Wild Boy (26 page)

When we came to shoot the video, the scale of the event was enormous—and Russell had bizarre plans for Simon.

“Simon I want you to be stripped and strapped to a revolving waterwheel, and you will then be fully submerged upside down as it rotates through the water,” said Russell.

“You want me to do what?” said Simon.

It was a dangerous stunt, but we could all see that he secretly loved the idea of all the attention it would create. Fair play to Simon, he was always willing to do something if it would help the band, especially if it appealed to the natural showman in him. This was something we would all want to see.

AS
well as the William Burroughs references, the subplot of the video was that we would have Milo O’Shea’s original Durand-Durand character under the stage, snatching people into his dark underworld. There were a lot of men running about in loincloths, and it was all a bit too camp for me, but it was at a time when there was a lot of hedonism, drugs, money, and ambition to outdo anything that even Michael Jackson had done in a video. Russell had decided to really push the boat out. I was sitting in one of the dressing rooms at Shepperton when one of our accountants came in.

“I’ve just had to take ninety thousand pounds out of the account of each band member towards the cost of the shoot,” he said.

“Ninety thousand pounds!” I winced. “Why does it have to be a ten-day shoot? What’s the matter with five?”

With £90,000 from each of us the band’s contribution added up to a cool £450,000, and with EMI’s contribution at least matching it, the total bill for the video came to around £1 million. Don’t forget this is at 1984 prices, so the idea of a band making something so extravagant today would be an impossibility; the economics simply would not work. I grumbled a bit about the cost at the time, but in hindsight we probably got our money’s worth over the course of our lives, because it was such a memorable project.

As well as Simon being tied to a waterwheel, I was due to be strapped into a Superman-style harness so that I could swing back and forth through the sky, while Roger would be fired up and down on a jet pack. John was due to be tied up in a derelict car, and Nick, meanwhile, would stick to playing his keyboards in a cage. The set was enormous, with lots of big scaffolds, and there was a giant statue of a gargoyle-like character with a high forehead (which we joked looked a bit like Paul Berrow). At the end of the ten days, Russell planned to blow up the entire set in a giant fireball. Give the man some credit—he liked to go out with a bang.

One interesting departure from all our other videos up until now was that there were no girls in this one and there was a lot of comment at the time about how homoerotic it looked. One touch that I added was the ripped-jeans look—as far as I know we were the first to do it, so maybe that’s my one contribution to fashion!

Simon’s waterwheel stunt was the obvious highlight of the shoot. There had been a few injuries so far, with people falling from scaffolds and so on, but thankfully Simon came through it unscathed. There were two divers on hand the whole time in case anything went wrong, but it still must have been very scary and claustrophobic for him. A lot was made in the press about the fact the wheel stopped turning at one point while Simon was underwater and the papers assumed he’d been trapped and had to be rescued. I think it was more of a case that the wheel was always supposed to pause and arrangements had been made for Simon to breathe through an air pipe. It was actually a very complex stunt worthy of a Bond movie, and our very own “Simon Le Bond” performed brilliantly. The final video was breathtaking (quite literally in Simon’s case), and the waterwheel scenes were very hypnotic to watch. It was released to critical acclaim, and it won a Brit Award for Best Music Video.

TRACEY
and I were at home at our cottage when her water broke, and our son, Andrew, arrived right on time on August 20. It was a long delivery, but we were both elated. I was present at the birth, and the first thing I did after cutting the umbilical cord was to count every finger and toe! The midwives wrapped him up in this little white towel and handed him to me, the medical procedures were over, and we had a little baby to care for.

“He’s gorgeous,” I told Tracey.

Nothing prepares you for the delicacy of holding a newborn baby. He was like a piece of fine bone china, and the first thing I thought as I sat down in a chair was
Christ—don’t drop him!

We had two bodyguards with us, and we kept the location of the hospital really quiet. I wasn’t going to chance any repeat of the horrible incident Tracey had suffered at Heathrow. The local newspaper found out where we were, but they weren’t intrusive and we went home safely with a midwife to our cottage. I found changing a nappy difficult at first, but you soon learn how to pick up the little legs and get on with it. As well as the midwife, we had a lot of help from Tracey’s mum, who taught me how to sit a baby on my knee and burp him while you gently hold his neck with your other hand. It requires you to be completely gentle in your approach, and I found the whole thing mind-blowing.

Lots of Tracey’s old friends lived nearby, and there was an extended network of people from the Midlands who were all there and all very happy for us. Sometimes it would get to eight in the evening and everything would be dead quiet, so I’d slip out to a great cider pub around the corner and wet the baby’s head with a few close friends and family. I’d found a completely new form of happiness that was so different from anything I was used to in Duran Duran. I was still going back and forth to London, making plans for the release of
Arena
and “Wild Boys,” but it was a big relief to know I had a beautiful family and my own tranquil little world away from the band.

LIFE
then took a very dark and completely unexpected twist—and it made me realize that all the success and adulation can suddenly count for nothing when a loved one’s life is in danger. Sadly, it is often only tragedy or the threat of it that reminds you that you are still human.

Tracey had been a bit tired in the weeks that followed the birth, but we both thought that everything was fine. In fact, she was about to become very sick and it would rock us both to the core. The only way I can describe what happened is that I came home one night and there was a different person in the house. At first I thought Tracey was just giving me a hard time about something or other, but she was swearing at me and behaving very belligerently, which was completely out of character.

“What are you talking about? Calm down,” I said.

She seemed to be confused about who she was. She started to make up things that she claimed had happened to her in the past, including a horrific account of how she’d been attacked by a man. None of it was true, but I later found out that she was going through some experiences in her mind that were demonic and seemed very real to her at the time.

