Wild Boy (30 page)

“We are off the rig, just crank it up,” I shouted.

We managed to get everything working after four minutes and we performed “Get It On,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “Murderess,” but we had to drop one number to make up for lost time. When I came offstage Bill Graham was still ranting.

“Why don’t you shut up?” I shouted at him.

“Steady on, Andy,” Jim Callaghan said to me. He was aware of how powerful Bill was, but I was past caring.

The rest of the day flew by. The other memorable event was Simon’s squawked bum note during “A View to a Kill.” In hindsight, it’s possible his voice wasn’t fully trained at the time because he’d been off the road for so long, but I wasn’t too bothered by that either. Back at the hotel that evening I crashed into bed after partying with Ronnie Wood and Jimmy Page. The shenanigans were still going strong downstairs, but when a knock at the door came from one of the crew inviting me back out I couldn’t take it.

This time the party really was over.

THE
following day I gave up drinking. I got up and went to lunch with Danny Goldberg and explained the way I was feeling.

“You know, I need to get out of this,” I said.

“Everything?” he replied.

“Well, I need to get out of the lifestyle, at least,” I said.

Danny was a very intelligent guy. He helped me to unravel things and he gave me a lot of advice. He’d been Led Zeppelin’s publicist for many years and he had traveled with them, so he was a seasoned old pro (he went on to represent Kurt Cobain). Danny was currently managing Don Johnson and Michael Des Barres. Don was very clean-living and he knew Steve Jones. Steve, my Sex Pistols pal from LA, had now decided to quit the bottle.

“Talk to Michael and Don,” advised Danny.

From that point on, Danny helped me with lawyers and everything that I needed to extricate myself from Duran Duran. Of course, as far as the rest of the world were concerned, Duran Duran were still a group and we were at the height of our success, but behind the scenes things were now too badly fractured for the five of us to carry on together. John and I were still in the middle of the Power Station tour (we’d had to cancel a couple of gigs at a cost of around $250,000 in order to do Live Aid), so I still had a bit of time on the road ahead of me before I could go to LA to sort things out with Danny. It felt strange to be sober and on tour. Up until now John and I had been living on a diet of Jack Daniel’s, cocaine, and fast food. I’d become cut off from the real world, and I had very little idea of current affairs or even about what was going on in the world of football back home, which was previously something I’d always kept in touch with. Being in Duran Duran had become like being sucked into some weird alternative reality in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
.

I was getting ready to go and do a sound check for a Power Station gig in the States when I turned on the TV news in my hotel and got a bizarre shock. There on the screen in front of me was footage of a yacht floating upside down in the sea.

“
. . . And once again the latest shocking news . . . A yacht belonging to Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon has capsized in rough seas. The singer is believed to have been on board.”

At first I was a bit numb.
This isn’t real: that can’t be Simon’s boat,
I thought. I rang John in his room.

“Put the television on,” I said.

The news bulletin didn’t have any more details. Was Simon still alive? Was he still missing or had he been rescued? Who else was on board the
Drum
when it turned over? A million questions were going through my head, and any differences between Simon and me were obviously forgotten at this moment in time. The sea looked dangerous and stormy in the grainy television images, and I knew from my background in a fishing village that nobody could survive for very long in seas like that. Our staff began calling Europe to try and get more information, and we began to make plans to cancel that night’s show. Hell, if Simon was dead we’d cancel the whole tour and be on the first flight back to the UK. Fortunately, news reached us fairly quickly that he had been rescued.
You were stupid to go out to sea, Simon, but thank God you are safe
, I thought.

In a funny sort of way the
Drum
incident was just another example of how the lifestyle threatened to destroy all of us. In fact, I was convinced that someone would end up dead if we all continued the way we were going. Another one of our nine lives had been used up. After the tour ended, I told John how I felt while we were in a car together in LA.

“You know, one of us is going to die,” I said quietly.

“What are you talking about?” said John.

“If we keep going like this we are going to die. It could be a drug thing, it could be an alcohol thing, or it could be something else. Simon nearly killed himself on a fucking boat.”

John didn’t seem to grasp what I was saying.

“Look at us,” I said. “We’ve been living on a diet of cocaine and Big Macs. You should quit this lifestyle and be an actor. It doesn’t agree with you.”

