Wild Boy (21 page)

“Dave—do you know what’s been going on?” I asked.

“Yeah Andy—I’ve been thinking about it as well. It’s one of your best pieces of work, you’ve got to release it.”

Fortunately, everyone else in London backed us to the hilt, and eventually they managed to get their American counterparts excited about it. “The Reflex” became our eleventh single and it was our most successful. It gave us a hit just when we needed it most, after we’d struggled to complete our third album, and in that respect it saved our careers from going off the boil. It got a fantastic review in the
New Musical Express
(the first track of ours to be praised in print by their journalists), and it reached number one in both the UK and the USA. It also got to number four in Australia, and it won an Ivor Novello award for International Hit of the Year—but most important of all, it bridged the divide.

Some things are worth fighting for.

AT
first, America seemed like a great big playground, and we were flattered by the constant comparisons that the US media made between us and the Beatles. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were our heroes, so it was a huge accolade to be mentioned in the same breath as them, and it became a regular talking point. In early February, we held a press conference at the Magic Castle pub in Hollywood, which was attended by a crowd of 150 journalists, who treated us as if we were the original Fab Four. We’d worked out a few lines together beforehand, and it became a very humorous affair as the reporters moved their way down the line and each of us introduced ourselves.

“Hello, I’m Simon and I’m the singer.”

“Hello, I’m Roger and I’m the drummer.”

When it got to my turn I joked: “Hello, I’m Ringo and I get pissed a lot!”

We had this thing about trying to make the American media laugh with us and it worked. They saw us as quirky English eccentrics and they loved us. It was a relief for such an important big press conference to go so well, and we later showed some brief sound bites from it in our
Sing Blue Silver
documentary. Duran Duran were finally accepted into American culture, and we were probably the last British band to achieve that. The tour itself was sponsored by Coca-Cola, and they couldn’t have asked for better publicity—even though at one point John pissed them off by admitting he preferred Pepsi!

They were happy times. It was as if we’d suddenly moved up another notch. It was the first time that we used a private plane on a tour—a big 727, which Simon jokily nicknamed the Excess-a-jet! The entourage that we traveled with was very large by this point—there were around 150 of us, including the road team and our camera crew.

The scale of each gig was enormous, and it was like a military maneuver each time we needed to assemble or disassemble our stage set. If we were due on the road the next day, a small army would descend the moment a show finished, and they would work quietly through the night in order to transport all our gear to the next venue. When a major band goes on the road it’s like undertaking a civil engineering project every day. There’s a whole science that has grown up around getting everything in the right place at the right time.

We had a convoy of eight or nine big trucks that would start loading as soon as we came offstage at around 11 or 11:15 p.m. The crew could get incredibly ratty if anyone was hanging about in their way—and with good reason. They’d be on a tight schedule, which meant they had to get the first truck out and onto the road by 12:30, after which the vehicles would come out one by one as they became ready. The order of the truck flow is very important, and it has to be planned with precision—otherwise, everything arrives in the wrong order at the other end, which can delay building the new set. Depending on the nature of the itinerary, the crew have to start building the new stage while bits of it are still on the road. It’s tough, physical work and it takes a lot of discipline to get it right. Everything is overseen by a stage manager, whose job it is to mastermind the ins and outs of the setup and breakdown. The head trucker then has to organize things to run smoothly and makes sure that none of the trucks go missing along the way.

The crew themselves travel on buses on which they eat and sleep throughout the night until they arrive at the new venue the next morning. Next, it’s a quick shower at the venue before they get called to assemble their gear from around 6 or 7 a.m. In addition to the stage, there’s all the equipment and a massive sound system; a complex lighting rig with hundreds of spotlights and projection gear; plus all of the backstage equipment needed for the dressing rooms, wardrobe, makeup, TV room, band room, hospitality, and greenroom. In all, there are many hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of specialized equipment, all of which seems to weigh a ton! Then there’s all the catering and merchandising stands that have to go up—and that alone can involve twenty or thirty stalls. I remember explaining it all to my dad one time and he was fascinated. It’s like UPS or Fed-Ex on a busy day. The loading and unloading can go on around the clock for twenty-four hours, from the first truck leaving to the last truck arriving. It’s a phenomenal deal, every day.

