It was my brother Paul Berrow who had the idea that Duran Duran should go to Sri Lanka for a week and make videos. He had previously been out there exploring what was an unspoilt and beautiful part of the world. He came back with a vision within which everyone was swept along.
When we landed at Colombo airport we were struck by how incredibly hot it was. Then we piled into the mini bus and it just got hotter, with no available air conditioning we sat and we baked our way down to the south of the Island. The hours passed with no relief. In that moment to some of the traveling party this must have looked like the worst idea in the history of pop. The journey was a sweaty affair and we were glad to finally arrive at the New Oriental Hotel in Galle.
I was given a garden room, absolutely enchanting, next to the pool. However, later that night when I retired to bed I found poo on my floor. I naturally complained. A member of staff came to my room to view the poo and he assured me that this particular poo was a good thing, because it was mongoose poo and mongoose eat snakes. So I would be quite safe in my garden room with my mongoose.
“I don’t think so, I want another room” I said.
“No rooms” he said.
So I said “Well I am going to sleep in my brothers room then, Mr Michael Berrow, he has a room in the main building, please get the key and take me there”.
We took off through the hotel to the reception desk, passing Russell Mulcahy and Eric Fellner who were having a late last minute production meeting for the shoot the next day.
“There is a mongoose in my room” I explained to them as I passed by. “Poo on the floor”.
They had their own drama to consider, shooting three videos in one week, namely Save A Prayer, Hungry Like The Wolf and Lonely In Your Nightmare. They would be working in challenging conditions, jungles and rivers and they had elephants.
The lovely Sri Lankan man took me to my brothers door and carefully turned the key whilst smiling and wobbling his head from side to side, probably thinking I was a neurotic western mess of a women who was totally overreacting to a bit of poo on the floor. Which on reflection was about right.
I felt my way through the darkened room to my brothers bed and climbed in with him.
He was reasonably startled and said with some panic “What’s going on?”.
“I have a mongoose and possibly snakes in my room I’m sleeping with you”.
To which he rolled over and went straight back to sleep.
They found me a new room in the morning.
Later in the week, the night before we stared shooting the Hungry Like The Wolf video, Simon decided he would rather like to have a few highlights in his hair. There was a hair and make up girl to hand so they went for it. Later that night I received a panicked visit from Simon explaining that I had to find hair dye a.s.a.p to bring the blonde down. He now had a head of yellow hair. Not good. Not good at all.
So I was up and out first thing hunting for what quickly transpired to be a tall order. I spent that morning going from ramshackle shop to rickety market stall. Felt like a mission impossible. We were in a country where everyone had black hair and I needed blonde brown. They didn’t stock western products back then, not where we were. Eventually I found one random box of brown henna and gratefully settled on that option. Meanwhile the video shoot had gone ahead as planned, they shot all morning in the market and Simon wore a hat with his bright blonde radiating from beneath. For the rest of the Hungry Like The Wolf video you will notice he sports a henna shade of brown.
MTV took the video to its heart and delivered Duran Duran to the American people. There would be no turning back. Global domination was theirs if they wanted it, and they wanted it alright. They worked hard and played harder. It has been said many times by many people that without music videos the band would not have succeeded as international pop stars. Whilst this statement holds truth I have always felt it edges towards discounting their credibility as a band. The combination of those five boys, each of them with their own very distinctive voice, came together to create pop perfection. A great marketing strategy can help any product succeed in the short term but if the basic product is no good it won’t last.
Hungry Like the Wolf won the Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video at the 26th Grammy Awards, making it the first video to ever win that award. So there you go, turned out to be a top idea.
By the time we left Sri Lanka I was ready to go back again and that’s exactly what a few of us did. When we got a well deserved four week break in between tours we took off back to Unawatuna beach and surrendered our souls to paradise.
Amanda.
x
amandaberrow 