Wild Boy (20 page)

BUT
even life in a paradise like Montserrat wasn’t without serious incident—and this time it was Nick’s health that would suffer. Tracey and I were in bed one evening when there was a knock on the bedroom door. It was Julie Anne.

“It’s Nick. You’ve got to come and see this,” she pleaded. I could see from the worry on her face that something serious had happened, and all memories of the previous friction between us were forgotten.

When I got to Nick’s room he was in a terrible state, sitting up in a chair clutching at his chest and gasping. He was pale and sweating, and he seemed to have trouble breathing.

“My chest hurts,” he gasped.

He looked like he was about to have a heart attack, which is clearly what he feared was happening. I was terrified for him.

“Don’t worry, we’ll call the air ambulance. Everything will be fine,” I tried to reassure him as he rocked back and forth.

The doctors were so worried that Nick was eventually airlifted to Florida, where he was taken to a hospital in Miami. After a few days he was fine, and I suspected he had basically just had a bit of a panic attack, which can cause trouble breathing. It was later reported that Nick had been suffering from paroxysmal tachycardia (or abnormally fast heartbeat) and that the problem may have been hereditary, but the stress of being in Duran Duran can’t have helped. Nick was no angel when it came to excess, but after that he stuck to a modest intake of red wine. In my opinion it was another example of how our manic lifestyle took its physical toll on us in different ways: I’d been struck down by the virus in Sri Lanka, John had badly gashed his hand in Germany, and now Nick was the one who needed medical treatment. I admired Nick for being straight with himself about it, and whatever he might or might not have got up to in the past, he stuck to red wine from then onward. It was a sensible move.

After Montserrat and our brief interlude in the UK for the Prince’s Trust gig, we flew down to Australia to finally finish the album. We rented a nice villa for Tracey and Giovanna on the outskirts of town. Recording at EMI studios in Sydney turned out to be hell. We were mobbed there, and security had to fight a way through for us every time we went in or out. It was flattering, but after a while, day in day out, it began to wear us down. I would wake up and dread having to go there. The third album was hard work because everyone expected so much from it, but we managed to record a version of “The Reflex,” which would later become one of our biggest hits after it was remixed in America.

As usual, John and Roger were the first to complete their contribution on bass and drums, and John was once again partying as if there was no tomorrow. His destructive demons were beginning to surface once more, and he crashed his car on Sydney Bridge while Nick, Simon, and I continued to work on the top of the songs. John would often go off and party on his own. We’d had a lot of fun together as a band when we were on the road, and going out drinking together in clubs was great fun, but problems would occur when we were in the studio. These were mainly creative tensions or problems caused by John wanting to go off and party to the extreme after he’d finished laying down his bass. It seemed to me that in his mind, his work was finished. At one point John was required to come back to the studios to do a bit more bass, and for some reason it seemed to send him over the edge.

“I’m not fucking doing that!” he raged.

Later, we discovered he’d hurt his hand again, this time accidently cutting it on a shower door. It was less serious than last time, but it was another disturbing omen for what the future held. As the year drew to a close, we planned to release “Union of the Snake” in the UK at the end of October. We were convinced we would repeat the same success as we’d had with “Is There Something I Should Know?” So the whole band got together and filled up a giant bath full of iced water in a hotel suite and stocked it with every type of champagne and fine wine we could possibly want. All we were waiting for was the news from London to give us the signal to drink it all.

But when the call came it was a huge disappointment. The best the single could do was to eventually make it to number three. What went wrong? I wondered. Was it a bad song? Was it because we weren’t in the UK to promote it? With hindsight, the song was up against “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club and “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel in the charts so it didn’t do so badly, but I still felt deflated at the time. Still, at least we’d finally finished the new album, and we were looking forward to getting back to Britain in time for Christmas and using up some of our allotted sixty days there.

We were glad to go back, and we played a series of great gigs while in London during December. We were shown on
Top of the Pops
on Christmas Day doing our lip-synched version of “Is There Something I Should Know?” as part of a seasonal round-up of the year’s number ones.

