I felt like a loser until I got clean
At the height of their success, Duran Duran’s John Taylor almost crumbled under the weight of fame before finding strength in sobriety. In a startlingly honest interview he reveals all about the band’s new album, their forthcoming Irish date and how his life has changed for the better
IT’S a grey day in London where Duran Duran’s John Taylor is Zooming from, fully embracing his departure from the warm LA sunshine to his home country’s colder climate, resplendent in a jumper and a woolly hat that shows off those still unmistakeable cheekbones.
The band are in rehearsals and dying to get back out there to play their excellent album Future Past. There were a few gigs last summer in between lockdowns but St Anne’s Park in Dublin now beckons for June 12 after a long wait.
‘We’re on day three of rehearsals and we’ve got our first gig back on Sunday in Ibiza, just getting back in that groove,’ bassist Taylor explains.
‘We did get to do some last year and it felt really good then we had a bit of a wobble,’ he says of the pandemic and the cancellation of a jam-packed Duran Duran calendar.
‘I mean, I love to play live, I can’t imagine not playing live and we need it, don’t we? It’s part of our culture, live music and getting together in that way.’
This was something Taylor was musing on at home in LA when the first lockdowns kicked in. For people who had spent their whole adult lives on stages and for the fans who normally flocked to see them, the importance of live shows to the music lover was made very clear.
‘I spent that first year of lockdown in the States and on the one hand we couldn’t go out, couldn’t hang out together, couldn’t socialise let alone go to an event like a rock concert,’ he says.
Taylor hated the divisive nature of the dialogue at the time — round Covid, round politics, round everything it almost seemed.
‘Everything was divisive — “which side are you on?” and we are not able to have that time where we rub shoulders with each other and just go “Hey I love this one don’t you?”
So at that time, I actually had a moment where — and I don’t mean this in a pretentious way — I thought “This is important! What I do is important, it’s important like soccer is important.” It’s a chance for us all to get together in a room or in an open space and be there for the craic rather than because you believe in this or that. It’s good for us, it’s good for the band — we need to do it too.’
Indeed, after the last number of years where young bands were citing Duran Duran as their biggest influence, the band are at the top of their game with Future Past, their first album since 2015 and arguably one of the strongest of recent times.
It also has a huge pedigree, produced as it is by dance music aficionado turned producer Errol Alkan with Blur’s Graham Coxon on guitar.
‘Nick did a Q&A panel discussion with Graham in London,’ says Taylor, before launching into the perfect impression of keyboard player Nick Rhodes. ‘He said to me “I met Graham Coxon that guitar player from Blur and yeah, he’d like to come and play on the album.’” And I hadn’t really thought about him but we thought it could be interesting and Erol Alkan who had agreed to produce the album then asked what we thought about Graham as he was his best mate.’ So, though it might seem an unusual pairing for some — Britpopper with the original New Romantics — Coxon’s addition to the four lifelong friends helped shape something extraordinary. ‘He was such a force,’ says Taylor. ‘He’s an absolutely brilliant guitar player and the four of us have brilliant creative empathy but we have been down the road and we have written a lot of songs over the years,’ he says of himself, Rhodes, singer Simon Le Bon and drummer Roger Taylor. ‘So having a wild card like Graham was really exciting. It was new and a new energy to us and he is an exceptional player. He’s extraordinary.’ The original four members
Happy out: John with his fashion designer wife, Gela Nash-Taylor — guitarist Andy Taylor left in 2006 — have been friends since their teens with John and Nick forming the band in 1978. They are friends who have experienced everything together — from the dizzy heights of superstardom to the everyday issues we all face like love and loss.
And it is this relationship that is more important to John Taylor than the music itself.
‘Everybody is changing, everybody goes through stuff and you’ve got this relationship with people you have known for a long time that has been born out of this incredibly special time you had together when you were still becoming,’ muses the bassist.
‘Friendship over time has to be about respect and real love, kind of unconditional love, really. And the fact that we do work together is almost like an offshoot. It’s really about the relationship, do we want to stay friends? And in order for us to stay friends we’ve got to care about each other, we’ve got to respect each other.’
He’ll admit that even now that the band are in their sixties — which is outrageous to think when you look at them — this can be difficult, especially if someone’s pride gets hurt.
‘We are all getting older and sometimes you get grumpy or afraid of something or other. But at the same time, we are all in it together, just as we were when we were kids.’ Taylor says.
‘So we’re all going through it and there’s no better person to understand where Simon’s at today than me and there’s no better person to understand where I’m at than him. So we’ve got that and the love of the music.’
Taylor divides his time between Los Angeles and England but says he is settled in the States now.
‘I still think of LA as home but I spend enough time in England because that’s where the boys all live so when we are working as a band, that’s where we are,’ he says.
He loves being in London but the Los Angeles weather appeals to him for important reasons.
‘Friendship has to be about respect and love’
It’s hard to imagine but when he moved over there with his first wife, actress and TV presenter Amanda De Cadenet, the band were an international success story, there was money in the bank but Taylor hated who he was.
