AFTER
the high of the MTV Awards, the rest of 2003 had flown by in spectacular fashion. Initially, there was no great master plan, but the phone didn’t stop ringing and every show we booked sold out, often within hours or even minutes. Many of the concerts were large arena shows which were cosponsored by American radio stations, and the demand was still enormous. On September 20 we played in front of 57,000 people at the Hyundai Pavilion in San Bernardino, California. The Cure and several other eighties bands were on the same bill. We later spoke to the Cure about the possibility of touring with them, because the potential seemed astronomical.
A couple of weeks later we were sitting in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel in New York, when somebody pointed out that despite all the intense interest we’d created in America and Japan, we still hadn’t played a single comeback gig in the UK. We really ought to organize something back home, we collectively reasoned, so let’s put on a one-off show there—but without overegging it into a grandiose event. We decided to phone our old friend Rob Hallett in London, basically to ask his advice as we felt he was the only one who’d understand where we were coming from. At first we wanted to do the show in Birmingham, and we toyed with the idea of performing at the Hyatt Hotel, standing on our old roots where the Rum Runner used to be. But Rob, never one to mince his words, advised us to do it in London.
“At the end of the day most of your fans are going to be in the South, even if you are from Birmingham. Do it in the place where the most people are,” he reasoned.
Rob suggested the Forum at Kentish Town in north London. It’s an intimate venue with a perfect stage and a standing audience, ideal for our homecoming.
“When do you want to do it?” he asked.
“Within a week or so,” we said.
Believe it or not, we organized it from New York in the space of about five days from start to finish.
The Forum was packed to the rafters with about 2,500 people on the floor and a further 500 on the guest list, which read like a Who’s Who of the London showbiz world. For me, it was also a special gig because it was the first time any of my children came to see Duran Duran live—and they couldn’t believe it. Most of the younger members of the cast of
EastEnders,
a popular British TV soap drama, were there, which impressed my family no end!
“Dad! They all came here to see you,” was their initial reaction. I think it was all a little odd to them, and they were certainly not used to so much attention being directed at them.
When we went onstage we tore the place apart. The intensity of the reaction from our fans gave us a tumultuous high and it was without doubt the very best Duran Duran gig
ever.
I’ve performed at two Live Aid concerts, played live at Madison Square Garden, and performed at hundreds of arena concerts packed with tens of thousands of people. But nothing compared to this for sheer energy and straight-up fun. In hindsight, it’s a shame we didn’t film it for a DVD. We started our set with an album track, “Friends of Mine,” which worked amazingly well as an opener. This was an audience of our most ardent fans and they greeted every number with enormous enthusiasm. A lot of our following were now grown-up women in their thirties, but they were acting like they were fifteen again, and it was amazing to see this new phenomenon. We closed the show with “Wild Boys” and then performed “Rio” as an encore . . . I guess some things will never change!
The reviews in the press the following morning were ecstatic, and word was starting to spread that we had finally got our act back together—all five of us. We got a similar, ecstatic reaction from fans in Philadelphia, where our tour bus was almost overturned by five hundred rampant mothers! It was nuts. There were crowds of mature women all behaving like teenagers, and they were rocking the vehicle. These were women, not girls, and the police had to clear the area with horses. (Don’t get me wrong, ladies, we were secretly very, very flattered by the attention!)
Not long afterward, I had managed to snatch a few days’ holiday in the Devonshire countryside with my family, when the telephone rang one Saturday morning. Would we be interested in touring Australia and New Zealand with Robbie Williams? I asked how big the shows would be and I was told we’d be performing in front of audiences of around 70,000. Of course we’re interested! I was determined to say yes, but I was the only member of the band in favor of accepting the tour, so I had to talk the others into it. The promoter strongly urged us to go and argued that we would add 10,000 to 20,000 in ticket sales for each gig.
“Come on, guys,” I argued. “We’ve never played in New Zealand, and it would be very cool to go back down to Australia.” I guess I was also surprised by the initial negative resistance, but that’s all part of a band’s metabolism.
