Wild Boy (5 page)

I was playing a few pub gigs with my band but it wasn’t enough to make ends meet, so my dad got me a job on his building site. It was hard, physical work, but I was used to that from the milk round. Every morning we’d get the same bus together, and we’d try to arrange things so that we could work in the joiner’s shop, because that was a slightly easier shift than on the main site. The building trade is a tough knockabout business, and there were plenty of would-be comedians working on the site who loved nothing more than to wind up the foreman’s son! But overall it was good fun. I didn’t even have to go for an interview, because my dad was held in such high regard by his employers. Most of the time we were treated very well, but I was really just filling time. Rock and roll was what I really wanted to do.

I’d been working on the site for about six months when I got my first big break. One of my neighbors, who lived across the road from us, was a guitar player named Dave Black. He had played in all the workingmen’s clubs and had a band called Goldie, who were very successful locally and who later had a hit with a song called “Making Up Again.” Dave had given me about half a dozen guitar lessons when I was in my early teens, and I used to go and watch him play quite regularly. Anyway, one day he came to see me and said he knew someone who was looking for a guitar player in a band.

“They are very professional, and you’ll be expected to play everything that they ask you to,” he warned me.

I couldn’t wait to give them a call, and so I played a few numbers to them and that was it, I was in. So I was sixteen and a half, I’d spent a few months “on the buildings”—and then I was suddenly on £35 a week in a band, and from that point on I never did anything different. The money was double what I’d been getting on the site, and I was doing the one thing I loved in life more than anything else. We were called the Gigolos, and we used to play all over the North East, touring up and down the motorway, doing covers of other people’s songs.

We used to play in the workingmen’s clubs a lot, and every Sunday afternoon they used to put on strippers. They paraded in front of a men-only audience, who all wore flat caps and pretended to be disinterested and read their papers. The lady would come on, and if you were in the group backing her you would have to play something like “Devil Woman” by Cliff Richard. The strangest act was in Sunderland, where in one of the clubs the lunchtime highlight on Sunday was a fire-eating stripper with the glorious stage name of Singed Minge. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

The Gigolos were a new wave band and we performed our own songs. At one point we even secured a deal with A&M to cut a single called “Teenage Girls,” but it wasn’t a hit. The lineup of the band and the name would change from time to time, but I’d nearly always find myself on the road in a transit van of some shape or description, and I lost count of how many times I slept in one. Later on, when I was in another band we had a van that we called the Streak, which was painted red with some paint we’d managed to get on the cheap from the Post Office. We used to call it the Streak because when we were coming back from gigs late at night we used to streak it up against a parked car and the red paint would come off. It was a pretty dangerous game, not to mention illegal, but at the time we didn’t care.

MY
guitar playing was going from strength to strength, and I managed to win a contract with a covers band to play a series of gigs at military bases in Germany. Looking back, it was another really important break in a formative sense, because it meant we had to learn a huge repertoire. It was also in Germany that I really learned how to party!

By now it was 1979. Maggie Thatcher had just become prime minister, the cold war was at its height, and Germany was stacked to the rafters with American troops. The country had been heavily militarized ever since World War II, and the whole place had to be prepared to go to war again at any minute, this time against the Russians. My dad had done his National Service there when he was eighteen, so he could relate to it, and he taught me a few phrases before we loaded up the Streak and headed off to the ferry down to mainland Europe.

The biggest base we played at was Ramstein Air Base, near Frankfurt. The sheer scale of it was staggering; it was like a small city in its own right. They would drive us around it and we’d see missile transporters and endless rows of fighter planes. To an eighteen-year-old from near Newcastle, the American culture was like a whole new world. Back in England all we had were Wimpy Bars, but on the base they had a vast array of American catering. Believe it or not, short-order food like hamburgers seemed very exotic at the time. You could eat as much as you wanted, and there were delicious things to try like pumpkin pie. The military was superorganized, but when you arrived at the base all you had to do was show your passport so they could check it briefly, and then they would give you a pass for the month. Terrorism was a threat even then, what with the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof supporters, but somehow the security didn’t seem to reflect that—I suppose they were more worried about the Russians.

We obviously had to play things that would appeal to an American audience, so we’d do covers of numbers by Stevie Wonder and Aerosmith. I also used to play a fifteen-minute solo of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and all the GIs would go nuts. If you got them going they would be really noisy on a Friday and a Saturday night, so the colonels who ran all the shows would sometimes intervene.

“Don’t play that, don’t whip them up. They got too drunk last night,” they’d warn us.

We’d often be told off if we went too far, especially if we did too much AC/DC. I used to put on a kilt and do an Angus Young impression until they eventually banned us from doing it—because it caused too much of a frenzy! If we played in the officer’s mess we had to be a bit more reserved and maybe do some jazz or something smooth, but it had to have an American flavor, so we’d also do the Eagles. I started to sing a bit, too, and I was sharing lead vocals in the band, so I had to learn all the great American songs and harmonies.

The Americans themselves were fantastic, because they were so open and confident. I had come from an area that was depressed at the time and falling apart by comparison, and then suddenly I was eating and drinking with the American military, who are the most confident bunch of people you are ever going to meet. They were all massively interested in me because I was still so young and no one does anything before they are twenty-one in America, unless they’re in the military.

So I met a lot of people who were the same age as me. They’d sit there and hold out a joint and ask me, “Have you ever smoked one of these?” They’d get high on American weed on the weekend and have big parties in the barracks. It was a real eye-opener, like something out of
Animal House
. They were like fraternity brothers who lived in these big barracks, which were just bedrooms linked by corridors. They would all put their speakers out in the hall and link them up, and it was just like you see in movies such as
Hamburger Hill.
They used to have these talent shows, for which we provided the backing music, and it was a great bit of relief for them to do a little show. They’d shout, “Come and party with us, dude,” and then someone would belt out “Gimme Some Loving” before the black GIs would get up and sing “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” It was great fun but I used to think,
Shit! If the Russians attack now we’ll all be partying!
Aside from the talent shows, we used to play six hours a night as part of our contract, which was exhausting, but it strengthened my voice when I was young.