‘We certainly didn’t go out there to live, we went out because she wanted to have a crack at the acting world,’ he says of his move that surprised fans back in the day. ‘And I found myself kind of liking it. When we played gigs there and had gone there as part of a tour I thought it was kind of dull and I wasn’t all that interested in it, but then it just started working for me.
‘We’d just had a baby and I joined these Daddy and Me groups and it was a different kind of life. I got sober there and I got this whole different outlook. I think it was a time in my life where I had a bit of depression and the blue skies were very helpful.’
The wild years of the Wild Boys, the soaring success of the band and the rock and roll lifestyle had taken its toll with someone who, though famous for those pouting poses, still seems like a shy working class lad from Birmingham.
And back then, they might have moved from New Romantic darlings to the pop giants posing on yachts whom every fan wanted a piece of, but the prettiest boy in the band found himself in an unhappy situation.
‘There was a time where drugs and alcohol… well, I had lost the ability to control myself in that area,’Taylor explains. ‘And I was just feeling like a real loser. In my early twenties and with the success in the early 80s I felt I had this incredible hand of cards that I’d played really badly and I just thought I was a f ***** g loser. I had to have a spiritual awakening I suppose and I got that getting sober. I had no idea really what that decision was going to do for me. It shifted my perception of myself. Firstly I knew I had to stay away from the drink because the drink always led me to the drugs and that was the line that I had to not cross. Quite early on I thought
Yacht rock: Taylor with Simon Le Bon in the 1980s
“If I can stick to this I’m going to be alright,” and the garden came back, flowers started growing.’
That baby, Atlanta, is now 30 and though his marriage to De Cadenet ended in 1997, Taylor has been happily married to fashion designer Gela Nash since 1999. And he works hard to keep what he’s got.
‘I’ve got this amazing life that I cannot take for granted,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to take it seriously because I could slip tonight. Booze always looks so good, doesn’t it, especially in the summer, but it’s just not for me, it doesn’t work for me. It’s not hard if you know how. I got introduced to the 12 Step programme and that worked for me from day one. It doesn’t matter where I go, I check in.’
In fact, some people in recovery in Dublin might have been surprised to find the famous rockstar in their meeting on Zoom during lockdown but Taylor credits that support with keeping his life happy and addiction-free.
‘People who are in recovery know how important recovery is,’ he says. ‘You do it because your life depends on it and I got lucky and I got pulled out of the drink into the lifeboat. For me, that fame ride is pretty intense and I always got tremendous respect for artists and actors that can go through that enormous success and not just even hold on but really thrive,’ he says, citing the singer Billie Eilish as a good example.
‘I just didn’t quite — it was just a little bit too much but it’s all good and I’ve got great energy and passion for what I do today. And gratitude— that’s really important I think. When you have that kind of fame right out of the box you become so complacent. And you forget to be grateful and you forget to appreciate how lucky and privileged that kind of success is when it comes to you.
‘And to hold on to it you have to learn to be grateful and appreciative. That’s why we appreciate our audiences and that’s why we appreciate the opportunity that people have been holding onto tickets for two years.’
Gela is coming with him to Ireland this time — it will be her first time to visit here. And when the band are on tour, Taylor says he and Rhodes are the ‘culture vultures’ who love visiting galleries and going to see paintings.
And at St Anne’s, as well as new material you can expect hit after hit from classic albums like Rio, The Wedding Album and more.
‘Putting the show together is always super fun, particularly if you have a new album of songs that you really enjoy,’ says Taylor.
‘You can pick a handful and set them off against the classics. I always like the idea that it’s like dealing cards to the audience — they kind of know what they are
‘The drink always led me to the drugs’ ‘To hold on to success you have to be grateful’
going to get but they don’t know exactly.’ In an era where the idea of the band is disappearing, particularly in the pop world, choosing Alkan as the producer was a bold move but it definitely produced a special kind of alchemy. ‘The idea now of music that is shaped by the musician is a progressive idea, maybe it’s an old fashioned idea,’ says Taylor, discussing where Duran Duran now fit in. ‘If anything the experience with Duran Duran is a band trying to work together to find a harmony. I work very hard with the producers to make bass sounds and basslines that are interesting and cool and each one of us does that. ‘And the songs are being written, that’s a given but there is something in the styling of the sound that is atypical to contemporary pop. ‘We are from the old school really, which is kind of Genesis by way of The Sex Pistols,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s about the edges, it’s about what happens when the bass player elbows the keyboard player and the keyboard player elbows the guitar player and we are all kind of jostling and that’s what you hear. It’s something Duran Duran has always been about and you hear it on this album. Fortunately we had a producer in Erol who said “I want this to be the best John Taylor bassline, the best Nick Rhodes keyboard, the best Simon Le Bon vocal, the best Roger Taylor drum sounds.” And that’s what we are really fighting for.’ Duran Duran play St Anne’s Park in Dublin on June 12, tickets priced €59.90 are on sale now via ticketmaster.ie