Wild Boy (29 page)

I just wanted to sit in the corner and enjoy the rawness of it all. They were a real band’s band. But as the night wore on I could see that John was all over the place, and he started making a real spectacle of himself. At first he was just swaying all over the place and going “woo whoooo,” but after a while he started to get very emotional about something. I don’t know whether or not one of the Stones said something to upset him, but he ended up crying his eyes out on Jo Wood’s shoulder. Jo was used to dealing with mad rock stars, but I thought,
Shit, I wish I had come on my own.
Keith Richards might have behaved obnoxiously, but he was right—most of the people present were just there for “a mooch,” and they didn’t have any real interest in what was going on.

“Come on, John, let’s go,” I said.

I went off to a club in Paris with Nick and his wife one night around this time, but the things between us went from bad to worse. Julie Anne got up on the dance floor on her own, and it seemed to make Nick a bit moody.

When we got back to the Plaza Athénée all hell broke loose. From what I could gather, Julie Anne locked Nick out of their suite and she barricaded herself inside. She was screaming at the top of her voice out on the balcony, and it caused a big commotion, because some people feared she might fall off.

The whole thing then descended into a farce when the fire brigade were called. I was feeling the worse for wear by now, and I watched Nick charging up and down the corridor, not knowing what to do next. Despite our differences I felt sorry for him, as his marriage was clearly not going to be a happy one. They’d had a blazing row and the following day his new mother-in-law and father-in-law flew over from the States.

When I woke up early the next morning, the day before the Eiffel Tower shoot, a wave of depression hit me as I recalled all the events of the last few days. I felt embarrassed at the memory of John staggering around at the Stones session, and I felt exhausted by the nastiness of the commotion at the hotel. Suddenly, I was uncontrollably upset and I kept crying.

This can’t go on,
I thought.

That’s when I made up my mind that I’d do the Bond video and get the hell out of there. I called one of our accounting staff whom I was friendly with and confided to him how badly I was feeling. The booze and the drugs and the carnage that surrounded Duran Duran were all just too much. I knew I was fast heading for a nervous breakdown if I didn’t change my lifestyle.

The next morning I got up at five, put on my dark sunglasses, and went to the video shoot. I left the Plaza Athénée soon afterward and I’ve never been back since, didn’t even want to walk in there again.

Looking back, when John and I formed the Power Station prior to “A View to a Kill,” Duran Duran had already split up.

We just didn’t know it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Live Aid: The Final Curtain

I
wasn’t looking forward to Live Aid. Sure, the scale and the grandeur of the event was something that I wanted to experience. But by the time we gathered in Philadelphia I was apprehensive about seeing Simon and Nick again. I think we were all starting to feel very frayed one way or another, particularly Roger. He was always very much the quiet man of the band, but somebody whom I respected immensely. I think the pressure of the constant attention, the touring, the traveling, and the whole circus just became too much for him and he started to become agoraphobic. He was naturally quite a shy person, and he began to dislike being involved in promotional appearances for our
Arena
album. Years later, I asked Roger how he’d been feeling at this point.

“I was hanging on by my fingernails,” he said.

Roger was right. The whole band seemed to be hanging on by our fingernails.

We were recording with John Barry in his mews house in Kensington when the call came in from Bob Geldof asking us to take part in Live Aid. We’d already sung on the Band Aid single, which had raised funds for starving people in Africa, and we’d also appeared in the video the previous Christmas, so we were top of Bob’s list for his grand plans that summer.

“I’m going to organize a great big fookin’ gig like you have never seen, and I need you boys to come on board first,” he said. “You’re the only UK band with any sales in America, so if you come on board it means America will come on board.”

