JOHN TAYLOR DURAN DURAN PLUS

“On tour in Germany in 1982, I wasn’t getting much sleep. He admits to steamy sessions on the tour bus, too. Everybody was doing it, and no one felt bad about it. “Hundreds of grams were being charged to record company accounts every week. In London, in the music business, cocaine use was as normal as drinking a pint of bitter in the pubs of Birmingham. “I had already gotten a taste for coke at the Rum Runner, where it was popular with some of the more louche clientele.

“It went with the territory of fame, success and record sales. “Cocaine was a big part of the 70s rock mythology I grew up with,” he recalls. He had first experimented with drugs in the mid-1970s at the Rum Runner club, which the band made their home in Brum. “I was a pin-up on thousands of bedroom walls but the fear of loneliness was turning me into a cokehead.” I didn’t want to be lonely and the drugs ensured I never was.

JOHN TAYLOR DURAN DURAN PLUS

“The drugs and the alcohol served to take away all those doubts, plus any inhibitions or insecurities I – or the girl – might have. Maybe it was some residue of Catholic guilt? Plain old common decency? Hadn’t Mother taught me something about this? “Jumping into bed like porn star Johnny is not as easy as you might imagine, especially with someone whose first name you’re not even sure of. And when you start doing it night after night, week in week out, your ideas about love and sex begin to get somewhat distorted. “You want it, but it doesn’t feel quite right. “Well, the trouble is – and I didn’t figure this out until I was almost 40 – that there is something about an intimate encounter of that nature with someone you barely know that jars against the spirit. “So what’s the problem, you might ask?” adds John, who is now happily married to second wife Gela Nash in Los Angeles, and who has a daughter, Atlanta, by first wife Amanda De Cadenet. Now I only had to wink in a girl’s direction in a hotel lobby, backstage or at a record company party and I had company until the morning. I wasn’t a jock or an intellectual, and I’d never had a regular girlfriend as a teenager. “I had been a nerd named Nigel at school. “Cocaine, I was beginning to realise, was an effective insurance policy against that eventuality. “Even though I had a girlfriend at home, my horror of lonely hotel rooms meant I would go to any lengths to avoid sleeping in them alone. “One thing I discovered on tour in 1981 was that girls – in all languages – liked taking drugs with me,” he says. In the ‘warts and all’ book, the rock millionaire, born Nigel John Taylor in inner city Birmingham, says sex with strangers was just part of life on the road – but his Catholic upbringing consumed him with guilt that only booze and drugs could ease. “It was months before I was let in on the secret – the numbers referred to the legal age for sexual intercourse in that particular state.” In the left-hand corner of each page of the US itinerary there was a number, usually 18, 21 or 20. Then follows a page-by-page account of the destinations. “All the numbers to call if in trouble are listed there – the management, the agencies, the travel agents, the local promoters. “Page one lists the principals, the inner circle and the crew. “Of absolute necessity for any touring musician is the itinerary, which usually comes from the road manager,” Taylor, now 52, reveals in his biography In The Pleasure Groove, which hits the shelves on Thursday.

It was, reveals Brummie bassist John Taylor, a guide to the legal age for sex in each place the megabucks band played. POP pin-ups Duran Duran always made sure they checked the tour manager’s ‘bible’ when they hit the road in the States.Īlongside details of the venues they were due to play, emergency contact numbers and a staff roster, was a mysterious number. John Taylor lifts the lid on sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll with Duran Duran in a tell-all biography this week.

John taylor duran duran