Then it was my turn to be screamed at again: “Seriously, if we’d have been forced to turn around to come and get you it would have screwed everything. That was bang out of order!”
These days, record companies build clauses into contracts which forbid artists from taking part in dangerous water sports. I suppose they might have a point—but when I fell into the sea it looked good in our video!
WE
released “Rio” as a single in the UK in November 1982. Sadly, the videos that accompanied our next three singles weren’t quite up to the same standard. “Is There Something I Should Know?,” “Union of the Snake,” and “New Moon on Monday” were all hits in their own right, but somehow the videos didn’t seem to have the same continuity with the songs as our earlier work.
The video for “Is There Something I Should Know?” was shot in London before we’d started work on our third album. It went straight in at number one, which was a momentous achievement (and I’ll tell you about the party we had to celebrate later on). But the video didn’t seem to follow any overall concept, apart from paying tribute to the Beatles in certain places. Just like the way the song existed in isolation and wasn’t part of an album, there was no theme to the video. Consequently, there were a lot of pointless sequences in it, such as all the strange men who seem to be measuring trees. It was very polished and photogenic, but a bit meaningless.
The “Union of the Snake” video, in my view, wasn’t much better. It was shot in Sydney, Australia, but strangely Russell didn’t do it; I assume he was tied up with something else. Simon had tried to explain to me what the lyrics of the song were all about, but I have to confess it sounded like a load of waffle to me—something about how we are all descended from lizards. Simon’s very well read, but I’m not sure that even he knows where his lyrics come from sometimes, although the directors of the “Union of the Snake” video fell for the lizard stuff in a big way! The video certainly has a reptilian theme, but amid all the footage of lizards chasing people there are lots of meaningless images, too, like the juggler who suddenly appears for no apparent reason. For all I could see it might just as well have been about wandering around with a stiffy!
There was worse to come. “New Moon on Monday” was our least favorite video of all. Everybody in the band hates it, particularly the dreadful scene at the end where we all dance together. Even today, I cringe and leave the room if anyone plays the video. We shot it just outside Paris on the third of January 1984, and we were all miserable because we hadn’t had a long enough Christmas holiday. Our management had convinced us to theme it on the French Revolution, and it also had historic references to the French Resistance—but, to be honest, it was just a load of gibberish. The set was dark and cold, and we spent most of the day drinking alcohol. By the time we were dancing at the end I was half cut. It is one of the few times I’ve seen Nick dance (watch his shoulders moving up and down if you ever get another chance to see it!). We were very uncomfortable with the whole thing. After “New Moon on Monday,” we all thought,
Bollocks—let’s now do something that’s fundamental and solid.
The answer was a spectacular live video in the form of “The Reflex.” We also did epic shoots for “Wild Boys,” during which Simon was strapped to the water wheel, and “A View to a Kill”—but I’ll tell you about those three videos later in the book.
WHEN
it came to establishing a foothold in the States, there’s no doubt that our videos gave us an edge over other British bands. We had a strategy for doing well in America and we believed we could make it there, but it involved a lot of commitment and hard work, and we knew we had to make more effort than any other band. It involved touring in as many American cities as possible and we were careful to always try and keep the American media on our side. Video was at the heart of our success. We couldn’t have done our first American tour if it were not for the MTV following that we established. During ’81 and ’82 we broke into markets in the rest of the world, but initially it was very hard to get radio airplay in America. But we were consciously aware that lots of nightclubs there had TV screens in them, and as our videos took off in the clubs it created a talking point around us. “They might not be big, but they are big everywhere else and look at this video of them,” was how the American media reacted. No one else had the videos so it made us larger than life. Because we were British, the US audience seemed to be willing to accept us even though we did risqué things like wear makeup and film sexually explicit videos, which might have caused a bit more shock if we’d been a band made up of all-American college boys. In particular, it was the videos that were shot by Russell Mulcahy and which accompanied our
Rio
album that first stirred things up in the States. We’d written the album mainly in London and had recorded it at George Martin’s AIR Studios on Oxford Street on the sixth floor of the building where Top Shop stands today. They were called “air” studios because they were built on hydraulic stages that created an air gap between the studio and the rest of the building in order to prevent noise from leaking into the building below.
