I’m not going to be a hypocrite and start moralizing against drug use when I’ve taken them in the past myself, but people need to understand that if they use drugs it can have dangerous consequences. You might wake up one day and find that when you weigh everything up, you might have been better off never taking drugs in the first place. There’s no doubt that as a society we are still paying the price today for the cocaine explosion of the eighties. But we are never going to solve the problem until we acknowledge one brutal fact: people take drugs because it makes them feel good. It’s a form of self-medication. By 1984, John Taylor and I were certainly self-medicating in a major way. We’d even used cocaine to get us through the incident with his blood-soaked foot.
When you first start taking them, the drugs work. There’s a time when it feels as if cocaine fills you with confidence, overcomes tiredness, and gives you the energy to get through the day. It doesn’t last forever, and after a while it goes into reverse and the drugs start having the opposite effect—as we were about to discover. Drink and drugs may feel as if they help you to communicate and break the ice, but really, you’re still hiding from whatever it is that stopped you from communicating in the first place. You might get away with taking drugs heavily for two or three years, but eventually there’s a price to pay. That’s when you start to wonder whether it was all worth it.
From around 1981 to 1985 I wrongly thought the drugs were working for me. Not every day to begin with, but I’d have the odd line in the recording studio during the late afternoon and early evening—and let’s face it, being in a studio is not like operating a chainsaw, so you can get away with it. I’d even taken speed on the day we’d shot the “Girls on Film” video, and my drug use slowly became more regular. For the first six months that I was taking cocaine in 1981 I don’t even think half the band knew, but when we recorded the
Rio
album and spent more time in London my drug use accelerated. We’d seen that drugs were rife in New York when we went to Studio 54 and a lot of people there were doing them openly, so it was inevitable that sooner or later the same thing would happen in the UK.
For a time I thought drugs even helped me to cope with the workload. Our record company would often expect us to get up early in the morning after a heavy night to do some promotional work, which you can easily manage to do for a few years even though you are living to excess. But eventually the drugs go into reverse. You become too weary to promote yourself for the fourth year running, and you start turning up at radio stations grumpy and tired. Suddenly the drugs are now making you ill and irrational. Your temper starts to fray and you become unpredictable. I remember on one occasion we were threatened with being banned from appearing on the BBC’s
Saturday Superstore
because I swore at a caller. I felt he was being rude to me, so I told him to fuck off on the air—I wasn’t in the mood to be diplomatic.
In John’s case I’m not sure the drugs ever worked even in a superficial way, because his destructive behavior began at a very early stage, around the time he cut his hand in Germany in 1982. It’s no coincidence that it was just a few months earlier that John and I had started to take cocaine together while we were in London and hanging out at the Embassy Club. After Al Beard’s story appeared, Pete Townsend wrote an open letter to us in the press begging us to stay away from booze and drugs.
Despite the headlines, we were never a band that took drugs collectively. Drinking was something that we all did together, and I always liked to smoke dope or have a drink as a creative way of relaxing. Drinking as a band, after a show in the dressing room, or in the hotel bar, or even going out to a club and laughing together, was something we enjoyed doing. When Nick gets a bit wobbly-legged after a drink he can be very friendly and amenable; we all could. If we went to a restaurant we would order a bottle of Dom Perignon and lobster. “If you can afford it, spend it” was how we saw it. In contrast, any drug use that occurred tended to be furtive. But by the time we were in Australia putting the finishing touches to
Seven and the Ragged Tiger
in late 1983, John’s cocaine use was secretly out of control and I was a heavy user, too. John and I even did coke together in the recording studio. On one embarrassing occasion someone found me staggering about next to a Coca-Cola machine. I was so wired that I actually thought I could get a line of coke from a vending machine.
John later confessed how bad things got for him. “It got to the stage where cocaine was literally given to me on a plate every day,” he said in an interview published years later in the
Sunday Mirror.