I wasn’t much of a fan of Bob at the time. I thought he was a bit of a gobby Irish singer whose band hadn’t achieved much, but you had to admire his determination. We’d had a bit of a laugh shooting the Band Aid video, because we’d been in Germany the night before with Billy Idol. We had been playing out there at the same time. We’d all gone back to the same hotel, only to be told the restaurant was closed and room service was finished for the night. Rather than go to bed hungry, we waited for the hotel staff to bed down for the night, then some of us crept downstairs and raided the kitchens. We spent the night helping ourselves to everything in the pantry, all washed down with copious amounts of booze. The next morning I was so hungover that we nearly missed the plane taking us to London for the Band Aid shoot. If you watch the video closely you’ll see I’m wearing a hat because I wanted to hide how scruffy and hung-over I looked! I wasn’t the only one a bit worse for wear; the guys from Status Quo kept everyone amused at the shoot with some boozy antics of their own. The episode had been a brief interlude of fun away from the usual hassle, so initially I hoped Live Aid might be the same. I was wrong.

After doing “A View to a Kill,” John and I were busy with our Power Station tour. We took a bit of a blow when Robert Palmer pulled out, saying he couldn’t spare the time. We were determined to go ahead, though, and we asked Michael Des Barres if he would take Robert’s place. The Power Station was still going to be my bridge out of the madness, with or without Robert. One thing I was determined to do was to make a clean break from the Berrows, who I remained unhappy with over the large slice of our earnings that they were entitled to under the terms of our contract with them. To my mind they were one of the causes of a lot of the madness, always driving us on to do more shows, public appearances, interviews, and dire projects like the embarrassing video for “New Moon on Monday.” And all the time they were earning more and more money for us to pay for their gleaming new Ferraris and expensive escapades abroad. So it was around about this time that I checked through all the paperwork and realized there was a legal way I could sever my ties with them.

Under our deal with the Berrows, they owned some of the rights to our music, which was something I couldn’t change, but there was a time clause that allowed me to employ my own management after five years. It meant that even though the Berrows still owned some of our publishing rights, I no longer had to work for them directly. It had the potential to get messy, but I eventually phoned them up and told them of my intentions. John was in agreement with me and I phoned the Berrows up from his house.

“You don’t represent me anymore. Your five years are up—you’re fired,” I said.

Of course, the Berrows still looked after the others (until 1986, which I’ll come to later).

I knew some of the other band members were beginning to feel the same way as John and I, but the sticking point was going to be Simon, who was much closer to the Berrows than the rest of us. Simon had two big passions in his life at this point: his future wife, Yasmin, and sailing—which was something he had in common with the Berrows, who shared his nautical ambitions to sail around the world. Together, they’d purchased an expensive yacht called
The Drum
, and they intended to enter the Fastnet yachting race on some of the most dangerous seas in the world. To me it was just another of the Berrows’ daft plans, like the time one of them had tried to build a lasting temple in Sri Lanka. Coming from a fishing family, I knew the sea was something to treat with respect. Simon’s plans to sail around the world would also mean him taking off the best part of a year, and I knew the chances of us resolving our differences with the Berrows while he was away with them were very remote.

When I raised it with Simon, it exploded into a spectacular row.

“I think we need to reconsider our contract with the Berrows. Things are not working the way they should be,” I said.

“No, it’s all right. Everything is okay, it will be fine,” insisted Simon.

His optimism would never dampen, but on occasions like this it would infuriate me. Simon is a kind, decent person, but at times he gets lost in Le Bon Land.
Which Simon have we got here today?
I wondered.
The one from the real world or the one from Le Bon Land?

“Take the blinkers off, Simon. Everything is not okay. It’s not okay to feel like this,” I argued.

“Oh mate, come on. You just need to calm down a bit,” Simon replied calmly.

Don’t give me that big brotherly “I am the oldest” load of shit,
I thought.
Take the blinkers off, Simon. Don’t address me and my problems until you’ve addressed your own.
As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have been taking a year off and going on a boat with the Berrows. It just opened the door up to make everyone else feel contemptuous of both him and them for leaving the rest of us behind.

“Well I want to do it,” said Simon flatly, his expression hardening.

“So we’ve got to wait for you to take a year off? I want to get rid of them and you are protecting them,” I shouted.

“Well, I am doing it,” said Simon sternly.

