The resulting ‘album’ was called Dusk And Dawn. With Nick controlling the keys, an art-school friend singing and on bass, and me on guitar, we made our first recordings on cassette in the space above Nick’s mum’s toy shop. It had presets such as ‘mambo’, ‘foxtrot’, ‘slow rock’ and ‘waltz’. So Nick’s mum, Sylvia, made a £200 investment: the first Wasp synthesizer to arrive in Birmingham, purchased at Woodroffe’s music store. They had three synthesisers and a drum machine instead. Nick and I saw them supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Mayfair Ballroom in the Bullring shopping centre and watched in amazed silence. Seeing The Human League for the first time was a turning point. I hoped to hook up with other like-minded souls, just as they had. ‘They’re just having fun.’Īfter telling a sceptical school careers officer that I wanted to be a ‘pop star’, I enrolled at Birmingham Polytechnic’s College of Art and Design for a 12-month foundation course.įor me, going to art school was inspired more by musical heroes: John Lennon, Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry. ‘Oh, leave them alone, Roger,’ his mum, Sylvia, would say. ‘Don’t you worry about it, Father,’ Nick would tell his dad as I applied a little lip gloss in their bathroom. ‘You’re not going out dressed like that?’ our parents would cry.
Throw in a little chiffon, maybe an animal-print scarf from Chelsea Girl, and you were away. Some of those jackets were divine, and fitted both Nick and me. At British Home Stores, in the city centre, there was a huge floor filled with two-piece ladies’ suits. Dad’s fitted me perfectly.īut then there was the transsexual glam aspect, and we found ourselves mixing it up with ladies’ blouses. Bryan Ferry’s sartorial direction was having its effect: boys were going through their dad’s wardrobes to find the baggy double-breasted suits such as those Bogie wore in Casablanca. Nick and I both wore chiffon without needing much encouragement, and we both loved the clothes, the hairstyles and the make-up of Britain’s glam-rock era. “They start to feel broken.” Chalk one up to the healing powers of art.New Romantic: John was inspired by the clothes, hairstyles and make-up of Britain's glam-rock era
“I’m 60-something, and a lot of my friends are closing down,” he said. It’s an unlikely origin story for an artist - but Taylor speaks of feeling revitalized by his work at a time when many of his peers are not. As he continued his life in Los Angeles during the pandemic, he made use of discarded objects from a nearby construction site as materials. “I consider myself fortunate that the early part of the pandemic intersected with a time where I just found myself wanting to paint and draw,” Taylor added. “I can’t help it because, if you’ve been doing what I have, for as long as I have, you can’t help but think: Is it a product?” “Very quickly, I got out of the idea that my drawing was just a private experience,” he told ARTnews. From there, it wasn’t long before he explored the idea of showing his work. “At that moment, I got caught up in the excitement of making music, as opposed to a career in any kind of art.”įor Taylor, the move into visual art was literally therapeutic - he recalled that, in conversations with his therapist, he found that certain things he was trying to address could best be done through illustrating them. That’s where we did our first gig,” he said. “I was at art school in Birmingham when I collided with punk rock and began Duran Duran. In an interview with ARTnews, Taylor explained his recent embrace of visual art. While he’s best known for his work playing bass in a wildly successful rock band, Taylor has recently developed a fondness for painting - something that deepened during the pandemic.
And there’s another name you might want to add to the list of famed musicians with a multidisciplinary muse: that of Duran Duran co-founder John Taylor. Does your favorite musician also have a foothold in the art world? In some cases, they do.