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Andy Taylor left Duran Duran twice: first in 1986, to pursue a solo career on the back of The Power Station, the hard-rocking spin-off band he’d formed with Duran bassist John Taylor the previous year; then again in 2006 after a Spinal Tap-style bust-up over the group’s ‘new direction’ (collaborating with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland) and some funny business involving a US visa which he claims Duran’s management failed to renew.

Taylor grew up in a small fishing village near Whitley Bay. His mother walked out on the family on his first day at grammar school, leaving him to be brought up by his father and grandmother. Something of a guitar prodigy, he toured US army bases in Germany with a covers band before answering the ad that Nigel (aka John) Taylor and Nick Bates (aka Rhodes) had placed in Melody Maker. His audition took him to the Rum Runner, the sleazy-sounding club that was the centre of Birmingham’s New Romantic scene, then into the hearts of pubescent girls across the world.

Wild Boy is a likeable, capably written autobiography that lifts the few remaining lids on Duran’s ’80s excesses. Reading between the lines, however, Taylor has a few anger management issues (the phrase ‘I’m not proud of what I did next…’ recurs with alarming frequency), and you can certainly see how his no-nonsense gruffness and rockist instincts might not be to the taste of foppish conceptualiser Nick Rhodes, the target of his bitchiest jibes. Hilarious to learn that Rhodes used to carry all his worldly possessions in a plastic carrier bag (‘It would always be a “decent” carrier bag, maybe from Marks & Spencer’), only played the black keys on his keyboards and hated the ‘Rio’ video shoot because the ‘dreadful waves’ wrecked his Anthony Price suit. John O’Connell