Wild Boy (43 page)
I learned that depression is very common. It’s not life threatening; it’s something that given time you can get over. It’s not something that I’m ashamed to admit to, because it can affect any and all of us, and it helped to explain why I’d been feeling so low at times. The one positive consequence is when you recover it makes you feel stronger inside and you find yourself running to places where you once feared to tread. You can take a battering in all different walks of life, and rock and roll is no different. So the doctor simply advised me to rest and he explained that the burnout I’d been through was mental and not physical. Ever wondered where you would be without your health? Well, now I know. Once again, it was time to slowly let out the air, just as I had done in 1986.
I guess the lifestyle we led in the band took its toll on all of us over the years in one way or another. For me that toll led to depression, John ended up in rehab, and Roger had his battles with exhaustion and agoraphobia. Nick got locked in what must have eventually been a troubled marriage to Julie Anne, given that they later divorced. Even Simon, who found so much happiness with Yasmin, didn’t emerge unscathed, having been nearly killed on a yacht and landing himself in the hospital through a motorcycle crash. When people look at young stars today, like Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse, as they struggle to cope with life at the center of the circus, there’s a temptation to think it’s a new phenomenon. But we went through our own problems in Duran Duran—it’s just that things weren’t picked over in quite the same detail back in the eighties.
Shortly before we parted company in 2006, Nick had approached me one day at our rehearsals in June and he told me he thought he’d discovered a way of wrestling back ownership of all our early work from EMI’s subsidiary company Gloucester Place Music (the company the Berrows sold out to in 1986). It could have involved taking legal action, but we never got around to discussing it further. It might have made a difference, because we’d have retained ownership of all of our work. Each one of us might be worth tens of millions of pounds today, and money might not have been such a sore point. Simon and I would certainly never have run out of money at the cash machine!
But you learn to take life as it comes and today I can look back on my time in Duran Duran with fresh eyes, and I realize that what we enjoyed together was something very special. I’m totally back to my old self now, and I can look out across the beautiful rolling hills of the Mediterranean and reflect upon why we couldn’t make it work in 2006. I didn’t listen to all of
Red Carpet Massacre,
the album that the rest of the band eventually released through Sony, but I heard a couple of the tracks. The title song “Red Carpet Massacre” was something that someone like me would have tried to avoid, because in my view it sounds like it was written in a hurry and the chorus is very repetitive.
People have wrongly assumed that I didn’t want to be in the band, but the opposite is the truth. I always wanted to be in Duran Duran, but we’d ceased to function as a band; it was seriously
dysfunctional.
We’d returned to being five individuals pulling in different directions, just as we’d become in the eighties. When it came to sorting out our problems, just like before, we failed to connect. I don’t have an answer for why that is—I guess we were all just coming from different places. In hindsight, that was our dilemma from day one: we were always five very different individuals, but it was that very diversity that drove our success. Despite all our arguments, Nick and I needed each other just as much as we needed every other member of the band. It meant we all had the capacity to do things which were incredibly original and successful, but we also had a huge mechanism for self-destruction. Perhaps things might have been different if we had all sat down together and discussed the tensions that tore us apart the first time around, but that never happened. In fact, I don’t think I ever once went to dinner with Nick during the six years that we were back together. There was no cocaine the second time around, but in the end it was the similar tensions caused by internal disagreements that came bubbling back to the surface.
History really did repeat itself.
People sometimes ask me what was more fulfilling: Duran Duran during the eighties or our time together after our reunion? For me that’s easy. The excitement of helping to invent something for the first time and breaking it in in the eighties will always remain our greatest achievement. We still lived in a much more naive world in the early eighties, and it felt like a much bigger prize to play for. But the second time around was also enjoyable for the recognition that it earned us via things like the Brits and the MTV Awards. When we were younger we got an enormous amount of success, but we didn’t really get a lot of recognition from the music industry, at least not in the UK.
I will always remain incredibly proud of everything we achieved in Duran Duran.
But the one thing above all else that continues to make everything so worthwhile was the warm reaction of our wonderful fans both times around. I think they understand most of all that the secret of our success was our diversity. During the final stages of working on this book I received an e-mail from a woman who explained that Duran Duran fans love their roses and chocolates, but she said they also like steak and beer.
I guess that what she was trying to say was Simon and Nick were always very good at delivering roses and chocolate, but that I was the steak and the beer in Duran Duran.
I’m happy to settle for that.
Ibiza—2008
IT’S
a telling moment the first time that you hear recorded music in the control room of a newly installed sound studio. The acoustics of every room are different, and when all the work and the wiring are finally completed it’s time to test everything and you know within the first few seconds whether or not you have it right. On the first day that I hooked up my equipment here in Ibiza, I grabbed the nearest mix CD to play on the studio speakers for the first time. It was a Trevor Nelson DJ set from Pacha in Ibiza, so I thought it would be funky and heavy on the bass, which are all good things to help judge the quality and resonance of the room. The CD had no track listing on it, so I skipped the first track, because on mix tapes the intro can go on for a long time, and I hit play on the second.
Boom.
“I’m Coming Out,” by Diana Ross, came on, which was produced, written, and performed by the late Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers, and the late Tony Thompson. Cool, and the room sounded good!!!
The spirits are with me today,
I thought. Out of all the tracks I could have randomly played, it was that one. Still, I think we all agree that a person’s influence can be as powerful in both life and death. The acoustics needed a tiny bit of fine-tuning, but since then I’ve never looked back. Many young bands have been out to Ibiza to record with me. Playing a great record is a very simple way to test a room, but I must confess that this particular experience was a bit more three-dimensional than usual and it still makes me wonder about things today.
As I stand on the balcony of our villa, looking out across the sun-drenched hills, Tracey is inside fixing up a cup of tea. We have four lovely children and a strong marriage that has survived twenty-five years of constant pressure. Below me is the courtyard where I smashed a beer bottle against the wall following my row with Simon Le Bon. Things are peaceful here now and I’m at peace with myself. So I’ll return to the question I asked at the beginning of the book while I was tossing and turning in that sweaty hotel room after Live Aid. Was the roller-coaster ride all worth it? The answer is a resounding yes. Sure, there were plenty of lows (like the time I fell in that bloody lagoon) but life is a series of ups and downs and we all have to choose our paths as we see fit at the time. I don’t hold any grudges against anyone in Duran Duran. Why should I? Maybe if there’d been fewer lows there wouldn’t have been so many highs, so you learn to take the rough with the smooth. I can honestly say that even if I had to do it all over again I don’t think I would change a thing.
Well, maybe next time I’ll give a miss to swallowing all that elephants’ piss . . .