Eventually the others agreed and sure as sure can be, they were bloody huge gigs—
enormo-dome sized!
In Melbourne we broke the house record at the Telstra Dome for the biggest-ever gig, and it was overpowering. I’ve never seen so many people indoors before. There seemed to be tens of thousands of people, tier after tier, stacked to the ceiling. Robbie had this big walkway that extended out into the middle of the arena, and I realized that I hadn’t done a gig that big since Live Aid. Robbie himself was very cool, friendly, well grounded, and very, very good live—he reminded me of a young Freddie Mercury onstage. Our own performances were also very energetic, and because Robbie had created such a huge stage, we’d cover a lot of ground during a show and it could be extremely tiring on the old legs.
I suspect that one or two of the other members of Duran Duran were secretly resentful of the fact that technically we were Robbie’s support act, but I didn’t feel that way. For me it was more like a festival arrangement, and professionally it was another important notch under our belts to appear alongside someone as current and as vibrant as Robbie Williams. When we were offstage, the tour was a very sober affair, although I admit that I was still physically shattered by the end of it!
On the way home from Australia we stopped off at Hong Kong, where we received a phone call offering us a further block of four to six shows in the UK. There had been around 200,000 applications to Ticketmaster for the Kentish Town gig, so it was a fair bet there would still be a lot of demand from people to see us live. We agreed and the tickets just kept selling, until we’d played a total of seventeen dates in the UK. This included breaking the house record at Wembley Arena for the most people at a single show, which was something that I got to announce to the audience—a little piece of Wembley history.
There was still no master plan, but our renewed success did mean that we were finally in a position to land what we needed the most: a record deal. It made sense for us to go with a US record company this time around, because a lot of our comeback activity had been based in the States. Sony, which is a predominantly American label, were keen to sign us, but Universal made us a better offer in the UK. There was a lot of debate about who to go with. There was something seductive about being with a British label again, but in the end we signed with Sony. I knew Donnie Ienner, who was president of the company, from my time in America, and we got on well because he was a bit of a rock fan and he loved acts in the mold of Bruce Springsteen. Donnie was a big, tall, Ivy League kind of guy who looked as if he could have been an American senator. He’d been in the business for twenty years and he could be a bit combative, but he liked to have a bit of a banter and he respected you if you held your own.
Donnie came to see us live at Wembley and he loved the show, so we did the deal with him instantly. Our ability to deliver live had served us well again. Intellectually, going with an American record label was the right thing to do, but with hindsight, and in my view, it was a fundamental mistake, because we later found ourselves under a lot of pressure to work with certain US producers who weren’t all necessarily what Duran Duran needed. But for now, it looked like a great deal. We had Donnie on our side, and fans were packing every gig we played.
WE
were in Houston to perform “Wild Boys” at a show that went out live on US network TV before the Super Bowl in February 2004, when I received a telephone call telling me that my father had cancer for the second time. It was a different type of the disease, completely unrelated to the gullet cancer he recently beat. My father had suffered prostate problems for several years, but it had now developed into fully blown cancer. The specialist said he could not have been more unlucky: to have beaten the gullet problems only to be diagnosed with an unconnected cancer was against all the odds, very unusual. Lightning had struck for the second time. It was as if the curse of Mr. Cancer had a personal vendetta against my dad. The disease had been rampant on my father’s side of the family, something that deals unfathomable odds to you and your loved ones. I remember speaking to one of our bodyguards whose own father had died of cancer, and he told me that the second time around the disease doesn’t want to let go.
It’s going to get him,
I thought. From this point onward, the shadow of my father’s cancer was always there lurking darkly in the background. All the feelings of apprehension and fear came back, and I knew the prognosis was not good.
