In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, October 2012
Copyright © 2012 by John Taylor
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Intro: Brighton, July 29, 1981
PART 1: ANALOG YOUTH
1 Hey Jude
2 Jack, Jean, and Nigel
3 Sounds for the Suburbs
4 The Catholic Caveat
5 A Hollywood Education
6 In Between and Out of Sight
7 Junior Choice
8 My Moon Landing
9 Side Men
10 The Birmingham Flaneur
11 Neurotic Boy Outsider
12 Shock Treatment
13 Barbarella’s
14 Ballroom Blitz with Synthesizers
15 Everybody Dance
16 Plans for Nigel
17 Legs for Days
18 Enter the Eighties
19 Music Never Sounded Better
20 The Poetry Arrives
21 The Final Debut
22 Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Rhodes, Le Bon
23 Bidding Wars
24 Divine Diplomacy
25 Divine Decadence
26 Manic Panic
27 Perfect Pop
PART 2: HYSTERIA
28 The Whole Package
29 All Aboard for the Promised Land
30 Memory Games
31 Legal Age
32 Dancing on Platinum
33 Bird of Paradise
34 The Pleasure Habit
35 Music Television
36 Down Under and Up Above
37 Incongruous on a Yacht
38 Theodore & Theodore
39 Coffin Sex
40 Jacobean
41 The Year of the Geographic
42 A Caribbean Air
43 Resentments Under Construction
44 Unlimited Latitude
45 Anticlimax to Reflex
46 Exploitation Time
47 The Remix
48 Megalomania at the Wheel
49 Shelter and Control on West Fifty-Third Street
50 Nouveau Nous
51 Guilt Edge
52 The Wheel World
53 The Model
54 Burnout
55 Is This the End, My Friend?
PART 3: DIGITAL TRUTH
56 Dead Day Ahead
57 In the Dark
58 Notorious
59 Surfing Apoplectic
60 Chasing the Wave
61 Tabloid Fodder
62 Wedding Spaghetti
63 Take Me to LA
64 Paranoid on Lake Shore Drive
65 A Million Tiny Seductions
66 Tucson
67 Day 31
68 A Fine Bromance
69 Gela
70 A Different Kind of Profound
71 The Reunion of the Snake
72 Osaka Time
73 Learning to Survive
74 Coachella, Indio, California, April 17, 2011
Acknowledgments
More Photographs
Permissions
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 won’t cry for yesterday,
there’s 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
It’s a Monday night at the Brighton Dome, two weeks before our third single, “Girls on Film,” is due out. It’s a month after my twenty-first birthday.
The lights go down and “Tel Aviv” strikes up. We have chosen the haunting, Middle Eastern–inspired 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 doesn’t 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.
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