Wild Boy (6 page)

The first thing I noticed when I got off the train was that everybody was speaking in a funny Black County accent. When I’d called to arrange the audition, the girl on the phone had a Brummie drawl that was so rich that I actually had trouble understanding some of the things she said. Brummie accents in the UK are like a long drawn-out drawl, and they are regarded with similar affection to the way some southern accents are in the States. When I got to Birmingham, the other thing I noticed was how trendy everybody looked. There was a big North/South divide in the UK in those days, and everybody I spoke to assumed that I was Scottish.

Birmingham wasn’t as big then as it is now, and I didn’t have any money for a cab from the station, so I decided to walk the rest of the way to the club. I bumped into a group of guys who all had big floppy hair and pointed shoes, and they told me they were in a local band called Fashion. I had trouble understanding what they were saying because of their accents, but I managed to get directions to the Rum Runner, which, from what I could gather, was located down an alley in an old Victorian building near a canal.

The Rum Runner had previously been a casino in the sixties, and it had its own boxing gym on the same site. From the outside it had an air of faded grandeur about it. Inside, it was not what you expected it to be at all, because it had been fitted out as a brand-new chic club, complete with mirrors everywhere, plush dark carpets, and its own triangular champagne bar, plus a DJ booth and a dance floor. It had big, wide seats made out of old rum barrels. There were also rum barrels set into the walls, which dated from the times when rum had been shipped up the canal, hence the name of the club.

The first person to greet me after I was shown inside was John Taylor. He was a very different-looking bloke than the handsome pop pinup whose photo would eventually be pinned on the bedroom walls of thousands of teenagers. He also went by a different name.

“Hello, my name is Nigel,” he said, holding out his hand in a friendly if slightly awkward manner. (His full name is Nigel John Taylor, and it was only later that he became known as John.) He was a tall, skinny kid who was well styled, but he wore these little round glasses that made him seem a bit of a geek. In hindsight, he looked a bit like Harry Potter! In truth, he was an incredibly good-looking bloke, and at first I thought he was deliberately doing the geeky glasses thing just to be cool. It turned out that he wanted contact lenses but he couldn’t afford them. One of the first things I noticed about him was that he was wearing a ridiculous pair of enormous winkle picker shoes. I remember thinking,
Christ, I hope I don’t have to wear a pair of them!
That aside, John was very friendly and confident, and we clicked immediately. He struck me as a straightforward and easygoing person who didn’t hold back. I later found he would always be the first to come and introduce himself whenever there was someone he wanted to talk to, and he was very good at making people feel at ease. It turned out that we had plenty in common, because John had played lead guitar for a while before coming off it to play bass. He was a few months older than me, although he hadn’t quite turned twenty. He had just been through art college, so he was basically still an art student at heart.

Roger Taylor, who’d previously been a drummer in a couple of punk bands, was also there when I arrived at the club, and the three of us had a good laugh about the fact that by coincidence we all shared the same surname. It turned out to be a good omen because we got on well despite our different backgrounds. They had long, floppy hair and were into David Bowie and Bryan Ferry and the whole new fashion trend that had started to gain currency ever since punk had died away. They were in on the beginning of what became known as the New Romantic movement, with its emphasis on frilly shirts and baggy trousers, whereas I was much more from a rock background and I had arrived wearing jeans and a scruffy old pair of training shoes. Later on, the rest of the band would spend a lot of time taking the piss out of my cheap shoes! (Nick’s dad still has a pair of my shoes as a souvenir, which I had bought for £2 out of a bargain bin.)

Musically, we found we shared a lot of ground straightaway. The advert that the band had placed in
Melody Maker
had cited certain guitar influences whom I admired, such as Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Mick Ronson of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars band. John also confided that he was a fan of the American bass guitarist Bernard Edwards. I admired Bernard, too, so I thought,
Oh, great, we’ve got something in common.
John was a bit of a traditionalist when it came to guitar, because he wanted to hear a rock-and-roll sound in the mold of Steve Jones, so later that afternoon I played him the Pistols track “Pretty Vacant,” and thankfully it blew him away.

