Gimme a Wristband is pleased to present our first guest post from loyal reader and Duranie, ‘Cat’. She loves John Taylor… a lot… and has been doing it well for a long time now. Here’s the story of how it all started.

John Taylor, snappy dresser and heart breaker.

No, I don’t have a rash… and no, I’m not running a fever.

Although I have been given looks over the years that seem to say that I should be certified.

It all started back in 1981, on a cold March evening, as I sat and watched Top Of The Pops. It was a tradition for me back then, in the days before MTV and twenty four hour TV. My routine never varied; finish homework, have my dinner, wait impatiently for some boring programme to finish, and then… Yellow Pearl would burst out of the speakers, multi-coloured vinyl singles swooping in and out of shot, as a distorted voice said the name of the show.

And then it was on with the music. If you were lucky, you got to see and hear some good artists; David Bowie, The Specials, Visage, Depeche Mode, Japan, Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army.

If not, you had to suffer crap like St. Winifred’s School Choir wittering on about how there was no one quite like grandma. Or Joe Dolce telling you to shadd uppa your face. Or worse still, The Tweets with The bloody Birdie Song. *shudders*

But on March 5th, 1981, my life changed. And so did I.

I changed from someone who had loved all types of bands, switching from liking ABBA, to loving Adam and the Ants.

But I saw Duran Duran on TOTP for the first of many times that night. And I went from just liking music, to being consumed by everything Duran Duran sang, did, wore and said. And while all of the band were extremely easy on the eyes, there was one young man that would be the love of my teenage life. He was dressed in black from head to foot; black shirt, and more importantly, black leather trousers. His hair was burgundy, and those eyes… my god.

Looking back, he made the bass guitar a very sexual instrument, but when you’re ten years old, you don’t think of that. You just focus on the physical aspects in front of you.

And boy, did I ever focus on them.

The room, as I recall, went tunnel vision, my eyes riveted to the vision in black, just to the right of the singer. The camera did pan around, as I discovered later, but back then, it didn’t.

Not as far as I could see, anyway.

That was it.

I was now totally, madly, head over heels in love with the bass player for Duran Duran.

John Taylor.

We all remember doing the same things with any and all John Taylor memorabilia back then.

We reserved the walls directly around our beds for posters and pictures of him. I recall that at one point, my walls were plastered with posters, and I still had to keep some in a box for safe keeping. I kept scrapbooks, trawling through any and all newspapers for the least little article about him.

And I know now, that I was not the only lovestruck fourteen year old who cried into her pillow when he announced that he was getting engaged to Janine Andrews. My heart was broken as I read in the newspapers about how much they loved each other.

Mind you, I wasn’t the only one who cheered when they split up, only for him to start seeing Virginia Hey. At least she got him a cameo in a programme, Timeslip.

The programme itself was awful, but hey… John was in it!

My Duranie friends and I had plagued our parents, begging them to let us stay up late enough to watch it. We sat inches away from the TV screens, ready to hit the record buttons on our VCRs, and squealed loudly when John’s face filled the screen.

My VHS copy of the tape died two years later, the tape worn away from the near constant rewinding.

I started practicing writing my name as, at fourteen years old, I just knew it would be someday.

Mrs. P. Taylor.

Don’t laugh, I’ll bet you did that too.

And then, the fateful day arrived when John stopped being just very gorgeous and cute.

He was now officially… sexy.

Oh yes. The hormones kicked in, and you started thinking about how his hips moved as he played his bass.

How it seemed as if he was grinding against it, a knowing smirk on his lips as he knew exactly what effect it would have on hormonal girls the world over.

You could stare at his pictures for hours, wondering what it would be like to not only have him kiss you, but throw you onto the bed and make mad, passionate love to you. You watched, drooling, as he stalked the stage clad in his trademark leather trousers, and wanted to peel them off.

For me, the summer of 1985 was when John wasn’t just gorgeous, he was now the man who invaded my dreams at night, who sneaked into my mind during the day, who was the catalyst for my sexual awakening.

For my mother’s generation, it was ‘Elvis The Pelvis’, banned from being shown on TV from the waist down.

For my mother in law’s generation, it was The Beatles. John, Paul, George and Ringo who made them scream until they cried, who sang “I’d love to turn you on”, but didn’t necessarily mean with acid.

For the girls of the seventies, it was David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Bryan Ferry.

But for those of us who were teenagers back then, our idol, our very own sex god was John Taylor. He was the yardstick against which all others were measured, and frequently came up short.

However, as with all good things, for me, they came to an end.

For almost twenty years.

Duran Duran slipped from my radar, my musical tastes now moving onto harder, rockier music. You could say that Power Station influenced me. I still squealed when I heard Duran’s music, still felt the old, familiar rush of hormones when I saw John, but they weren’t high on my list anymore.

Christmas Eve, 1991. John Taylor finally got married to Amanda De Cadenet. He was 31, she was 19 and very pregnant.

The following week, the pictures appeared in Hello! magazine. It is a moment in time that is imprinted in my brain, even if I wasn’t as rabid a fan as I was five years before.

John was wearing a black jacket, and a truly hideous floral type shirt. She (I still can’t bring myself to say her name) was wearing a black dress and a pink jacket. And they were holding hands.

I can remember how I’d picked up the magazine, slack jawed in stunned horror. I had always thought he would have married the beautiful girl he’d been with for four years, Renee Toft Simonsen. Instead, he’d married a child, whose sole claim to fame had been presenting a TV show called The Word, their idea of entertainment being a drunk man in his twenties making out with an elderly woman.

To the other people in the shop, I probably looked like I was catching flies. Inside, my heart broke, my inner teeny sobbing hysterically into her pillow. I placed the magazine back onto the shelf, and left.

The intervening fourteen years saw me growing up fast. I became a single mother to a son, and raised him on my own until he was four. I met my long time partner, and gave birth to two more children, a girl and another boy. Nevertheless, my love for Duran and John manifested itself in my baby boy’s name; Taylor.

Flash forward to 2005.

The stars must have been aligned, or someone was telling me to pay close attention.

The first sign was an online discussion I had with a friend who’d been a Duranie at the same time I was. He declared that Simon Le Bon was the sexiest member of Duran, something I pointedly disagreed with. We argued and fought over it. In the end we agreed to disagree, but I was firmly convinced of the truth.

Everyone knew that John was the sexiest member, right?

Another online discussion, another admission that my favourite Duran was John. This time, the bug has hit me, and I google John’s name. And I not only discover that John has his own website, but – miracle of miracles! – Duran are back together!

And so I find myself back in love with the band, and still as obsessed with John as I ever was. The battles he has fought with his addictions have only made me admire him more, the tales told by those lucky enough to have met him make me realise that he is truly a beautiful man.

There are benefits this time around, thanks to the internet.

I find myself surrounded by women, and girls who were still in diapers the first time around, and we have bonded (excuse the bad pun).  We share tales of our children singing along to the new material, and of which member they like. We make plans to keep in touch, to share our vast libraries of audio and video with each other.

But mention John Taylor’s name, or post his picture up on your chosen forum, and there will be grown women still swooning over him, just like they did twenty five years ago.

My name is Cat, and I am proud to say that I have been down with the sickness.

And if there’s a cure, don’t bother giving it to me.