Christmas 1983 held a special significance for me due to the wonderful present Tracey was about to share with me.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” she confided, when we were alone together in our cottage in Wolverhampton. “I think I am pregnant . . .”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“The Reflex” . . . and Cracking America

A
HELL of a lot of blood, sweat, and tears were spilled during our tour of America in 1984. It was the year that we finally conquered the United States and we were duly anointed on the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine, which billed us as the Fab Five in comparison to the Beatles. We were honored with two Grammy Awards, and we fulfilled our lifelong dreams of performing in front of a sellout audience at Madison Square Garden. It was fantastic. For a while everything that we touched seemed to turn to gold. But adulation comes with a price; and over the next few months we were about to experience a series of deeply disturbing incidents. The US leg of what fans referred to as our Sing Blue Silver tour that year was the last time that all five of us went on a major tour together during the 1980s. John, in particular, would end up in a very dark place, and I would finish the year secretly questioning whether or not I wanted to remain in the band. But for the time being, things seemed to be going perfectly.

I was overjoyed that Tracey was pregnant, and we were looking forward to becoming parents. I’d met and married the woman I loved, so starting a family was naturally something that we wanted to do. The timing was going to be difficult, with me having to be on the road for so long, but Tracey was very close to her mother and brothers, and I knew they would look after her while I was away. Before we went to the States at the end of January, we were due to play a series of gigs in Japan to warm up. Tracey and I decided the traveling would be too much for her to come along to Japan, although we arranged for her to join me later in the States.

The tour was preceded by an enormous high—and on this occasion that high was the first time we heard the finished version of the remix for our new single, “The Reflex.” We’d originally recorded the song as a track for our third album,
Seven and the Ragged Tiger
, which had a very difficult birth and was finished way behind schedule. The track on the album isn’t the greatest version of “The Reflex,” and it was very different from the remix that we eventually released commercially as a single. We’d learned about the value of remixing for the American market from our experience with
Rio,
so we asked Nile Rodgers of Chic to produce versions in both 7-inch and 12-inch formats. Before CDs or digital downloads, 12-inch vinyl discs were often the only way you could achieve a truly rich depth of sound, so it was an ideal medium for Nile. As well as being hugely successful as a guitarist and founder member of Chic, Nile was just about as hot as it got at the time, having worked with INXS. He’d produced “Let’s Dance” for David Bowie and later did “Like a Virgin” with Madonna. Nile agreed to work on “The Reflex” with an Italian sound engineer, Jason Corsaro, and together they came up with something very special.

We were on the road when we got a phone call from our management, who were the first to be sent a copy of Nile’s version of “The Reflex.”

“Chaps, I have got the remix and I think you ought to come and listen to it in person,” boomed Paul Berrow in his deep voice.

He didn’t say anything else, so I didn’t really know what to expect when we all arrived at his hotel suite in the Midwest to hear it. I can remember that as we walked into the room everything smelled strongly of mint, and we were greeted by the sight of Paul, who’d just finished having a massage with mint oil by his new girlfriend, Miranda, whom he later married.

“I hope a massage is all you’ve been having, you dirty bugger,” I joked, rather unkindly, under my breath.

“I’ve only just got this from Nile, chaps,” Paul explained. “Miranda, can you just pop this on play over there.”

Suddenly the room filled with the magical sound of the opening bars of the new remix:
Ta nah, nah, nah. Ta nah, nah, nah.

“Fuck me! That’s good,” said Simon, on behalf of all of us. “That’s
exactly
how we want it to sound, exactly.”

Within a second, you could hear that the vocals were brilliantly engineered, the bass was fantastic, and everything about it screamed
hit, hit, hit!
If you do this for a job, after a while your instinct always tells you very strongly if something is good—and all of us, to a man, just went: “Wow!”

Paul seemed less convinced.

“Well, no . . . hold on,” he stammered, but we wouldn’t hear any of it.

“Go back to your massage,” I said.

Nile’s mix sounded different to anything we’d done up until then, yet somehow it still retained all the qualities of a great Duran Duran song. One of the things that was so groundbreaking about it was that it was the first time a black producer had really exploited sampling to its full potential on a commercial single by a leading white band. Nile had taken Simon’s vocals and reworked them using new forms of programming to give the single a brash, funky, and futuristic sound that instantly stuck in your head. Twenty years later everybody would be doing it, but Nile was way ahead of the times.

