From the highs of teen adoration to the lows of rehab, Duran Duran’s John Taylor has been through the wringer – but the band’s bond remains unshakeable, he tells Emma Higginbotham
Every generation has its pop pin-ups, and if you happened to be going through puberty during the 80s, there’s a strong possibility that yours was John Taylor from Duran Duran.
Chisel-cheeked, floppy-haired and square-chinned, the swaggering bass player graced many a magazine cover, bedroom wall and adolescent daydream. At the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party – the British teen equivalent of the Oscars – he scooped ‘Most Fanciable Male Human Being’ four years in a row (until Philip Schofield bagged the top spot in ’87).
But before he was John Taylor, international heartthrob, he was Nigel Taylor the nerd (his words), who wore National Health glasses, loathed sport and loved painting Airfix models. In fact, he can pinpoint the exact moment he became cool. It was his sixth form leavers’ party and, armed with a £15 electric guitar he’d sprayed white with his dad’s car paint, young Nigel and his band Shock Treatment were about to play their first gig.
“I’d borrowed an amplifier from a friend who was in a punk band, and I put my guitar through this amp and played a really simple – I hesitate to use the word ‘chord’, because at this point I’m really just holding strings,” he says, and laughs. “But the sound that came out changed me forever. And whoever was in the room who witnessed it, including quite a few sixth form girls, it changed their perception of me forever. There’s just something about wielding that kind of power. It was almost... biblical.”
Within months he’d swapped guitar for bass, glasses for contact lenses, Nigel for his middle name, and co-founded Duran Duran. The rest, as they say, is history.
But it’s not over yet. More than four decades later, despite various highs and lows, Duran Duran are still going strong. They’ve sold north of 100 million albums, their metaphorical trophy cabinet bulges with Grammys, Ivor Novellos and Brits, and they’re about to release their 16th studio album to coincide with Halloween. Called Danse Macabre, it is, says John, a “Gothic extravaganza” that arose by chance a year ago.
“We’re not given to acts of spontaneity, but we had this show booked in Vegas for Halloween, and we thought well why not make it different? It started with choosing songs that we loved that would fit into this Halloween vibe, and we came up with about seven we wanted to perform. The way we learn a song by recording it, and so having done the gig, we were sitting on these recordings that we were all really excited about.”
The recordings are covers of moody tracks old and new, from Ghost Town by The Specials to Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish. “Her rendition is so minimal, and we’ve turned it into, like, Bohemian Rhapsody,” he grins. “It’s really multi-layered and quite operatic. That was a lot of fun to do.”
They’ve also spooked-up a couple of old Duran Duran favourites, as well as writing new numbers. “So now we’ve got a really unusual three-course meal that’s very different to the kind of meal that we would usually prepare for our fans,” he says, adding that it’s been a joy to make. “Usually when we embark on a new album project, it’s two years out of your life, and by the time you get to the end of it you’re just – ugh,” he says, miming a full-body sigh. “And I don’t feel like that with this. It’s like a freebie.”
John is chatting to Weekend over Zoom from his Wiltshire home; he also lives in Los Angeles. Still rakishly handsome at 63, he’s come a long way from his early years in Hollywood. No, not that one – the Birmingham suburb where he grew up with his mum, Jean, and dad, Jack, who worked for a car parts manufacturer.
An only child, he dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot or racing driver. “Then I started wearing glasses, so those were out. Then music really just took hold of me when I was 13. I started identifying with Bowie, and Ferry, and Queen. I was putting pin-ups of these guys on my walls, and prancing around the room, singing along with Starman.”
A bright boy, John went to grammar school – but not very often, preferring to bunk off and haunt Birmingham’s record shops instead. He’d go to gigs with his friend and future bandmate Nick Rhodes (then plain old Nick Bates), “but the thought never occurred to me that I could be a musician until The Sex Pistols came along when I was 16. They changed the landscape for kids like me. Suddenly it seemed like ‘Wow, I could do that!’ And that was it. I found my calling.”
At 18, John was studying art at the city poly when he met fellow student Stephen Duffy (who’d go on to have a pop career in his own right). Along with another friend, they started jamming in a room above Nick’s mum’s toy shop, and Duran Duran – named after a character in 60s sci-fi movie Barbarella – was born.
“It was at a very specific moment in pop culture. Every band that you went to see in a pub was doing something out of the ordinary,” he recalls. “The thing about the punk spirit was that you had to find your own lane, and it was a lot about attitude. Duran Duran really fitted into that, and evolved quite quickly. When we started off it was like a clunky electro pop thing, but as soon as Roger joined, and we started practising our funky grooves, it became more about that.”