“What the fuck do you mean, I should be an actor?”

“You should give up being in Duran Duran and be an actor—it’s what you are good at. How many more times does something bad have to happen? Car crashes, bad drug comedowns, arguments, drunken bust-ups . . . How many more do you need before one of us goes all the way?”

When you are sober, you come out of denial, and I knew that we were close to losing everything. It wasn’t just people in the band who were living on the edge, it was those around us. Sooner or later someone was going to pay the ultimate price. It could have been Nick’s wife falling off a balcony, or it could have been my wife through postnatal depression. Or what would have happened if the next time there was a stabbing at a party the knife went through someone’s heart or lungs? What if one of us got alcohol poisoning or ran out of luck the next time we were racing to a gig and a tire blew? Up until now the booze and drugs had prevented me from seeing any of this, but we’d reached a crossroads and it was time to change direction. Simon nearly proved my point a few months later when he crashed his motorbike and spent six days in the hospital with bruised testicles. Ouch. Yet
another
one of our nine lives gone.

Roger, meanwhile, seemed to have reached a similar conclusion to mine near the end of the year. EMI had been anxious to keep a lid on things, so officially all five us were still in Duran Duran, but in December Roger announced he was quitting. He was suffering from severe anxiety and, unbeknownst to the rest of the band, he had become very ill. He was just burned out by the whole thing and he was later quoted in the
New York Times
as saying “I’d been on a thousand airplanes, but I didn’t know how to get on one as an individual. I had to relearn life.”

Only Simon and Nick seemed to want to soldier on. As well as Roger quitting, the other major event in December of that year was that Simon married Yasmin. As far as the press were concerned it was a marriage made in Heaven: the pop star and the gorgeous Persian model. I think his newfound love probably saved Simon from the sort of demons that the rest of us were facing. He’d always stayed positive, and in Yasmin he’d found a very smart girl. Years later (after we patched things up) I became friends with Yaz, and Simon won’t mind me telling you that she’s the one with the balls in the Le Bon household. She’s super-intelligent and always argues her corner very well if you’re debating something with her. Simon was later quoted as saying that he first spotted Yasmin’s photograph when he was flicking through a model agency book with John. He was besotted from the moment he saw her and later managed to track her down and ask her for a date. He chose very well because as well as being a famous supermodel, she is sharp, witty . . . and a great cook. Their ceremony was a grand affair and it was nice to be going to Simon’s wedding when we could so easily have all been going to his funeral. Simon told us how he’d feared his oxygen would run out while he was trapped in the upside-down hull of
The Drum
with his brother Jonathan, who is a very fit lad and a strong swimmer. Jonathan volunteered to swim underwater through all of the oil, shit, and ropes that were thrashing about in the sea in order to get help.

“I had to watch my brother go, knowing that I might not see him again. I also knew that if I didn’t see him again I would be dead,” confided Simon.

Thankfully, Jonathan had made it, and he’d been able to help rescuers pinpoint exactly which part of the hull Simon had been trapped in. Unfortunately, just like
The Drum
, Duran Duran was now almost beyond salvage.

We made one last attempt to find a way forward. I had to go to London to sort out some business and the four of us—Simon, Nick, John, and I—all met at a loft flat I owned in Wanstead. There had been a lot of legal wrangling and I had disingenuously given the others the impression that I was willing to carry on because I couldn’t be bothered to have it out with them. I wanted to avoid a confrontation, but I knew it was very unlikely we would work something out.

It was a fairly friendly meeting, but we were just propping things up. Simon and Nick wanted to carry on with plans for a new album, but I argued we should take a rest. In my mind, I ran through where each of us was in life. Nick was locked in an unhappy marriage (given that he later divorced) and his long-term finances were far from healthy due to his lavish lifestyle. In 1994, the mansion he shared with Julie Anne in South Kensington was repossessed by Coutts bank. Meanwhile, I’d been close to a nervous breakdown and had nearly lost my wife. John was in danger of slowly killing himself through drugs, and Roger was no longer there. Only Simon seemed unscathed, thanks to the renewed vigor he’d been given by Yasmin, but even he seemed to have a death wish for crashing boats and motorbikes. I thought to myself that the band had only existed over the last year for the purpose of propping up Simon’s boats, propping up Nick’s new debts, and propping up John and me with drink and drugs.