I lost it completely: I used some very blunt language along the lines of accusing Simon of wanting to “wank off around the world with them on a fucking boat.”

“Well . . . I am doing it!” he roared.

YOU
can understand why there were a few awkward silences when we got together for the Live Aid rehearsal in Philadelphia. We were at number one in America with “A View to a Kill,” and we were about to perform at the biggest show on Earth, but you wouldn’t have known it from our demeanors. Physically, John and I were lean and concert-ready from being on the road with the Power Station, but Simon seemed bloated and distracted. Roger was suffering in his own private hell and Nick was . . . well, Nick was just Nick. The five of us hadn’t been on the road together since San Diego the previous year (the night of the stabbing at the Coca-Cola party), and when we started playing together it showed. There seemed to be scores of people whom we didn’t know milling around at the rehearsal.

“Excuse me,” I shouted into a microphone. “Can everyone who is not actually working please fuck off out of the room.” It was something I’d learned from the Keith Richards School of Charm.

The next morning—the day of the show—I awoke in my hotel room and had breakfast in bed while watching the TV. Live Aid had steamrolled into being an enormous phenomenon. There were events all around the world to raise money for the starving in Africa. The principal gigs were at Wembley Arena in London and at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and virtually every major artist in the rock world was taking part. It was a culturally defining moment, like Woodstock had been a generation earlier. The day raised millions and it saved lives—but whether or not the awareness and the goodwill that it generated had any lasting good is another matter, because twenty years later Africa is still in poverty. Like I said at the beginning of this book, half the world watched the show while the other half starved.

Because of the time difference between London and Philadelphia, I was able to watch the opening act at Wembley from my hotel room before we left for JFK Stadium. Status Quo were first onstage in London, and their rousing performance reminded me of their antics at Band Aid. When it was time to leave my hotel I went down and got into our limo. As well as with Duran Duran, John and I were performing with Tony Thompson in the Power Station that day—and in turn Tony was due to play drums with Phil Collins and Led Zeppelin. So in our entourage we had elements from three groups: Duran Duran, the Power Station, and Led Zeppelin. We were joined by Danny Goldberg, a very shrewd LA showbiz agent who’d agreed to look after my affairs now that the Berrows were soon going to be off the scene.

It was a sunny day, and there were crowds thronging about on the streets everywhere. Inside our limo the five members of Duran Duran sat in silence, as if we were going to a funeral. I suppose that in a way we were, because Live Aid was our final curtain. Only Danny and Tony Thompson spoke occasionally to break the ice. Tony was trying to crack the odd joke, but I think even he could sense the tension.

The bustle behind the scenes at the gig bordered on mayhem, with trucks and trailers parked up as far as the eye could see behind the stadium. Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards gave us a good laugh when they turned up drunk and fell out of their limo. I spent most of the time backstage gulping white wine and eating Domino’s Pizza; there was no fancy catering. Bill Graham, a powerful American music promoter who’d famously played a rock promoter in
Apocalypse Now
, was calling the shots. When the time came for John, Tony, and I to go on stage with Michael Des Barres in the Power Station I pulled in my guitar and . . . boom. Both amps were dead.

Shit.

I am about to appear at the biggest show in history and I can’t play a note. I turned to Keith, my technical assistant.

“What are we going to do?”

“Give me ten minutes,” he said.

“I haven’t got ten minutes.”

I could hear the roar of the crowd. The two noisiest audiences in America are usually Seattle and Philadelphia, and today Philly was really up for it. Then, above all the cacophony of noise I heard Bill Graham shouting.

“What the fuck is happening? We’ve got to get this show on the way!” he bellowed.

I looked at Keith. Suddenly he went charging off and grabbed one of Jimmy Page’s amps from the Led Zeppelin crew.

“Can I borrow this?” he said, and grabbed it before waiting for an answer.

Keith and the crew carried out the amp and I plugged in my guitar. Every second counted to prevent the audience from becoming impatient. I spoke to one of the other technical staff in the live broadcast truck to explain to them they’d have to make some adjustments.