"By the time of Live Aid (1985), though, the fun had fizzled away and I was apprehensive about seeing the rest of the group again. We were all starting to feel pretty frayed, one way or another. 
Simon Le Bon - whose two big passions at that time were sailing and his future wife, the model Yasmin Parvaneh - seemed bloated and distracted. Meanwhile, Roger Taylor, our drummer, had started to become agoraphobic. 
Roger was naturally a shy person and the pressure of the constant attention and travelling had become too much for him. He was going through a private hell. 
Nick Rhodes, our keyboard player, was locked in an unhappy marriage (he later divorced), and his finances were far from healthy due to his lavish lifestyle.
John Taylor, with whom I'd been touring, was in danger of slowly killing himself through drugs.
As for me, I'd come close to a nervous breakdown from the stresses of our crazy life and my own cocaine problem. I had also nearly lost my wife, Tracey - the band's hair stylist whom I'd married in 1982 - to severe post-natal depression. 
We hadn't all been together on the road since the previous year, and when we started playing it showed. Combine that with all the shouting matches and the icy silences - well, I just knew I had to get out. So I did.
[...]
John Taylor and I went back to touring with our breakaway group, The Power Station. Then, one day, I turned on the TV news, only to get a bizarre shock - '. . . a yacht belonging to Duran Duran singer Simon Le Bon has capsized in rough seas. The singer is believed to have been on board.' 
At first I was numb. Was Simon alive? Was he missing, or had he been rescued? A million questions were going through my head. 
The sea looked dangerous and stormy in the grainy television images showing Simon's upturned yacht, and I knew that nobody could survive for very long in water like that. 
John and I began to make plans to cancel that night's show. Hell, if Simon was dead, we'd cancel the whole tour and be on the first flight back to the UK. 
Fortunately, news eventually reached us that he had been rescued. But it was just another example of how our lifestyle threatened to destroy all of us. 
'You know, one of us is going to die,' I told John. 'What are you talking about?' he said.
'If we keep going like this we're going to die. It could be a drug thing, it could be an alcohol thing, a car crash or something else. How many more times does something bad have to happen before one of us goes all the way?' "

*Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor