Wild Boy by Andy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

States. When I got to Birmingham, the other thing I noticed was how trendy everybody looked. There was a big North/South divide in the UK in those days, and everybody I spoke to assumed that I was Scottish.
    Birmingham wasn’t as big then as it is now, and I didn’t have any money for a cab from the station, so I decided to walk the rest of the way to the club. I bumped into a group of guys who all had big floppy hair and pointed shoes, and they told me they were in a local band called Fashion. I had trouble understanding what they were saying because of their accents, but I managed to get directions to the Rum Runner, which, from what I could gather, was located down an alley in an old Victorian building near a canal.
    The Rum Runner had previously been a casino in the sixties, and it had its own boxing gym on the same site. From the outside it had an air of faded grandeur about it. Inside, it was not what you expected it to be at all, because it had been fitted out as a brand-new chic club, complete with mirrors everywhere, plush dark carpets, and its own triangular champagne bar, plus a DJ booth and a dance floor. It had big, wide seats made out of old rum barrels. There were also rum barrels set into the walls, which dated from the times when rum had been shipped up the canal, hence the name of the club.
    The first person to greet me after I was shown inside was John Taylor. He was a very different-looking bloke than the handsome pop pinup whose photo would eventually be pinned on the bedroom walls of thousands of teenagers. He also went by a different name.
    “Hello, my name is Nigel,” he said, holding out his hand in a friendly if slightly awkward manner. (His full name is Nigel John Taylor, and it was only later that he became known as John.) He was a tall, skinny kid who was well styled, but he wore these little round glasses that made him seem a bit of a geek. In hindsight, he looked a bit like Harry Potter! In truth, he was an incredibly good-looking bloke, and at first I thought he was deliberately doing the geeky glasses thing just to be cool. It turned out that he wanted contact lenses but he couldn’t afford them. One of the first things I noticed about him was that he was wearing a ridiculous pair of enormous winkle picker shoes. I remember thinking,
Christ, I hope I don’t have to wear a pair of them!
That aside, John was very friendly and confident, and we clicked immediately. He struck me as a straightforward and easygoing person who didn’t hold back. I later found he would always be the first to come and introduce himself whenever there was someone he wanted to talk to, and he was very good at making people feel at ease. It turned out that we had plenty in common, because John had played lead guitar for a while before coming off it to play bass. He was a few months older than me, although he hadn’t quite turned twenty. He had just been through art college, so he was basically still an art student at heart.
    Roger Taylor, who’d previously been a drummer in a couple of punk bands, was also there when I arrived at the club, and the three of us had a good laugh about the fact that by coincidence we all shared the same surname. It turned out to be a good omen because we got on well despite our different backgrounds. They had long, floppy hair and were into David Bowie and Bryan Ferry and the whole new fashion trend that had started to gain currency ever since punk had died away. They were in on the beginning of what became known as the New Romantic movement, with its emphasis on frilly shirts and baggy trousers, whereas I was much more from a rock background and I had arrived wearing jeans and a scruffy old pair of training shoes. Later on, the rest of the band would spend a lot of time taking the piss out of my cheap shoes! (Nick’s dad still has a pair of my shoes as a souvenir, which I had bought for £2 out of a bargain bin.)
    Musically, we found we shared a lot of ground straightaway. The