John Taylor - In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran

DUTTON

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First printing, October 2012

Copyright 2012 by John Taylor

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Contents

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye,

to restore it, and to render it the more fit

for its prime function of looking forward.

Margaret Fairless Barber

But I wont cry for yesterday,

theres an ordinary world

Somewhere I have to find

And as I try to make my way

to the ordinary world

I will learn to survive

Duran Duran, Ordinary World

Crisis = Opportunity

Chinese Proverb

Intro:
Brighton, July 29, 1981

I ts a Monday night at the Brighton Dome, two weeks before our third single, Girls on Film, is due out. Its a month after my twenty-first birthday.

The lights go down and Tel Aviv strikes up. We have chosen the haunting, Middle Easterninspired instrumental track from our new album to function as a curtain-raiser, to let the audience know the show is about to begin.

But something strange is happening. None of us can hear the music. What is going on out there? The sound of an audience. Getting louder. Larger. Chanting.

Screaming.

And then, out onto the stage, behind the safety curtain we go. A frisson of fear. We look to each other with nervous glances. Faces are made. Is that for real?

We plug in; bass working, drums beating, keyboards and guitars in tune.

Ready.

Tel Aviv reaches its coda. Here we go.

And the curtain rises on our new life.

The power of our instruments, amplified and magnified by PA stacks that reach to the roof, is no match for the overwhelming force of teenage sexual energy that comes surging at us in unstoppable waves from the auditorium.

The power of it is palpable. I can feel it take control of my arms, my legs, my fingers, for the duration of the opening song. It is unrelenting, waves of it crashing onstage.

There is no way we can be heard, but that doesnt matter. No one is listening to us anyway. They have come to hear themselves. To be heard. And what they have to say is this: Take me, ME! I am the one for you! John! Simon! Nick! Andy! Roger!

As our first song grinds to a hiccupping halt, we turn to each other for support. But the next song has already somehow begun without us. We are not in control anymore. Seats are smashed. Clothes torn. Stretcher cases. Breakdowns. It is a scene out of Bosch. Every female teenager in Britain is having her own teenage crisis, simultaneously as one, right now, vaguely in time to our music. The frenzy is contagious. We are the catalyst for their explosions, one by one, by the thousands.

We have become idols, icons. Subjects of worship.

PART 1

ANALOG YOUTH

1 Hey Jude

I am four years old. Confident and shy. Hair blonder than it would be in my teen years. In shorts and sandals, a young prince of the neighborhood, the south Birmingham suburb of Hollywood. How perfect.

Ten oclock in the morning on any given weekday in 1964, and I have stepped down off the porch and wait, kicking at the grooved concrete driveway, watching as Mom pulls the front door closed, locks it up, and puts the key in her handbag; she puts the handbag in the shopping bag, and off we go. Left off the drive and up the hill that is the street on which we live, Simon Road. Our house is number 34, one up from where the road ends.

We walk together along the pavement, counting down: 32, 30, 28. On the left side of the street are all the even-numbered semidetached houses, single buildings designed to function as two separate homes (ours is twinned with number 36). Across the street, the odd-numbered houses are detached, each building a single dwelling, all much larger than ours, and so are the back gardens, which are long and tree-filled and bordered at the bottom by a stream. The driveways are slicker too, with space for more than one car.

Later on, when I started to become a little status-aware, I would ask my parents, Why didnt you pay the extra six hundred quid that would have got us a stream at the back?

I hold Moms hand, remembering the Beatles song that is so often on the radio, as the incline gets steeper. We reach the crest of the hill, where Simon Road meets Douglas Road, and turn right.

We pass a twelve-foot-high holly bush, the only evidence I have found that suggests where the estate got its name. We march on, crossing Hollywood Lane in front of Gay Hill Golf Club, an establishment that will assume mythical proportions in my imagination as a venue for wife-swapping parties, not that anyone in my family ever set foot in the place. There was no truth in the rumor.

Cars flash by, at twenty or even thirty miles an hour. We make it to Highters Heath Lane, another main artery of the neighborhood, which must be taken if youre visiting the old Birmingham of grans and aunts and uncles, recreational parks and bowling greens. It gets traversed a lot by the Taylor family at weekends. It must also be used by mother and son if we are to reach our destination todaySt. Judes parish church.