Wild Boy (17 page)

One of the temples we visited was guarded by shaven-headed monks in orange robes, who stood to attention just like the guards outside Buckingham Palace.

“Don’t try to look them in the eye, because if you do, something will happen to you,” one of the locals warned us.

Apparently, local folklore maintained that the guards could hypnotize you with their eyes and force you to see visions of their choice. I thought,
Oh, really?
and I remember coming face-to-face with two of them at the gates to one temple, and they were looking straight ahead and standing motionless. I tried not to look at them, but of course curiosity kept making me take the odd peek.

But the real problems started to occur when we were filming the main temple sequence in the video, the one where you can see some hills in the background. We were doing our thing when we slowly started to notice more and more monks in orange robes gathering around at the foot of the hills. What we didn’t know was that a political rally connected to the growing civil unrest was about to take place. The monks were gathering because their leader was about to arrive by helicopter, so they took a dim view of Duran Duran prancing around miming a performance of “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf.” One of the crew came over to talk to us.

“The crowd is going to get bigger, and in about half an hour we will have to leave. When we give the order, we will all have to go straight to the buses and leave,” he warned.

By now there were thousands of monks surrounding us, and most of them were glaring at us intently in silence. Suddenly we could hear a helicopter overhead. One of the religious leaders came over and spoke to us through an interpreter.

“You are causing offense. If you leave respectfully that will be fine, but you
have
to go,” he said.

The message was clear. Either we got on our buses or they’d force us to leave—and with a civil war brewing it could have easily escalated into a very serious incident. I certainly wasn’t going to argue with four thousand angry monks with only the likes of Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes to back me up. We were on the buses and gone!

ONE
scene that none of us wanted to do was a sequence that Russell was keen on, in which a band member had to volunteer to writhe about while an elephant’s trunk squirted water over his bare chest. It was very homoerotic.

“There’s no way I’m doing that gay thing with the elephant,” I said.

For once even Simon was slow to volunteer to do something in front of the camera, and Nick and Roger were having none of it, either. In the end, John agreed—after all, he was the pinup, we argued. The resulting scene appears about halfway through the “Save a Prayer” video, and we ribbed John over it for many years to come. It was shot at a lagoon where the local crew had recently helped to film a Tarzan movie. Some of the scenes we did there were also used in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which featured Simon doing his best Indiana Jones impression. The lyrics to the song were very suggestive and parodied
Little Red Riding Hood,
except that the wolf is a guy who’s on the prowl for a lover. So the storyboard for the video was basically “Indiana Jones is horny and wants to get laid!”

The water at the lagoon was very dark and murky and, as I later found out, it was full of bugs—no doubt because it was used as a latrine by the local elephant herd. The shoot got pretty wild at times. There was one big bull elephant that seemed to take exception to its handler. We were halfway through the shoot when we suddenly heard a deafening roar followed by a sequence of crashes. The angry bull elephant had gone berserk, splashed through the water, then charged full speed at its handler, who only narrowly managed to get out of the way before it went raging off into the jungle. Elephants are mostly gentle animals, but we’d been warned that if they get angry they can easily kill a person. Thankfully it was going in the opposite direction to where we were standing or we would have been flattened, but it caused a bit of a kerfuffle and we were worried that the rest of the elephants might turn upon us.

By now the heat was starting to get to me, so I decided to keep cool by sipping on plenty of Jack Daniel’s and Coke throughout the day. Not a great idea. Although I’d refused to do the gay scene with the elephant, I was willing to trying riding on top of one. Everything was fine until it was time to get off. As the elephant began to lie down to let me off, my right leg snagged and started going under it. I managed to whip it out just in time, and I complained vehemently to the handler, but he was a little Sri Lankan guy who didn’t speak any English and so he couldn’t understand me. By now a lot of moaning was going on, and I admit I was one of the worst offenders, along with Nick.

“What the fucking hell are we doing here? Which one of us is meant to be Tarzan?” I shouted. Little did I know it would soon be me falling out of a tree.

I decided I was having nothing more to do with the elephants so I climbed up into a tree and perched on a branch about ten or fifteen feet above the water. It seemed like the perfect vantage point from which to mime playing guitar, but I hadn’t accounted for the effect of the Jack Daniel’s on my sense of balance. I wobbled and suddenly . . .

Splash.

Falling into the sea in Antigua was one thing, but the water in the lagoon was dark and murky. It had been a long drop and suddenly I was submerged and ingesting mouthfuls of the dirty black liquid. Believe me, falling into a lake that’s been used as an open toilet by elephants is not a pleasant experience. By the time I crawled out of the water I was coughing and spluttering and wondering what the effect on my health would be. I was worried about swallowing so much of the mucky water, so I thought it would be a good idea to empty my stomach by being sick. The only catering facilities on the set were these little stands that sold bags of fried red chillies, which looked a bit like potato chips. I thought if I ate enough of them it would help me to throw up, but in fact they were delicious. I ended up eating loads of them, washed down with even more Jack Daniel’s.

When the shoot ended, I soon forgot all about falling in the lagoon, but it came back to haunt me with great vengeance about a week later, after we arrived in Australia to play a series of gigs. I was feeling hot and sweaty onstage in Sydney when I was suddenly doubled up by excruciating stomach cramps. I managed to play to the end of the set, but during the encore I had to quickly dash behind an amp, where I was violently ill. The next few days were agony, and I spent the whole time either throwing up or running for the bathroom. By the time we got back to England I was physically exhausted; no matter what I did I couldn’t seem to shake it off. I felt completely drained and awful, and for the first time in my life I was seriously worried about my health. Things took another turn for the worse when I broke into a fever. Eventually I was rushed to the hospital and placed in an isolation ward with suspected malaria. The doctors seemed completed baffled by it until finally I was persuaded to transfer to a private hospital. As soon as the medical team realized where I’d been, I was diagnosed as suffering from a nonspecific tropical virus that I’d picked up from the dirty water in the lagoon!