Every show has to be perfect—or as close to perfect as you can get it. For the band it might be show number 27 on a 100-date tour, but for a fan who has paid his or her hard-earned money for a ticket it still has to be every bit as good as the first night. Without a really excellent crew something is going to suffer, and it will usually be the show. Fortunately, in Duran Duran we were generally surrounded by a really good crew made up of intelligent guys who were always smart and on the button. We paid them well and we always made sure they had plenty of food and drink on their buses, which they basically lived on for the duration of the tour. The guys who made the most money were the riggers, who would assemble all the lighting. It was breathtaking to watch them at work 150 feet in the air, suspended above the stage. We had a very high-tech show and a lot of the moving lights that we used were new and varied. For safety reasons the riggers’ work always had to be spot-on—you don’t want a two-ton lighting rig crashing down on Simon Le Bon in the middle of a performance.

As well as our regular entourage, don’t forget that during the Sing Blue Silver tour we also had a full-sized film crew accompanying us everywhere in order to shoot our documentary! It was a big old show. No British band had done a set quite on this scale before, certainly nothing that involved big video screens and such intricate lighting. It was a nice feeling for everyone in the band to be the bosses of something so big. I can remember taking a step back and watching it all happen with Simon one day.

“We’ve created a whole little industry here just from wearing makeup and all hanging out together in a Birmingham nightclub!” we mused.

We performed in front of more than 500,000 people during the American leg of that tour, and there was always something happening on the road to keep us talking. There were plenty of interesting characters in our crew: most of them were English and we knew them well. We’d persuaded a couple of the Stones’ fixers, Jim and Paddy Callaghan, to work for us, and there wasn’t a trick in the book that they didn’t know. They were tough old Cockneys of Irish extract and they’d seen it all. Meanwhile, I even had my own spliff roller in order to save time on rolling joints (which gives you an idea why our plane was called the Excess-a-jet).

Every day the crew would be buzzing with banter about who’d done what the night before. Contrary to popular perception, unlike the free and easy days of the Rum Runner, no member of the band slept with fans while we were on the road. It was just something that we never did because we simply didn’t allow outsiders into our inner circle, plus we all had partners by now. In addition to Tracey, Giovanna, and Julie Anne, John was dating Janine Andrews (my ex) and Simon was close to a model called Claire Stansfield. It was as if we were in our own little bubble with its own community that was separated from the fuss and chaos of the outside world.

Of course, some of the younger crew members were more than happy to reap the rewards of being besieged by gorgeous women, and I daresay that quite a few rock chicks were invited onto their buses. During shows, our fans would throw their knickers onto the stage with phone numbers attached, and as a consequence our road crew were constantly sweeping the stage! It was unbelievable—we’d get backstage after the gig and there’d be 2,000 teddy bears, 150 pairs of knickers, 300 bras, 50 joints, and God knows how many hotel room keys.

Of course, the theatrical streak in Simon thrived on all the attention, and he loved to go crowd surfing. He’d puff out his chest and dive into the audience so that they could catch him in a forest of open arms. I used to joke afterward that there must have been a few sharp intakes of breath when they caught him because he’s a big bloke! On one memorable occasion, the audience were treated to an eyeful of Simon’s crown jewels when his bulging leather trousers tore open. He was energetically bouncing around in full flow onstage when he dropped down on his knees with his legs apart in order to belt out some vocals.

Rip!

Unfortunately, Simon wasn’t wearing any underwear, and his entire undercarriage went on show to a packed auditorium. It made Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl faux pas look like kid stuff. Fortunately for everyone in Duran Duran it wasn’t televised, and the incident made only a few lines in the press. We were always ribbing Simon for being a bit podgy, so the fact his trousers had torn open simply added to all the hilarity.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured him afterward. “It was only a very small thing so I don’t think anybody noticed!”

