Wild Boy (11 page)

“When we went to the Louvre it was closed, so we spent most of our time in bed, eating strawberries, cheese and French bread,” she told the paper.

The rest of the band had a bit of a quiet smirk at the article, but to be fair to John it can’t have been very nice for him, especially as his parents would have seen it. The article was one of many invasions of privacy he suffered, and it must have been upsetting. When we played in Japan, John had more girls chasing him than anyone, and I think it started to get to him. We knew we would have female attention, but it was hugely difficult to manage on a personal level. The record company had planned it that way and had pushed John into doing lots of interviews with
Smash Hits
, but they didn’t realize just quite how big it would become. It started with John, and then it spread to Simon and the rest of the band.

In some ways our hedonism was completely at odds with what was going on in the rest of the country. This was the summer of ’81. There were violent riots all across the UK, caused by mass social discontent. In music, as well as in the country generally, it was almost as if there were two cultures running in parallel. There were bands like UB40 and the Specials, who were singing about unemployment and urban decay, and then there were the likes of us, who just wanted to have a good time. I was the same as any other guy on the street—we were working-class escapists who wanted to live out our dreams.

We played one gig at Birmingham Odeon while there was literally a full-scale riot going on outside. The Odeon was in a beautiful old building on New Street, and the rioters were tearing the city apart while the police battled to clear the street. We had allowed a journalist from the
New Musical Express
to accompany us inside, so it was a very strange interview because we could hear the roar of the crowd outside. These were very troubled times in the UK, and it was also the height of the cold war, so the world was living in fear of nuclear disaster, but we took it all in our stride. It was during this interview that Simon came out with the famous line, “We want to be the band to dance to when the bomb drops.”

WHEREVER
we went, we were determined to export the party atmosphere with us—and America was no exception. Our first jaunt to the USA turned out to be three weeks of mayhem and we nearly got kicked out of the States before we’d made an impression.

Los Angeles was one of our first stops. We’d heard lots of legendary stories about British bands’ hell-raising in the past at the famous Hyatt House Hotel on Sunset Strip. It was nicknamed the Riot House because Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham, had ridden a motorcycle through its corridors and Keith Moon of the Who was supposed to have driven his car into the pool there. We’d read a book called
The Diary of a Rock ’n’ Roll Star,
by Ian Hunter, which catalogued all the wild behavior of British bands on tour in America, and it became our bible.

“Come on, fellas, we’ve read the book, now let’s do it,” I said to the others.

The only trouble was that by 1981, the Hyatt wasn’t quite so tolerant. We had been boozing it up all day long, and someone decided it would be a wheeze to put shampoo in the fountain. It was amazing—there were bubbles billowing everywhere. Then we went up to the roof and we could see all these well-heeled guests enjoying a brunch buffet down below. Before long there were cream cakes raining down on them. I think at one point I actually tipped a bucket of water over someone from above on the balcony. We were just being childish rock stars, but it couldn’t have been fun for anyone else in the hotel. There were lots of complaints about us during the day, but we didn’t really take any notice until about 6:30 p.m., when the stormtroopers finally turned up in the form of the LAPD. One of our crew had gone to the toilet and heard the police talking outside. It gave us thirty seconds to escape.

“Quick, it’s the cops—get rid of all the dope!” shouted one of the roadies.

The adrenaline suddenly kicked in. Before we knew it the place was swarming with big, armed cops, who were very tough and aggressive. In my boozed-up state, I was convinced we’d all be deported, so I legged it as fast as I could. I ran up the road to the Roxy club and banged on the door.

“If anyone is in there, let me in,” I begged. “We need to call the British Embassy.”

I was allowed into the Roxy, but after a stiff drink I decided that maybe calling the embassy wasn’t such a good idea after all. Thankfully nobody was nicked, and a member of our entourage managed to smooth things over with the cops. The person who sorted it out had a great sense of humor and he used to get drunk and fall asleep with a briefcase containing all the cash from our gigs chained to his arm. The police agreed to let everyone go on condition that we left the hotel. But the news traveled fast. We discovered no other decent hotel in town would take us, so we had to stay in this grotty little shithouse for the rest of our stay in LA. Nick and I had to share a room, and I can remember the sheer horror on his face when a cockroach crawled over him in the night.