Despite my feelings, the meeting ended amicably, but things were still unresolved. Eventually, Simon and Nick called in Nile Rodgers to play on the new Duran Duran album,
Notorious
. There was talk of legal action against me if I refused to also take part and eventually I agreed to come to the studio and play on a few tracks to make the transition a bit smoother.

When I arrived at the studio on a Saturday morning, as arranged, there was no one there apart from a French sound engineer.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Oh, it was Grace Jones’s birthday party last night so they are probably still sleeping it off.”

Great. I go to the trouble to come here and help out against my will, and no one can even be bothered to turn up because they are all out partying with Grace Jones (who was the girl of the moment after starring in
A View to a Kill
).

I opened up a guitar case in the studio and out fell a bag of cocaine.

That just about sums things up
, I thought. I plugged in my guitar, played a few tracks with the French engineer in order to honor my contractual obligations, and then I left to phone my lawyer.

It was over
.

So what was it that caused Duran Duran to split in 1986? Booze and drugs? Creative tension and personality clashes? Legal arguments with the Berrows over cash? Our relentless schedule and the pressures of twenty-four-hour attention? All of these played a part, but in the end it boiled down to two things: we had stopped communicating with each other and we were exhausted.

Our dissolution wasn’t caused by people. It was caused by the circumstances that we found ourselves in.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Beyond the Power Station: The LA Years—
Ooh La La

TRACEY
and I moved to a beautiful little house in Los Angeles, and it felt like we were slowly letting out the air that we’d been bottling up over the previous two years. It was our way of making peace with ourselves after all the stresses and mayhem of having to hustle through crowds of camera crews and screaming fans every time we went out in public. Of course, I was still recognized everywhere we went, but I soon discovered that in LA you can find a man to solve any problem. In a town full of Hollywood stars there’s always someone to talk to who understands your needs and who has probably been through similar experiences to your own.

I was out walking one day when I found this wonderful wooden house in Malibu on the top of a hill, facing out across the ocean. It was a beaten-up old property that would need a lot of love and attention, but the view was exquisite. As I sat there, on the top of the hill looking out across the beautiful blue waves of the Pacific, I thought:
Wow—this is perfect.

Tracey and I had a child to think about now as well as ourselves, and I sensed that living in the United States would give us the breathing space that we needed. We’d been grateful for the help and support of Tracey’s family back in the Midlands in the UK, but if you’re trying to cope with being trapped in the glare of the international spotlight, there aren’t many people who can advise about that sort of thing in Wolverhampton. America was the natural choice for us to make.

I’d taken Danny Goldberg’s advice to speak to Don Johnson and Michael Des Barres about how to take stock of things, and they both helped me throughout this period in my life. Don was a very interesting guy and I learned a lot from him. He was by far the biggest TV star in America at the time due to his role as gun-toting cop Sonny Crockett in
Miami Vice,
but he seemed to just naturally cope with all the attention that he created, and he accepted it all with good grace. Don was a little bit older and wiser when it came to taking things in his stride. He was fascinated by the music industry and we became good friends.

Later on, Don took me down to Miami, and it was like hanging out with a king because everyone in the city respected him so much. I can remember stopping at some traffic lights with him there while he was driving an open-topped Beemer. Suddenly, all the cars around us started to sound their horns in order to say hello:
beep, beep, beep!
We were quickly surrounded by well-wishers . . . but nobody banged on the car or tried to ransack the vehicle, like they’d done when Tracey was in a car at Heathrow. Instead, it was just hilarious. Everywhere we went there were cries of, “Hey—it’s Sonny Crockett!” I thought I’d experienced it large up until now, but this took things to a whole new level. What was all the more amazing was that Don didn’t always have twenty-four-hour security around him. Often he just dealt with it on his own. Of course, he was sober and together enough to be driving and looking after himself—something which I hadn’t been for quite a while. At times in Duran Duran I’d have struggled to remember my car keys, let alone be in a fit state to drive—had I ever learned to drive in the first place!