Duran Duran's Ordinary World made me dream of meeting them. Then I did
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Version 0 of 1. At the start of 1993, aged 12, I was a mess. Home was a bleak place, and school was much the same. Girls in my year called me “shit-coloured” and told me I was “so ugly no man will ever fuck you”; I was stabbed in the back with a maths compass, held under during swimming, and my clothes were dumped in the showers during games, so I had to travel home wearing them sopping wet. I thought about running away, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. I’d only be found and brought back home.I spent my nights crying with bedsheets in my mouth so my sobs wouldn’t make a sound, dreaming of escape. Then, one day, I heard a song on the radio. The chorus went: But I won’t cry for yesterdayThere’s an ordinary worldSomehow I have to findAnd as I try to make my wayTo the ordinary worldI will learn to survive.” It was beautiful, with a soaring guitar riff and heartbreaking lyrics. It was, of course, about the breakdown of a relationship, but it seemed to speak directly about my situation. I fell in love with it. For days, I stayed glued to the radio, hoping to hear it again. I learned that the band was called Duran Duran, the song Ordinary World, and that it was from an album called The Wedding Album. I saved up, bought the cassette tape, and played it so much I wore all the white writing off both sides. Duran Duran had made a huge comeback with the album, which reached No 4 in the UK, and No 7 in the US. But when the girls at school found out that I liked the band, they called me a loser for wanting “to shag a bunch of sad old men”. I didn’t care. It seemed right that I should like a band no one else at school liked, as no one liked me either.I dreamed of one day meeting Duran Duran, and playing piano and singing on one of their albums. I gradually listened to Rio, and Notorious, and Seven and the Ragged Tiger. While the other girls at school had posters of Take That and East 17 in their lockers, I stuck up pictures of Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes. The posters were soon defaced.I came across an advert in TV Hits magazine for a penpal who liked Duran Duran, and started to correspond with Anna, who lived in Eastbourne and was only a year older than me. I was underdeveloped and barely five feet tall with facial hair, and was terrified she would think I was tragic when she met me and saw my Tesco jeans and reversible anorak. But despite her long glossy hair and trendy clothes, she didn’t care that I wasn’t as cool as her. Aged 13, I had finally made my first proper friend.We travelled to see Duran Duran at Wembley Arena, where we sang along to every word. A year later, when I was 14, we went to a solo gig by Duran Duran’s then guitarist, Warren Cuccurullo. To my amazement, we met Warren himself and had a picture taken with him. Months later, I met him again at an interview with the London radio station LBC, and told him I wanted to be a singer-songwriter. “You should come to our studio sometime,” he told me.Aged 15, I was asked out for the first time, by a boy a year older than me. When I told him I was a Duran Duran fan, he memorably labelled them “cock rock” and made me promise not to make him listen to them. He made me mixtapes of Suede, Pulp and Blur in an effort to “improve” my musical tastes, not realising that most of those bands had been influenced by Duran Duran. Aged 16, I had to leave school. I had thrown a Coke can in another girl’s face after she spat on my lunch, and her stepsister’s gang were waiting for me after school to beat me up. “You’re going to have to decide what to do with your life now,” the deputy head told me gravely, as he escorted me past the gang. “I know what I’m going to do,” I told him. “I’m going to go and find Duran Duran.”I found out their studio’s address: 24 Octavia Street. It will always seem magical to me. I travelled there from my house in Pinner in the north-west London suburbs to South Kensington station, then took the 345 bus across Battersea Bridge and made the short walk past the pub down to the pretty Victorian street.The first time I turned up, I didn’t see anyone at all, except for other fans hanging around. They were all much older than me and weren’t overly friendly, but then I was used to people not being friendly by now.The second time, Warren came out of his house and squinted at me. “Weren’t you at my gig two years ago?” he asked. I nodded, surprised he remembered me. In retrospect, the band probably didn’t have many other teenage, mixed-race, Asian fans.“I just got kicked out of school and want to write songs for a living,” I explained.He replied: “Come on in.”I couldn’t believe it. I walked past all the other fans, through the door and into his living room, full of guitars and machines and wires, and a friendly engineer whom he introduced as Tinley. Warren sat on the sofa next to me and began playing guitar. “This is the new track we’re working on,” he told me. It was full of sitar-like riffs and Indian tabla, mixed with trippy beats.I sat there for hours, mesmerised, until it grew dark. “I should go home,” I said finally.“I’ll get you a taxi,” he said.“But I live in Pinner,” I protested.“That’s OK,” he replied. “It’s on account.”I had never taken a black cab before, and fumbled with the door, not knowing how to open it. I remember panicking, thinking the bill was going to be ridiculously high and that Warren would hate me for it. I didn’t realise rock stars didn’t need to worry about money. After fretting for a while in the cab, I jumped out at Wembley Park and took the tube home.“I spent today in the studio with Duran Duran’s guitarist and engineer,” I told my boyfriend on the phone that evening.“Sure you did,” he said sarcastically. “Were Michael Jackson and Madonna there, too?” The next day, I returned to Octavia Street, but didn’t have the courage to knock on the door. I had been there for half an hour when a motorbike roared into the street, and Simon Le Bon stepped off, dressed head to foot in leathers. He greeted the other fans, then peered at me. