TITLE: Life After Duran Duran / No Longer a Cover Boy / Andy Taylor creates his own 'thunder'
AUTHOR: Jim Magahern
DATE: 07/26/87
SOURCE: The San Francisco Chronicle
TRANSCRIBED BY: Tom McClintock

ANDY TAYLOR was just 18 when he saw that fateful classified ad in the British music paper Melody Maker - the one soliciting a guitarist and singer for a new Birmingham band called Duran Duran.

"I had just come back from about two years of trudging around Europe, playing and singing on military bases and all," the Newcastle-born musician recalls. "And I was anxious to get into another playing gig."

The story of Andy's audition with the soon-to-be Fab Five has been retold several times in the fan magazines, and by each account, the union appeared to be a match made in heaven.

"They (founding members Nick Rhodes, John Taylor and Roger Taylor) were quite blatant," the third unrelated Taylor told Rolling Stone in February 1984.

"They said, `We're poseurs. We want a good-looking poseur band.' I said, `Good, because I Like dressing up and I love wearing makeup.' "

But in truth, Taylor now claims, he was lying through his perfect teeth. He confides, "The thing that really attracted me to joining the band, was that the two managers who were working with the band also owned a nightclub. And we could go rehearse in this nightclub all day and get drunk in it all night. For free!"

Eventually, Taylor's lie caught up to him. "I guess I never actually fit in, 'cause I wasn't very good at wearin' the makeup and that, and they always used to bone at me for wearing jeans," he says.

Even Andy's hair, which was often photographed tied back in a functional ponytail, seemed at odds with the other Duranies' well-coiffed cover-boy look. "As a result, I suppose, I was never in the videos a lot," he recalls. "It was always the old singer and the pretty bass player. Which never bothered me, not being in the videos. Until we won our first Grammy - the only Grammy we ever won, and it was for makin' videos! I felt like sending mine back."

He didn't, of course - Duran Duran never did have a John Lennon in the lot. But Taylor did finally reach the point when he decided it was time for him and the "prettiest boys in rock," as Duran Duran was once dubbed by People magazine, to part ways. His 1985 one-time fling with the Power Station whetted his appetite for more outside projects, and in 1986 his guitar was heard on Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" and Belinda Carlisle's "Mad About You." He scored a hit of his own with "Take it Easy," a tune from the movie "American Anthem." Now, he's climbing the charts with a solo album, "Thunder."

"In the end," says Taylor, "my misfit status (in Duran Duran) has probably worked in my favor, because I avoided a lot of what subsequently followed - the glamour backlash that Simon Le Bon has put up with, and John Taylor. That image thing has followed them, but I think I've kinda shrugged it off."

Indeed, the raucous tracks on "Thunder" suggest that the former Duranite is making a very conscious effort to prove he's no longer just another pretty face. His decision to ask former Sex Pistol Steve Jones to co-produce seems to underscore Taylor's determination to divorce himself from the ultraglossy, synthesized pop-rock of his former band mates.

When Andy Taylor remembers his years with Duran Duran, he mostly remembers three things: the girls, the girls and the girls. "Oh, God!" he exclaims. "It was like `How many do you want?' You know? `Take your pick.' Every night!"

Duran Duran's appeal to pubescent women had been extremely well-documented: The mobs of screaming girls at every U.S. airport they touched down in on their first American tour; the international hotels forced to move the band members to alternate lodging after the inevitable invasion of party-hearty females in their lobbies; the tons of fan mail, ranging from marriage proposals to Polaroid self-portraits.

As for how often Taylor himself reaped the benefits of all this Duran-demonium, the "married one" of the group insists he maintained a monk-like detachment. "The temptation and all that was very difficult to avoid," he admits. "But I was married right through the whole thing, you know. My wife (who's now expecting the Taylors' second child) has been with me since I was, like, penniless.

"It's not that it was bad," Taylor says. "I mean, the dedication of those girls was unbelievable. And (it still is). I mean, still, every birthday that comes down, I get, like, thousands of cards, but it became very difficult to live among that for too long. And I think that's why I got out of it. I realized that I was too old for it, really. Like, Simon's 30 now, you know. You ain't communicating with 13-year-old girls when you're 30. I'm 26, so the gap isn't quite as big. But when the 8- and 9-year-olds started sitting in the first row, I began to get a little worried."

Taylor's not particularly concerned about attracting multitudes of screaming young girls to his solo shows. "Actually, I'm hoping that the guys will be more into it now than they were with Duran," he notes. "Because that was a problem, you know, the lack of a male audience. I think I've gotten rid of that problem with the new album, since it's got a tougher sound than any of the Duran albums."

If Taylor's meteoric rise to success with Double Duran has taught him anything, it's what not to do this time around.

"It's not that I've become jaded," the still-young rock star says. "I just know what the pitfalls are now. You know. I saw the money being stolen. I saw people's lives getting destroyed, and my own getting rocked a bit. I mean, I made a lot of money, blew most of it, made records the wrong way, used the wrong choice of producers things that I regret. And I've seen what the rock 'n' roll lifestyle can do. I know what cocaine does to you, I know what drinking Jack Daniels constantly will do to you. And if you can avoid some of that nonsense, which is basically what it is, you're a lot better off."

Andy Taylor's old mates, Duran Duran, play Thursday at Cal Expo in Sacramento and Friday at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.