Ironically, the news about my dad coincided with what should have been one of my happiest moments professionally, because it came just before we were due to receive an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music at the Brit Awards in London. It was well timed, because in early April we were due to start a fully fledged Duran Duran reunion tour of the UK. My father’s diagnosis with prostate cancer had left me feeling shell-shocked, but as the Brits approached I tried to put on a brave face. We were due to perform “Wild Boys” and “Ordinary World” live at the awards, which were being held at Earl’s Court in London. Nick had insisted on “Ordinary World” even though it was a song that had been recorded while Roger and I weren’t in the band. I thought it would have made more sense to do “The Reflex” and “Wild Boys,” but Nick got his way. (I wondered if secretly he liked the idea of grandstanding the one major hit that he and Simon had enjoyed
during the nineties
while Roger and I were out of the frame.) It was a strange choice, considering that two out of the five of us had nothing to do with creating it, but I didn’t mind too much because it’s a song that I love to perform—and it was an immensely popular song, as Nick never missed an opportunity to point out!
I’d only ever been to the Brits once before, in the nineties—Tracey and I had been guests of Rod Stewart when he collected an award with the Faces. That had been a hilarious evening. All the Faces were there, apart from the glorious Ronnie Lane. To me, they were all just the same as I remembered seeing them on TV, still all noses and hair, except they were a bit older. They all had a proper old drink together before going onstage and playing a fantastic set. Afterward we all went back to their dressing room, where they carried on drinking and cracking jokes (usually at some other poor bastard’s expense!). Rod is one of the funniest guys you could ever meet, and watching him alongside the Faces was like an episode of
The Comedians
on TV. The Faces (formerly the Small Faces) were a quintessential bunch of Cockney lads who were determined to take the piss out of anyone and everyone they met, but all in the best possible taste of course.
Amid this hilarity, in walked Lenny Kravitz, who’d also been attending the awards. There was a pause in the merriment as the group eyed up their very tall, beautiful, and impeccably dressed visitor. Lenny was just about the biggest star in America at the time, so it was a very grand entrance he had acquired.
“Hey guys, I’m Lenny,” he said,
“All right, Lenny,” replied one of the Faces.
Each member of the band offered their individual greetings as Lenny went around the room.
“Hello, Lenny, son.”
“Good to see yer, Lenny. Yeah.”
“Nice one, Lenny.”
Looking very pleased with this warm reception, Lenny then went off to continue his tour of the building and other artists’ trailers. No sooner had he closed the door behind him, when there was a brief silence followed by the most English of put-downs: “Wanker!”
The entire trailer, guests et al., burst out laughing at the cruel assessment of Lenny. It was a very UK moment, and to me it summed up British rock-and-roll humor perfectly, and how not to take yourself too fucking seriously. It wasn’t that the boys wanted to be nasty to Lenny; they were basically taking the piss out of themselves for exuding so much fake charm when they’d been introduced to him. It was also their way of saying,
You might be a big international star, but you’re not in Kansas now, Toto!
The other thing I remember from that night is how the Faces constantly joked with each other by repeating over and over again the choice phrase, “Bollocks, you cunt!” (And to think they wrote some of the sweetest lyrics of the times!)
So it was with fond memories that I attended the Brits with Duran Duran on February 17, 2004. We arrived at Earl’s Court in a single limousine, containing all five members of the band and two bodyguards. Also on the bill that night were 50 Cent, the Darkness, Dido, and the Black Eyed Peas. While we were getting out of our limo, a huge convoy of black vehicles pulled up containing 50 Cent and his enormous entourage. We watched in amazement as a seemingly endless stream of bodyguards climbed out of the stretched cars before finally the man himself emerged. I didn’t have the heart, or the balls, to tell him that we don’t pack heat in quite the same way over here in the UK, but who would?
When we got inside I found myself chatting with Justin Hawkins, the lead singer of the Darkness. He was a very nice bloke, very personable. However, the conversation was somewhat surreal, because he was wearing a huge set of feathered wings on his back. The bizarre outfit was part of his costume for his performance later that evening—meanwhile, he was passing the time before going onstage by playing table tennis. Just at that moment 50 Cent and entourage walked by and Hawkins squealed out a very enthusiastic greeting.