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?” “Ariane,” I replied nervously. “I want to be a singer-songwriter, too. I’m from Pinner, like you.” “I’d like to go back to Pinner sometime,” he told me. “Where do you live? I told him. He knew the street. “We can go for a ride on my motorbike,” he said, as the other fans looked at me as though they would happily kill me.That day kicked off a friendship which has lasted until now, on and off. Simon turned up at my house on his motorbike, carrying a spare helmet, and I rode on a motorbike for the first time, clinging on to his waist. I was terrified as we zoomed around corners, but I also though that if I I had to die, there could be no better way than this.I asked him if we could go to Croxley Green, where my boyfriend lived. I will never forget travelling down his street and seeing my boyfriend loping down, unaware of us, then his disbelief, almost outrage, as we both got off the bike.Simon said hello to him, but my boyfriend barely acknowledged him. After I’d said goodbye to Simon and gone indoors, my boyfriend said furiously, “He’s a knob. What the fuck is he doing here?”I was just happy that he finally believed that I knew the band. I tried to explain that there was nothing between me and Simon; that he and the other band members saw me as a daughter, but my boyfriend didn’t believe me.My love for the band outlived my relationship. I sat quietly in the sessions for their albums, soaking up the ambience, and laughed as they made jokes. They asked me to contribute lyrics, though I never had any accepted, and they listened to my own songs and gave me gentle feedback. I went to the pub with Simon and Tinley, drinking water as they drank beer; I was given free tickets and backstage passes to their London concerts. For the first time, it felt as though I were part of a gang, one anyone would want to belong to.There are no debauched stories to tell. I never saw any of the band take drugs. I never saw Warren’s famous pornographic side, and I never slept with any of the band members. I wasn’t that kind of fan. I just loved the music, and felt honoured that they were willing to share it with me. The most rock’n’roll things I ever saw were the gold and platinum discs, and a picture of Warren embedded into his crystal banister. The turning point came when I was 19, when my childhood dream appeared to come true. I had gone to college eventually, and was now about to start a music degree. I was in the studio with the band as they recorded their latest album, Pop Trash, when Nick Rhodes said he wanted me to sing and play on three tracks.I was so nervous during the vocal session, my voice quavered and trembled, and the band agreed to leave the vocals to the professional backing singer. I was crushed, but the piano sessions were a consolation. In retrospect, Nick could probably have played the piano parts himself and was just being kind, allowing me to do it. The producer was Ken Scott, an avuncular man who had worked with the Beatles and David Bowie, and the sessions took place in a proper studio: Matrix Maison Rouge in Fulham. The Sugababes were recording their first album next door.The band said I would be paid for the sessions and get a credit on the album. I was thrilled, and told everyone I knew. A journalist from the local paper in Harrow asked if he could interview me about “putting Harrow on the map”. I couldn’t wait until the album came out. I was never paid for the sessions, but I didn’t mind.On the day of release, I rushed down to the local record store and bought the album. My hands shook as I ripped off the cellophane and trembled as I fumbled through the inlay sleeve. I searched for my name, but it wasn’t there. There had to be a mistake. I searched again, in vain. There was no credit.I was devastated. I cried all the way home, and tore my band posters off my bedroom walls. I had been wrong: the band didn’t care about me after all. I travelled down to Battersea and asked Warren what had happened. He seemed distant and forlorn. He explained that my contributions hadn’t appeared on the album, and that the band had meant to put me in the “thank you” credits but had forgotten. A few days later, he signed a piece of paper I had printed saying that I had played at the sessions. I later found out that he had been kicked out of the band and was returning to the US, because Duran Duran were reuniting with their original line-up. They no longer recorded at his studio; I didn’t know where they were. And when I turned up at the next London gig, my name wasn’t on the list.The dream was over for me. I scrapped my plans to be a singer-songwriter, did work experience at the NME, and wrote a couple of reviews for them. I decided to become a writer instead, and went into television scriptwriting. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I was OK at it. In 2008, I began writing for the Guardian, and received an email from the girl who had stabbed me in the back with a compass at school.“I’m sorry for making your life hell,” it said.In 2008, a comment piece I wrote launched the atheist bus campaign: an effort to make atheism visible by putting adverts saying “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” on the sides of London buses, and I appeared on TV and radio around the world to talk about it.And then, a couple of days after I was on the BBC news, a letter arrived for me at the Guardian via Riazat Butt, the then religious affairs correspondent. “It says Le Bon,” she told me over the phone. “Shall I open it?”It was from Simon, saying it had been lovely to see me on television, and that the campaign was long overdue. He enclosed his number, and I called him while he was on tour in Rio. “I didn’t know you were an atheist,” I told him, then asked: “How do you stay normal when something as weird as [the campaign] happens?” “You just stick with the people you’ve always known,” he explained.A few months later, HarperCollins commissioned me to edit a charity anthology, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas. I asked Simon if I could interview him for it, and we met up again for the first time in nearly a decade. It was good to see him again. I never told him why I had stopped following the band; it didn’t seem to matter now. We met up once more, for the audio recording of the book, and the publisher took a photo of us.We stay in contact these days, and follow each other on Twitter. When I had a baby in 2011, Simon tweeted to say: “Congratulations to you on the birth of your daughter. I’ve always loved the name Lily. Bless you all.” And last year, he gave me a quote for my latest book, Give: How to Be Happy.I never did appear on a Duran Duran album, but Simon’s name appears in my books. He is kind and generous, and will always remind me of finding solace in my childhood. This month my band The Lovely Electric are releasing our debut album Beautiful Filth, the first time I have ever released music. But whether it’s successful or not, I finally found my way to the ordinary world, and learned how to survive. |