IN
addition to “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” we’d shot a third video in Sri Lanka, for a track called “Lonely in Your Nightmare.” We did the whole lot for about £55,000, which is much cheaper compared to what they would have cost if we’d shot them using old-fashioned film techniques. “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” are like mini movies in their own right, yet they each cost less than £20,000, which illustrates how video allowed us to do things that we otherwise could not have done. It helped us to connect with our audience a bit like the way the Internet helps new bands to do the same today. I guess the flip side is that a lot of people still think we spend all our time messing about on yachts. When it came to video, Russell surpassed everybody else. Loads of bands use video to bling things up today, but he did it back then . . . and on a tight budget.

And as for the virus that I picked up in the lagoon: the private doctors managed to get rid of it almost immediately, but I spent four days in the hospital before I was fit enough to leave. I suppose there’s a lesson there somewhere, along the lines of: “If you smoke dope and drink Jack Daniel’s in the tropical heat, don’t fall into a lagoon full of elephant’s urine and wash it all down with more booze and a bucket of chillies.”

But I guess some people never learn.

CHAPTER SIX

Princess Diana’s Favorite Band

IT
was almost impossible to describe how beautiful Princess Diana was when you met her in the flesh. She possessed a rare aura and a timeless grace that you perhaps come across only once or twice in a generation—and we were lucky enough to be her favorite band. Diana never made it to the throne, but as far as the world was concerned she was already the queen of fashion and glamour and all things that glittered, so it was inevitable that the royal seal of approval would give Duran Duran an enormous boost. Unfortunately, it also made us a target for terrorists. Simon, John, Roger, Nick, and I didn’t know how close we would come to paying with our lives for our royal association.

The IRA secretly intended to assassinate Prince Charles and his attractive young wife on the night of July 20, 1983. A huge bomb was planned to go off while the royal entourage watched us perform live onstage. The device was designed to cause maximum carnage. Killing the heir to the British throne and wiping out the UK’s most popular band in a single attack would have caused pandemonium and handed the Irish Republican Army its biggest-ever coup.

I obviously would not still be around to tell the tale if the IRA plot had been successful, but it was only thanks to a remarkable piece of counterintelligence work by Scotland Yard and their colleagues in the Garda that the attack was foiled. It would be several years before we learned the truth about what was planned for that evening, but we now know that a man named Sean O’Callaghan was secretly sent to London with orders to kill. His mission set off an incredible chain of events that we knew nothing about, but which could so easily have ended in tragedy.

Terrorism, however, was the last thing on our minds when we were invited to meet royalty for the first time. We were midway through recording our third album in Montserrat in the Caribbean when a telephone call came in from London to inform us that the Prince’s Trust had invited us to play before a royal audience.

“They want you to be the headline act at a gala charity show in the summer at the Dominion Theatre in London,” explained our agent, Rob Hallett. “You’ll all be personally introduced to Charles and Di in person before the gig, so everyone will need to be on their best behavior.”

Bloody hell—it must all be true about Diana being a fan of ours
, I thought to myself.

We’d read in the newspapers about Diana’s supposed fondness for our music, but up until now we’d taken it all with a pinch of salt. It was certainly good PR, but we wondered if it was just something that our record company had spun up for the publicity.

Normally we would never interrupt our recording schedule for anything, let alone a stage performance, which would mean having to rehearse thoroughly and get fully stage-ready. This was an enormous task that would involve organizing clothes and crew and everything else associated with a major show, not least of which was cutting down on our alcohol intake in order to look our best! But this was in an age when there was still an insatiable fascination for royalty, and a command performance was something you wouldn’t even dream of turning down. So it was easy for us to say yes, despite the fact it would cause us an enormous logistical headache.

“How are we gonna rehearse properly while we’re stuck in the studio out here?” I asked, aware that planning such an important event would normally involve weeks of working with our stage crew back in the UK.

“No problem,” said Rob. He explained that the record company were planning to fly all our backing singers and a saxophone player out to the Caribbean in order that we could rehearse there and so cause minimum disruption to our schedule.

The prospect of meeting Princess Diana caused huge excitement for all our families. In 1983, the public still had enormous respect for the Royal Family in a way that was different from the disinterested manner in which some people often regard them today. Back then, the Royal Family seemed to be more fundamentally part of our lives, and they were held with a regard that still bordered on reverence. It sounds silly today, but they somehow seemed less
mortal,
yet at the same time we felt as if we’d grown up knowing them, albeit from afar. When the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee in 1977 to mark twenty-five years on the throne, the whole nation came out to celebrate with her, and there were kids’ street parties everywhere. But despite our respect for them, the Royals somehow existed only in a formal world that was cold and beyond our direct reach.

When Diana came along she gave the Royal Family a whole new dimension. Young people like us at the time could relate to her because we saw a beautiful English rose who was the same age as us and who shared similar tastes and beliefs to our own. It was a great thing for the nation to have someone who was so touchable, and she was never afraid to show she cared for ordinary people. She hugged and kissed children with AIDS without fear and she brought love back into the Royal Family at a time when protocol tried to dictate that you couldn’t show feelings. Not surprisingly, she became the most iconic lady in modern British history, and young women, in particular, shared a strong empathy with her. So all things being considered, I was much more excited about meeting Diana than I was about meeting Prince Charles.

There was a huge feeling of anticipation within the band, but for me the day held an extra significance because it was also the first time I was due to see my mother since the awkward meetings I had shared with her in my teens. Our latest attempt at a reunion had been planned at Tracey’s instigation.