They’d told me that they had a few more people to try out and I went back to Newcastle, but it was all very positive. Sure enough, a few days later I got a phone call asking me to go back down. I borrowed £30 off my dad, packed the rest of my gear and that was it—my new life began.
The Rum Runner was an ideal base because I could crash there and use the facilities in the old boxing gym to shower each morning before work. We’d spend our days practicing and jamming, then we’d party every evening in the club. We were soon running up an enormous champagne tab every night, and in order to pay it off I did a bit of cooking in the kitchen and a few odd jobs around the club. Roger, who was dating one of the cloakroom girls, Giovanna Cantone, also collected glasses and did a bit of painting here and there to pay his share. I daresay the odd rump steak used to get wolfed down by us on the quiet, but we never took advantage of the hospitality.
TUESDAY
was the big night of the week at the Rum Runner, when the New Romantic crowd would turn up. All the guys dressed in frilly shirts and wore makeup, and there would be scores of gorgeous female models, some of whom were very famous. Mike Berrow was dating Carole Dwyer, a Page 3 girl. Her sister Joanne was also a regular at the club, along with another model, Joanne Latham. They all had big, blond, back-combed hairdos, and they wore skintight Lycra leggings or miniskirts, just like Hot Gossip, the sexy dance troupe from
The Kenny Everett Show.
Giovanna caused a stir by shaving her head bald like a character from
Star Trek,
which was a very bold thing for a girl to do in the eighties. The Rum Runner was very exclusive—the doormen would make customers line up outside the entrance, and then they would deliberately turn away anyone who didn’t look cool enough to be let in. This just made everybody else all the more desperate to come inside! Nick was a great DJ. He used to work in the club, and he really knew how to get people onto the dance floor.
I soon discovered that lots of local celebrities liked to party at the Rum Runner, including the footballer Frank Worthington, who played for Leicester City and who lived in a Holiday Inn, which was considered the height of luxury at the time. We’d sometimes go off to the Holiday Inn for late-night boozing sessions. Roy Wood from Wizard was another regular at the Rum Runner, and all the characters from Black Sabbath would hang out there, too—so there used to be some pretty full-on partying.
We would stay up until six in the morning in a little drinking posse at the back of the club after it closed. It didn’t take much to encourage us. I was known for being very loud and for having hollow legs when it came to drinking. Nick could drink copious amounts of champagne (which meant Roger and I had to collect even more glasses). John, in contrast, used to get drunk on two pints of beer, and he’d lose his spectacles and walk into walls!
SO
my first memories of life in Birmingham aren’t just about the band but everything that went with it. It was like walking into this ready-made rock-and-roll world that was filled with excitement. What we desperately needed, however, was a front man, so for our first big task we auditioned a singer named Guy Oliver Watts. He was a lovely bloke and stayed around for a couple of weeks, but we just didn’t click. I was flattered when the other guys asked me what I thought of him—because I was still very much the new boy myself and it showed they valued my opinion—but I told them I didn’t think Guy was right for us. We sent him packing, which seemed a bit brutal at the time, but it was part of the process of elimination that we needed to go through in order to form a perfect band. We did some demo material on which John wrote some lyrics and I sung some vocals, just to have some singing on our music, but it wasn’t very productive.
Then one of the barmaids told Mike Berrow that she shared a flat with a guy who had sung in a band and he had written a lot of songs.
“He could be just what you are looking for,” she said, so Mike arranged for him to come down to the club one afternoon.
So there we all were, in the Rum Runner, when in walked this tall, good-looking guy with long legs and lots of confidence.
“Hello, I’m Simon Le Bon,” he said in a Southern accent.
The first thing I thought was,
Fuck me—he looks just like Elvis!
He reminded everyone of a young Presley because he still had a lot of boyish puppy fat around his face . . . You knew straightaway that he would be a hit with the girls. The only slightly unfortunate thing was that he was wearing skintight pink leopard-print trousers! The flashy pants had been Simon’s way of making a grand entrance, and I can assure you that all the stories that have been repeated over the years about how outrageous he looked are true. He was perfect, our own ready-made Elvis (albeit one who looked like he’d been to the chip shop a few times)!
