Wild Boy (35 page)
One of the first things I discovered was the blues scale for playing lead guitar twelve-bar blues. I can remember watching Angus Young in concert with AC/DC and thinking,
Are his fingers doing that scale?
I realized that all the great guitar players, like Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and Pete Townsend, all played the blues, so I wanted to learn to do the same. I found that Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” was relatively easy to play, and I soon progressed from there. Once you discover you can conquer one bit of what a guitarist does you look further to the next level: chord structure and riffs . . . the movement of the guitar part. Soon I was aggravating the neighbors, playing along to the records, things like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” over and over until I knew it by heart. After you get used to copying riffs you can start to twist them around and experiment on your own.
All the great guitarists in the world were at their prime during the late sixties and early seventies. People like Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Gary Moore were all from the same golden age of guitar heroes. In fact, the last great guitar riffer, in my opinion, was Steve Jones, who could have played in any band, not just the Sex Pistols. He was a rock riffer, not just a punk riffer.
So, basically, I ended up learning to play lots of riffs—I had always said I wanted to be in a band like AC/DC, but fortunately I was either astute enough, or skint enough, to join Duran Duran! Originally, I had no desire to be in a band that seemed so light compared to the heavy rock of the seventies, but the times they were a’changing very quickly, then the eighties and technology arrived. Things moved on from the Pistols and evolved into a very austere electrosound that came from the likes of Kraftwerk. It was the beginning of New Romanticism, but it was still very cold and had yet to become hedonistic. Suddenly guitar didn’t seem so central, and electronic keyboards began to take a leading role in the emerging music scene.
As far as idols go, David Bowie was probably the artist whom we collectively admired the most. Had there been a Duran Duran maypole that we all danced around, David Bowie would have been the person tied to it. His
Ziggy Stardust
and
Hunky Dory
albums were hugely influential records that we all grew up listening to and admired, probably our first collective influences.
By the eighties, even though the guitar was less dominant, it was still a crucial component for writing songs. If you listen to a hit like “Save a Prayer,” even though the keyboard line is more dominant, all the chords and the basic structure come from guitar. If we couldn’t have sat down and strummed an acoustic guitar, that song couldn’t have come to life. Similarly, without the synthesized keyboards that Nick brought to life so well, it would have sounded like a poor imitation of the Eagles.
Unlike a lot of other New Romantic bands, in Duran Duran we realized that even though things were changing rapidly, we didn’t want to lose the ability to have the punch and the edge that guitar could give us. We wrote with guitar
and
keyboards—and that was a fundamental part of our success. Simon has the ability to sit with a guitar and find things because he has a great understanding of music (which he needed in order to deal with the other four of us!).
Along with keyboards, the other driving force of the times was disco. Everything started with the dance floor and the Studio 54 experience. The dance floor was very powerful in those days as a medium for records to break. And that was where Duran Duran came to life—the crossover between the Pistols and Chic: guitar music with a disco beat, which turned out to be an unstoppable hybrid. Even though I was more of an AC/DC fan, I could see the magical potential of Duran Duran because we weren’t one-dimensional like a lot of our contemporaries.
A band like Duran Duran is a fusion of fashion, hedonism, and music. When you added the club scene at the Rum Runner to the vision that Nick and John had when they were kids at art college, which was influenced by Roxy Music and Brian Eno, it was a unique mix. The five of us just seemed to click, and we created the bones of our first album in the first six weeks that we were together. The guitar skills I had learned from watching my idols and from playing on the road in Germany allowed me to experiment in order to make my guitar work with Nick’s keyboards. He was doing something that nobody could really read at that point because only he knew what he was trying to achieve—but we found a clever way of working together in order to create something special. It was hard work at times, because you can be sitting there scrunched in a room going over each component of a song again and again, hour after hour. People often assume that bands write their lyrics first and then build the music around the vocals. But in Duran Duran it was the opposite. Ninety-five percent of the time it was the other way round: the music provided the basis for us to collaborate with our fusion of different styles; this in turn allowed us to create a magic carpet of sound for Simon to lay his lyrics over—and I’m very proud that I was able to be at the heart of that creative process.
