Wild Boy (39 page)

“Hey 50, man, wanna come and play table tennis with me?”

Big mistake, Justin,
I thought,
big mistake. You’re dressed like a chicken and he hasn’t got a clue who you are, save that you want to play him at table tennis. To add to this, he has about thirty blokes on his side.
Now, a game of basketball would have been more of a cultural exchange, but an offer from a chicken-winged, androgynous rock singer to play Ping-Pong didn’t strike me as 50’s definition of urban cool. Although Justin was wearing wings, I figured this probably wouldn’t fly and if the rapper dude took it as a public put-down then . . . aren’t they supposed to shoot you at that point? The rapper stared wide-eyed at Hawkins and then walked off, saying, “Weird, man—fuckin’ weird!” It was another very English moment during an evening when Duran Duran took center stage and held it effortlessly, and we felt like kings of the Brits. I was very chuffed that my kids and family got to see the good side of our endeavors, and I was also pleased that we, as five guys all aged forty-plus, could still hack it live on national TV at the most prestigious event on the UK music calendar.

Later, at the aftershow, I chatted to Justin Timberlake, who presented us with the award. We talked about the possibility of working together at some point and he said it would be an interesting proposition. He was very into music and he’d been doing it a very long time for such a young man.

IT
was a great evening at the Brits but the euphoria soon began to wear off as the impact of my father’s illness sank in. Some of the shows that we performed on our tour were fantastic and got great reviews, so my dad was still smiling on his daily trip to the paper shop, but deep down inside I knew he was living on borrowed time. I did what I could to help and offered to pay for him to have treatment in the States, but he insisted on staying close to home. I felt uneasy that my commitments in Duran Duran meant I had to be away from him so much, and at times it felt like I was living in a Bermuda Triangle as I tried to juggle between spending time either with him or my own family or with the band. One small blessing was that Duran Duran played in a gig in Newcastle for the first time in twenty-three years, which was excellent because it meant my dad could come and see the band perform live in our hometown. It was an unforgettable evening and it lifted my spirits enormously to be on home turf.

Meanwhile, Sony were eager to get their hands on our comeback album, which we’d decided to title
Astronaut.
We planned to make it an out-and-out pop record. The problem was that we found ourselves in the crazy position of touring, doing promotional work, and trying to finish the album all at the same time. The pressure began to build, and Nick and Simon soon started to argue incessantly about lyrics. Nick had reappointed himself head of the Lyric Police, and he seemed to be always on Simon’s back, and they bickered so often that some of the crew nicknamed them Hinge and Brackett after the two old women characters in the famous TV drag act of the same name.

Their rowing had started in the south of France, when we first began to work on the new album, and it got worse. On one occasion Nick pinged off an e-mail having a go at Simon about this lyric or that lyric, and he copied it to everybody else.
Who made you the boss, Nick?
I thought. In my opinion it showed that he still didn’t have much respect for the rest of us to take it upon himself to fire off such an e-mail on his own. I felt that this was particularly harsh on Simon, who seemed to be going through a patch that many songwriters experience, wherein it suddenly becomes much harder to keep churning out the material because you literally run out of words.

I’d witnessed a similar thing with other singers. Rod Stewart had been very open with me about this and explained that sometimes it’s possible to go through periods in which you don’t always enjoy it so much. With us, it got to the point where Nick seemed to be threatening to write the lyrics himself. I was utterly against this, because Simon had always been the only lyricist we needed, and you can’t replace the uniqueness of originality. But Simon couldn’t seem to get his lyrics to where he was happy with them, and he didn’t seem to want to take on board any comments from the rest of us when we tried to help.

I suddenly realized why John had initially been so against recording a new album. He’d been around Simon and Nick more than I during the late eighties and nineties, and maybe he accepted that their creative relationship was badly fractured.