“Fle, fle, flex,” echoed Simon’s voice, hauntingly.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be too far ahead of the times for the likes of Capitol Records. Incredible as it may seem today, we initially faced a battle to persuade them to release it. The first thing we did after hearing it was arrange to sit down with our management the next day to talk about a strategy for marketing “The Reflex” with an accompanying video. We were determined to film something that represented the core of what we were about as a way of bouncing back from the “New Moon on Monday” video, which contained those embarrassing dance sequences. Our tour was sold out and people were clamoring to see us live, so the time seemed right to do a live video. At the time, we were the only British band that could pull off those huge arena shows (Spandau were dust by now!), so we put together a grand plan. It included shooting the video, filming a
Sing Blue Silver
documentary, and recording a live
Arena
album. The only drawback was that when it came to “The Reflex,” the record label had other ideas.

“We have a problem. Capitol Records don’t want to release it. They think it is too black,” explained the Berrows.

“Too black? What do they mean, too black?” we asked.

“They think it’s the wrong sort of association. It sounds too much like something a black artist might do.”

I was incredulous. “Well maybe that’s because it’s been fucking mixed by the world’s leading black producer,” I spat back in anger.

I’d never encountered this attitude before, not on this scale. Where I grew up in northeastern England there were no black people. As far as I and every other member of the band was concerned, Nile Rodgers, Tony Thompson, and Bernard Edwards of Chic were successful artists who we respected and admired. Everyone rated Bernard as one of the greatest bass players in the world; our appreciation of him had been one of the things that John and I had discussed together on the very first day that we met at the Rum Runner. I could hear Bernard’s influence in John’s playing at that first jam session. Chic were people who were great inspirations to us because of their music and their style . . . and then suddenly we were told we couldn’t work with them. No way!

But you have to remember that this was 1984, and even the likes of MTV, which was very progressive, in the main aired only videos by white bands. In those days, shameful as it may seem today, it was very hard for black musicians to get airplay, and the people in charge of the record industry were very open about it.

“No, it’s too black. He’s black. Don’t release it.”

It’s shocking to think that just a generation ago things were so screwed up, but all five of us in Duran Duran were indignant and we were determined to fight our corner. Michael Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean,” from his
Thriller
album, had already been a huge success on MTV in 1983, so thankfully things were starting to change for the better, but it was a slow process.

Ironically, John and I had already had some initial discussions with Tony Thompson in Sydney the previous year about the possibility of working together at some point in the future. We’d also become good friends with Bernard. There was still an awful racist streak in America, but the Chic guys were so cool about it, and Bernard had actually explained to us what it had been like for black people to grow up in the South in the fifties and sixties. I think their characters were a lot tougher because of all the things they’d had to deal with in the past. It was a hard struggle for them, but the one thing that can bridge most divides is music—and in this case we were determined not to back down.

“Well, actually, you haven’t got a choice about whether or not to release it,” we told the suits at Capitol. “Go and call EMI in London because you will find that you can’t do that. Our contract says you don’t have the power to prevent us.”

Capitol were an American subsidiary of EMI and they were ultimately controlled from the UK, so we knew that whatever deal we had in Britain would have to be honored in the States. Thanks to the clause in the contract that we had signed as fledgling artists four years earlier, we had retained creative control over our music—and we had learned from the flop of our second single, “Careless Memories,” not to let the record label dictate to us about release decisions. But it was a risky strategy. We could force Capitol to release “The Reflex,” but we couldn’t make them spend money promoting it unless they genuinely believed it could be a hit. And without proper promotion even the best singles can struggle. We didn’t often meet with the record company at this point. We would normally just sit down with them for ten minutes and let them know what we were doing—and this was going to take more than a quick meeting to resolve. When the five of us were united about something we were a powerful force to be reckoned with, so the Berrows were dispatched to London to sort things out. Meanwhile I phoned our old ally Dave Ambrose at EMI.