New York turned out to be far more welcoming and we were greeted there as if we were a young Bohemian band whom everyone wanted to be seen with—even the great pop artist Andy Warhol. We could just walk into anywhere and be given a table, which was amazing given the short space of time we’d been together as a band. Capitol Records, who were owned by EMI, were looking after us; when one of their press officers heard that Nick and John were fans of Warhol, she called him up to arrange a meeting.

“There are five good-looking young guys in town from a great band who want to meet you—and they wear makeup,” she told him.

Sure enough, we were invited down to Studio 54 on a Sunday night to meet him. There was a huge queue to get in because as an underground club it was still coming to the end of its heyday, but nobody told us that Sunday night was gay night! It was obviously a huge honor to be seen with Warhol and it caused quite a stir. He latched onto us immediately, and I remember him saying to me over and over again, “Oh, Andy, you’ve got to wear pearls. You gotta wear pearls, Andy!”

Then it was Nick’s turn.

“Oh, I like that Nick and I got a photo at home to prove it!” screeched Warhol.

I kept thinking,
Wow! It’s Andy Warhol and he knows all our names.
I was flattered because Warhol was an icon and I knew that David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground had all been heavily influenced by him. I could see the beauty in what he did, but I wasn’t really from that school—unlike Nick, for whom Warhol was a real source of creative energy. At times it seemed as if Nick was obsessed with him. The fuss caused by our meeting with Warhol was huge, and the association never really wore off. Studio 54 was amazing with all the lights and the great atmosphere, and I could see that the Berrows had tried to style the Rum Runner on it. But I couldn’t really immerse myself in the New York gay scene, and I found all the hunky boys in shorts a bit too much. Having said that, New York would eventually become a great playground for us, particularly John and I—but that was all still in the future.

We did a lot of traveling during 1981, and places would seem to go nuts for us whenever we went there for the first time. Paris was one example of this, when we played a gig there in September 1981, a few weeks before we went to New York. We’d hit upon the idea of taking two coachloads full of fans from the Rum Runner with us to France, just to ensure the party went with a swing. EMI agreed to spend £20,000 to pick up the tab. The plan was to turn the whole evening into a big stunt for the press.

When we got to Paris we held one hell of a party in a club at a grand old Parisian ambassador’s residence, which had opulent works of art adorning all the walls. They took one look at our crowd and nearly didn’t let them in. We were lucky to even get into France at all, because earlier in the evening the border guards had seen our buses and wanted to put us back on the ferry. Everyone had put on their most outrageous New Romantic gear, which meant the gays all had huge feathers and the girls had virtually nothing on; they were just scantily clad in underwear with a pair of angel wings on their backs. Some of the men wore SS uniforms, which were accepted then as part of the fashion and not meant as a political statement. It was just a way of looking cold and austere. Back then, it wasn’t considered as an insult to victims of the war—we’d beaten the Nazis and to us they were figures of fun. You have only to look at the furor caused by Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform at a party to realize how much things have changed.

We knew we’d make an impact in France because nothing like that existed in Paris. “Impact” turned out to be an understatement. The party got so wild that we damaged some seats and the toilets were awash with drugs. Worse still, someone drew a funny moustache and comedy glasses in lipstick on one of the oil paintings. It caused a right old stink because it was an expensive work of art and EMI were forced to pay thousands to have it restored.

But the evening served its purpose and the party got loads of media coverage, more even than the gig itself.

The word was starting to spread . . .

CHAPTER FOUR

Rio:
Love & War

I
danced with a gorgeous blond girl during our trip to Paris and I soon found myself falling in love with her. Her name was Tracey Wilson, and the following year she would become my wife. Tracey was a hairdresser who managed a salon where Duran Duran used to go to blag free haircuts and she was part of the regular crowd at the Rum Runner. Unlike some of the other girls, she didn’t drink or take drugs—and at first she wasn’t impressed by my advances. In fact, prior to going to France, whenever I approached her she usually made it quite clear she wasn’t interested and at one point I was horrified to learn that Simon had started to take an interest in her.