Simon explained that he’d been in a punk band called Dog Days when he was seventeen. He’d also done a bit of singing with seventies pub bands. He sang us a few numbers and we were impressed. But most important of all, we discovered he could write lyrics. Simon brought along an A5-sized book with a paisley pattern on the cover, which was packed with his own handwritten poems. The book turned out to be a real Aladdin’s lamp because it contained all the lyrics we could ever wish for. Looking back, I believe that was our Ground Zero —for me, the defining moment in the history of Duran Duran was when Simon pulled out that little book of lyrics. There was even one poem that he brought along on that first day, called “Sound of Thunder,” that fitted perfectly to one of the tunes we had already been rehearsing. We tried it out straightaway that afternoon and it worked; eventually it became a track on our first album. We were in business.
Simon is a much better songwriter than people realize. He’s very deep and thoughtful, and he was just like that when he was young. It was obvious that he was very well read, and I was very impressed by him. His lyrics and his tone fitted our music perfectly, and he always managed to find a vocal melody that worked with the music that I had already created. He also had a commercial ear, which appealed to all of us.
“I really like the new Simple Minds album,” he told us in conversation, which impressed both John and Nick, who had both just bought the same album.
“Good, you’re in,” said John. “We’ve got a gig in four weeks.”
And that was it, he was hired! That was the day the band was formed. Everything before that moment seemed to suddenly lose importance. As well as the lyrics, Simon had a decent voice, maybe not the best, but he had an
original
voice and, more important, it was a
pop
voice. We never needed a rock singer; we needed someone like Bryan Ferry who could cruise over the top of our music—and that was exactly what Simon could do brilliantly.
Simon and I bonded straightaway. We had something in common—unlike the others, who all grew up locally, we were both from outside Birmingham. Simon was a drama student at the University of Birmingham, but he came from a suburban family down in Bushey, just outside of North London. His family were descended from French Huguenots, and his father, John, was a civil servant. His mum, Anne, ran small businesses in antiques and catering. Simon was the eldest of three brothers . . . and he loved attention. In fact, he was totally up himself—but I mean that in a nice way, because the one thing you need in a good front man is for him to be self-obsessed in a theatrical manner.
SO
with Simon Le Bon on board, we were flying before we knew it. There were now five of us and we each brought something special to the mix. A good band is made up of people with different strengths and weaknesses, and the sum is always greater than any one part. In Duran Duran we were each good at something different, and the strength of each person’s individual contribution was important. For example, Nick’s contribution was very different from mine, but every member of the band was equally vital. I developed a knack for being able to hear something and pick out the bones in order to work out how every part fit together. I had done all the basic work of learning music while I was out on the road, and I’d figured out how all the guys before me had done things. It meant that I could take an idea and help translate it into something original, so I hoped that what I gave the band was a kind of musical cohesion that they had previously been lacking.
Until now, no one seemed to fully grasp some of the things Nick was trying to do on keyboards. Nick might have lacked some of the traditional musical skills that I possessed, but it was our juxtaposition of different approaches that helped to make us so successful.
Technology was starting to change keyboards in a big way and suddenly there was a whole raft of new equipment available, mainly from Japan. Whereas in the past bands used to have big banks of wires and stuff, the equipment suddenly all became solid-state, much smaller, and a lot more user-friendly. Technology was always Nick’s thing—he was obsessive about being the first to have a new piece of kit in order to create a certain type of sound before anybody else could do it.
Years later, when Simon wrote the lyrics to “The Reflex,” there was a lot of speculation that the song was about Nick. According to the song, “The Reflex is in charge of finding treasure in the dark.” That’s what Nick would do: he was a genius at finding little bits of treasure in a song. (Nick’s also an only child like in “The Reflex,” although Simon denies the lyrics are about him.)
My own little piece of genius was working out how to reinvent the way I played guitar in order to integrate it with all the new technology. We formed at a time when most bands were removing guitars in favor of synthesizers, so I had to change the way I played to work alongside the new type of sound.