I spoke to Nick about it in the hope that I might be able to help; in situations like this it’s often useful to have someone other than the singer throw in their ideas in order to get things flowing. I said something along the lines of, “I know I can work with Simon.” I hadn’t spent the wilderness years of the nineties with him, so we weren’t worn out creatively. But my efforts proved to be mainly unproductive because I felt, rightly or not, that every time I offered any constructive criticism Simon seemed to take it the wrong way. If we’d been able to communicate healthily, then the input I was offering would have been taken in good spirit, but I think it was often perceived as an attempt to rip him apart. Was I expecting the old bugger to be up to more than he really was? I wondered. Whatever the answer, it definitely wasn’t happening. I’ve thought a lot about why Simon was like that: maybe it was because he’d taken such a battering from Nick over the years or maybe that he simply couldn’t take anyone else’s input anymore. Or perhaps he’d been trying for commercial success for so long that he just couldn’t see things with a fresh head or notice the wood for the trees.

Whatever the cause, it was very frustrating for all involved. Our management team had constant behind-the-scenes conversations regarding the problem but offered little by way of a solution. We must have recorded twenty or thirty songs that I could play you now, but they were never fully finished. Frustratingly, we all spent a lot of time and energy working on material that was not completed, either because Simon didn’t write the lyrics or because Nick didn’t like the way they were going or he had other things to attend to. It was as if the intensity of their focus seemed to have faded, although they still remained very close socially. Perhaps that’s what Duran Duran was now, I wondered—a musical social club with an overpriced transport plan.

The difficulties started to cause new tensions between Simon and myself, and there also seemed to be growing friction between Roger and Simon, which was something that had never surfaced before. Roger and I were still on a slightly reduced percentage of the band’s earnings than Simon, Nick, and John, and it was beginning to irritate me. In my view, our live shows had been the major driving force behind Duran Duran’s comeback, and I felt we had both made a huge contribution in helping to drive the energy and vigor of that. The problem was that every time I raised the issue, something would come up to put it off, and the matter was never given any proper airtime.

The friction over lyrics came to a head in the form of a blazing row between Simon and me during a session one Saturday afternoon when I suggested he try to sing a line to song called “Want You More” in a certain way.

“Why don’t you do it like this, take the line and stick it here?” I suggested. His angry response was not in character.

“No. Don’t be pompous with me,” he snapped back.

Pompous! Why is he mad with me?
I wondered.

“Don’t call me fucking pompous,” I countered. “When you write songs together, try living on a two-way street, then perhaps you won’t feel like you are constantly driving in the wrong fucking direction year after year. You weren’t like this when we were younger.”

And neither,
I thought,
was I.

“I’m just saying change that line and put it somewhere different and you are flatly saying no?” I asked.

Simon stood his ground, taking as hostile my attempts to be constructive, and before I knew it we were in an angry screaming match.
I am out of here,
I thought. What concerned me the most was that his reaction was totally out of character. Did he harbor some deep resentment from all the troubles of the eighties? Pissed off, I slipped out of the studio and caught the first British Airways flight back from Gatwick to Ibiza. I stopped for a long overdue vindaloo en route to the airport, and like any Englishman with a belly full of curry, I then drank a lot of plonk in the departure lounge—so by the time I was boarding the plane I felt wobbly and full of anger and chillies.

When I arrived home my temper overheated and I threw a full bottle of beer across the courtyard of our villa, watching it shatter against the old walls. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever thrown something like that in anger and Tracey could see that I was close to the edge—it felt like we were back in Germany in 1982. She was right: I began to question in my mind whether my row with Simon was the beginning of something bleak and irreversible.

With the fact that we’d now been working on the album for three years and it was hardly flowing like a river, I realized that touring with Duran Duran was also becoming less and less fun. It was still exciting to receive so much attention, but we no longer had any sense of togetherness when we came offstage. We were all different people now (not to mention much older) and we didn’t go off to clubs to drink together after our shows like we did in the old days. None of us were doing drugs this time around, nor were we sharing much else in common. We were five separate individuals, and it felt to me as if the band didn’t seem to have any collective soul of its own. Even all the fine wine we carried around with us tended to be consumed away from each other with our respective friends or family when they visited us on the road. I felt that the only bit that was really enjoyable was the part where we were playing together onstage.

