Love and betrayal: how I lost Duran Duran’s John Taylor

A real-life encounter with a teenage fantasy crush was doomed to crash and burn.

Still going ... Simon Le Bon and John Taylor perform as Duran Duran helps bring in 2023 in Times Square in New York. Picture: Getty Images

Megan Lehmann

@meganlehmann

3 min read

12:00AMJanuary 06, 2023.

Updated 4:35AMJanuary 09, 2023

Hard to lose what you never had but on September 20, 1999, I lost my first love. Lost is possibly the wrong word. More accurately, I threw him under a bus for the sake of my career. Does he know? No. Would he care if he did? Also no.

But whenever I hear one of his songs on the radio or, as is more likely these days, in aisle nine at Woolies, I am stabbed in the heart by a two-edged sword of wistful remembrance and raw, helpless guilt.

Megan Lehmann's John Taylor story.

Washed-up rock star. He wasn’t washed up when I knew him. Knew is possibly the wrong word. More accurately, I had his posters on the wall and was aware of his birthdate and the name of his first pet and had secretly whispered my undying devotion to the idea of our future blissful life together into my pillow at midnight during the hot north Queensland summer of 1982. Lord, was it hot.

Only a teenager can dedicate so much time to charting the minutiae of their first love’s existence in precise, repetitive and maddening detail. Only a teenager can believe it’s first love.

Washed-up rock star. The irony is that Duran Duran bassist John Taylor wasn’t even washed up when I called him a washed-up rock star in the pages of The New York Post 17 years later. Okay, he wasn’t in his prime; the band’s heyday was a memory by 1999. He was going nowhere with his solo efforts, but he could still wear leather pants and get away with it. And he had good years ahead. He would go on to reunite with his bandmates, fill stadiums, release albums, earn some of the best reviews of his career. Last year, Duran Duran was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

In 1982 John Taylor washed up in interesting places.

In 1999, my big achievement was getting a thumbs-up from my boss. John Podhoretz, former speech writer for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was features editor of America’s spiciest tabloid and the architect of my destiny.

He decided that Duran Duran’s former bassist starring in a film as a washed-up rock star was a story and who was I to argue, a starry-eyed twenty-something from Australia trying to make it there, make it anywhere. The headline wrote itself, he said. Washed-up rock star plays washed-up rock star. There was even a New York Post-worthy pun: Taylor made for it.

The film was called Sugar Town. It was a satire of the Los Angeles music scene and it was Taylor’s screen debut. I was to interview him about his role, his inspiration, his castmates, and then the paper – well, me – would throw him under a bus.

The time difference between New York and LA meant it was late at night when I interviewed the man of my teenaged dreams by phone from the 10th floor of a Sixth Avenue skyscraper. I was alone at my desk, staring out the window at a navy-blue evening, cabs and city folk bustling below, hands down Manhattan at its finest. It was unusually quiet in the newsroom.

Hilarious, I was thinking, that 13-year-old me had once thought I could turn John Taylor’s head. That this grown man who plucked his girlfriends from the covers of magazines and frolicked with them on private Caribbean islands would wait for me and we’d get married and live happily ever after, maybe in Paris or London or New York.

I felt a bit protective, then, of teenage me. Adrift in a Queensland country town, so far from the rock stars and models, so hungry for connection to the promise of a wider world that I would project all my longing onto a guy on a poster.

I would later read Taylor’s memoir and learn he’d grown up a nerd in Birmingham, England, an only child preoccupied with diecast model cars and close to his parents. Stardom had overwhelmed him, he said. He’d been painfully shy. And incredibly lonely. I knew nothing of that on the balmy September evening we connected on the phone, my first love and I, so many years after he’d unwittingly ascended to that station.

John Taylor in 2004.

The John Taylor I spoke to was unfailingly gracious, sincere and likeable and … real. I wrote the story, soft as a cushion, ensuring he retained his dignity. I acknowledged he was in on the joke, called the role “a boldly self-effacing move”, and described him as “charmingly honest”.

None of that mattered, of course, when all those words – blah blah blah – appeared beneath that headline. Washed-up rock star. Maybe he never even read it, but I still burn with shame. Losing a first love: there can be no consolation. It is only with time that the ache dissipates, eclipsed by a massing of distractions. Anyway, I’m really sorry, John. Or Mr Taylor or whatever.

Megan Lehmann is a writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine.

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