Today, if I had to choose five albums to take to a desert island, the Beatles would top the list. No chapter about idols would be complete without paying homage to the Fab Four. My love for their work goes right back to that early copy of
Sgt. Pepper
that I was given by my cousin, and my interest in their music has never waned. In fact, if I were on my imaginary desert island I would have to cheat a bit and make my first choice the Beatles’
Anthology
, because then I’d get everything!
Electric Ladyland
by Jimi Hendrix would be on my list because all the great rock bands of the sixties and seventies, from the Rolling Stones onward, were in awe of Hendrix and influenced by the blues. The first Oasis album,
Definitely Maybe
, would be there—you can hear all the classic components of the Beatles et al. working below the surface; they make an incredible sound for one large eyebrow. I’d also choose
Hunky Dory
by David Bowie, because it was one of the first albums that fascinated me in the early seventies.
And my final choice would be
Ooh La La
by the Faces. They were huge in the seventies—they should have been bigger than the Stones, but Woody left. The fact that the composition of our first single, “Planet Earth,” owes a tip of the hat to “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” shows that Duran Duran were all fans of Rod Stewart and the Faces. (Nick even wore the tartan scarf when he was a wee laddie.)
The one thing I wouldn’t take to my desert island would be any Duran songs. They’re great pieces of music, but I don’t know any artist who likes listening to his own work; it’s probably because you’ve heard it a thousand times over in the studio! Having said that, “The Reflex” is probably my favorite piece of our pop music. However, “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film” also gave me a lot of satisfaction because no one had ever sounded quite like that before, and it’s satisfying to think that we may have contributed to things changing. Those records helped to define the eighties, and I like to think that in our own way, Duran Duran helped to nudge the satellite of music into a new orbit . . .
Duran Duran II: Roaring Back—Into the Tiger’s Den
THEY
say (whoever they are) that time is a great healer, and sometimes it’s true. Simon and I didn’t have any contact with each other for six or seven years after the breakup of Duran Duran, and it wasn’t until the early nineties that we even spoke to each other again. Things had gradually thawed between us, and as the new millennium approached we were both older, wiser, and willing to let clear water flow under the bridge. To be fair to Simon, I’d fueled a lot of the public friction between us after we split in 1986, so it was only natural that sooner or later he would choose to react in print himself. But as the years had passed we’d tacitly agreed to let bygones be bygones.
I called Simon one afternoon in 1998 to let him know I’d be in London for a while over the summer. We’d moved back to the UK by now and were living in the Midlands. It was around the time of the World Cup Finals, and Scotland were due to play in the opening game against the holders, Brazil. As Simon and I both shared a passion for watching international soccer, he invited me down to stay with him and Yasmin at their house in the Home Counties. I discovered that Yasmin was a great homemaker and a very good mother to their children. It was the first of several times that I stayed with them and at one point Yasmin put me on a weight-loss diet which consisted of lots of sweet potato and grilled tuna and it worked like a treat. Like Tracey, whom Yasmin had become friends with, she often needed to have the patience of a saint. I remember on one occasion Simon tried to put together a chair he’d bought from IKEA or somewhere. He glued all the parts together in the wrong way and then stomped about in a fury when he couldn’t rectify it. It was hilarious, but Yasmin would react to anything like that simply by raising an eyebrow!
It was a very different London to the one that had been our playground while we were recording
Rio
during the early eighties. The Embassy Club was still going strong, but the new in place where most of the young showbiz crowd liked to be seen was the Met Bar at the Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane.