‘Roger’ was drummer Roger Taylor (no relation) and, when Stephen and his pal left to form another band, they recruited guitarist Andy Taylor (again, no relation). The final cog was Simon Le Bon, a Birmingham University drama student with a fine line in poetic lyrics, who joined in 1980. With Simon’s showy vocals complementing their pulsating, new wave dance sound, John had no doubt they’d make it. “It was just a sense of certainty. You could just see,” he says. “Again, it was a very particular time. Record labels were desperate for young energy, and the doors were open. And we were very well behaved,” he adds. “We did what we were told, because we wanted to get to America, and we wanted number one hits. We wanted it all.”
And they got it. Although not immediately. After singing to EMI, their first single, Planet Earth, charted at... number 97. But making a video and performing on Top of the Pops not only saw it race to number 12, but sealed Duran Duran’s fate. Because no matter how good their music was – and it was undeniably good – it was their handsome faces and flamboyant styling that really wowed. With their angular hair, billowing shirts, wispy scarves and suede pixie boots, they looked like five sexy pirates. And although dismissed by the serious music press (NME said “Duran Duran are going to be huge, and they don’t deserve any of it”), readers of teen magazines like Jackie and Smash Hits couldn’t get enough of their new idols.
They became very famous, very fast. Performing in Brighton in July 1981, the wall of screams from hysterical girls meant they couldn’t hear themselves play. In Japan, they’d wade through stages engulfed with cuddly toys and flowers. In the USA, fainting fans were stretchered to safety. Back in London, up to 30 devotees would camp outside John’s flat every day. On one occasion, as he blew his nose at a public appearance, a fan fished his tissues out of the bin and, next time she saw him, proudly told him she’d given herself his cold.
“It was a lot,” he says. “A lot. We knew what we were in for, because we’d seen The Beatles, and we were really lucky that there was five of us, that we had each others’ back. But it got pretty existential.”
Swapping their New Romantic style for silk pastel suits (with sleeves rolled firmly up), Duran Duran became renowned for their racy music videos, often filmed exotic locations. They toured relentlessly and, much as John loved performing, he found it hard to fill his days, and started mixing drink and drugs.
“You get caught up in it,” he says. “I don’t think I slept for the first half of the 80s, and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to catch up on that sleep. But there’s a period in your life when you’re experimenting, and you don’t have to be in a pop group to do that. I never went to university, but people say you go to university to learn how to drink. So I learned how to drink while we were making Rio, and Save a Prayer, and touring the world.”
By the time they recorded Bond theme A View to a Kill in 1985, tensions were beginning to show. Roger and Andy left, and the band’s popularity waned. By the end of the decade, Duran Duran were no longer mobbed, and for the first time, venues had empty seats.
Meanwhile, John met and married Amanda de Cadanet, presenter of Channel 4’s The Word, and their daughter Atlanta was born in early 1992. But after moving from London to LA, the couple grew apart. Lacking direction, John went to see a therapist, who said she couldn’t help him unless he stopped drinking. After one last all-night bender, he went into rehab, “where the only thing you have to change is everything,” he says with a wry laugh. “I was lucky to find a recovery programme that works. That works if you work at it,” he clarifies. “I put as much energy into being sober as my friends who drink put into drinking.” He’s been sober ever since.
At a party in 1996, John met his now-wife Gela Nash, co-founder of fashion brand Juicy Couture. She already had two young children, and the following year he left Duran Duran to concentrate on parenting his new blended family.
“I was tired of coming back and forth from California to England,” he explains. “And with the band, I just sort of ran out of ideas, and needed to get away. I’d been doing it my entire adult life. But after a couple of years I bumped into Simon in a department store in Beverley Hills, and we’d just really missed each other.” In 2001, they decided to reform.
Over the years John’s had various side-hustles, including The Power Station with Robert Palmer, and Neurotic Outsiders with Billy Idol. Duran Duran has had several incarnations too, but now it’s just four of the original members (Andy, who’s fighting prostate cancer, left in 2006, although he plays on three tracks on Danse Macabre). And John is fine with that.
“I’ve played with so many other incredible musicians over the years, and yet those guys, they bring out the best in me,” he says. “That’s the thing about bands. Technology allows kids to do all sorts of things today, and I’m not sure that Duran Duran would have come into existence at this time. Instead, you’d have five kids making music in their bedrooms on their Pro Tools, or whatever.
“But there’s something about working with others that *creates* us,” he stresses. “I'm the musician that I am because they moulded me, and when I’m on stage or in the studio with them, I’m the best version of myself. You could put me on stage with the Rolling Stones or Harry Styles, and I’d be clunky! But with Simon, Nick and Roger, I’m the best fucking bass player in the world.”
Does he think about retiring? “Yeah, all the time!” he laughs. “But we’re still driven, and I don’t want to do nothing. I want to be useful, and one of the most useful things I can do right now is to perform, and to bring people joy through our music. And to show that not every partnership has to end in acrimony,” he adds. “There’s something heroic about people that stick together.”
Danse Macabre is out now
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2023 (c) Waitrose