“PLANET
Earth” was finally released on February 21, 1981. It got to number twelve, and it stayed on the charts for eleven weeks. More important, it got us a vital slot on
Top of the Pops
. We launched a mini tour just before the single hit the shops, and we were in Liverpool when we got the call from the record company to tell us we’d gone into the top forty. We had to do an interview on Radio One and go down for a recording for
Top of the Pops
.
We all thought,
Fucking yeah! It’s happening—this is a dream come true!
I remember phoning my dad in excitement from a call box and saying, “Dad—we got it
—Top of the Pops
!”
“Well done, son—I am proud of you,” he said.
I tried to stay in regular contact with my dad whenever I could, although in those days there were no mobile phones (and not all hotel rooms had their own phone either), so sometimes we’d go a while without talking if I was on the road.
As far as the band was concerned, EMI had really fast-tracked us.
Top of the Pops
was the BBC’s flagship entertainment show at the time, and it used to get around 18 million viewers, so
everybody
wanted to appear on it. It was an iconic thing to be seen on and your record was guaranteed to do well in the charts afterward. All eyes and ears would focus on Radio One and
Top of the Pops
, because there was nothing else.
There was only one snag. Due to strict union rules in force, every version of a song that was broadcast on
Top of the Pops
had to be a special new recording for the show. It was a rule designed to generate extra money for all the highly paid TV technicians. This was before Maggie Thatcher had ripped apart the unions, so the rules had to be obeyed—at least on paper. The record companies hated it because the last thing they wanted was to risk a bad recording going out on air.
“So what happens is this,” explained someone in the know. “The version that goes out on air is
remarkably
similar to the album version.”
Someone told me that what happened was there was a clandestine swap of tapes so that the “new” version never got broadcast, which suited everybody. I’d heard about this from an old friend of mine who knew about the music industry. The unions were none the wiser, presumably because they got paid anyway. It would have been a big scandal at the time if anybody had known, and it explains why our lip-synching on the show was a bit more obvious than it would have been otherwise—the version we “sang” had been recorded months earlier.
On the day of filming, we were incredibly excited, although when we got to the studio we all thought,
Is this it?
It was small, with a tiny, tiny stage, and the dressing rooms were very basic. The BBC were very bossy and were notorious for slinging people off if you were not on time.
“There will be no special treatment for anyone. If you miss your call you are out,” they told us.
We discovered we were to be on the same show as the Who, who were obviously regarded as rock gods. They had a
huge
set and a
giant
dressing room.
“Hold on,” I said. “I thought everyone was equal!”
The reality was that dealing with the BBC establishment was like going back to school. You had to play by their rules. Record companies were terrified of the BBC because they had the power to make or break bands, unlike today. Every child of every age in the UK watched Saturday TV,
Top of the Pops
and
The Old Grey
Whistle
Test.
WE
started being recognized almost immediately after
Top of the Pops,
and it gave us a real buzz. Whenever you spoke to anyone you’d want to ask them, “Did you see it, did you see it?” But unlike some of the other New Romantic bands we felt we still had a rock edge, and at first we thought we’d reach a much more rock-based audience than we did. EMI obviously had other ideas, and they had a publicity plan already worked out for each of us.
“We are going to promote John first because he is the most photogenic,” they explained. “And we are going to start with him in Japan.”
I sensed this strategy would secretly wind up Simon because, as the singer, he was naturally expected to be the front man. It was the shape of things to come, and there were many times when Simon and John would be vying for attention, often with hilarious results. It would irritate Simon that John attracted the most fuss from female fans, but when it came to photo shoots it would irritate John that the photographers always wanted the singer to stand in the center. Sometimes there was a lot of shuffling to see who stood in the middle. The simple fact was that John
was
incredibly photogenic but he
wasn’t
the singer, so that caused problems between them straightaway.
Nick, meanwhile, who loved talking about pop art, was obviously going to enjoy doing a lot of interviews, so the record company had plenty of plans for him. As for me, Dave Ambrose had some interesting advice.
