In The Pleasure Groove
Love, Death & Duran Duran
by John Taylor with Tom Sykes
Dutton
Over Christmas, 1984, Duran Duran bassist John Taylor was greeted at his parents’ house by four huge bags of fan mail. As his parents gushed with pride, Taylor, noting how his folks “sounded like two fans who found their way into the house and inhabited my parents’ shells,” lost his mind.
“I emptied the sacks in a rageful frenzy, dumping the contents violently on the floor . . . frothing at the mouth, tearing up the envelopes unopened. My parents watched the rampage, their mouths agape. ‘Don’t you get it, you two? I don’t f – – – ing care about any of this!’ ”
Taylor’s memoir, written with former Post columnist Tom Sykes, could have been subtitled “Rich White Rock Star’s Problems,” as he continually bemoans the burden of too many drugs to consume and babes to take to bed.
At 13, Taylor, born Nigel, bonded with 11-year-old Nick Bates over their love of glam rockers like David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson. As teens, the pair embraced the genre’s fashions, from the baggie double-breasted suits of Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry — Taylor’s idol — to gender-bending chiffon and animal-print scarves.
Their attire made them targets in their blue-collar town of Birmingham.
“We often drew insults from construction workers,” he writes, noting one incident where the pair were accosted by “a gang of denim-clad bozos” who screamed, “We are gonna get you! You fairies are f – – – ing dead!”
Blending their glam-rock influences with punk and New Wave, and changing their names to John Taylor and Nick Rhodes, the pair hooked up with drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Andy Taylor (none of the Taylors are related), and singer Simon Le Bon, who showed up to the band’s first meeting in “skintight leopard-print ski pants with loops under the boots,” looking to Taylor like “Shakespeare’s idea of a rock star.”
The band signed to EMI and released their first single, “Planet Earth.” Taylor was 20 years old. There wasn’t much struggling after that.
What there was plenty of was cocaine.
“In London, in the music business, cocaine use was as normal as drinking a pint of bitter was in the pubs of Birmingham,” Taylor writes. “The business took account of the hours lost to hangovers and scrambled thoughts. Hundreds of grams were being charged to record-company accounts across the city every week.”
As the band’s profile rose, so too did the worship of teenage girls. Taylor, a self-declared former nerd, soon discovered the potency of mixing admiring fan girls with copious amounts of drugs.
“I discovered on tour in 1981 that girls in all languages liked taking drugs with me,” he says. “My horror of lonely hotel rooms meant I would go to any lengths to avoid sleeping in them alone. Coke, I was beginning to realize, was an effective insurance policy against that eventuality. I only have to wink in a girl’s direction in a hotel lobby, backstage, or at a record company party, and I have company until the morning.”
Such was the band’s Sodom and Gomorrah lifestyle that their printed tour itineraries in America included the age of consent for whatever state they were in, and band members would have a piece of paper slid under their door every morning reminding them of essentials like:
TODAY IS OCTOBER 3
IT IS FRIDAY
YOU ARE IN CHICAGO
TODAY IS A SHOW DAY
SOUND CHECK IS AT 4PM.
At several points in the book, Taylor recounts how he could barely walk down the street without bringing some young hottie to bed with him but makes it sound like a chore, as in this account of sleeping with his managers’ sister on a tour bus in October 1982.
“Is there any form of fornication less pleasant, less comfortable, than at mid-afternoon on a rumbling old tour bus?” he asks. “Coffin sex. Capsule sex. The smells of sweaty socks and diesel. No air. I should have been over this; this was high-school stuff.”
While turning the planet Earth into his sexual playground, Taylor found himself in the fraternity of rock-star elites.
“I first listened back to a mix of ‘Rio’ sitting beside Paul McCartney, who was working in the next-door studio and, at my beckoning, came to listen to what we were up to,” Taylor writes. “His approval was denoted by a highly satisfying two thumbs up.”
Duran Duran met and performed for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, as they were Diana’s favorite band, and also got to know Andy Warhol who, after a Duran show, approached Taylor while “sipping his drink through a straw” and slurred to him, “You should be the singerrr.”
And while visiting and jamming with the Rolling Stones at one of their Paris recording sessions, Taylor found himself in a spat with legendary Stones muse Anita Pallenberg, who obsessively (and incorrectly) accused Taylor of stealing her name (the band took its name from a character in the film “Barbarella,” but not the one Pallenberg played). He finally placated her with a promise of bass lessons.
The band spent a lot of their time at a hotspot called The Embassy Club, where Lemmy from Motorhead took up permanent residence on the club’s Space Invaders machine in what Taylor describes as, “like an art installation; just add amphetamines.”
