Wild Boy by Andy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

the band going to be?” I asked the girl who answered at the other end.
    I listened as she replied in a broad Brummie accent: “Oh, the name of the band is Duran Duran.”

CHAPTER TWO
    The Rum Runner—1980
    SO here I am, I’ve just turned nineteen and I’m sitting on a train to Birmingham on my way to my first audition with Duran Duran. Not that there was much of a band to audition for, as I would soon discover. There was no singer, no lyrics, no record deal, and very little by way of repertoire—but I was about to enter a ready-made world of fashion and hedonism in the form of a nightclub called the Rum Runner, and it would quickly drive us to the top of the music business.
    Blondie were at number one in the charts with “Call Me,” and within two years we would be appearing on the same bill as them in America. But for now Britain was in the grips of its worst economic recession since the early seventies, and I was down to my last few quid left over from what I’d earned playing at US military bases. Touring in Germany had been enormous fun, but after I got back to the UK the money soon started to run out, and it left me hungry to make a living from rock and roll.
    I remembered my grandmother telling me, “If ever you get the chance, leave this place.” When I was younger, she had seen a medium who had predicted that one day I would travel. I knew that my grandmother always had my best interests at heart, so it was time to follow her good advice. Despite the gloom that seemed to hang over large parts of the country in early 1980, I was feeling pretty positive when I arranged over the telephone to meet the fledgling members of Duran Duran at the Rum Runner.
    “It’s close to the City Centre. You can’t miss it,” they told me.
    I packed my electric guitar and little portable amplifier, and I passed time during the four-hour train ride down from Newcastle by flicking through a copy of a newspaper that I had found on a seat. The headlines at this time would soon be dominated by the Iranian Embassy siege in London, during which terrorists took twenty-six people hostage for several days and threatened to execute them. The papers still found room to report on the fact that Prince Charles had fallen off his polo horse. Later that summer, the world would watch breathlessly as an attractive young girl, Lady Diana Spencer, fell in love with the heir to the Throne. She would become the most iconic woman of her time, somebody who loved music and who embodied the aspirations of a generation. I had no way of knowing it as I sat on the train, but I was about to join a band that would eventually become Princess Diana’s favorite rock act.
    I’d already done a lot of touring with various bands, but travelling wasn’t something you took for granted in those days, so as the train pulled into Birmingham New Street just after lunchtime it felt as if I’d been on a long and epic journey. In a way I had, because culturally Birmingham was at least a million miles away from Newcastle. I had come from a region that was heavily depressed due to the economic downturn of the seventies, and the area was starting to suffer terribly due to the first cold blasts of Thatcherism. By comparison, Birmingham was rocking: it had its own arts college and lots of great cafés and little fashion shops that had a real buzz about them. The Midlands were also thriving musically: Dexys Midnight Runners were based there and they had just released
Geno,
and UB40 and the Specials were all emerging there around the same time.
    The first thing I noticed when I got off the train was that everybody was speaking in a funny Black County accent. When I’d called to arrange the audition, the girl on the phone had a Brummie drawl that was so rich that I actually had trouble understanding some of the things she said. Brummie accents in the UK are like a long drawn-out drawl, and they are regarded with similar affection to the way some southern accents are in the