We were doing a lot of partying in London at the time and one of the girls who started to hang around with us was Paul McCartney’s oldest daughter, Heather. I worshipped the Beatles, so I was delighted when she invited me and some of the other band members up to her family home in St. John’s Wood one afternoon to look at some of her dad’s memorabilia. It was no accident that Paul wasn’t home at the time, and she showed us lots of his old clothes and things.
“Me dad would hate me hanging out with you lot. Don’t ever tell him,” she warned us.
A few weeks later Heather came into AIR Studios.
“Don’t tell Dad that I took you up to the house and all that sort of thing, but he says he’s recording in one of the other studios round at the back and would you like to meet him?”
We were all unanimous. “Absolutely, yeah.”
Then all of a sudden he just walked in. Now in 1982, shortly after Lennon had gone, if a Beatle walked into your studio it felt like God himself had just arrived. We were in complete awe.
“All right, boys?” he said. “I’ve been listening outside over the last few weeks to what you’ve been doing. There’s a track called “Rio” . . . That’s a hit song, that.”
We were openmouthed. I thought about that copy of
Sgt. Pepper
my cousin gave me in 1967. Art had met life in a spectacular way.
IN
addition to the “Rio” video that we shot in Antigua, “Save a Prayer” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” also had great videos to accompany them, both of which we filmed in Sri Lanka prior to going to the Caribbean. Sri Lanka was a whole adventure in itself. It was chosen as a location because Paul Berrow had been there on holiday and had become obsessed with the place, to the point where he hatched a madcap scheme to build his own temple there! He’d been impressed by all the Buddhist monuments and wanted to plow some of his newfound millions from Duran Duran into creating something in a similar vein. I don’t know whether it was purely a moneymaking scheme or something that he wanted to do for aesthetic reasons, but by this stage I didn’t care. The management were beginning to irritate me a little bit with their daft brain waves.
“Chaps! Chaps! It’s bloody fantastic out there and I’m going to build something huge,” boomed Paul, before outlining his plans in detail.
“Check this out,” I said to the other band members. “He’s building a temple in Sri Lanka. I wouldn’t let him build Lego with me, let alone a temple. And he has the cheek to say everyone in the band is mad!”
Simon had a bit more sympathy: “He’s just eccentric and creative.”
That’s
our
job,
I thought.
Judging from Paul’s contribution to “Girls on Film,” it would have turned out to be a Temple of Love, but whatever it was that he started to construct got destroyed in the civil war that began in Sri Lanka soon afterward. But a happy by-product of Paul’s obsession with Sri Lanka was that he met a production crew out there who could make all the arrangements we needed in order to shoot there. They arranged all the film permits and were responsible for navigating us around; they even hired a herd of elephants. It was amazingly cheap—and the results were breathtaking.
Simon, John, and Roger initially traveled to Sri Lanka together, while Nick and I stayed back in London doing the final mixing for
Rio
and finishing some B sides. We went to join the others about three days later, having left the studio at 4 a.m. and grabbed just a couple of hours’ sleep before getting up to catch the plane. We had a quick bit of breakfast at the airport before flying with our good old Indian airline again in the cheapest seats. In all the rush, Nick hadn’t really put much thought into dressing comfortably, and he was wearing a pair of tight leather trousers. We assumed there’d be a nice air-conditioned limo to meet us at the other end, but we were in for a nasty surprise.
“Fucking hell, it’s hot,” said Nick as we stepped off the plane.
It was like walking into a wall of heat.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be in the hotel bar enjoying a nice cold beer very soon.”
Wrong again. The others were all in a faraway town called Kandy, and the only way to catch up with them was by taking a four-hour taxi ride across dry scrubland on a bumpy road in 100-degree heat. The vehicle was a clunky old sedan that looked like it had been built in 1958 and it had no air-conditioning, so it acted like an oven in the baking heat. I could see Nick wilting next to me as he sweated it out in his leather pants while we were rattling and rolling along.
“Fucking hell. This place is horrible. They’re bastards for bringing us here,” moaned Nick.