“It was understood that no one should attempt to interupt him,” Taylor says. “He had far too many scary tattoos, and his interest in the Third Reich was well documented.”
But sex, drugs and the pressures of fame were chipping away at Taylor’s sanity. After clubbing in Munich one night, he wound up in bandmate Roger’s hotel room. Roger, bloodied, had been involved in an altercation that landed him in the hospital. While John had apparently been present, he had blacked out, with no memory of the incident. Then, when his girlfriend tended to Roger’s wounds, the drugged-out bassist was suddenly consumed with jealousy and punched a glass fixture, making him the second band member to land in the hospital that night, and leading to the cancellation of the remainder of their tour.
Later on, Taylor was briefly ensnared in a love of Ecstasy. He recalls one night at a club in Sydney, dancing to the music of Grace Jones while high on the drug. “I have never felt so warmly comforted,” he writes. “I am opening up, open to everyone and anything, awake, receptive. My touch sense is exploding, gently. Touch me! Touch me again! The silk, the leather.”
Then, this “oneness with the universe” vanishes.
“Somewhere to the left of me, a reptilian tongue flickers, catches a fly that flew too close. Closer still, [a] record company executive has a tail, a piece of scaly dinosaur meat that is thumping the leather banquette steadily, patiently, like a windshield wiper stuck on slow. The trip will not stop, and along in my high-rise Sydney f – – – pad I am teetering on crazy. I am crying, ‘Stop it, God, make it go away.’ But there is no relief to be had, and the clock runs onward to another wasted dawn.”
Whatever turmoil ensnared the band, the fans remained rabid. Touring Japan, they required roadies to “continually sweep the stage, vainly trying to keep it clear of cuddly toys, flowers, bouquets, and other gifts showered on us.” At a show in Seattle, “even before the lights went down, girls were being stretchered away and treated for panic attacks and dehydration.” At home, meanwhile, the bandmates had 24-hour fan encampments outside each of their homes, perpetually “greeted by excitable fans squealing and snapping their cameras.”
Taylor says his favorite groupie moment was in Atlanta. “I had a cold and was sniffling into a series of tissues, absentmindedly throwing them into a wastepaper bin under the table. The next time in the city, a girl called out to me at another public appearance. ‘I was the girl who got your cold.’ I wondered what on earth she was talking about. ‘After you left the press conference last year, I stole your used tissues,’ she said. ‘I wanted to get your cold.’ ”
But female fans clamoring for band attention stood little chance unless they walked a runway. Taylor dated a succession of Scandinavian models, including one he’d inadvertently been rude to at the Limelight before learning she was a top Ford Model. He tracked her down to make amends, and they wound up dating for years. Similarly, singer Le Bon married a model he met after “leafing through some models’ cards, looking for someone who might look good on his arm at a film premiere.”
Taylor bought an apartment at the Park Belvedere with panoramic views of Central Park. He lived down the hall from Boy George, and “it was hard to tell which apartment partied harder.” George played a joke on Taylor one morning, leaving “a silver tray piled high with white powder” outside Taylor’s door in what he calls “a Georgian joke about my lifestyle.”
After a particularly bedraggled night of partying with Freddie Mercury and Queen, Taylor showed up “a complete mess” for a Saturday morning TV appearance, “slurring my words and clearly out of it.” He was rude to a fan on the air, and afterward, backstage, singer Bryan Adams suggested that he get some help. “The concern was so sincere,” Taylor writes. “I hated him for it.”
The band’s next few albums were met with shrinking audiences and record sales and a growing sense that the music world was leaving them behind. Taylor, who was jarred by seeing the singer for former pop sensations the Bay City Rollers working on an MTV film crew, “took a lot of long baths and escaped into books.”
After reading Albert Goldman’s biography of John Lennon and how “the myth was unable to bear up to the scrutiny,” Taylor “threw the book down on the floor and just broke down crying.”
“I was crying for John, but also for myself,” writes Taylor. “What chance did I have?”
After a therapist told him that “if you can get sober, you could really be somebody,” Taylor got clean in 1994. In the years that followed, he met Juicy Couture co-founder Gela Nash, who became his wife, and left Duran Duran in 1997.
He began raising a family and embarked on solo projects far smaller than he’d been used to. While Duran Duran would reunite a few years later, Taylor learned humility while touring his own, much more modestly received projects.
He recalls one solo gig in Miami which, thanks to “a terrifying storm,” found him, after years of performing for maddened crowds of thousands, playing to eight people.
“That’s when you find out if you are the real thing or not. If you got it in the blood,” he says. “Anyone can walk out onstage in front of 30,000 people who all have the records and know all the words and are having a good time. But if you can walk onstage in front of eight and enjoy yourself, then maybe you’ve got something.”