So it was against that background that we followed the advice to locate overseas for tax reasons. It all made perfect sense on paper, but in reality it was a tricky game to play because it meant we were on a strict “sixty-day rule,” which stated we could spend no more than that exact number of days in the UK. At the time, leaving the UK didn’t seem like such a big deal because we’d gotten used to living on the road while touring overseas. But we didn’t realize how precious each and every one of those sixty days would become. Our nasty experiences in Germany should have sent us a warning signal about the dangers of being away from home for too long, and in that sense leaving the UK permanently was probably the worst thing we could have done for the sake of our long-term sanity. Sometimes you’d end up just sitting in a hotel with nothing to do but keep out of the country. But we also felt it was the only thing we could do if we wanted to secure our financial future. We were starting to do well in America, and although we’d earned good money up until now, we hadn’t earned
American
money, so we were keen to invest as much of it as wisely as possible.
The decision we took (to be tax exiles) made us much more aware financially and Nick and I began to question how much money the Berrows seemed to be making from us. Instead of charging us a straightforward management percentage, we had a complex deal with them under which they technically owned some of the rights to our music. It meant that we had to pay them a far greater proportion of our earnings than might otherwise have been the case. The Berrows did a great job in helping to launch us and they negotiated a very good deal with EMI so they definitely played a part in our success. But I was beginning to question why it was they should own rights to our music when we were the ones who wrote it. There was nothing illegal about it, but I think Nick and I were both a bit uneasy about it and we were in favor of tackling them about it head-on. But Simon meanwhile was becoming increasingly close to the brothers. Roger avoided confrontation and John was probably the least financially astute of all of us. I used to say that John would bury his head in the sand with a checkbook hanging out his backside if he could and I was only half joking.
Our decision to move abroad had definitely contributed to the fact that by the time we arrived in London for the Prince’s Trust, we were unsettled and underrehearsed for a show of such magnitude—as discovered on the night itself. Further problems followed when we played another charity gig soon afterward at Aston Villa’s football stadium in Birmingham in aid of a charity called MENCAP. The charity had been promised a substantial amount of money in profits, but the problem was that the ticket sales were far lower than expected. Meanwhile costs had been allowed to escalate. We were employing enough accountants at the time to ensure this sort of thing couldn’t happen, but it all went horribly wrong and the charity ended up being sent a check for just £5,000, which its director, Brian Rix, refused to cash and instead hung on the wall in his office. Even though we felt it wasn’t our fault, each band member felt so bad about it that eventually we put £50,000 into the kitty between us to try and raise a reasonable profit, but the fallout continued to cause negative headlines for several months.
DESPITE
the problems that lay ahead, the year had started with a huge high, thanks to “Is There Something I Should Know?” going straight into the charts at number one, which was a big achievement in those days. It was our fastest-selling record, and it was probably also the quickest song to write. Simon and I did most of it together over Christmas in an apartment we shared on Green Street in London while we were recording there. We needed a single between albums. We came up with the main riff while we were messing around, and it was followed very quickly by the rest of the chords and the main melody. It felt as if it only took about ten minutes to come up with but it was probably a bit longer. We then ran it by the rest of the band and Nick came up with “deh dah dah” bit on top of Simon’s “Please, please tell me now” lyric. It was a neatly timed little idea that was influenced by the Beatles track “Please Please Me.”
EMI loved it, and “Is There Something I Should Know?” was released on March 26, 1983. We knew immediately from the sales figures that it was doing well, but we weren’t able to get the chart position until it was officially announced by the BBC at 10 a.m. on a weekday morning. In those days it was rare for a single to go straight in at number one in the UK and it had only been done ten times in the previous twenty years (Slade and the Jam did it in the UK three times, no one else more than once). Today sales of 50,000 will do it, but back then you had to sell bucketloads, close to half a million singles in a week, in order to pull it off. We were confident we’d done it, but we still needed to hear it officially confirmed.
