Former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor has claimed that his bodyguards “beat the shit out of” Vince Neil after the Mötley Crüe frontman allegedly tried to start a fight with him.
Taylor didn’t specify exactly when or where the incident took place, but added that he’d encountered Neil while he was flanked by “some fucking biker dudes”.
“I never had the weird, pervy, fucked-up experiences that a lot of people talk about,” the Duran Duran rocker told Classic Rock in a new interview looking back on his career. “The worst shit was Vince Neil trying to fight me, and my bodyguards having to sort him out. He turned up with some fucking biker dudes, so they beat the shit out of them as well, ha ha ha!”
Neil had previously hinted at some animosity towards Taylor in a 2005 interview with ContactMusic [per Blabbermouth], where he hit back at comments Taylor had made about Mötley Crüe travelling in separate tour buses.
“I read this thing where those fuckheads in Duran Duran were like, ‘We all travel together and that’s the only way to tour and it just shows how fucked up Motley Crue is,’” Neil declared. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck are you to tell us how fucked up we are!'”
In August, Taylor opened up more about his reasons for quitting Duran Duran, saying it was due to “creative” reasons, and was “not personal”.
In a new interview Classic Pop magazine (via MusicNews), the guitarist said that it “bugged” him that the band brought in a wider circle of people for 2007 album ‘Red Carpet Massacre‘, which was produced largely by Timbaland.
“I couldn’t do the Timbaland album, because it just didn’t move me,” he said. “I was saying to the others, ‘Why do we need this?’
“There’s so much talent in that band, I never felt the need to bring other people in to write with Duran. It bugged me.” He continued: “It wasn’t about getting my own way.”
Taylor has been living with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer since 2018 and also revealed around that time that a drug he is taking to treat it has extended his life by five years.