“You can ’eff off, there’s plenty more fish in the sea,” I told him. “She’s mine.”

It was almost a year since Duran Duran’s first album had come out. Simon and I were still living together in the flat we shared in Moseley. The album had got to number three on the charts and it was still selling well, so we were getting a lot of attention because of it—although strangely in Moseley most people continued to ignore us. Being a red-light district, there were cars crawling everywhere—but they weren’t looking for us. There was a curry house if you went in one direction from our flat and a corner shop if you went the other way. It was a funky place to live and we’d walk past chilled-out Rastafarians with boom boxes in order to get our groceries, but at nighttime we’d avoid the bus and always get a taxicab straight to the door.

When I’d moved to Birmingham to be with Duran Duran, finding a partner hadn’t exactly been part of my plans, but those long Sunday afternoons that I used to spend alone while the rest of the band were with their families left me wanting to find a decent girlfriend. The first time I’d seen Tracey had been in the Rum Runner. Her brothers, Sean and Mitchell, ran a string of salons and I was mates with them because they were part of the crew that used to hang out in the club. Mitchell was Tracey’s younger brother and he had movie-star looks just like her. He did a bit of photography and took some photos of the band at the salon. Sean, the older brother, was as mad as a fish, but he was also the one with the brains, and together they were a very entrepreneurial family. Tracey was close friends with Giovanna, who was still working in the cloakroom and dating Roger. She was also friends with Nick’s girlfriend at the time, Elaine Griffiths. The three girls all used to dress dead sexy.

What first attracted me to Tracey was that she had a certain dignity and pride in herself. She was one of those kids who the first time she had one gin and tonic too many she hated it so much that she never really drank again. I was leading a fairly hedonistic lifestyle at the time, so it was appealing to see someone who was so different to me in that respect—plus, of course, the fact she didn’t seem interested in me at first just made me all the keener!

“I’ve seen you. You’re in the band with all them lot and all those who party in the club,” she told me dismissively in one of our early conversations.

No matter how hard I tried to impress her, I got nowhere for weeks. It was as if she was thinking to herself,
Hmmm. I am not sure if I want to mess about with him. He is always on the road.

Giovanna, who remains a good friend of mine to this day, didn’t help matters to begin with. “Ooh, you want to watch him. He is a right womanizing bastard,” she said to Tracey. Thanks, Giovanna—like most guys in a band I had my fair share of female attention, but it was hardly a fair description! I’d been in bands for several years, including in Germany where I had my share of fräuleins (including one incident where I got caught with a German girl in the back of the Streak by her father!).

A few nights before our gig in Paris, Tracey was in the Rum Runner celebrating her twentieth birthday, so I spent the evening trying to chat her up. It was my way of saying
happy birthday!
Although she was initially quite cool toward me I sensed I was starting to make some progress and we ended up flirting together by squirting each other with a soda siphon. At one point she flung up her arm and it knocked the siphon into my face and chipped one of my front teeth. Ouch! At the end of the night I sidled up to the bar and explained how much I’d enjoyed her company and joked that at least she’d knocked only one of my teeth out—but when I looked round I was talking to someone else who looked a bit like her. I was so drunk that I’d been chatting to the wrong girl for the last ten minutes!

Tracey was part of the group who traveled to France with us and I must have made a good impression on her birthday because she agreed to dance with me in Paris, and this time we really hit it off. Getting a girl to dance with you was significant in those days, and it had a certain charm about it. It counted for something because there was still an air of innocence about the female population. I can’t ever remember seeing girls rolling about in the gutter or comatose through booze: frat school behavior for women was still a thing of the future. Somebody took a photograph of Tracey and me while we were dancing and it appeared in the papers in the UK the following day. The picture caused a bit of a stir because the press believed I was loosely seeing another girl back home, and the newspapers kicked up a bit of a fuss. After Paris, Tracey went straight back to Birmingham on the bus, but the band were scheduled to do some more gigs in Europe, so we had to go back on the road. Suddenly I found myself calling her whenever I could from a call box, and when we got back to the UK I asked her to come to dinner.