“Are you okay?” I asked, putting my hand on her arm.

“Get off,” she growled, as she lashed her arm back. I could feel the strength in her as she pulled herself away from me and it scared me.

I thought maybe I’d done something to upset her, but then I noticed that her eyes had changed and I realized that something else was going on. To this day, I’ve kept two photographs of Tracey that were taken a few days apart. In one her eyes are beautiful and bright, sparkling with life soon after she gave birth to our son. In the second photograph, which was taken after she became ill, her eyes are dull and dead. Every time I tried to physically calm her by putting an arm around her, she became aggressive and her strength was frightening. I later found out that increased strength can be a side effect of psychosis. When I touched her hand it was so tense that she felt like rock.

“I’ll make you a cup of tea and run you a warm bath,” I said, hoping it would relax her.

Eventually I managed to get her in the bath and I went downstairs for about twenty minutes, wondering what to do. Our cottage was old, so I could hear everything upstairs. I heard the floorboards creak as she got out of the bath and went into the bedroom where our baby was asleep. A tiny little alarm bell started ringing inside me. I went upstairs and I found her standing at the open window with little Andrew in her arms. I spoke to her softly, but there was no reaction from her—she didn’t seem to know what she was doing. Then the penny dropped and I knew there was something very, very badly wrong. She was completely unrecognizable, and for one fleeting moment I thought maybe she was possessed. I don’t know what her intention was, but I was terrified she was going to jump.

“Give me the baby, Tracey, and come away from the window.”

I tried to take Andrew from her but she wouldn’t let me. I managed to move her away from the window and I closed it. As soon as I’d made things safe, I called Tracey’s mother and I rang a doctor.

The medics knew what was wrong pretty quickly. The psychologist explained Tracey had suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by a full-blown postnatal psychosis. Many women experience postnatal depression, but only one in a million suffer something as severe as this. There was a danger it could become life-threatening.

“How long will it last?” I asked.

“The level of seriousness depends on the patient because it’s a hormonal thing, but it could be up to eighteen months,” explained the doctor.

Eighteen months! I felt that Tracey would be better off at home rather than in the local hospital, so we organized twenty-four-hour medical care. Our doctors made a decision to sedate her by putting her into an enforced coma for six days. It was for her own safety because she was so ill that her brain needed complete rest—and the only way to do it was to medicate her.

It felt as if everything in my life had just evaporated into ether. I looked at our little baby and I prayed Tracey would be okay. I couldn’t think about anything else. Everything that happened to me up until now was insignificant compared to this. I was terrified that even if Tracey pulled through it would be too late for her to bond with our child. I’d seen enough to understand that a baby smells and feels its way through the first few weeks of its life with its mother, and any disruption could only be a bad thing. The lowest moment was when the doctors suggested that one of the treatments that could be suitable for her was electroshock therapy. It sounded like something from Victorian times.

“No thank you,” I said. “There’s no one else here who you can ask about that so don’t mention it again.”

For six long days and nights I helped the medics and my mother-in-law care for Tracey. The nurses worked in shifts. They told me it was important to get a routine going so that everything stayed as familiar as possible for Tracey when she briefly awoke from time to time. I ate breakfast and watched TV each morning, and during the breaks in her medication I would help to bathe Tracey whenever she roused a little. At one point the doctors had to put her on a drip to get some nourishment inside her and to keep her hydrated, so there was a lot of equipment up in the bedroom. We’d recently decorated the room for the arrival of the new baby, and now it looked like an emergency ward. Tracey’s medication was increased during the evenings so that she could sleep for ten to twelve hours without being disturbed. I tried to cuddle her at night but she was all floppy. The nurses explained that she couldn’t react to me emotionally because she was so heavily sedated. The only thing we could do was to look after her hygiene while her brain relaxed and the medication did its job. The whole point was to prevent her from reacting to anything and let her calm down.

Thankfully, it worked.

Slowly, the doctors reduced the medication and she started to come around. I held her hand and it felt gentle again. The anger was gone, and the woman I loved was back. She managed to hold a glass by herself for the first time in a week, and I knew she was going to recover. Food was still not easy, but slowly she began to improve and the dark rings around her eyes began to vanish. Once Tracey had calmed down, the doctors were able to balance her hormones by giving her drugs, and her condition began to stabilize. Inducing the coma had been necessary so the doctors could control her mental psychosis before they could start balancing her body. A lot more is known about how to treat the condition today than was known in 1984, but she pulled through.

It was a great relief when things started to return to the way they had been. I needn’t have worried about her bonding with the baby; I only needed to watch her splashing with him in the bath to realize everything was fine. But the doctors warned us there was a danger the psychosis could return in the future.

“We don’t advise you to have any more children or you could find yourself suffering again,” the doctors told us.

I would sit and wonder what had brought on the illness. Was it anything to do with my lifestyle in Duran Duran? Being trapped in a car at Heathrow Airport while it was ransacked and she was pregnant couldn’t have helped. Had the time Tracey spent with us in the States taken a heavier toll on her than I’d imagined? Was the furor over our cocaine use a factor?

The honest answer is that I don’t know. It’s a rare illness, but it can strike any woman after childbirth. Tracey never smoked while she was pregnant, and she has never been much of a drinker, so physically she didn’t put any stresses on herself during pregnancy. In fact, she was a strong, energetic woman who went riding almost every day and kept herself very fit—and all those things helped her pull through.

One thing that the whole episode taught me was that your priority in life should always be your family and the health of your family. If ever that collides with work commitments you should always choose family first. Sometimes it can be hard to juggle both. There were times during this period when people would call me with updates and assessments of how our release plans for
Arena
were going and I’d think,
You know what? It’s not that interesting to me at the moment. I’ve got more important things to care about.