“It’s okay, it’s safe now. We’re going home,” I reassured her when we eventually reunited.
As the car pulled away from London, it finally felt as if we were leaving all the chaos behind. As we drove around a newly opened section of the half-built M25, I held Tracey tight and she began to calm down. By the time the car reached the M1 and turned north toward Shropshire, I could feel the pressure beginning to lift from my shoulders. The blood-drenched hotel rooms, the fights and arguments in the band, and the booze and drugs—all seemed to be left behind as the car sped through the darkness toward the comfort of home. All I could think about was how much I loved Tracey and how glad I was to be briefly away from the madness of life on the road.
Fuck it. I am leaving it all behind. Thank God.
“I Saw Duran Duran Go Crazy on Cocaine”
I’M
at the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris, and I’m about to discover how it feels to wake up and find yourself suddenly splashed across the front pages of the tabloids for cocaine abuse. The date is May 8, 1984, and John and I have hooked up in France to try and do some demo tracks together in the studio. The hotel we are staying at is just a stone’s throw from the bustle of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. In my opinion it’s the best in Paris, better even than the Ritz. The walls are beautifully decorated and padded with silk, and John and I each have our own suite at the very top of the hotel, which is famous for its distinctive slanted windows and its fabulous architecture. We’ve come a long way since our days at the Rum Runner, but our wild partying during our time in Birmingham is about to come back to haunt us.
I was curled up asleep in my suite with the Do Not Disturb sign on the handle when a knock on the door awoke me before breakfast.
“Guv, Guv . . . Wake up. I need to talk to you.”
It was one of the personal assistants who had stayed on with us in order to deal with our accounts and various other things after we had come off the road in April. When you get an unexpected knock on the door early in the morning, and there’s no telephone call beforehand, you know it’s not going to be good news. This time it turned out to be real trouble, something that would affect all our families and change the public’s perception of Duran Duran. I grabbed a bathrobe and opened the door.
“There’s been a story published in London, Andy. You need to read it straightaway.”
He passed me a copy of the
Sun
newspaper, and I felt a sick twinge in my stomach as I read the headline:
COKE CRAZY DURAN DURAN
. There were photographs of Simon, John, Nick, and me on the front page, and the paper didn’t mince its words. “Simon Le Bon put his head into a packet of white powder . . . and sniffed. Andy Taylor laid out huge lines of coke on the kitchen sink unit.” I continued to read with disbelief: “They are hooked on the stuff, says ex-minder. They need it to perform, they need it to have a good time, they need it to cope with the pressures of stardom.” Inside, across the center pages next to a big photograph of the five of us, was la pièce de résistance, a lurid account of our drug use which was headlined,
I SAW DURAN DURAN GO CRAZY ON COKE
!
It was by Al Beard, the former head doorman from the Rum Runner, who had been entrusted to look after our welfare by the Berrow brothers. I cast my mind back to that cold Christmas Eve four years ago, when I’d first snorted cocaine in the camper van outside the club in Birmingham. Al’s bouncers had watched me go in and out to buy drugs that night. Al knew everything, and I mean
everything
. His story contained wild accusations from start to finish—but it was the first real act of public betrayal that we’d encountered as a band. A lot of his claims were inaccurate, and some of the details would have been comical were it not for the repercussions that they had.
“Soon after Duran Duran made it big, John Taylor announced he had found a new use for his gold American Express card,” claimed Al Beard. “He pulled out a little packet, emptied a load of white powder onto the table and chopped it finely with his credit card. Then he sniffed it up his nose.
“One gram of cocaine? That’ll do nicely, sir.”
I was singled out as the worst offender, but Beard made allegations about all of us, with the exception of Roger, whom the paper was careful to point out did not take drugs.
“Andy Taylor is top of the coke league,” claimed Al’s article. “Andy is wild . . . the effects of coke do show from time to time. Andy Taylor has been known to collapse on tour.” The newspaper was also promising its readers more revelations for the following day:
TOMORROW: HOW I FIXED GIRLS GALORE FOR THE LADS
.