I was with Tracey in Wolverhampton with the champagne on ice when we received the good news by telephone. I spoke to a girl named Lynn from our fan club office, and Tracey could tell by my voice getting higher and higher as I said, “Yeah, yeah . . .
Yeah
!”
Pop, pop, pop. Plonk.
Straightaway we were drinking Buck’s Fizz at ten o’clock in the morning. For me, it was one of our most significant achievements, because we’d galvanized close to half a million people in one country over a five-day period. It was a great pop song that I had a lot to do with, and I remember how happy it made me feel. It came along at the height of the time when we needed to deliver something, between albums and amid all the turmoil created by our decision to become tax exiles.
The only slight downer was that when we mimed our lip-synched version for
Top of the Pops
we had to do it in advance, before we had any idea how well the single had done. When the nation saw us on TV a lot of people thought we looked a bit miserable. I have to confess we didn’t look like a band that had just gone straight to number one!
IN
April we finally split the country. We rented a big old château at a place called Valbonne, on the Côte d’Azur near Cannes in the south of France. It had a great big communal room where we all used to hang out. There was a rehearsal room, a mobile studio outside, and loads of bedrooms upstairs. We’d planned to get cracking on
Seven and the Ragged Tiger
, but unfortunately we hadn’t banked on how strong the lure of the bright lights of Cannes with its film festival would be. Looking back, it was the start of the megadamage because my cocaine use began to accelerate and John had developed similar habits of his own. We were living the high life to the full and soon we were partying every night.
I think John was driving his gold Aston Martin by now, but Mike Berrow went one better and turned up in a beautiful, brand-new browny-red Ferrari. Nick and I wondered how much of our earnings had gone toward purchasing the car, and I admit we had a quiet snigger when Mike came out of a nightclub to discover someone had smashed all its windows. He probably thought we’d done it, although that wasn’t our style.
Meanwhile, we discovered that Elton John was in town filming his new video for “I’m Still Standing” with Russell Mulcahy. This was before Elton became teetotal, so he was still a steaming party animal. We went up to see him at his hotel and spent the afternoon getting blasted on martinis. We decided it would be a laugh to get him drunk and we were literally slinging the drinks down him.
“Ooh, you are lovely boys,” he screeched, loving every minute of it.
We got him so drunk that eventually he went upstairs and threw a huge wobbler and trashed his suite, which was decorated with expensive antique furniture. The hotel weren’t very happy and Russell was shocked because it caused all sorts of chaos—but it was a great party.
Daytimes were spent mainly lounging around the pool as a constant stream of visitors attended our château. We were interviewed and photographed there by
TV Times
. The British TV personality Paula Yates came down to film a special episode of
The Tube
with us for Channel Four. One unexpected guest who arrived around about the same time was the model who’d been crowned Miss UK at the time. Needless to say she was gorgeous, and it was hilarious to see the effect she had on Simon and John. Suddenly they were both running around like lapdogs after her.
“Can I get you a drink? Would you like to go for a swim?” they would ask.
I can remember sitting inside the château with Tracey, watching them together in the pool as they swam up and down trying to impress her. Occasionally Simon and John would exchange a dark look with each other as if to say
Go away, she’s mine.
At one point they temporarily abandoned the hunt and came back inside the house. Then John came out and sat back by the pool with her.
“The bastard!” said Simon as he spied him out of the window, before running back down to the pool. This went on like a real life sitcom all afternoon. The irony was that neither of them had a hope in hell as Miss UK wasn’t in the least bit interested in them!
But despite all the fun and games, it was also a time when cracks began to appear between us. In particular, a rift between Nick and me started to grow. It first came to a head in an explosive way due to a row between us that I felt was caused by his partner, Julie Anne, who gave Tracey the impression that I’d been flirting with a model during an air flight. I’d been over in the States for some promo work and was flying back on the same flight as Julie Anne. I think we’d all been ribbing Nick a bit because he’d had to stump up for her ticket cost, whereas everyone in the band was traveling for free courtesy of the record company. During the flight I’d innocently sat next to a woman on the plane who turned out to be a model, and we’d chatted politely for part of the journey.
