“Fucking hell, chap. That was a long night,” I complained.
“What the fook are you moanin’ about?” he said. “You never dropped a beat.”
That was Robert all over: no fuss, just get on with it. But he didn’t stand on ceremony; if I had messed up the show he would have been the first to tell me in the bluntest of terms. That evening we all went back to the Hyatt in Roppongi, which is one of the most modern and high-tech hotels in the world. It’s also got one of the most fabulous wine cellars in the world, which suited Robert’s palate perfectly, and around thirty of us had dinner together there. After a wonderful meal we all went off to a hip-hop club, where Le Bon got up in the middle of the dance floor for most of the evening while Robert and I and his girlfriend, Mary, chatted together. (Simon loves to get up on the dance floor at every opportunity, and God bless him for it, because he’ll always be a front man at heart.) I finished the evening chatting with Robert over a gin and tonic in his hotel room at 3 a.m. It had been another long night, but this time both of us were still relatively sober and we spent the evening reminiscing about all the good times we’d shared. That was the last time I saw him—at 3 a.m. with a gin and tonic in his hand and a twinkle in his eye.
I was in Ibiza three weeks later, sitting on a rooftop terrace with some friends, when I got a phone call from someone in our office.
“Sit down, it’s bad news. Robert has been found dead in Paris.”
It was a terrible blow, but in a strange sort of way I was grateful for the time we had enjoyed in Tokyo.
Is this what they mean when they say something is spiritual?
I thought.
At least we said good-bye.
Soon after I received the news of his death I started to deal with media calls. It was no secret that Robert liked to drink a lot, and he had died of a heart attack, so his lifestyle was an obvious angle for the news networks to take. But he deserved to be remembered for so much more than that, so I went live on ITN and Sky TV and I spoke of how fundamentally important he had been to British rock music, one of the few UK singers to ever achieve that level of success in the United States. He was a singer’s singer and a very competent musician with a huge amount of natural ability; he could noodle about on keyboards and guitars and create his own music without having to rely on a whole band to bring his work alive. Singer . . . writer . . . musician . . . he was one of the rare breed that could do all three.
I can remember looking up at the night sky later that evening and thinking about all the good times we had shared over the years, all the work we had created and sold; and stupid shit like the time we got drunk and dared each other to walk through Central Park in New York at night just for the sheer hell of it (neither of us did it in the end). Or the first man to drink three martinis (one for each shoulder, then the third hits your head), or his Top Five Restaurants (that one was always changing as he globe-trotted). He was very much an alpha male, but he was also a gentleman and he was great with kids. I remember when my son Andy was about ten years old, Robert sat down and spoke to him for hours and hours about music and this and that—he was very engaging with children. Meeting people like Robert is one of the great perks of working in the music industry. You might have thought we wouldn’t have got on so naturally, as we both had a habit of being pretty blunt about things, but we were good friends. It was a pleasure to meet someone like Robert, not just because of who he was and what he achieved, but because underneath I always felt he was just a Northern boy like me who worked very hard.
Most of all, Robert loved his work and would sleep with a Dictaphone next to his bed in case a new song popped into his head during the night. Yet he never let his work get in the way of his zest for life. I can still remember his words when Bernard died and I asked him if he was going to the funeral.
“No, I don’t think so. He was just a workmate,” he said.
Robert wasn’t being disrespectful. He was just trying to say that life was for the living and it was better to leave Bernard’s family to grieve in peace. He never liked to be around any fuss. Sadly, I never made it to Robert’s funeral due to work commitments. But I didn’t need to—we’d made our peace in Tokyo.
TONY
Thompson’s death was less sudden than Robert Palmer’s but it was every bit as tragic. Tony died a few months after Robert on November 12, 2003, from kidney cancer. He was age forty-eight, and his demise probably hit me harder than I realized at the time. We’d been out of touch for a few years when I received a phone call from his partner telling me about the cancer. There was a complication with his insurance, which meant he was unable to afford proper treatment in the States, so John and I phoned around to everyone we knew in the music industry and suggested that we all make a substantial donation to a treatment fund. But it was too late—a few days later his partner phoned back and told us he was dead. If only he had told us sooner. Why didn’t we know how far his condition had deteriorated? There are a thousand questions you ask yourself over and over again. But quite simply, that wonderful, gifted, funny man—who had kept our spirits so high during the Power Station—had been too damn proud to ask. One thing we did discover was that he had recently married and for the first time in his life had found true happiness, but I still miss him dearly.
Another friend of Duran Duran’s who died at a young age was Michael Hutchence, who was found hanging in tragic circumstances on November 22, 1997. His death hit Simon particularly hard, and he later wrote a very moving song about it called “Michael, You’ve Got a Lot to Answer For.” Simon and Michael had been close friends ever since they’d met as young men during our first tour of Australia. Michael was thirty-seven.
The loss of all these people made me realize what a high price can be paid if you live life at such a fast pace. After all, you can’t ignore issues about lifestyle when your friends are dying from it, and I am thankful that I slowed down when I did in 1986.
THE
first time I’d met Bernard Edwards was in New York City. As I explained earlier in this book, in Duran Duran we were all in awe of the Chic guys. They exuded a certain confidence that was as natural as their seemingly endless string of hits. In fact, I believe that Bernard Edwards, Tony Thompson, and Nile Rodgers were a serious little trio who changed the sound of modern record production in their time. It would take a whole book to explore all the contributory factors, but for the purposes of this writing I’d like to tell you a little bit more about what they were like as people.
