When you burn the candle at both ends, pretty soon something has to give - and it happened in April 1984 in San Francisco.
I was called to John's room in the middle of the night, and everything - the bedding, furniture and walls - was drenched in blood. There was also a broken, bloodsmeared bottle of vodka on the floor. I couldn't get any sense out of John, but then I saw where all the blood was coming from. The soft underside of his foot was covered in a mass of cuts, which seemed to have shards of glass sticking out of them.
John was crying and screaming out in pain, but his eyes looked out of it and I don't think he was aware of what was happening to him. I kept thinking: 'Fuck, please don't let him bleed to death.'
The incident was down-played in the media, but John's foot was a real mess and I think he needed 42 stitches. Believe me, this was not a minor incident - taking cocaine, getting drunk and dancing on vodka bottles is not a good combination.
I was scared for John and what this would mean for him, but I was also scared of the implications it could have for everyone else in the band.
I knew John would be lucky to walk any time soon, let alone run up and down on stage - and we were due to perform the next day.
'We need to call in a Rock Doc,' said someone. A Rock Doc is the name we gave to friendly medics we could call upon if things got heavy and we wanted something dealt with quietly.
I knew this wasn't going to be easy: John was going to need a serious amount of morphine to kill the pain, but that would risk turning him into a zombie who'd be unable to perform.
The only solution was to fire him up at both ends.
The Rock Doc gave him huge amounts of morphine in the foot, and then John took pharmaceutical cocaine through the nose to keep him awake. And that was how we got through the gig. The doctor injected John between the toes and wrapped up his foot. Then it was sniff, sniff and on stage.
Forty minutes later, John was back in his room. 'Aaaggh!' he screamed as the bandages came off. Sniff, sniff. Wrap.
No lessons were learned from what happened to John and no one talked to him about it. In Duran Duran we dealt with external problems, but when it came to sorting out our personal troubles we didn't connect.
I wish I knew why that was but I don't have an answer; we just hailed from different directions when it came to communicating, so it was often easier to leave things unsaid.

*sometimes what you think it is NOT what it really is