John Taylor Recalls His Guns N’ Roses and Sex Pistols Supergroup
Duran Duran bassist John Taylor looked back at the time he was a member of the ‘90s supergroup Neurotic Outsiders, saying the experience helped him deal with his newfound sobriety.
The lineup featured Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses and Steve Jones of Sex Pistols and had originally formed for a one-off show at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. Instead, they continued to perform for two years and released a self-titled album before a lack of record sales and the members’ main projects brought the project to an end.
“That was a blast,” Taylor told 99X Atlanta in a recent interview. “I’d just gotten sober and I wasn’t sure that I really was going to be able to do music, you know? And I got in with a rough crowd – one of them was in the Sex Pistols and two of them were in Guns N’ Roses!”
You can watch the interview below.
He noted that the Outsiders had planned to perform only one show as a fundraiser for a friend of Sorum’s who was fighting cancer. But when the band was asked, “Why don’t you guys come back and do Monday nights?,” the opportunity offered Taylor a return to his punk roots.
“I always tell kids, ‘When you’re starting out, try to get a residency,’” Taylor added. “When you’re playing the same stage, like every Monday for a month, every Friday for two months, you really get to work it in. You do a gig and then you’ve got seven days to reboot, [and] it keeps you moving forward. So I loved the idea of going back. ... And yes, we had these guests coming on and we were playing Pistols songs and Duran songs, and Iggy [Pop] sang with us, and Billy [Idol], and it was just fantastic. That was like the universe. For me, that was God in my life.
"At that moment in my life, I needed it to be simple. In Duran … we set the bar high for ourselves. With the Neurotics it was just, like, Steve would be like, ‘I’ve got this song – follow me!’ You just had to hold on for dear life!”