The pilots were the most impressive people on the base. I remember standing in a queue in the officer’s mess and some pilots came in wearing their flight uniforms with their names on them, like in
Top Gun
. They exuded aggression; it was as if they were saying they were ready at any moment to go up in the sky and shoot Commies. The European front line was obviously prepared to go to war at any time. You didn’t really get a sense of it off the GIs, but you knew the pilots were ready for it. They all had to be under twenty-four and ready to kill the moment the order was given, and they were a bit of an exclusive club. Some of the officers also had a certain air about them, too, that seemed to say,
I can kill anyone if I am ordered to. I have the authority to kill.

The colonels were much more approachable. There was one colonel and his wife who befriended me, and I used to regularly go and eat with them. They had a video player, which was something almost unheard of in the North East, and I remember I was blown away when we sat down to watch the latest
Star Wars
movie on it.

It was easy to forget that the whole place was one big war machine. However, there was no animosity between the Germans and the Americans. We used to stay in the local gasthaus, and it was okay to walk down the road doing Adolf impressions, à la John Cleese in
Fawlty Towers.
In those days the locals thought it was quite funny, and we weren’t so fearful about political correctness as we are now. The Germans were just like us and liked to get drunk on their beer. All the towns around the bases would have loads of great bars filled with German girls, American GIs, and the British bands that came to entertain them. It was a lot of fun, but all good things come to an end, and eventually so did our contract. I had to return home, but it had opened up my eyes to the world.

THEY
say traveling is the only way you ever learn anything, apart from what’s handed down to you, and it was true for me. By the time I got back to England, I knew it was time to move on and join a bigger band. I started checking
Melody Maker
every week, because it used to carry adverts seeking musicians for bands. It wasn’t long before I spotted one seeking a “Live Wire Guitarist.” It cited Mick Ronson of the Spiders From Mars and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols as musical influences, so I thought it looked worth a call, but what I didn’t know as I went down to the call box was that it would change my life once again.

Looking back, I suppose you could say that all the great things that lay ahead in my life began with that phone call (even though I am now notoriously difficult to get on the phone). All the money and the record sales, all the fast cars, the drugs, the champagne and five-star hotels, all the meetings with royalty and the visit to the White House; all the exotic video shoots in Sri Lanka and all the wild parties with the likes of the Rolling Stones and rock’s royalty, all started from a call box outside a sleepy newsagent in Cullercoats.

I dialed the number and explained that I was replying to the advert for a guitarist.

“What’s the name of the band going to be?” I asked the girl who answered at the other end.

I listened as she replied in a broad Brummie accent: “Oh, the name of the band is Duran Duran.”

CHAPTER TWO

The Rum Runner—1980

SO
here I am, I’ve just turned nineteen and I’m sitting on a train to Birmingham on my way to my first audition with Duran Duran. Not that there was much of a band to audition for, as I would soon discover. There was no singer, no lyrics, no record deal, and very little by way of repertoire—but I was about to enter a ready-made world of fashion and hedonism in the form of a nightclub called the Rum Runner, and it would quickly drive us to the top of the music business.

Blondie were at number one in the charts with “Call Me,” and within two years we would be appearing on the same bill as them in America. But for now Britain was in the grips of its worst economic recession since the early seventies, and I was down to my last few quid left over from what I’d earned playing at US military bases. Touring in Germany had been enormous fun, but after I got back to the UK the money soon started to run out, and it left me hungry to make a living from rock and roll.

I remembered my grandmother telling me, “If ever you get the chance, leave this place.” When I was younger, she had seen a medium who had predicted that one day I would travel. I knew that my grandmother always had my best interests at heart, so it was time to follow her good advice. Despite the gloom that seemed to hang over large parts of the country in early 1980, I was feeling pretty positive when I arranged over the telephone to meet the fledgling members of Duran Duran at the Rum Runner.

“It’s close to the City Centre. You can’t miss it,” they told me.

I packed my electric guitar and little portable amplifier, and I passed time during the four-hour train ride down from Newcastle by flicking through a copy of a newspaper that I had found on a seat. The headlines at this time would soon be dominated by the Iranian Embassy siege in London, during which terrorists took twenty-six people hostage for several days and threatened to execute them. The papers still found room to report on the fact that Prince Charles had fallen off his polo horse. Later that summer, the world would watch breathlessly as an attractive young girl, Lady Diana Spencer, fell in love with the heir to the Throne. She would become the most iconic woman of her time, somebody who loved music and who embodied the aspirations of a generation. I had no way of knowing it as I sat on the train, but I was about to join a band that would eventually become Princess Diana’s favorite rock act.

I’d already done a lot of touring with various bands, but travelling wasn’t something you took for granted in those days, so as the train pulled into Birmingham New Street just after lunchtime it felt as if I’d been on a long and epic journey. In a way I had, because culturally Birmingham was at least a million miles away from Newcastle. I had come from a region that was heavily depressed due to the economic downturn of the seventies, and the area was starting to suffer terribly due to the first cold blasts of Thatcherism. By comparison, Birmingham was rocking: it had its own arts college and lots of great cafés and little fashion shops that had a real buzz about them. The Midlands were also thriving musically: Dexys Midnight Runners were based there and they had just released
Geno,
and UB40 and the Specials were all emerging there around the same time.