Wild Boy (2 page)
Back at the hotel there was a bigger-than-usual party; I’d never seen a bar with so many people in it who I loved. Michael Des Barres introduced me to Jimmy Page (what a sweet man, you’d never guess he was so fascinated by Aleister Crowley) and at one point I was sitting on a sofa with Jimmy, Ronnie Wood, and Keith Richards. I had Michael snap a photo; he knew all these guys from the seventies and he had a friendly, endearing charm, even with Keith. Later, when I saw the shot, I couldn’t help but laugh. Their legendary craggy faces reminded me of the heads carved on Mount Rushmore, with me sandwiched in the middle, trying to do my best “rock” look. Yet despite all the mirth, my heart just wasn’t in the mood to party, and shortly before midnight, as the booze slowed down, I retired to my suite.
I crashed into bed and reflected that Live Aid should have been one of our biggest highs, but it wasn’t—although I suppose I had anticipated that. To the rest of the world, we were the best-selling band in the UK and America and we could do no wrong. We were five close friends who mixed with royalty, and we had enjoyed a level of success that most bands could only dream of. But behind all the glamour, the smoke and mirrors, everything tasted sour, and the medication was no longer working. I lay there alone in the darkness of my hotel room, lit a blunt joint, and tried to inhale deeply, slowly, and ignore the constant whining in my left ear caused by the volume of the stage audio monitors.
Ahw no . . .
Suddenly there was a knock on the door. It was a member of our road crew.
“Super T”—that was my nickname—“we’ve booked a table. Meet by the elevator in ten.”
Bollocks,
I thought.
Super T? All I want is a cup of tea.
So there I was, Andy Taylor of Duran Duran. The UK press had recently accused me of being the “wildest of the Wild Boys,” but I just couldn’t consume any more booze or drugs. Worse still, there was no twenty-four-hour room service tonight.
“Fuck off and leave me alone” was all I could muster.
I’d had enough. I needed a rest from this
Groundhog Day
coke-fueled lifestyle. I realized that the consumption had to stop for the madness to begin to subside. For a while, success had brought us happiness and wealth beyond our wildest dreams. But the lifestyle we had aspired to, and for which we had worked so hard, became the very cancer that was starting to destroy us. Little did I realize how long it was going to take to repair some of the lives damaged as a consequence of our excess. For sure, we paraded around in our fast cars, with beautiful models on yachts in the south of France and the Caribbean, without needing to pay the bill at times (that came later). But it begs the question: Was it all worth it? Not too many people knew about our incendiary arguments or my fights with our management—and the dark depression and bitter resentments that these confrontations created. Neither did they know about the blood and the exhaustion, all from being constantly on the road, or about the mad cocaine binges, or the paranoia and insanity that was caused by being in the spotlight for what amounts to twenty-four hours a day.
We were hanging on by our fingernails.
We were called Duran Duran. This is the story of how we came to rule the world and nearly threw it all away. Brace yourself—it’s a roller-coaster ride . . .
The North East—1972
FOR
most kids, the first day at grammar school is a big occasion. For me, it changed my life forever because it was the day my mother chose to abandon me and my brother. I was eleven years old. When I came home from school on the bus in my brand-new uniform, I discovered that she had just disappeared and taken all her things with her. Everything she owned was gone: her clothes, her ornaments, everything—there wasn’t even a note to say good-bye. Nothing was left but a very dark feeling in a place that was supposed to be safe. It was like a heavy guillotine had suddenly come rushing down with great force and sliced everything apart without any explanation as to why I was guilty.
IT
would be four very long years before I would see her again, but I didn’t cry at the time (that would come a lot later). You see, the way I’ve always thought about life is that you can either choose to give someone a friendly slap to say, “Hello, stop being such a fucking idiot,” or you can just hit them with a bat. If you give them a slap you might wake them up a bit, but if you hit them with a bat you proverbially risk killing them. So no, this wasn’t just a little slap, this was from the middle of the bat, the part that hurts the most. The irony was that up until about the age of ten I had enjoyed a relatively normal childhood. But once you’ve been hit by the bat, life will never be the same . . .
