We were angry.

Anger is good.

Anger is galvanizing. Have you ever noticed how often a soccer team performs better after one of the players has been sent off the pitch? Surely Malcolm Gladwell must have a theory about that. Our backs were against the wall. Steve and Simon had dared to count us out, thought they could do better without us.

We retreated to the room above the toy shop and plotted our revenge.

We had to turn this crisis around.

What did Nick and I do? We called Andy Wickett, the singer of TV Eye, who we knew was now out of a job, and asked him to join Duran Duran. He jumped at it. It was an incestuous game of musical chairs with a Birmingham accent.

Andy organized a meeting with Roger Taylor, the drummer with one of Birmingham’s better bands, the Scent Organs. The four of us met at a house party the following Friday.

Roger Taylor is one of the nicest guys anyone could ever meet. He was working on the production line at the Rover car plant in Solihull, as was his dad, but he wanted to make music full-time.

For a guy who liked nothing better than beating the hell out of his drum kit, Roger had a very laid-back, easygoing manner. There was something casually fifties about him, with his James Dean hair and preppy style. And his reputation preceded him. When the Damned had played Barbarella’s the year before, their drummer, Rat Scabies, had gotten up from behind his drum kit and dared anyone in the audience to take his place. Roger did.

I never imagined Roger wanting to play with us. I thought of him as being on another level. But he could feel the way the wind was blowing and did not want to just thrash away anymore. He wanted to make music that had the energy and attitude of punk but was also new and different. He agreed to come and jam with Andy, Nick, and me.

Duran Duran version 2.0 moved out of the toy shop and set up its gear on the second floor of the TV Eye Cheapside squat, where Andy Wickett still lived, enforcing a future-friendly new music zone, while the Subterranean Hawks, Steve and Simon’s new band—the bastards!—were on the third floor, working on their Rolling Stones/Bob Dylan legacy.

The scene was set for a serious battle of the bands.

Inevitably, the parties would meet; there were encounters at undesignated times in neutral demilitarized zones such as the dilapidated ground-floor kitchen where the dishes never got done, and sneers and cigarette papers would be traded.

A sniffy elitism crept down from the third floor at times, especially as we began to upgrade our sound to incorporate dance-friendly grooves. When Roger first joined the band, I was still playing guitar, and I began to hone a more rhythmic style that would lock in with his drumming.

We were venturing outside the punk bubble musically and had a social life to match. We liked going to wine bars such as Hawkins, next door to Virgin Records on Corporation Street. The girls were more appealing there, and we were made welcome and treated better than we were in Birmingham’s grimy pubs.

The wine bars also gave us exposure to a broader musical diet. The first time I heard Chic’s song “Everybody Dance” was in a wine bar. The impact of that song on me was huge, because the bass guitar came across as the lead instrument. I had never heard bass played that way. This record was as revolutionary to me as “Anarchy in the UK” had been. I picked up a bass guitar that Andy Wickett had in his bedroom and started playing around on it. I found that I could quite easily imitate the style of the Chic bassist, whose name I had no idea of, along with the basslines of other popular disco hits such as Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” What I lacked in technique, I made up for in attitude.

Roger and I got excited at the idea of playing in the style of these disco bands and began to forge a sound together. We even began to talk about a rhythm section, a term that I don’t believe had ever been used by a punk rock band. The bass was taking over, locking in the low-end notes with Roger’s bass drum. I liked the interplay and exchange of energy that took place between us.

This is what my instincts were telling me: focus on bass. The guitar-player question would be answered soon enough. I made the decision to invest some of my meager cash resources in a bass guitar of my own—an inexpensive Hondo copy that looked meaner than it was.

I often think, given the number of hours that I have spent looking at Roger’s face over the years, how lucky I am to have such a pleasant, nonjudgmental, friendly face to look upon.