Getting to know these guys gave me a very unique experience of New York. It was their town, and they had a network of great musicians, sound engineers, studio owners, and nightclub bosses. Among the three of them there wasn’t anything that they could not specialize in. Amid all the heat and frenzy of New York, they created more great music than Timbaland or Dr. Dre. Bernard always remained the anchor. He had an exceptional gift for organizing music; he could take apart an idea and strip it down to its essential elements, rearrange the tune, and then figure out what part everybody else would play in it. You always had to be at the top of your game to work with him, but he never gloated about his gift or rubbed it in on those who were less talented. He just gave it to you straight and he always respected the artists (well, at least to their faces!).
As well as being a great musician himself, he truly understood that the role of being a great music producer was to support others to help them do better things. I enjoyed working with Bernard because his watertight attitude suited me perfectly. In music, you often find that your best ideas come together within the first five minutes of trying something new, and he had an instinct for hearing quality straightaway within something that you were trying to shape. He also had the ability to dig you out of a creative hole on the days when you were struggling.
I didn’t realize how much I was learning subliminally at the time when I worked with him, but later in life, as I came to understand his methods I attempted to apply them in my own work. He wasn’t easily intimidated and he never suffered fools gladly. I doubt we would have ever finished “A View to a Kill” if it wasn’t for Bernard having a big enough heart and the right character to see it through.
I can always remember Rod Stewart’s reaction when he first heard Bernard and Tony play together in the studio. I had invited them to LA to record an album with us called
Out of Order
in 1987. Rod just stood there, stunned.
“Fuck me, Andy. I didn’t realize they were that good,” he said, and Mr. Stewart isn’t the easiest to please in that regard.
Between them, Bernard and Tony produced a body of work that defined the times they lived in. They dominated the music scene from 1977 to 1987 and beyond by constantly challenging themselves and pushing each other to the limit. Chic are now probably the most sampled disco act in house and dance mixes, and their collective hit machine runs into hundreds of millions of sales. The four major projects that I worked on with them (“A View to a Kill,” the Power Station, Robert Palmer’s
Addicted to Love/Riptide
album, and Rod’s
Out of Order
album) collectively accounted for around 25 million albums, and as Rod once said, “What an awful lot of alcohol!” As well as working with Duran Duran, Bernard wrote, played, and produced records with Blondie, Bowie, Luther Vandross, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Madonna, the Isley Brothers, and Earth, Wind & Fire—all massive mainstream acts.
Bernard had an endearing quality of bringing you down to earth with a bump if ever you needed it. I recall that at one memorable session in LA, I arrived at the studio after getting trollied on booze the night before. I was convinced that despite my alcohol intake the previous evening, I had recorded what I thought was the mother of all guitar solos. I pushed up the volume and played back my work as loud as I could, trying to convince myself that it sounded fine. After it finished, Bernard’s voice filled the studio.
“You call that a motherfuckin’ guitar solo, Andy?”
Ouch!
As well as all of his achievements I have listed above, he was also in my opinion the greatest bass player ever, and that alone would have been enough to carry him to the top. I think the definition of
legend
is well served by this man’s contribution to music.
In memory of Bernard Edwards, Robert Palmer, and Tony Thompson. Why did you have to go so soon?
I’VE
been lucky enough to work with many great people in my career, and another one of those was Colin Thurston. He was Duran Duran’s first producer and arguably the most instrumental. His contribution to Duran Duran was fundamental because he produced both our first album,
Duran Duran
, and
Rio
.
It was Colin who first opened my eyes to the potential of the recording studio and my potential within it. I was nineteen when I first met him; he had already worked with seminal artists such as David Bowie and the Human League. With Colin’s help I recorded nearly all the guitar work on our first album during two evening sessions—all the parts for the entire album in two nights—and he made it sound great.
What I remember most about him was what a nice bloke he was: he was very clean-cut, he didn’t drink, and he had very neat handwriting! I believe John Lennon once said that to succeed in the music business you have to be a bastard, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth (or something like that!), but Colin was the exception. He made our early time in Duran Duran very fulfilling, which can’t always have been easy. Sadly, he recently passed away. Thanks, Colin, because without such a solid, professional beginning . . . who knows?
One thing that Colin must have been aware of was that although the five members of Duran Duran were all very different, we shared a set of common musical influences. Colin was the filter that allowed us to come together as a whole. Everyone in Duran Duran was born within a few years of each other, so we all went through school at the same time and we all listened to
Top of the Pops
and Radio One. We all read
New Musical Express
and
Sounds
and listened to the same concert tours as they went into either Newcastle, Birmingham, or London.
That’s why I recognized the musical influences in the advert that the others placed in
Melody Maker
when they were looking for a guitarist. It listed Mick Ronson and Steve Jones, and I think the other person named was Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. I recognized what they were trying to say straightaway, so we connected through our idols and influences. Going to concerts as teenagers laid the foundation for how we understood each other. Nick and I were always the two who enjoyed being in the studio, and we worked well with Colin as teenagers. With his help, we recorded all our own beats on the first album—all our own chords, all our own melodies, and all our own lyrics.
When I look back, the thing I ask myself most is, “How did we do it all so young?” But it didn’t seem like we were young at the time because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, we were in an age when you went out to work full-time at sixteen and you were married by twenty-one. We didn’t feel like a
young
band, we felt like a young
man
band. Like all musicians, the way we learned was through listening and watching all the great artists who were our idols and influences.
I think if you are interested in music at a young age, then when you listen to records you start to take them apart in your mind to figure out how all the different sounds fit together. In those days, as far as I was concerned there was only one type of hero, and that was a guitar hero. So I’d watch
Top of the Pops
and try to work out where you needed to put your fingers on the fret board to make a certain sort of guitar sound. I’d get my chord books out and try to copy it, but there was no easy and simple solution to fixing it quick; the only way you could really see what a guitar player was doing was to go and watch him live. I developed a trainspotter-style fascination for watching their fingers.