“When we get to America, your role will become really important,” he told me. “Over there all the attention is always on the lead guitarist, and you will be the one who does all the interviews when we get to the States. You can’t break the States without a good guitar player, and the last band who did it were Queen.”
It was a lot to live up to, but the record company seemed to have everything worked out, and, as always, what would really make or break us would be the music. “Planet Earth” had done well, but instead of capitalizing on it EMI next released a single called “Careless Memories,” which made only number thirty-seven. It was the record company’s choice, but everyone else around us said, “Why didn’t you release ‘Girls on Film’ instead?” It was a bit of a wobble that knocked our confidence, and after that we always made sure that we dictated which songs were released. But we needn’t have worried; on July 25 we released “Girls on Film,” and it really lit the touch paper. It got to number five and stayed on the charts for eleven weeks. Suddenly everyone wanted to meet us—and the female attention started almost immediately. Never mind “Girls on Film”—there were crowds of screaming girls almost
everywhere
we went, and it wasn’t long before the press picked up on it. We developed such a big female following largely as the result of a conscious effort on EMI’s part. They had a clever marketing plan based around what they learned from promoting the Beatles in the sixties—and the girls loved it.
“It’s been so wild that we have even had to be smuggled out of our gigs in a Black Maria,” complained Simon in a
Daily Star
interview. “There have been times when I’ve gone back to my hotel room to find fans sitting on my bed.”
Within a few months things had gotten so crazy that some of the venues we visited had to call the police because they were afraid they’d be overrun by marauding teenage girls. The tabloids got to hear about one incident in Sheffield when the cops had a real battle to get us out the stage door and Simon got mobbed.
“Lead singer Simon Le Bon is recovering from almost being throttled when a girl grabbed the scarf around his neck and wouldn’t let go,” reported the
News of the World,
which also quoted Simon as saying, “I think she wanted to take my head home with her.”
Simon got quite badly ruffled, but he loved it. Secretly, we were all loving the attention—and so were the record company, as it looked like their cunning plan was working. They made sure we appealed to the female audience through publicity in publications like
Smash Hits
. “Planet Earth” had got to number one in Australia, so EMI announced we were going on a world tour that would begin Down Under and would include Japan, Europe, and America.
We had a wild stopover in Thailand on the way to Sydney, and the journey was a bit of an experience in itself. Including our road crew, there were about twenty-five of us traveling in a group. The record company booked us economy class with an Indian airline. Air travel was a lot less regulated then, and there were actually people trying to cook up meals in the aisle of the plane using little gas camping stoves. During the brief stay in Thailand we were high on excitement, and there was lots of drinking and wild partying. When we finally got to Sydney we were greeted by a great big bear of an Aussie, who picked us up at the airport in a large American car and acted as our minder.
“G’day, I’m Grant Hilton—pleased to meet you boys,” he said, extending his hand like a big paw. He was a six-foot-two-inch stereotypical Aussie.
We soon found out that the local sheilas were just as mad for us as the English girls were, except they were much noisier and were never afraid to get their kit off! Grant was the manager of a little rock-and-roll hangout called Benny’s Bar, where the boys from INXS used to hang out. It was only a tiny venue and it had a little round window set in the front door, which you had to go up to and show your face in order to be let in. We met INXS there on our first night. Simon and Michael Hutchence spent a lot of time together and eventually became good friends. INXS were a young band just like us and they wanted to have fun, so the first thing we decided to do was throw a party out by the beach for our road crew. It was a rock tradition to give them a celebration before the start of a tour.
Someone phoned up a modeling agency, so the beach was crawling with crowds of gorgeous women at the party. There was a trampoline on the sand, and everyone was urging the girls to have a go, shouting, “Come on—it’s for the road crew.” Before we knew it, the girls took off their bikinis, and they were bouncing up and down, topless, on the trampoline while the crew were all openmouthed. We were fast learning that 80 percent of our audience was female, and that kind of raw female energy followed us everywhere. Some of the fans could be incredibly persistent; they would wait outside our hotel and tell us they had never missed a single gig.