Despite our good-natured gags about Simon’s weight, we were all very physically fit, including him. Life on the road can be very grueling, and if you’re playing energetic shows for two and a half hours a night for three or four nights a week you soon start to build up levels of fitness similar to those of a young footballer. I used to love to let rip onstage and I’d climb onto amps and jump off in order to entertain the crowd. It played hell with my ankles, so I used to wear specially strengthened boots so that I wouldn’t end up breaking a leg. Our energy onstage was very important to Duran Duran and at heart we always wanted to be a great live band.

We hoped this would come across in the video for “The Reflex,” which was put together using footage shot at several different shows. The main one was a performance we gave at the National Exhibition Center in Birmingham, but major portions were also shot during a gig we did during the Sing Blue Silver tour at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Russell Mulcahy once again did a fantastic job as director, and in my opinion “The Reflex” is one of the best live videos ever made. We wanted the atmosphere to feel as if we were performing in an amphitheater, which is why there are Roman columns at the side of the stage. The set was based on something extravagant that Nick had sketched out while we were in Montserrat together the previous summer. The video is the best representation of the energy of the band. You can see the fun we were having onstage during that tour etched across our faces.

The camaraderie you experience on the road can be one of the best things about being in a band, and we’d often play practical jokes on each other. On my twenty-third birthday we were staying in New Orleans for a gig when Jim Callaghan (whom we called JC) laid on a surprise as we left the hotel. We were all going together to a bar called O’Brien’s with loads of the crew to celebrate my birthday by getting bladdered on cocktails with big straws. Tracey was with me as we walked down the road, and as we got to the corner there was a street musician standing there playing.

“Yo! Andy—Happy Birthday to you!” he sang out of the blue, just as I walked past.

Suddenly crowds of street musicians seemed to appear from everywhere, and they all surrounded Tracey and me, singing “Happy Birthday!” It seemed like JC had secretly tracked down every street musician in New Orleans and arranged for them to give us our own special serenade as we walked to the bar. It was a lovely gesture and it really made our day.

I think all of us were enjoying things at this point. It seemed as if we were at the peak of our indestructible youth. But sadly, even though we were enjoying things for now, there was plenty of trouble just around the corner. As I said earlier in this book, life in the rock-and-roll industry is like being on a roller-coaster ride with its highs and lows. Well, if the early part of our American tour was a peak, we were about to go into a dip. The danger signs had been there a few months earlier while we were in Australia recording our third album. Going to the studio to fight our way through crowds every morning in Sydney had been a morale-sapping process that had eaten away at our resolve to make great music.

As Tracey described it, “Every day all the band seemed to do was get up, go to the studio, and work. Then you’d come home and go to bed. Day after day after day.”

Worse still, the experience had chipped away at the band’s unity. After John and Roger had made their contributions and were therefore no longer required in the studio, it had seemed as if Nick had constantly wanted to change things, and some days I felt as if I was fighting to protect our input. Nick seemed to want a more arty electronic sound than John, Roger, and I, and Simon often seemed happy to go along with it. John, meanwhile, seemed to struggle to fill all the extra time on his hands and resorted to his familiar trick of wild partying. By now his relationship with Janine Andrews was becoming increasingly fiery. When the producer of our third album, Alex Sadkin, had asked John to rerecord some of his bass work, John’s reaction said it all: he lashed out in anger and hurt his arm in a fury. Roger, meanwhile, was likable and quiet, as usual, but we later found out that he was becoming dangerously exhausted. It seemed as if every time we were away from home for long periods of time the pressure would eventually begin to take its toll on all five of us—and America was no different.

Another negative factor was that the friction between certain band members and the Berrow brothers continued to fester. Nick and I were increasingly hostile toward them because we were unhappy with the financial deal we’d signed with them back in 1980. We had no objection to them making a living from Duran Duran—after all, they’d helped to make everything happen so quickly in the first place—but we felt their share of our profits was simply too great. Worse, in our minds, was the fact that they had some of the ownership rights to the music that we had created. It was ironic that Nick and I, who rarely saw eye to eye on most things, were united over our concerns about the financial arrangements.