I’d been around enough musicians in the past to know it’s not easy to get something special going, and I had a sixth sense that I’d just met a bunch of people who were going to make it. I had great respect for them because they all had the ability to think outside the box—and I was convinced that I could help them build that box. There was a certain magnetism around the band. It felt almost like a foregone conclusion that we were going to do well—although it wasn’t particularly well thought out to begin with. One thing we all agreed to do very early on was to split any future royalties five ways, because we felt everyone’s contribution was strong enough to justify an equal share. We were all young, and to us it didn’t matter who wrote which bit; we’d all share the credit.
THE
crowd in the Runner loved us from day one, especially the women. Ironically, the fact that we wore makeup turned out to be a great chat-up line. We’d end up discussing cosmetics with the girls—I’d been a fan of Bowie, who wore a lot of makeup of his own, so I wasn’t at all fazed by the idea of wearing it—and it wasn’t long before I was dating a gorgeous model. Mike Berrow came over to me one evening and pointed out a beautiful blonde on the other side of the club.
“There’s this girl over there called Janine, who wants to meet you,” he said, smiling.
She was a model named Janine Andrews, who at the time was one of the UK’s most famous pinup girls. Sexy photographs of her were published in newspapers on almost a daily basis, and the British public were obsessed with her in much the same way as they are in a model called Jordan today. Janine was five foot ten, tall, well over six feet in her heels—a lot taller than me, anyway! At first I didn’t believe Mike, but Janine turned out to be a smashing friendly girl and we got on well. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d been a penniless nineteen-year-old in the North East and here I was, in a champagne paradise with a model for a girlfriend. I remember thinking,
If the boys could see me now!
The Rum Runner turned out to be a great setting for the band. We had a ready-made headquarters with its own support base. A similar cultural thing was happening down in London at the Blitz Club, where Spandau Ballet were creating a stir. Certainly for us, being based in a club was a godsend. When you took all the hormonal and creative energy that we had and combined it with all the girls and the socializing and drinking, it brought out the best in us. I guess it had been like that for bands ever since the sixties, with the Beatles and the Cavern Club being the ultimate example.
We were soon belting out new material at our jamming sessions all the time, and within about five or six weeks we had cracked most of the ideas that would eventually form our first album. At the same time we were making plans for our debut performance in front of a proper live audience, and it was only natural that our first gig should be at the Rum Runner. The Berrow brothers were determined to make it a huge success, so much so that Mike suddenly announced that he’d be making a guest appearance onstage.
“I’ll be playing saxophone during ‘Girls on Film,’” he proudly told us. “Don’t worry, I’ve been practicing. I think you’ll be impressed.”
When the big day arrived in July, Roger and I were the first people in the Rum Runner. It suddenly struck me that we’d always rehearsed on the main floor of the club, rather than on any type of raised platform.
“What’s the matter?” asked Roger, who must have noticed my puzzled look.
“Well . . . where’s the effing stage? Where are we actually gonna play?” I asked him.
“Oh, there’s these big boxes outside, and we’ve got to move them all in order to make a stage,” he explained.
So much for all the glamour! I have a vivid memory of lifting all these boxes with a terrible hangover at 10:30 in the morning, while John, Nick, and Simon were nowhere to be seen. I thought,
Lazy bastards! I hope it is not always going to be like this!
That night all the New Romantic crew turned out to support us in great numbers. We played all our new original material, including “Girls on Film,” which went down like a storm. We also did a cover version of “I Feel Love,” by Donna Summer. I snapped a guitar string during the evening, but the most memorable thing about the night—for all the wrong reasons—was Mike’s performance on saxophone. Playing sax might have sounded like a great idea to him, but he was dreadful! Saxophone isn’t something you can just pick up overnight, but as far as I could tell Mike had simply gone and bought one and assumed he could play it. It doesn’t quite work like that with a sax; you have got to learn it, which takes a long time, and even if you do learn it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be any good!