It was 1984 and Duran Duran bandmates John Taylor and Andy Taylor had come to New York to chop an album. Additionally they lower a whole lot of cocaine.
The good-looking duo was encamped on the ritzy Carlyle Resort, the place they ran up a $450,000 tab, and bought bombed on blow and capsules.
“We had a person who would come to go to us with a toolbox full of each tablet or substance you may think about,” Andy wrote in his memoir, “Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran.”
John and Andy additionally disabled the bogs so that they couldn’t flush and “left slightly shock for the following visitor” once they modified rooms.
“I uncurled one of many suite’s posh rest room rolls, drew a large pair of breasts on it and scrawled a impolite message earlier than fastidiously rolling it up once more, conscious that the following visitor to learn it might in all probability be a head of state,” Andy wrote.
“We laughed hysterically on the concept of a world chief having to ask upkeep to return and help them.”
A part of the New Romantic motion, Duran Duran was successful from the second they launched their first album, an out-of-nowhere, self-titled platinum vendor, 41 years in the past. That includes singer Simon Le Bon, guitarist/bassist Nick Rhodes, keyboardist John Taylor, drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Andy Taylor (none of whom have been associated), the group went on to promote 100 million albums and produce 30 Prime 40 hits.
Regardless of all their success, it wasn’t till this month that Duran Duran was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Corridor of Fame (the ceremony airs on HBO this Saturday).
But when there have been ever a Corridor of Fame for wild, self-destructive exploits, Duran Duran would have been a shoo-in many years in the past.
“Cocaine was actually given to me day-after-day on a plate,” John Taylor wrote in his tell-all “Within the Pleasure Groove,” in regards to the group’s 1981 tour. “I didn’t eat that a lot. I took medicine. That was my weight loss program. I believed it was cool.”
The group — named after Dr. Durand Durand, the interplanetary scientist within the attractive sci-fi flick, “Barbarella” — was in the best place on the proper time. They shot their third and most salacious video, “Ladies on Movie,” simply two weeks after the launch of MTV.
The clip grew to become an immediate hit, turning the band into megastars. The British press likened them to the Beatles, dubbing its members the Fab 5.
This was heady stuff for a gaggle of children who grew up in working-class Birmingham and first carried out at a neighborhood bar known as Rum Runner, owned by two brothers who would later go on to co-manage Duran Duran. That’s the place they refined their music and in addition acquired a style for groupies and white powder.
Throughout its first few years, Duran Duran was truly thought of healthful and family-friendly. However that notion was smashed in 1984 when The UK Solar printed a surprising exposé based mostly on insights from Al Beard, a former band minder and bouncer at Rum Runner.
He recounted how band members scored medicine behind the membership, snorted cocaine off a chrome steel kitchen sink and had their means with prepared groupies, “ordering” them as much as their rooms. He claimed that girls have been delivered by resort porters like room-service meals.
On one event, in response to Beard, Andy noticed “a ravishing blonde on the pavement … Inside minutes of climbing into the again of the automotive with Andy, she had all of her garments off.” As for John, “he would arrive at a resort and decide a teen woman from the foyer earlier than checking in,” Stephen Davis, writer of “Please Please Inform Me Now,” advised The Submit.
Mannequin Bebe Buell, who has written an upcoming memoir, “Insurgent Soul,” about her life, advised The Submit that she felt protecting towards John Taylor after they met on the LA nightspot Membership Lingerie.
“He was getting eaten alive,” she stated. “A pack of chicks would fawn and provide cocaine and ask him to get together. He was 20 years previous. At that age, you don’t know the distinction between any individual wanting a bit and any individual actually caring for you.”
Buell, who famously dated Todd Rundgren, Steven Tyler, Elvis Costello and Useless Boys vocalist Stiv Bators, hung out with John for a number of months when Duran Duran was opening for Blondie in 1982 throughout a US tour.
“I slept in the identical mattress with him,” she stated. “He was tender and candy. He was the man who would wash your again if you took a shower and maintain your hair if you threw up.”
By the top of 1983, after three hit albums, John amped up his drug use whereas mixing “Enviornment,” the band’s first reside album, on the Energy Plant studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Mick Jagger was down the corridor engaged on a solo album, Bob Dylan was in-house however not often seen, and the medicine flowed. “There was nowhere I’d reasonably be than within the security and safety of the studio, poised between shelter and management, completely coked out of my mind,” he wrote in his e book.
In the meantime, a guide who labored with the band on the premiere of the 1985 James Bond movie, “A View to a Kill,” which options the Duran Duran tune of the identical title, advised The Submit: “I did coke with them that evening and discovered the following day that I used to be pregnant. I used to be a nervous wreck all through my being pregnant, although my baby was effective.”
The tempo of performing and the need to create edgy movies introduced its personal risks, too.
A scene for the band’s “The Wild Boys” video might have value Le Bon his life.
It known as for the singer to be strapped to a working windmill that had been partially submerged in a swimming pool. Because the blades turned, he spun in a circle however the machine malfunctioned and stopped with Le Bon’s head underwater.
“My coronary heart was beating so quick,” a choreographer who was on the shoot advised The Submit. “I questioned how they’d save him. However they did. Divers [on hand as lifeguards] jumped into the pool.”
Medicine didn’t seem to play a task within the mishap. However, the choreographer stated, “everybody was partying laborious on the time. It was an infinite cocaine run. I don’t know if it was a matter of needing it. Nevertheless it was there. It was a distinct time.”
Andy and John have been the largest hell-raisers. In 1984, the duo splintered off from Duran Duran to create a brand new band, the Energy Station, which is what introduced them to the Carlyle that 12 months.
“These two guys have been so into coke that the roadies known as the band Powder Station,” Davis stated. “They have been extra into doing traces than they have been into making nice songs.”
“Their conduct was very erratic,” the guide who labored with the band advised The Submit. “I bear in mind us all being within the make-up room at CNN when Andy flew off the deal with and screamed at me. He’s the one particular person in my profession who made me cry. He was set off simply in these days.”
Issues got here to a head throughout the 1985 Reside Help live performance in Philadelphia, the place Duran Duran, that includes its three different members, headlined over Led Zeppelin — whereas Energy Station hit the stage earlier than the Thompson Twins.
“The 2 factions didn’t discuss to at least one one other,” stated Davis, who famous that the unique Duran Duran ensemble “didn’t play collectively once more for 18 years.”
By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, the group’s stardom had dimmed, with band members enduring failed relationships, unsuccessful recording efforts and stints in rehab.
“I used to be haunted by the acquainted wave of regrets: the alternatives I had wasted within the eighties, the unhealthy selections I had made again and again, time and again,” John recounted in his e book. “What an asshole I used to be!”
The band’s final seven studio releases, together with “Future Previous,” which dropped final 12 months, had principally lackluster gross sales, although their 2004 album “Astronaut” went gold.
The final time Buell noticed John was in New York greater than 25 years in the past, she stated.
“He was doing a solo efficiency at SideWalk Cafe within the East Village,” she recalled. “I remembered considering to myself, ‘You’re a dwelling god. What are you doing there?’ I introduced Nicolas Cage with me in order that he would have a celebrity within the viewers. [John] sang that evening and he was superb. I advised myself that I hope this isn’t the top, that he wouldn’t be taking part in these little rooms ceaselessly.”
She bought her want.
Although Andy Taylor is now battling stage 4 prostate most cancers, his bandmates are clear, sober and have been touring this 12 months to packed audiences. In August, they performed at Madison Sq. Backyard and this month launched a live performance movie, “A Hollywood Excessive.”
As Buell says, “I like a comeback from hell.”
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