I
was born on the sixteenth of February 1961 at Tynemouth Jubilee Infirmary, the first child of Ronnie and Blanche Taylor. My mum and dad had grown up in a small fishing village called Cullercoats, which is just up the coast from Whitley Bay and Newcastle upon Tyne, so it was only natural that they would eventually set up their own marital home in the same village. Three years after I was born my little brother Ronnie arrived, and for a while life must have seemed perfect for my parents. We lived in a beautiful little bay close to the seafront, in a crowded fisherman’s terrace that we shared with my dad’s family, who were spread out over three or four floors. We lived downstairs, my grandma and grandfather on my father’s side of the family lived in the middle, and an aunty and uncle lived on the top floor.
In those days, as everyone got older and began to get on their feet, they moved out and got their own houses, but it wasn’t necessarily the case that when you got married you moved out straightaway—you had to work hard and save first, which was the position my parents found themselves in. Our little terrace lay behind the workingmen’s club (the CIU) and close to the Fisherman’s Institute. We always referred to the CIU affectionately as “the club,” because it had been founded in part thanks to my family’s efforts. Close by on the bay there was a fish-and-chips shop and an amusement arcade. My earliest memories are of standing on a beer crate in the arcade and playing pinball at the age of five, and I was quite good at it, like a little pinball wizard.
We literally grew up on the beach, and we would have endless games of football on the sand, during which all the kids in the neighborhood would turn out in great numbers. There were no fearful parents with four-by-fours; you just had to be home when your dad said so. There wasn’t a hidden cove that we didn’t know about or a cave that we hadn’t explored. On Guy Fawkes Night we’d build huge fires on the beach and let off fireworks and feast on baked potatoes. In those days there were no health-and-safety experts or prying council officials to order us around, so we were pretty much left to our own devices when it came to creating our own fun. We had our own set of social rules, because people rarely traveled in those days. I think the farthest any of my family had been was a day trip to Blackpool with the club. Life belonged to an earlier age, and it was before the big housing redevelopments of the late sixties and seventies, so we still had an outside toilet, which was next to the coal bunker and the air-raid shelter. It would be freezing and dark if you had to get up in the middle of the night for a number two, so I used to wake my dad up and ask him to stand by the door. Otherwise it was a pee in the pot.
Apart from mining and farming, the only other industry was fishing. My grandfather and all my uncles had boats, so most days I used to get up at 4 or 5 a.m. when they went out to sea. They would come back with fishing pots brimming with lobsters, and we used to kill them in the kitchen. My grandfather was a lifeboat man, and my great-grandfather was on the same boat before him. A loud cannon used to boom in the middle of the night to signal its launch, and the whole family would all get up to gather on the bank while the sons and husbands went off to sea. The explosion was really loud. To a child, it was incredibly exciting to watch the drama unfold. There could be a full-scale gale going down over the North Sea but they would still get up in the night and get the boat out; it was amazing nobody ever died. Most people’s lives in our community were linked to the sea in some way. During World War II, most of my dad’s family had been in the Royal Navy or the merchant navy. At home we had an old framed photograph of a corrugated-iron bomb shelter that still stood in the backyard. My dad grew up during the war, so he was obsessed with it and spoke about it constantly. We used to joke that he kept the photograph up on the wall just to remind everybody, lest we forget.
Early on, there was no hint of the trouble with my mum that lay ahead. I’ve still got lots of family photographs that show us all looking normal and happy. Christmas was always a grand affair. We used to do all the traditional different bits and pieces, and all my grandmother’s extended family, who lived miles away in a distant rural area, would descend upon us in a big group. So there were always a lot of people around at Christmas, sometimes so many people that I don’t actually know where they all managed to sleep. In the summer, all the folks would come over again and our family would spend hours singing together, belting out northern folk songs and all the old classic numbers by Bing Crosby and Jim Reeves, my grandmother’s favorite.
