At the end of February 1984, my relationship with the Berrows reached an all-time low and exploded in a violent row—and it was over something that should have been one of our finest moments. Unbeknownst to anyone in the band, we had secretly won two Grammy Awards—and our esteemed management didn’t tell us.
To receive
one
Grammy, let alone
two,
is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement that most rock acts can only dream about. It still makes me furious to this day that I didn’t find out until it was too late for us to collect them in person because I didn’t know that we’d won until the actual day. I don’t know exactly when the Berrows knew, but I was furious with them because I felt it was their job to keep us informed about things as important as this. We were performing a string of gigs at destinations that included Kansas City and Pittsburgh, and at the time I assumed that someone thought the disruption would be too much to handle on short notice.
Instead, we were told we’d won at the last minute, and we had to make do with accepting the award trophies on the road via a live video link. Our first Grammy, and we fail to attend the biggest television rock-and-roll event in America. I was furious. If there was even the slightest chance we could have won, all we would have needed to do was postpone one gig—the fans would have understood, and we could have rescheduled the gig. For the record, we won Best Short Video (for our “Girls on Film”/“Hungry Like the Wolf” video 45) and Best Video Album (for our
Duran Duran
video album), but the row totally soured the achievement. It was a horrible thing to miss out on and it stole our thunder. I was incandescent with rage and I was soon shouting at Paul Berrow.
“We win a Grammy and you don’t tell us?”
Paul tried to argue there hadn’t been time to arrange things.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I screamed. “There was time to bring the Grammy trophies here to us but we’re not allowed to go to LA to accept them?” By now I had completely lost it. “You might be a tall streak of piss compared to me, but one day I’m going to run up you and fucking head-butt you,” I raged.
As usual, the Berrows were full of excuses, but I wondered if the reason they didn’t tell us was because they were afraid of losing a little bit more of their control over us in LA? I was twenty-three years old and married with a pregnant wife, but maybe they thought I was too naive to handle it. Simon was twenty-five, yet I felt they were treating us as if we were still teenagers.
“Right, you motherfuckers. That’s it,” I threatened. As far as I was concerned, I’d had enough of the Berrows.
The sooner we ditched them the better.
America . . . and Cracking Up
WHEN
you burn the candle at both ends, pretty soon something has to give—and in America it happened during April 1984 at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco. I can’t remember who it was who first called me in the middle of the night to tell me that John Taylor’s hotel room was drenched in blood. What I can vividly recall is the horrific scene that greeted me when I arrived there in the early hours of the morning.
Everywhere, blood.
It was all over the bed. I can remember it on the covers and on the sheets, I can remember it on the wall up by the window, and I can remember it on the floor and all over an antique chair. In fact, one whole side of the room was covered in blood and there was a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka on the floor. It had smears of red gloop congealing on its broken edges. John sat on a chair in the corner, whimpering.
I couldn’t get any sense out of him, and it took a second or two for my brain to try and make sense of the scene. I’d been drinking heavily that night and I’d also taken cocaine; so had John. I assumed John had been involved in some sort of argument with a girlfriend. The room was in a state as if there had been an argument. Things had been turned over, but the room wasn’t completely trashed or smashed up. John continued to rock back and forth, crying in pain and clutching at himself.
Then I saw where all the blood was coming from.
The soft underside of his foot was covered in a mass of cuts that seemed to have shards of glass sticking out of them. I assumed that he must have stepped on the broken vodka bottle with the force of his full weight, but I couldn’t tell if all the mess had been caused by his foot spurting or whether or not in his semiconscious state he’d walked around the room with bits of glass embedded in him.
I grabbed the telephone. “Emergency. We need a doctor . . . ,” I said, as the adrenaline in my veins began to sober me up.
I could now see that John was very emotional. He was crying and screaming out in pain, but his eyes looked out of it. I didn’t think he was necessarily aware of what was happening to him. He was breathing deeply, as if that was the only thing keeping him sane. I put my arm around him to try and comfort him, but I could feel panic beginning to rise within myself.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” I repeated over and over.
I don’t know if I was trying to reassure John or convince myself. I kept thinking,
Fuck me, please don’t let him bleed to death.
I could see that he’d suffered a horrible wound. By now his foot was a really nasty piece of work, all purple and swollen, with lumps of flesh hanging from it. I don’t know how long it took for the medics to arrive, but pretty soon it seemed as if the whole world had descended upon John’s room. The first thing the medics wanted to establish was whether or not there was any tendon damage. I could see from their demeanor that they regarded it as a serious wound, but they reassured John that they would do their best to patch him up.
“Calm down, John. Breathe deeply, everything is going to be all right,” they said to him.
The incident would be downplayed in the media. It was later reported that John needed twenty stitches, but I think it was more like forty-two or forty-three stitches. Believe me, this was not a minor incident. Slowly, I started to feel relief that John was receiving proper medical attention, but I still had an awful, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was scared for John and what this would mean for him, but I was also scared of the implications it could have for everyone else in the band.
“My God, how is this going to look?” I asked myself, when I eventually got back to my room.
I was in a state of numb shock and I started calling various members of our crew. “Right. Meet me here now. We’ve got a serious problem,” I told them.
It dawned upon me that the timing couldn’t have been worse. We were due to shoot some major sequences of a show for our
Arena
film at Oakland Coliseum in California the next day—and the preparations for that were due to start in a matter of hours. I’d seen enough of John’s foot to know he would be lucky to walk anytime soon, let alone be in a fit state to run up and down onstage with a bass guitar.
“Andy, it’s going to cost several hundred thousand dollars to scrap the shoot,” I was warned. “Plus, there are the insurance implications to think about.”
