Duran Duran’s John Taylor’s journey from being a nerd to a pin-up to a devoted husband

Duran Duran’s bassist John Taylor, 62, who has been married to fashion designer Gela Nash since 1999, didn’t want to settle down for a long time.

The musician shares one daughter, Atlanta Atlanta de Cadenet Taylor, with British photographer Amanda de Cadenet. They were married from 1991 until 1997. John was about 31 years old when he married Amanda, who was around 19, in 1991.

“I work a lot harder on my second marriage,” he told Red magazine in 2012. “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.”

When the guitarist became famous, he had fans throwing themselves at him but he wasn’t always the suave ladies man.

“I had been a nerd at school, never had a regular girlfriend. Now, I had only to wink in a girl’s direction in a hotel lobby, backstage or at a record company party, and have company until the morning,” he wrote in Daily Mail.

He went from being a nerd at school to being so famous with women that one of them collected his used tissues to get his cold.

When they were in Atlanta, US at a press conference, he had a cold and was sniffling into tissues. He threw them in a bin under the table but a girl reportedly collected them. , throwing them into a bin under  the table.

She told him at another press conference: “After you left the press conference last year I stole your used tissues. I wanted to get your cold.”

When he was on tour, he learned that “girls liked taking drugs” with him. “My horror of lonely hotel rooms meant I would go to any lengths to avoid sleeping in them alone,” he wrote. “I was a pin-up on thousands of bedroom walls, but fear of loneliness was turning me into a cokehead,” he added.

When he was on tour in the US, the left-hand corner of each page of the American itinerary carried a number like 18, 21 or 20. John wrote: “It was months before I was let in on the secret: the numbers referred to the legal age for sexual intercourse in that particular state.”

He had become used to his high-flying life and the “girl-pulling powers”. The fan-following was equally extreme back home. “There was a 24-hour fan encampment outside the house, squealing and snapping their cameras whatever time I got home,” he wrote.

With so much of the world at his feet, when his bandmates were settling down, he was choosing his girlfriends from the covers of fashion magazines. “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.’”

How he settled down

Eventually, in 1985 he began a four-year-relationship with Danish model Renée Simonsen. He had seen her on the cover of US Vogue. They got engaged but split up later.

He married Amanda, who was a socialite, in 1991. But, that marriage didn’t last long. “...I certainly didn’t go screwing around on her, but I really struggled to just be a partner. I resented it,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald (TSMH.

However, when he met Gela - things changed for the better for him. “For years, I had a secret life. I couldn’t be honest with my partner. So I really had to clean up my act and now I’m starting to see the joys and the effects of that honesty, and what can be gained from it. It is of infinite depth,” he told TSMH.