We would react by saying, “Fucking hell, how many gigs did you say you had been to? Okay, fifty shows! We’ll let you in for an hour.”
It was a really young hot female audience, and at that age it was a very difficult thing to manage—at times, impossible. Our fans were—and still are—amazingly warm to us and they’d go to great lengths to do something nice. Once, Simon mentioned in an interview that he liked continental chocolates, and suddenly we were sent an avalanche of them. Apart from Roger, who was with Giovanna from the beginning, none of us had serious girlfriends in the very early days, so there used to be a lot of rivalry, particularly between Simon and John, about who got to chat up the best girls.
Being number one in Australia gave things a lot of heat. We were invited onto
Countdown,
the Australian version of
Top of the Pops,
which was presented by a lovable old bloke named Molly Meldrum. He was famous for wearing a big cowboy hat and his catchphrase was “Molly Meldrum loves you lots.” He gave us a massive buildup for weeks on end to promote us, and the tour soon sold out. We’d travel from gig to gig under the blazing sun in a dusty convoy of giant cattle trucks with all the gear stowed in the back, which was open sided.
To celebrate, we went to a party at Molly’s house in Melbourne, and all the Australian cricket team came along. Molly had lots of expensive Egyptian art all around the place and I was amazed it survived the party. On another occasion we went to the Manzel Room in Sydney, which had a reputation for being the roughest rock-and-roll place on the planet, and we got thrown out for being too rowdy.
We pretty much met everyone we wanted to meet in Australia, and the whole thing was like a big dream. I loved cricket, so it was a big deal to meet Greg Chappell and his boys, as they were people you only normally got to see on the BBC.
LIFE
was so much fun that when we got back to the Rum Runner, I remember thinking,
Well, even if we don’t make it any bigger, this has all been worth it.
We were surrounded by everything that young men aspire to have, and at times some of us tended to get a bit overindulgent. We had a little private room at the back of the club for “extra activities,” which was decked out to have a bit of fun. We had cushions and mattresses and candles in there, and it was a place where you could go to smoke a spliff or be alone with a girl. I jokily called it the “sex offender’s room” (things weren’t so politically correct then), and it ended up being used quite a lot. The Rum Runner was still very much our base; it had a policy of letting in two girls for every guy, so there was never any shortage of female company.
There was one girl in particular who was absolutely gorgeous, and she just loved sex with any man who would go with her. I won’t use her real name here, so let’s just call her Miss X instead. I was the first to discover her delights but I found out that afterward she went through quite a few of the males at the club. She was blond and beautiful, with looks that would have made any Hollywood starlet jealous, but she was quite happy to service you in the sex offender’s room or anywhere else if need be. Generally the MO of girls like Miss X was that if they went with one of us they’d attempt to go after the others, too, not just the band but those around us.
Sometimes someone would accidentally walk in on people when they were in the sex offender’s room. I can remember Al Beard running over on one occasion and spluttering, “Oh chaps! Have you heard about Roger and Giovanna? We’ve just caught them at it!”
I think most of us had an unexpected walk-in at some point, but we were just doing what young men do when they’re single and surrounded by beautiful women, and the choice of females at the Rum Runner was overwhelming and unreal. This was before the scourge of AIDS became a national issue, so things were still very hedonistic.
“That was the whole point in forming a band. Girls, absolutely gorgeous girls,” Simon once said in an interview. “We were five heterosexual, good-looking men. We competed against each other for the sexiest girls . . . and I won!”
In fact, it was John who often found himself with the most girls on his arm, sometimes with outrageous consequences. John was very popular, and he just bounced in and out of girlfriends every few weeks. After the album had come out he’d managed to find time to sneak off to Paris for a romantic couple of days with a girl named Roberta. It must have been a passionate time, because a few years later we opened up a copy of the
Daily Mirror
to see Polaroid photos they had taken of each other in bed. John was pictured drinking a cocktail naked in bed, and Roberta was reclining on the sheets dressed only in stockings, suspenders, and high heels, under the headline
A HIGH TIME IN PARIS
.