I was more concerned about John at this point, but the question of the film shoot was something that we’d be forced to deal with as soon as the sun came up. I feared our insurance company would not cover the losses if they could argue, rightly or wrongly, that the injury had been caused by reckless behavior or if it could in any way be construed as being self-inflicted. I obviously wasn’t in the room when John got hurt, so I don’t know how it happened—all I saw was the mess and a man who I cared for who was in trouble. But getting drunk and dancing on vodka bottles was hardly the sort of thing that our insurers would be in a rush to pay out on. John would later deny (both to the band and later to the media) that he did anything on purpose or in a rage that night, and at the time we were more worried about dealing with the fallout than apportioning blame.
A group of us sat down in my room and tried to work out what to do next. If John was unable to play, then there would be no show . . . and no show meant no film shoot, which in turn would jeopardize our whole marketing plan for the next few months. All in all, we estimated we could have kissed good-bye to a cool $750,000, which would be worth several million dollars today.
“How are we going to get through this, then?” I asked.
“Well, we are near to the end of the tour. Maybe we can call in the Rock Doc and John can just hobble through it,” said someone in reply.
The Rock Doc is the name we gave to a friendly medic whom we could call upon if things got heavy and we wanted something dealt with quietly. Most major rock bands have them and in an emergency they can often medicate you with whatever it takes to get you onstage, even if it involves some slightly unorthodox medical practices. So that’s what we did. John was patched up during the night and the next morning we called the Rock Doc, but I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It was no coincidence that I was the first band member who’d received the phone call about John’s injury. Ever since Australia he had been increasingly erratic, and I was regarded as the only member of Duran Duran who could really talk to him because we were close—and kindred spirits when it came to cocaine. It shows how disjointed we’d become as a group. One thing that was certain was that John was going to need a serious amount of morphine to kill the pain. Of course, apart from easing pain the other thing that morphine does is turn you into a zombie, so John also needed something else to keep him awake.
When the Rock Doc arrived the next morning I was the only guy in the room with John.
“Come on, we’ll get through this,” I said to him.
In the end, John had to be fired up at both ends. The doctor gave him huge amounts of morphine in the foot. Then John took pharmaceutical cocaine through the nose to keep him awake. It was the only solution; otherwise, the morphine would have knocked him out. The doctor was there and he was actually letting John snort it. That’s how crazy things had gotten: a doctor was actually allowing us to take Class-A drugs.
“Here, Doc, while you’re at it,” I said, pointing at the cocaine.
He looked at me sadly.
“Fuck it—do you know what we have been through in the last twenty-four hours?” I said, helping myself to a line of the drug.
And that was how we got through it all day. The doctor injected John in between the toes and wrapped up his foot. Then it was sniff, sniff, and onstage. Forty minutes later John was back in his room.
“Arrggh!” he screamed, as the bandages came off while he leaned back in his chair.
Sniff, sniff. Wrap. Then it was back onstage for another forty minutes. I want to stress for legal reasons that the doctor involved wasn’t a member of our regular circle. Let’s just say that when you work in the rock-and-roll industry, there are always ways and means of contacting people like that. We went through the process of John coming offstage to take more drugs three or four times until we finally got the filming done.
Unbelievable.
Looking back, it was all so surreal. When I replay it in my mind it’s like watching the sort of mayhem you’d expect to find in a Quentin Tarantino movie. John would later be quoted as saying that he felt as if his body had left him and his soul was pinned to the ceiling—and that’s exactly how he looked: as if his soul had left him. Anybody looking down on us from the ceiling of that hotel room the night before would have witnessed a morbid sight, with the stark red of all the blood against the white sheets and me panicking as I cradled him.
We got through the video shoot, but I think maybe we both lost a bit of our souls that night.
NO
lessons were learned from what happened to John and no one talked to him about it. In Duran Duran we liked to identify something if it was causing us an external problem, like when Capitol refused to release “The Reflex.” But when it came to sorting out our own problems we didn’t connect. I wish I knew why that was but I don’t have an answer, we just came from different directions when it came to communicating, so it was often easier just to leave things unsaid. After the filming took place, we didn’t know what we had in the can or whether or not it would be of any use, but nobody kicked up a fuss.
My feelings toward John were very mixed over the next few days. On the one hand I felt enormous sympathy for him: he’d been through a horrific ordeal and he, more than anyone, had suffered the most from the pressures of twenty-four-hour attention. Being at the center of the circus was something that was starting to eat away at all of us, and it would eventually affect every one of us in a different way. For now, John was the one who was suffering the most. But besides feeling sympathy, though, I was angry with him, too, and there were moments when I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. It was the second or third time that something like this had happened to him, and I was beginning to lose patience. There were plenty of times when I had felt like punching our management but I’d held back, so I reasoned that John should have done more to avoid getting into bad scrapes.
“You don’t fucking do things like that at our age,” I cursed to myself.
Officially, the injury to John’s foot was due to an accident. All he said afterward was that he was drunk and dancing around his room when he accidently stepped on the vodka bottle. In my view drugs had been an aggravating factor—and it says a lot that the thing we turned to to get us out of the mayhem had been more cocaine. Sadly, the incident wasn’t the only time blood was spilled. There was more to come at our end-of-tour party. A lot more.
We had two or three more shows to do, and I was counting the days before I could go back to the UK to spend some time with Tracey. Our baby was due in August, and I was beginning to long for the peace and tranquillity of Shropshire. The madness of being on the road seemed never-ending, and despite the fact that the tour had started with such a high due to all the adulation we received, our moods started to dip. A rock-and-roll lifestyle has no structure. When you are young you don’t look back, but later on you realize it’s a series of highs and lows. You can get high on creativity as well as drugs, but what goes up must come down and it can drain your energy. “The Reflex” was about to go to number one, but in addition to the incident with John, there was more trouble ahead—and it would further take the shine off things.