I was staggered. Al Beard hadn’t been around us for nearly four years and yet here he was, claiming to know our most intimate secrets. A lot of what he said about Simon and Nick was exaggerated. Certainly at the time the article was published Nick, far from being hooked on drugs, actually disliked being around cocaine. But the central allegation, that Al Beard had witnessed some of us taking cocaine at the Rum Runner,
was
true—and it had the potential to be hugely damaging to us. John and I had not tried to hide our drug use from our inner circle at the club, but until now it had remained a secret from the wider world.
This was going to be a tough one for the band to get through, but what really scared me was that I knew the story would also give the press carte blanche to approach our families. Until now we’d been marketed as a band who wouldn’t even take an aspirin, yet here we were being exposed for drug abuse. Our record label had promoted us as the squeaky clean darlings of teenage pop magazines like
Smash Hits
, so it was about to become open season on us in the media. By now all the other newspapers would be desperate to follow up the story and there would be teams of reporters on the doorstep of everybody who knew us back in the UK. Our staff had woken me up because they realized my dad would have seen the story before I did, and they knew it would be initially more of a problem for our families than it was for us.
“This is a fucking nightmare. We’ve been stitched up,” I groaned.
When I get nervous I often want to eat—so the first thing I did was order some food to get something inside me to try to calm myself down. They served the most amazing scrambled eggs at the Plaza Athénée, really creamy and perfect, so I called room service. I tried to reread the article while I waited for the food to arrive. My mind was racing. Was this going to open the floodgates and cause lots of other people to come out of the woodwork? Who had we sacked recently? Did they have a confidentiality clause in their contract?
Right, I need to get on to everybody . . . get the lawyers on the phone, give out a warning. This could go on and on forever
, I thought to myself.
I left most of the eggs, but I managed to pull myself together enough to call my dad in Cullercoats. It was a difficult telephone conversation.
“Hello, Dad, it’s Andy. How are you?”
Silence.
“I am a bit upset,” he finally answered. “When I went to the paper shop this morning, I got a few funny looks.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” was all I could say. I knew that he always walked to the paper shop every day, and he often said that he encountered different attitudes, depending on what was happening to me in the news.
“Well, you know, son, I know I once found hash in your pocket when you were a little kid,” he said quietly, in his hushed Geordie accent. “I know you take drugs, just as long as you are all reet, yah know?”
This was heartbreaking.
“Dad, it’s not as bad as they are making out and—”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve been having loads of shagging and fun,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “It’s not bad, son. You are a human being and I know you are all right.”
There he goes
, I thought,
he’s doing the same old thing he always did when I was a kid, pretending everything is all right when he must be hurting like hell inside
. He wouldn’t tell me how he really felt, but I found out later that he was petrified. He didn’t understand why we took cocaine, and he was terrified of what we were doing to ourselves. The reporters’ door knocking started almost immediately. My dad absolutely hated it and slammed the door on them, disgusted and fearful of what the neighbors might think.
John’s family were Roman Catholics and he was their only son, so they were mortified, too. They’d had to put up with more crap than any of us, including the occasion when they had to pick up the papers and see photos of their son naked in bed with a girl. John’s mother, Jean, is a sweet, churchgoing woman, and this would have been soul-destroying for her. Simon’s mother, Anne, is also a really warm person. Normally she was very strong and could take anything in her stride, but how would she react to this? Nick’s dad, Roger, was next on the reporting pack’s list. Nick’s dad adored our band, and he had a room full of all our memorabilia. He was too polite to tell them where to go and let one of them in for a cup of tea in the hope that it might calm the storm, but it didn’t really work. From this point onward the association with cocaine never left us. But when all was said and done, deep down inside I also knew that the real blame lay with me for dabbling with drugs in the first place. It had left a stain on the doorstep that our families had no control over—and none of them had ever said anything or done anything to deserve it. I was ashamed.
Al Beard had more “ammunition” against us for Day Two of the exposé, although this time we were labeled as womanizers.