As we watched the dusty landscape pass by, it dawned upon us that we were entering a very different world from the one we were used to.
There were beggars everywhere and many of them had limbs missing. The level of poverty was shocking. In the few shantytowns that we passed there was no sanitation, just raw sewage running down the street. We saw many sights like that during our stay in Sri Lanka, and even now I can remember vividly how shocking and humbling it was. But despite the hardships they faced, the local people were warm and friendly and greeted us with eager curiosity.
All the way along the roads, children would spill in front of the vehicle and stop us, offering us watermelons. There would be ten-year-old kids, and even five-year-olds, offering to chop off the top of the fruit with machetes so that you could drink from them. Then they’d gesture for something in return and we soon cottoned on to the fact that what they wanted from us most of all were any Biro pens or pencils that we had with us. If you gave them a Biro they would react as if to say,
Phew—fantastic,
because it meant they had something to learn to write with.
I remember thinking:
How long will that last them and where will they get another one from?
It certainly put things into perspective: here we were as young pop stars looking forward to our glamorous forthcoming tours of Japan and Australia, yet all it took to make these people grateful was a Biro.
When we finally reached the hotel in Kandy, Nick gingerly climbed out of the car, dripping in sweat, with his trousers virtually melted onto his skin. We’d certainly never been to a place like this before and we were anxious to get into the cool behind the mosquito nets.
“You can’t eat anything but cheese sandwiches,” was the first thing the crew said to us. “There’s too much of a risk of food poisoning and we can’t let anything jeopardize the shoot.”
Nick was bright pink by now, and we must have looked a bit of a sight together. “Fucking hell, where the hell have they brought us to?” I asked myself.
But things were about to improve. I could spy a swimming pool in a courtyard at the back of the hotel. Nick and I finally got a cool beer as we watched the sun go down. The sunset was amazing; the whole sky turned a deep red color above us while we sipped our drinks.
THE
poverty that we witnessed in Sri Lanka was something that moved us all, particularly when we reached the capital, Colombo, where the conditions seemed worst of all. There were crowds of children on every street corner.
“Mister, you want drink? You want smoke? You want woman?” they would shout to us. I remember following directions from one of the street kids to a shanty bar in order to buy some weed—so much for sticking to cheese sandwiches! They even had bootlegged copies of our own album for sale. But Sri Lanka was a series of contrasts, and it was also immensely beautiful. The beach scenes in the “Save a Prayer” video showed the coastline exactly as it was; we didn’t attempt to change anything for the cameras. The sands were unspoiled and completely deserted, apart from the odd fisherman sitting on a pole in the sea just as you see them in the video. We didn’t have to do anything to create a stunning backdrop because it was all just naturally there. Even the locals whom you see in the videos are ordinary people who just wandered by. Some of the interior scenes were shot inside the hotel foyer where Nick and I had collapsed after our four-hour taxi ride from hell.
Russell and his storyboardist, Marcello Anciano, had been out to Sri Lanka to check things out beforehand, and they had shown us some of their plans while we were still in the studio. We’d never really seen or understood anything like that, but in hindsight it’s obvious that Russell understood the value of having a leading man in the videos—not just a lead singer but someone in a leading role, which was Simon. When you watch the Sri Lankan videos now, you see that what he did with Simon was really effective because most of the scenes are pure Le Bon, with the rest of us only appearing in bits and pieces, which suited me fine. Simon was Film Boy, John was Poster Boy, and I guess I was Wild Boy!
“Save a Prayer” was our attempt to do a ballad, and the Buddhist temples were a perfect setting for the song’s spiritual overtones. The historic monuments that we filmed around were truly magnificent. But unfortunately, the choice of location nearly got us lynched by four thousand angry monks! We tried not to cause offense, and we always took off our shoes to show respect, but you could see that the monks were uneasy about us being there. The Berrows had persuaded us to go to Sri Lanka in the first place, but what they hadn’t told us was that the whole country was on the verge of civil war at the time! Feelings were running pretty high because of the political situation, so I guess the last thing the religious leaders were in the mood for was Duran Duran turning up at their most sacred temples with a load of cameras. They had no problem with us visiting the holy sites, but it was the fact that we were filming there that upset them.