“I was drinking every day and taking cocaine every day. I didn’t eat that much. I took drugs—that was my diet. I convinced myself it was cool.”
Not everyone in the band had the same attitude about drugs as John and I. Roger was never really inclined that way, and I hadn’t seen Nick indulge in anything stronger than red wine since his health scare in Montserrat. Simon, however, did admit on record a few years later that he dabbled with some types of drugs, and I am not going to add to that—although clearly he never did anything on the same scale as John or I.
“I got involved in drugs more than most people I know. I loved some drugs,” Simon said in an interview with the
Daily Mirror
in the nineties. “I enjoyed a very hedonistic life and had some great experiences, but drugs are dangerous and I am certainly not advocating people using them.”
Dangerous
is the right word, but it would not be until at least another year after the Al Beard story hit the newsstands that John and I would discover just how destructive drugs could be.
THE
cocaine scandal had an immediate effect. The police pulled in our road crew and started to question all our top boys. They didn’t touch any of us in the band because we were mainly out of the country, but from then on every time we returned to the UK we would be turned over by Customs. The indignity and hassle that Simon and I had suffered at Heathrow a few weeks earlier started to become a regular occurrence. The Rum Runner was already experiencing problems with its license at the time the story appeared, but from this point on it was obvious that the police’s main objective was to close the club down for good. On August 1, the Rum Runner’s management found themselves before Birmingham’s city magistrates and were fined after admitting to selling drinks without a license.
DURAN DURAN WERE DEEPLY INTO DRUGS,
said the headline in the
Daily Mail
’s report of the court case the following day.
“Pop group Duran Duran were alleged yesterday to be regular users of cocaine and cannabis in the nightclub which launched them to stardom,” reported the paper.
“There is no question that members of the group were regular users of cocaine and cannabis as is common in that world, not only in their private lives but in the club also,” solicitor Stephen Lineham told the court, according to the
Daily Mail
.
“The claims about Duran Duran will come as a shock,” added the
Daily Mail
. “For it was the appeal of their clean cut image which three years ago set them off to international stardom . . . In July last year, Princess Diana said they were her favourite rock group.”
The police activity at the Rum Runner continued. During another raid they eventually found what they were looking for, and seized some cocaine which had been discovered hidden behind a brick in the wall. They arrested an associate of the band. He’d been on the road with us at one stage to organize some of our merchandising. It was terrible, because in many ways he was just the fall guy. Meanwhile, the Rum Runner had a compulsory purchase order served on it. It was bulldozed to the ground and a Hyatt hotel was built on the site. The party was over.
A
strange and unexpected postscript to the cocaine scandal was that it actually made us more acceptable to certain sections of the public. “The Reflex” sold better than ever, and we were suddenly seen in a new light by the
New Musical Express
. Nobody necessarily admired us for taking drugs, but the story humanized us because it made people realize we were fallible. It showed that we weren’t perfect and that we had our flaws just like everybody else, and it gave us a gritty realism in some people’s minds.
Drug use is very common in the music industry, so the people immediately around us were not actually that shocked. It’s true that we had a young teenage audience, which sat very uneasily with the drug revelations. But we were all teenagers ourselves when we started out, and we didn’t consider our audience to be younger than ourselves—and we certainly didn’t ask to be role models. Drugs grew out of the circumstances that we found ourselves in, when really all we needed to do was to take a bit of time off to relax. But like I said earlier, there were no days off. It would eventually drive me to the brink of a breakdown and force John to go into rehab, but at this point all that was still in the future.
I always used to maintain that I never needed to go to rehab; I just needed to go home. At least back at home I always had Tracey, who remained the one constant in my life. She was unaffected by all the madness.
Or so I thought . . .
Wild Boys . . . and Darker Still
I
need to slightly rewind the clock to the moment I arrived back in England following the stabbing incident at the Coca-Cola party in Los Angeles in April. As our car sped up the motorway through the darkness of the night to Shropshire, it felt as if the pressure of life in Duran Duran diminished with every mile that we traveled up the M1. Tracey was expecting our baby in August and our home life, for the time being, seemed settled and stable compared with the chaos that surrounded the band.