HERE ARE THE GIRLS YOU ORDERED, SAID POSH PORTER,
screamed the headline. According to the story, Al Beard arranged for girls to be delivered to us in hotels via room service. In fact, most of the details in the story related to half truths about events at the Rum Runner four years earlier, and once again he accused me of being the chief culprit.
“The band used [the Rum Runner] a lot, especially Andy Taylor. He was very good at chatting up the girls . . . I remember driving around Birmingham with him once when we spotted a beautiful blonde on the pavement,” claimed Al.
“We stopped and picked her up. She was a model . . . Within minutes of climbing into the back of my car with Andy she had all her clothes off,” he wrote.
I certainly couldn’t recall that, but now it was Tracey’s turn to be inquisitive.
“It doesn’t really say anything nasty, but who is that model?” she asked me.
“The story is four years old. Read it,” I reassured her. “Look at what it says. It was when I worked in the Rum Runner, everything was before I knew you.”
Meanwhile, I had plans for Mr. Beard. We had sixty full-time staff working for us, including five full-time bodyguards who were all ex-military. One of our senior people arranged a discussion about how to react, and the first thing I wanted to do was find Al Beard.
“Right, where is the fucker?” I asked.
“Oh, we know where he is. He’s gone to Marbella.”
“Marbella! That’s a stupid place to go. Don’t people disappear there?” I said. I felt I had every right to be furious, but in hindsight I was letting off steam and acting as if I was a Ray Winstone character in a movie. If I’d seen Al Beard while I was out in a car, on the spur of the moment I would have gladly run him over. I was all in favor of sending private detectives over to Spain to track him down. Al had buggered off there because he probably feared that if he was in the UK we would send people round to confront him. What I actually wanted was for someone to sit him down for a chat. I presumed he’d been paid about forty or fifty grand for the story, and I wanted him to hand it over. I wanted to say,
You know, Al. Give us the money back and you can get on with your life. We’ll forget about it, I’ll make a deal with you, but you are not having the fucking money.
Sending the boys round would probably have been the worst thing we could have done under the circumstances. It would have just led to more squealing in the papers, not to mention landing us in serious trouble with the law. Thankfully, I was the only member of the band who was in favor and the idea was dropped. Simon and the others were levelheaded enough to know it would have just caused more trouble.
“Fuck it, let’s leave it. He can’t go back to Birmingham anyway,” was the general view.
Al Beard was finished in Birmingham. No one would trust him on the door anymore, and the Berrows, the Cook brothers, and everyone else who we knew there would be just as angry with him as we were. The reason I was so furious wasn’t so much because my cocaine secret was out, it was the act of betrayal. Today I know that drugs are dangerous, and I can understand why the newspapers exposed us. But at the time I felt that Al Beard had failed to explain why, if he was such a moral person, he had kept quiet for so long while drug dealers operated at the club. He even admitted in the story that when pushers arrived at the Rum Runner he would go through to the back of the club and tell us they were there. I never got to ask him. As far as I know no one has ever seen him since, and I never had any contact with him.
ONE
thing Al Beard had been correct about was that there was a relationship between copious amounts of cocaine and the Rum Runner. There were two big stainless-steel sinks in the kitchen, which is where lines of the drug would be chopped up. We might have seemed too clean to take an aspirin, but if you’d have crushed one up I’d have certainly known what to do with it.
Drugs were beginning to permeate society on a scale that had been previously unseen. The early eighties were a period of immense and sudden change. Thatcherism, corporate branding, and the birth of the Yuppie culture all came along in one big wave. There was still plenty of poverty, as the riots of 1981 in the UK had had demonstrated, but for the first time many young people were starting to attain huge disposable incomes compared with a generation ago. Cocaine arrived on the scene along with that wave of wealth, and by 1985 the streets were virtually covered with the stuff. There was a naive acceptance in certain circles that it was okay to indulge because it was a young drug and people didn’t think it could cause any damage. Nothing could be further from the truth.