The first time I parted with Duran Duran, I’d been reading a John Lennon book. After the Beatles split, he went on the lash for two years in Los Angeles, and I thought, “What a good idea.” I’d been on tour in America with the Power Station, and I really didn’t want to handle the British press, so Tracey and I decided to stay in the States.

The great thing about LA then was that you could get lost in a crowd. There were so many people in the entertainment business, there were no paparazzi and you wouldn’t get followed, as you would in London. At the time, we had a small son, Andy Jr, and Tracey was pregnant with our second child.

It was when I was walking in Las Flores Canyon one day that I found it. It was an ordinary Californian single-storey wooden house, built in the 1950s, with the best views on the planet, facing out across the ocean. I had grown up by the sea, in Cullercoats, a small fishing village near Newcastle upon Tyne.

We bought it for not a great deal of money, as it was so beaten up. It had four bedrooms, wasn’t huge and was all dark and dingy. At first, Tracey said, “I don’t like it. It’s horrible — I don’t want to live here.” But it was a sanctuary after five years of mayhem, and we both grew to love it.

We stripped everything out and made it light, white and liveable. It was like a sitcom: we got in two overtly gay interior designers and spent as much money as possible. I think our sofa cost £50,000. The guys had me running all over the place, choosing shag-pile carpets and fabric. It turned out quite funky.

In the hillside garden, there were coyotes and snakes — and with brush all around, you had to watch out for fires. Within about three weeks of our moving in, there was a huge fire in the Malibu Canyon that was coming our way. I said to Tracey, “I’m going to get the hosepipe out if it comes any nearer”, not knowing that these things are colossal. They got control of the fire two or three canyons from ours. It was terrifying.

For my 25th birthday, we had a giant transparent marquee put on the back of the house, although that night it was raining so torrentially, we thought we would have to cancel the party. The sheriff escorted all the guests through the mud slide. Five hundred people came. It was a time when, if I wrote a party list, people would turn up purely out of curiosity. I’d been part of Duran Duran, we’d had the James Bond theme [A View to a Kill, in 1985] and I’d been part of the Power Station. Nobody ever said no to an invitation.

Michael J Fox was there, chain- smoking, and there was the Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe sideshow — John was in a mood. Rod Stewart was there, too. For an English bloke who’d only been out of Newcastle for a few years, it was quite funny. As for band members, I think Nick was there — but he’d go to any party. I had everybody sign this big board when they came in. I gave it away to charity afterwards — now it would probably be worth gazillions.

As for being clean, that was the “in and out period”. I think at that party I was pretty well behaved, because I can remember it. In those days, everyone was off their heads in LA, but they’d hide it. It always used to amaze me that you’d have a party where nobody was doing cocaine — but there was a big queue for the loos.

Living in Malibu gave us the space we needed, but I still had to work. I was doing a lot of solo stuff, which was going really well in America. I couldn’t take my foot off the gas.

I ended up selling the house to Roy Orbison. We’d gone back to England for a bit, as we had a little thatched cottage — another fire hazard — out in Shropshire, and we loved the countryside. So we decided to sell up in America. I think Roy’s wife, Barbara, had been to the house and she wanted to buy it. My father used to sing Roy Orbison songs to get me to sleep. I mean, I grew up with that sort of stuff. They bought the house and pretty much everything in it, and moved in all their memorabilia.

The brush fire of 1993 took the place out. I went back after it had burnt down to look at it. I tried to make my way up a road where all the tarmac had melted. There was a chimney stack and nothing else. I just stood there. It was strange to see such a significant part of my life burnt to the ground. It was like, “Whoa, now there’s the end of an era.”

Andy Taylor’s autobiography, Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran, is published by Orion at £18.99

Interview by Emma Wells

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