We had decided to stay at our cottage in Tracey’s old neck of the woods so that she could be near her family when the baby arrived. I used the next few days to take stock of where my life was—and where it might be going. For the first time I began to wonder if things might actually be better outside of the band. We’d had a fantastic time and enjoyed enormous success, but was it starting to take an unacceptable toll on all of us?
The first person I confided in was my brother-in-law, Sean. We’d been out together at some of the fantastic old country pubs in the area, and it turned into a late-night drinking session that ended with us watching the sun come up. We were lying down in a cornfield looking up at the sky. I can see us today in my mind’s eye, as if I’m looking down from above, with the vivid greens and yellow of the corn all around us. I’d been bottling up my feelings until now. They say that’s what cocaine does. It cuts you off from your own emotions. It makes you bury things. It was the first time I admitted that I was starting to get very weary of life in the band.
“Would it surprise you, Sean, if I told you that I don’t necessarily want to do this anymore? I don’t know if I should stay in Duran Duran,” I said.
I think Sean was shocked, as we had it all: money, success, fame.
“It’s probably just something you are feeling because you are tired. You’ve been on the road for a long time,” he said. “With Tracey being pregnant you’ll need a break at some point. You probably just need a rest.”
It felt good to talk to somebody, and I knew Sean had a good head on his shoulders. I decided to make a go of things. Now that the tour was out of the way, we mainly had just postproduction work to do on the
Arena
album, so it felt as if we had some breathing space. Roger and Nick both planned to use the spare time to get married over the summer. All of us were still tax exiles, which was part of the reason I was in France later when the Al Beard story broke, but I was hoping to spend as much time in England with Tracey as possible.
WITH
all the births, marriages, and escapes from death that occurred over that summer, you might think there wouldn’t be time for much else, but the other thing we managed to cram in was the video shoot for “Wild Boys,” which took place prior to the weddings. The opulence and expense we went to on that video outstripped everything we had done until that point. Once again Russell Mulcahy was the chief architect. It was filmed during a ten-day shoot at Shepperton Studios, on the huge soundstage that had been built by George Lucas for
Star Wars,
and the cost was staggering.
The title of the song came from a William S. Burroughs novel that Russell had acquired the song rights to, so it was an unusual project because the idea for the video came along before the track itself. The book tells of how a gang of teenage marauders from North Africa terrorize a population, but when all the cocaine revelations started to emerge it seemed like a great song title for us. The first line starts with “The wild boys are calling . . . ,” and people assumed it had been written about us. Underneath, I suppose it was, but on the surface it is based on the book. We were putting together the
Arena
album with footage from Toronto, the NEC in Birmingham, and San Francisco, and we needed an extra track.
“Let’s go in the studio with Nile Rodgers and see if we can come up with something with Russell’s Wild Boys idea,” somebody said.
When we first started doing the track we set up a really interesting drum sound with Roger, and I had a little riff that I thought I could weave into it. The problem was that by this time I was mostly staggering into the studio drunk or flying high as a kite on cocaine, or both. By 10:30 at night I can remember standing up and trying to play guitar, but I’d had so much Jack Daniel’s that I gave up.
“I’m going,” I said. So we went down to the Cafe de Paris, where a group of us sat in one of the cubicles they have there.
When the time came to leave I tried to stand up and fell over. It was the first time I had gone out and gotten so plastered that I had to be assisted out of the place. It was also the first time that I didn’t care what people thought anymore; I had enough bodyguards to carry me out. In those days there were very few paparazzi around, so I escaped being plastered all over the front pages. Fortunately, during the sober parts of the day we managed to come up with a good track with the help of Nile, who gave it a dance edge—but it took a few weeks to do.