We carried on recording but it continued to be laborious work. Some of it was done in London and then the rest was completed while we were in the States doing promotion for the forthcoming but as yet unfinished album. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I was getting the distinct impression that we were not getting the benefit of much good advice from our recently appointed New York–based management.

All the time we were doing promotional interviews on the radio I could tell the record wasn’t really kicking in: it was just spin, spin, spin—but with no real substance. One of the things you learn very quickly in music is that you can’t win by cheating—you can’t fake inspiration or great songs. Just simply seeing how it’s done isn’t enough; there are some fundamental skills and instincts beyond basic PR. I began to wonder whether or not we should wait until the New Year to give us more time to get it right, but Sony were keen to go ahead.

Eventually, our new album
Astronaut
went on sale in late October 2004. I was happy enough with the music itself. I’d written a very large amount of the material myself and, despite all the ups and downs, I had worked very closely with Simon, but I didn’t like the way we had mixed and finished it. We’d had no time to sit on it and tweak it for even a couple of weeks, which is often necessary in order to clear your ears and listen to it with a fresh perspective for one last time. I can never understand the almost hormonal rush for attention and cash flow that occurs with a record release.

We got the American chart result for the first week of
Astronaut
on the same day we appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show in the States. Ellen was a great host, a really fabulous woman, but despite the pleasant experience of going on her show, no sooner had we blasted off when our sales figures soon brought us down to earth later that day.
Astronaut
sold 51,000 albums; it went in at number fifteen in the US chart and it made number three in the UK chart. It was a respectable start but hardly the huge comeback fanfare we’d been working for. Our management tried to put a positive gloss on it, but I wasn’t willing to be fooled as the next week’s shipping figures were already down by 50 percent.

“We’ve sold eighty million records in the past,” I said. “This is fifty thousand.”

To create any real momentum we were hoping for 200,000, or at worst 150,000 as a start, but as November hit, the album was actually moving down the charts—in total
Astronaut
sold about a million copies worldwide. It was enough to ensure that we didn’t lose any money, but it didn’t really create enough of a buzz to give us any focus on the radio. We probably sold more concert tickets in most areas than we did albums. Yes, there was still plenty of demand for nostalgia shows, but the album had been a laborious plod commercially.

To be fair to the others, I probably wasn’t always the easiest person to be around during this period, and I can remember some ridiculous rows between us. We were traveling in a car when I had a huge rant at some of the others when they proposed playing a gig in China. I gave them a twenty-minute lecture on why I didn’t want to go there because of the political situation. I began to enjoy winding them up. It was my way of intimidating the others to drop the illusion that we’d made the best of our collective endeavors.

One other very important fact was that I was on the way to suffering from depression. I lost my rag with Nick while we were in a car together in Europe doing some promotional work. We didn’t have any security with us, and there’d been a few crowds that had jostled us for autographs as we went in and out of hotels. I’m normally happy to sign things for fans, but I was starting to feel twinges of the agoraphobia that I’d experienced twenty-five years ago. I was also quite snappy with people over our overexposure; some band members thought we were U2 and attempted to emulate them. Nick was sitting in the car with me droning on about something or other when I suddenly snapped.

“Shut the fuck up!” I screamed at him. “This is the real world, Nick, there are so many real things in life that are more important than what you are going on about.”

We continued the rest of the journey in silence. I think some of the others could see I was under strain, because afterward John and Roger came and sat down with me in a room and we talked about it. Roger had made no secret of the fact that he’d found things mentally tough in the past and John, having been in and out of rehab, had also struggled with many demons. John knew what it felt like to come up against a big hump in the road that you can’t seem to get around, which was the way I was beginning to feel. I explained that I’d never been one who liked struggling through crowds, and maybe the fact that the album had flopped had taken a bit of a toll on me, compounded by my father’s illness.