The musicians of the family were definitely all on my father’s side. My grandmother used to sing a lot in the workingmen’s clubs, and one of her brothers was a brilliant trumpet player. Whenever her family came from the countryside to stay with us on the coast, we used to have huge get-togethers that would basically involve drinking and singing while my dad would play some fantastic tunes on the harmonica. We used to go to church a lot, and all the family would come and sing there, too, so music was part of my childhood from the beginning. My cousin Marjorie had bought a copy of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band
by the Beatles on the day it came out, and she would come round so that we could play it together. Later she gave it to me, and I still have that original copy of
Sgt. Pepper
from forty-odd years ago with her name on it. We also used to play all the great singles that came out during that period, which were all stacked up in the corner of the room, and I have lots of little memories of my family being together around the record player. We used to play the Beatles, the Hollies, the Kinks, and lots of sixties bands. Around this time I was very excited to discover that my dad had a guitar hidden away in the cupboard, which with hindsight turned out to be a very important find. There was a guitar tuition program on BBC Two at the time called
Hold Down a Chord
, and I was hooked. I managed to get the instruction book that accompanied the show, and I spent hours practicing until I could play the chords by heart.
SO
for a while, we functioned like a normal family. I used to help my mother in the garden doing greenhouse work in order to get the tomato plants to grow and we had lots of rosebushes that needed constant attention. I remember sitting with her, looking at all the blossoms in the trees and listening to the birds sing. But if I’m honest, I was always closer to my father, even back then. I was quite a stroppy kid, and I had a lot of confrontations with my mother because she was obsessive about tidiness and would order me not to go in and out of certain rooms, which I used to hate. She would have her favorite things that I wasn’t allowed to touch, and this often led to friction between us. I was always much more comfortable with my grandmother on my dad’s side of the family. She was a lovely, kind woman. After my mum’s parents passed on while I was quite young, she would become the main matriarch in my life.
A few months before I was due to go to senior school we moved to a new house of our own, a bright little cottage on a corner plot about a mile or two away. My dad worked as a foreman for a building firm, and his speciality was carpentry. He soon put in a new electric fireplace with some timber borrowed from the joiner’s shop, and he went on to do the place up. To outsiders everything must have looked idyllic, but secretly my parents’ marriage was already in a lot of trouble. They would argue late at night, and sometimes I’d end up trying to break them up. It had been going on since I was about nine, and I was spending more and more time with my grandmother, particularly on weekends—which I guess must have been my old man wanting to get me out of the way because they were fighting so much.
There was a strike in the construction industry that summer, so there was a lot of upheaval because he had to break a picket line in order to get into work. My dad was a Tory, but nearly everybody else in the North East was a Labour voter, so he and my uncle Bob had to arrange to get people into work round the back entrance in a pickup truck, and it could get very violent.
The world was a very different place back then. Breaking a picket line was a big deal, but my father had just bought a house and taken on a big mortgage, and he probably felt he didn’t really have any choice. Putting a kid through grammar school wasn’t going to be cheap; there might not have been any fees to worry about, but if you factored in all the uniforms and the extra school materials that you needed, along with the cost of numerous school trips and outings, it was much more expensive than comprehensive school, and my dad had to shell out a lot to afford it all.
MONEY
had always been tight, so my mother had taken a waitressing job in a club during the evenings to help make ends meet. But in many ways her waitressing job turned out to be the root of all evil, because that was when the trouble began.
The change was almost instant. A few weeks after taking the job, she dyed her hair blond instead of its normal brown color, and she started dressing differently. I remember sitting on a bus with her one particular morning and looking at her outfit.
Bloody hell, your miniskirt is short
, I thought to myself.
She would stay out late waiting on tables, and often she would not return until the early hours. It wasn’t long before I started seeing my mother do things that I shouldn’t have seen her do. The first time was when I was about ten. I wandered back from school one morning, maybe because I’d forgotten something or didn’t feel well. It was about ten past nine, and I saw a red car that had suddenly parked outside the house. I don’t know why, maybe it was childhood intuition, but I decided to watch instead of going inside. I’d seen men drop her off a couple of times in the past, so maybe there was a part of me that was already suspicious that something unhealthy was going on. Even as a ten-year-old kid you start putting two and two together.