Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor is the second memoir I have read from a member of Duran Duran, but the first one written. In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death & Duran Duran by John Taylor was published in 2012 yet Wild Boy came out in 2008. With the exception of the first chapter, where Andy filled us in on his childhood in Cullercoats in northern England, he was true to the title and from the second chapter on he wrote solely about his life in Duran Duran. I was surprised that he wrote hardly anything about his solo career or his time with the Power Station. Not a word even about his biggest solo hit, “Take it Easy”. This memoir was a fast read and I was amazed at the level of candour Andy revealed in his tales of drug and alcohol use and family health battles. Almost from the beginning of Duran Duran’s success in early 1981, Andy was nose-deep into cocaine and booze. He remarked on how different the public image of the group was from reality. The clean-cut fashionable New Romantics were really getting wasted every night and doing their bodies serious damage, and not just from the substances they put into them. With the exception of drummer Roger Taylor, who was an introvert who mostly shied away from the raucous party scene, the four other band members partied all night and got into some pretty rough physical altercations. Feet and hands got bloodied in many a brawl but never their adorable pin-up faces.
Personal relationships were not sugarcoated and Andy revealed his true feelings about his bandmates, their wives and girlfriends, as well as his management team. By 2008 Andy had since left the band for a second time so it is possible he wouldn’t have been so blunt–or even written the book in the first place–if he was still with Duran Duran then. However all must be forgiven and forgotten as he rejoined the group in 2023 to record their latest album, Danse Macabre. While Andy’s fondest memories are of Simon Le Bon, his impressions of Nick Rhodes were filled with tension. The keyboardist was self-obsessed in the studio, domineering, no-nonsense and whip-cracking. Andy had no love for Nick’s girlfriend and future wife, Julie Anne Friedman, who groupied her way into the cloister of Duran Duran personal space. Bassist John Taylor was a party animal, always late but he got the work done. Andy was able to pry himself away from his first management contract in order to earn more money, for one thing, and also to deprive his managers from earning millions off his back.
The most love he has for anyone is for his wife Tracey, whom he married in 1982. They have four children, and as I grew up with Duran Duran it is hard to consider that the oldest Duran children are now in their forties. These Duranny kids were infants when their dads were making videos all over the world and running for their lives away from screaming packs of fans.
The writing style was oral based, so an unnamed editor must have knitted it all together to flow chronologically. On several occasions Andy, after introducing one topic, wrote that he would address it later, which reads like an oral remark. He did elaborate on these topics later, likely during another probing interview with the ghostwriter.
Andy wrote about his wife’s and father’s health battles, and it was poignant to read about his father’s death from prostate cancer. Andy revealed that other men in his family had been diagnosed with this type of cancer and, sadly, it too would strike Andy. As Duran Duran was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022 I watched as Simon read, nearly in tears, a letter from Andy explaining why he wasn’t able to join the group. It wasn’t for reasons of acrimony; Andy was too ill to make the trip.
At 314 pages of solid text, this memoir was a breeze to get through. Had Andy written a true rock and roll memoir, he would have included a full decade–the nineties–which, as it was a time of his life when he was not part of Duran Duran, was for the most part excluded from this book. Two colour photo inserts were included.
Editing gaffes were the misspelling of Pete Townshend’s surname (three times, all without the H); the flipflop between Julie Anne Friedman and Freidman; and adding an extra T to Hinge and Bracket.