In truth I didn’t even know the model’s name and I certainly didn’t try to pull her, but when I saw Tracey her face was like thunder.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” replied Tracey.
“Come on, what have I done?”
“Who were you sitting next to on the plane?”
“I don’t know, some model,” I said, protesting my innocence.
Tracey wasn’t normally a jealous type of person. I’d had a few glasses of champagne, and assumed rightly or wrongly that Julie Anne had been gossiping to someone about the model on the plane. In my mind, I could imagine Julie Anne telling everyone “Well, the girls were all over Andy on the airplane. Oh my God, you should have seen it! There was this beautiful model sitting next to him.”
I knew something like this was going to happen the moment I saw her
, I thought to myself as I rushed off to find Nick.
“Nick, for fuck’s sake! What was that all about?” I demanded. My face was red with anger, but he was dismissive.
“Yeah, well. She doesn’t know the rules,” he replied flatly. Everywhere we went we were surrounded by female attention and the rule was we had to accept this without anybody making an issue of it.
“You will not survive if we live like this,” I raged. “Don’t fucking do that again. You can both keep your mouth shut in the future, okay? Otherwise the next time you even
appear
to be at fault I will tell her. Imagine if everyone started blabbing their mouths off about things that aren’t even fucking true.”
If I’m honest, it wasn’t very constructive of me to shout at Nick like that, but I was simply furious, and I remained wary of Julie Anne for a long time afterward. Nick and Julie Anne’s bedroom was directly below the room Tracey and I were in at the château, and there was a secret back staircase that led down to them. I was so suspicious of her that it nearly crossed my mind to sneak down and listen in on them in case they were talking about us. It might have seemed like an overreaction, but there were a string of little incidents that started to wind up some of the others, too.
Things started to appear in the press, including the location of where we were staying, which caused us huge problems with the paparazzi. Roger was photographed by the
Sun
holding an air gun inside the château grounds, which he’d borrowed from security. We were really angry about that because of the negative image it sent out. We even phoned up the
Sun
to warn them that we’d set the dogs on their reporters if they returned. Privately, the finger of suspicion pointed at Julie Anne, which may have been completely unfair, but as the only outsider among us she became the one whom I trusted the least. I found it interesting that when it was time to go to Montserrat somebody stole her passport.
“Passports,” said the woman at the check-in desk.
One guy always carried all our passports, usually the tour manager, who was accompanied by a bodyguard. “Julie Anne, have you got your passport?” he said.
“Ain’t you got mine?” she asked.
“No. We haven’t got your passport. Come on. Chop chop. Check in.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to explode. “You can find her fucking passport or I am not going,” he snarled.
Eventually, things calmed down and the missing passport miraculously appeared, although I’m sure that later on the plane, one of us discreetly suggested to Nick that there might have been a reason the passport had disappeared. Ironically, Tracey and I were due to share a villa with Nick and Julie Anne in Montserrat, and I feared there would be more trouble, but in fact things calmed down a bit after that.
Montserrat was beautiful. I found some great bars, and I was soon sampling the delights of Caribbean rum punches again. We would all whiz around the island together on these little Mini Moke vehicles that the locals used. We had a big Jamaican chef at the studio, and if we dared to leave any of his food he’d soon be out of the kitchen, knife in hand, to ask us why.
“What’s da matter with you, man? I used to work at the Hilton in Kingston, Jamaica—you don’t like ma cookin’?”
“No, no—your pumpkin soup is great,” we’d reassure him. He was a real character who became a friend to us all, and years later, while sorting through a cupboard, Tracey and I found a load of photos of him, which brought back fond memories.