There was a strong punk influence in the Midlands and there was an old punk club there called Barbarella’s, where all the top bands used to go to play. Just as New Romanticism grew out of punk, I discovered that Duran Duran were named after Milo O’Shea’s character, Durand-Durand, in
Barbarella
, the sixties movie starring Jane Fonda. I got the impression that the name had mainly been John’s idea, and it was an example of his art-school mind working at its best. He didn’t realize how good he was as a bass player; he was a complete natural at it and he could play effortlessly.

He was very particular about getting the look and feel of everything right, but you got the feeling that, at the heart of it, what he wanted most of all was to form a great rock-and-roll band.

Meanwhile, my first impression of Roger, who was also age nineteen, was that he was very much the quiet one. His dad ran a small business near Castle Bromwich, so, like John, Roger was another local boy. Roger had done a few dead-end jobs since leaving school, but he was only really interested in playing drums. He’d previously been in a punk band called the Scent Organs, who’d reportedly been banned from practicing at the local church hall. But I soon sussed out that Roger wasn’t the sort of person who liked confrontation. In fact he was quite shy and definitely not one to be pushing his views into your face all the time. He didn’t say much, he just went over and started banging the drums. Roger had a classic James Dean look; he was quite muscular and he reminded me a bit of the Fonz in
Happy Days
(except instead of saying “Hey” all the time, Roger would go “All right” in a Brummie accent). One thing Roger definitely had was fantastic ability as a drummer. He was coming out of a punk phase, and he was beginning to approach things in a slightly different way, which was influenced by disco, and it sounded really interesting. A drummer needs a lot of mental discipline, because if his timing is out then the rest of the band will lose it, too, and I could see that Roger’s concentration was very impressive.

Nick Rhodes was the next person to arrive. He turned up about an hour or so later than arranged, and I would soon discover that was Nick all over, because he was always late.

“If there’s one bad thing I’ve learned,” he once told an interviewer, “it’s that if you absolutely have to be somewhere by six a.m., you don’t have to get out of bed until at least eleven.”

My other enduring first impression of Nick, to this day, is that he carried all his personal possessions around with him in a plastic bag. It would always be a “decent” carrier bag, maybe from Marks & Spencer rather than a flimsy one from the corner shop, but he simply refused to put his personal stuff in a briefcase or a satchel. Nick’s dad was quite wealthy and owned a toy shop. Nick was the youngest member of the band and he hadn’t quite turned eighteen, but he’d been childhood friends with John. Nick was naturally androgynous even without makeup; he had a sort of boy/girl look about him that was to become one of the hallmarks of being a New Romantic. His voice was slightly flat and nasal, and his real surname was Bates. (I used to call him Master Bates and he later changed his name to Rhodes for “aesthetic reasons.”) As a keyboard player he was a bit of a genius in the sense that he had the ability to see some things in a completely different way from anyone else. Having said that, he didn’t seem to want to understand the traditional structure of music, and he didn’t care about knowing the difference between a major and a minor scale. Musical scales are a bit like male and female. One is minor and dark, the other is major and uplifting, and you have to be careful how you cross them. When Nick played I noticed that he was just using the black notes on his keyboard, which was something that Kate Bush was famous for doing at the time.

“You’re only playing the black keys?” I said.

“Yeah, so?” he replied.

“Well, that means you are just doing one key.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, like Kate Bush,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, like Kate Bush,” he replied, but I wasn’t quite sure if he knew what I meant.

Nick’s interpretation of doing music was very obviously going to be different to mine.
Playing
seemed to be the last thing on his mind, but he wanted to make keyboard
sounds
and
textures
and
layers
of sound—and in that sense he wanted to do something different that had never been done before. He could certainly make beautiful sounds, but in those days he couldn’t sing or dance (in fact, I used to joke to myself that his voice sounded a bit like a robot with a Brummie accent!). In terms of music, John and Nick had grown up watching
Top of the Pops
on BBC One, just as I had. There were no Internet or satellite music channels, so
Top of the Pops
was a huge event that the whole nation would tune into. In that way we all shared a common background, and we spent most of the afternoon jamming and playing together.

