RICHARD KAY: I was a dilettante and a creep, says Duran Duran star John Taylor
By RICHARD KAY
PUBLISHED: 6 September 2012
PUBLISHED: 6 September 2012
At the height of his fame with Duran Duran, men envied him and women wanted him. But instead of missing his old womanising ways, rocker John Taylor has now admitted he used to be a ‘dilettante’ and a ‘creep’.
And in a frank revelation about his hedonistic past, the bass guitarist, now 52 , says he used to choose his model girlfriends by picking them from the covers of fashion magazines.
‘It was pretty cynical. I mean, what a creep,’ he says. ‘But as a guy in his 50s now, I can look back on that guy who was 24 and be non-judgmental.’
Taylor — who has been married to his second wife, fashion designer Gela Nash, for 13 years — says his partying ways left him unable to settle down for years, even when his fellow bandmates Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor got married.
He says: ‘I was a dilettante. It was: “Get me off stage, where’s the party?” I was so addicted to so much stuff that, by the time I was 26, the idea of settling down seemed ridiculous.
‘Everyone else in the band was settling and I felt like I sacrificed that. It was, like, “Well someone’s got to stay single.”’
In 1985, Taylor began a four-year-relationship with Danish model Renée Simonsen, whom he had seen on the cover of U.S. Vogue.
The pair became engaged, but split in 1989. Taylor married socialite Amanda de Cadenet in 1991, but they separated four years later after having a daughter, Atlanta Noo, now 20.
‘I work a lot harder on my second marriage,’ he tells Red magazine. ‘At first, I was a bit of a loner, I couldn’t go out for dinner with the band and spent a lot of time in my hotel room, getting strong.
'Now I can do what I want, I have enough time under my belt.’
In an extract from his forthcoming memoir — published next week — Taylor revealed Duran Duran were offered sex by so many young women in the U.S. someone had to write the age of consent for each state they played in on their call sheets.
‘In the corner of each page of the U.S. itinerary, there was a number, usually 18, 21, or 20. It was months before I was let in on the secret. The numbers referred to the legal age for sex in that state,’ he says.
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