some camp-looking male dancers from the Rum Runner to help glam things up. If you look closely you can see that one of the dancers we used in the final cut was Martin Degville, who went on to make a name for himself in Sigue Sigue Sputnik. The video opened with a shot of Roger, who was bare-chested and floating above the earth, before cutting to all of us playing together on what looked like a platform of ice that was suspended in thin air. In fact it was all shot through Perspex and the backgrounds were superimposed. We lined up together in the same order onstage that would eventually become our signature: Simon in the center, John to the left, and me to the right (as you face the stage). We had a bit of a hiccup on the day that we filmed it: John and I didn’t bring our own guitars, so we ended up playing on instruments that we weren’t really comfortable with. But it came together well, apart from one shot that featured Simon, or rather a certain part of Simon’s anatomy, that Nick was very unhappy about.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Nick scowled as we reviewed an early cut of the tape. It showed a bare-chested Simon attempting to give a smoldering look by raising an arm above his head—only to reveal a bit too much body hair.

“That’s Charlie’s armpit!” I explained gleefully (I called Simon Charlie because his full name is Simon John Charles Le Bon and I thought
Charlie
sounded more down-to-earth).

“Well—do you want it in the video or not?” asked Russell. Actually, we didn’t want to lose the whole sequence, so it is still there to this day: a lingering shot of Simon’s hairy armpit amid all the glossy New Romantic imagery. I don’t think Nick was ever very happy about that one. But it didn’t do us any harm, and it was largely thanks to the fact that we had a video to complement the song that we went straight to number one in Australia, hence the reason we already had a profile by the time we arrived Down Under in early 1981.