The night before the Scotland game, Simon and I decided to go out on the town and get off our trolleys for old times’ sake. Simon wanted to go to the Met Bar, but I was a bit worried that I’d be like a fish out of water, because all the Brit Pop crowd liked to hang out there and I didn’t know any of them. Crowded clubs and bars were never my favorite hang. It had almost been impossible at one point in the eighties to really do that sort of thing, and although the madness of the times had passed and it was now possible to move around in public without getting screamed at, I preferred the less “on show” places to get bladdered. I didn’t want to be the bloke from the eighties trying to look young and hip again, but Simon was full of his usual enthusiasm.
“Come on, it’ll be all right,” he insisted. “It’s better than those shitholes in LA you been hanging at.”
We jumped into the sporty little VW that Simon used to get around town and he drove us to the Metropolitan, where he pulled up right outside the door. Simon plonked his car keys into a doorman’s hand and asked him to park it somewhere overnight. I’d never been inside the Met Bar before, but I soon discovered that it’s a curious little place, very small and dark, and the toilets are located on the right-hand side as you enter it from the hotel’s reception.
We were standing there by the entrance when Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls came rushing over to say hello to Simon. Hot on the heels of Geri was Victoria Beckham (who was still known as Victoria Adams, as it was about a year before she married David). Geri was very bubbly and excited, and I really wanted to meet her because she seemed like a really ballsy chick, more like Boss Spice. But Posh had other ideas. Victoria came over to us with a very stern face and pulled Geri away.
No way are we talking to you,
was the polite way of saying what her face showed; and
whoosh,
they disappeared off into the toilets. (Why do all girls head for the toilet when there’s something going down?)
“What the fuck was all that about?” I said to Simon.
“Ah, well . . . ,” replied Simon, looking slightly impish. “I think it might be because of something that I said to Victoria when I last met her.”
“Tell me more.”
What had happened was that Simon confided to Posh while they were chatting that he’d had a very vivid dream about her the night before. I presume that at first Posh was quite flattered, until Simon added that the dream had actually involved him having a perfect view up her skirt while she was wearing no knickers! Victoria was horrified, especially as Simon used a
very
unchaplike word to describe a certain part of her anatomy. She took great exception, and I think she ended up giving Simon a good slap in return. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no suggestion that Simon was trying to chat her up or anything like that, it was just his weird sense of humor coming out.
The whole thing had become something of a talking point in the showbiz world. In fact, an article about it appeared in the
Daily Mirror
a few months after we spoke, when Simon later alluded to the incident on the
Jo Whiley Show
on Channel Four. LE BON SO SORRY OVER POSH GAFFE, said the newspaper’s headline.
“Simon Le Bon has written a grovelling letter of apology for disgracing himself in front of her,” said the article. (
Fuckin’ legend,
I thought,
that’s sorted the men from the boys then!
) “Details of the Duran Duran star’s embarrassing behaviour remain sketchy. But it appears he was less than a gentleman to poor Victoria when he met her at the Brits awards ceremony earlier this year.”
I must admit I roared with laughter when he told me about it in the Met Bar, although I can see why Victoria was offended, as it’s not really the best line to say to a girl, is it?
Great,
I thought.
We’ve been snubbed by Posh Spice because of Old Spice!
But then that’s what helps to make Simon so unique: he might have a very suave and sophisticated exterior, but deep down inside he can sometimes be a bit of a lovable slob just like the rest of us. He’s been very misinterpreted over the years by the media, who often mistake his confidence and optimism for arrogance. He’s taken a lot of stick for it, and as a result he’s grown a very thick skin and learned not to react when people take the piss out of him. Actually, most people whom I’ve introduced him to are pleasantly surprised and end up saying what a nice fella he is. Often, however, strangers will come up and pick on him for no reason in public, presumably out of jealousy.
THE
day after our brief run-in with Victoria Beckham at the Met Bar, Simon and I watched the Scotland match together at his home and chatted about the possibility of a reunion. Duran Duran’s back catalogue of music was doing well, and we’d had one or two early approaches to see whether or not we wanted to do something for the turn of the millennium in 2000. Simon and Nick had carried on together in a watered-down version of Duran Duran during the nineties with guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, but the view seemed to be that if the original five were to reform it would create a lot of interest.