It was obvious that they wanted someone who could really play in lots of different styles and genres. But I soon discovered that they didn’t really have anything by way of their own repertoire. They didn’t have any lyrics or finished musical numbers, but they did have one little diamond, which was the chorus to “Girls on Film,” and Nick had a little wisp of a keyboard sequence to go with it. You could hear immediately that it was something special. John and Roger had obviously practiced together a lot, because they were using many different techniques to let the sound come through from Nick.

I remember Nick telling me, “This is one of the songs that we have got and we really think it is going to be a hit.”

Then he sang the line “Girls on film, girls on film,” and I knew he was right. I thought:
Fuck me! That’s cool—I wonder who wrote that?
But it turned out none of them had, because it had been written by their previous singer, Andy Wickett, whom they told me was on holiday. In fact, Andy had already quit the band, and what they didn’t mention at first was that they didn’t have any singer at all. That small piece of chorus from “Girls on Film” was the only thing that had survived from their earlier lineup, but to be fair to Andy Wickett it was quite significant, and later on we had to do a deal with him when we released the song commercially. It was a very good chorus for a song, and I am pretty sure that we came up with the basics for the rest of it when we first jammed together that afternoon. They were impressed by all the different styles I could do. Playing rock and blues was my standard thing, but I could also do funky stuff, and I’d learned all the different chords that go with R & B as well as pop. My time in cover bands had served me well, and I could do things by bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Thin Lizzy.

I knew I had won them over, because while we were playing together all the secretaries and the staff from the rest of the nightclub stopped work and came down from upstairs in order to listen to us and watch us play together. By the time we had finished the club was due to open for the night, and they invited me to stay on for the evening. I had to get the late train back up to Newcastle, but before I left I could see that the Rum Runner had a fantastic buzz about it. There were people starting to queue up outside, and you could see it was going to be packed.

The whole nightclub scene was going through a period of change in those days, and places like the Rum Runner were at the forefront of it. The old-style cabaret establishments that were famous for serving chicken in a basket were being replaced by disco clubs. Then off the back of disco came a new breed of ultraslick clubs like the Rum Runner, where people went to drink champagne and have a great time. I guess it was a kind of counterculture that allowed people to get away from all the gloom and unemployment in the real world. Whatever it was, I could see the Rum Runner was like a little fun palace where it was party time every night. It also turned out to be packed with Page 3 girls, who were at the top of the showbiz A-list. In those days topless models were regarded by the press a bit like the way newspapers today regard footballers’ wives who the headline writers in the UK are fascinated with and now refer to as WAGs (which stands for Wives and Girlfriends). The Page 3 girls were the WAGs of their generation, but instead of dating footballers they were desperate to be seen with pop stars.

By the time one of the club’s managers offered to drive me back to the station I’d already seen enough of the Rum Runner to know that I wanted to be part of it. The club was owned by two brothers, Mike and Paul Berrow, who were in their late twenties and part of an established Birmingham family who had business interests in the rag trade and property. Their father, Roy, had run three or four casinos in the city during the sixties and seventies. If you run casinos you inevitably get the odd member of the underworld frequenting your establishments, and it turned out that an associate of the Kray twins had once been arrested while coming out of the Rum Runner.

The Berrows themselves were straight, but some of the gangster chic rubbed off on them and people used to wrongly assume they were into all sorts of shady dealings—and I suppose it was an image that didn’t do them any harm. They were actually sharp-minded businessmen, and it had already been agreed they were going to be the management of Duran Duran. It was obvious the club’s party scene and the band were going to complement each other perfectly. As Mike dropped me off at the station, I noted the fact that he had a flash BMW and I remember thinking,
This is perfect—even the managers have got plenty of money!