The Class of 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony should have been a celebratory event, but it got off to a bittersweet start Saturday, when inductees Duran Duran — who’d been snubbed by the Hall for 17 years, and finally got in this year on their first nomination — announced that their original guitarist, Andy Taylor, was unable to join them onstage due to his stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer.
When the 2022 inductees were announced this past May, Andy — who played in Duran from 1980 to 1985 and from 2001 to 2006, as well as in the supergroup Power Station with Duran bassist John Taylor — had excitedly told the press that he fully intended to reunite with his former bandmates at the Hall’s 37th annual ceremony. Tragically, his health has since taken a turn for the worse.
After the new wave legends were introduced by Robert Downey Jr., they opened the Hall ceremony, with their current touring guitarist Dom Brown, with “Girls on Film,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and an especially emotional “Ordinary World.” John Taylor, frontman Simon Le Bon, drummer Roger Taylor, and keyboardist Nick Rhodes then approached the podium, with Le Bon first thanking guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, who played with the group from 1986 to 2001 and cowrote “Ordinary World,” for his “massive contribution to Duran Duran.”
In the excerpt Le Bon read at the ceremony, the 61-year-old guitarist expressed his disappointment over missing the ceremony, stressing, “Let there be no doubt I was stoked about the whole thing, even bought a new guitar with the essential whammy!”
Backstage in the press room after Duran Duran’s performance and speech, Le Bon spoke on behalf of the band, saying: “It is devastating to us to find out that a colleague — not a colleague, that’s the whole thing; a mate, a friend, one of our family — is not going to be around for very long. It is absolutely devastating. We love Andy dearly and I’m not going stand here and cry — I think that would be inappropriate — but that’s how I feel like. So, now we’ve got that [question] out of the way, can we not go back to that?”
Andy Taylor released a new solo single, “Man’s a Wolf to Man,” just last week. His full open letter explaining his absence from the Hall of Fame ceremony.
The 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony took place Saturday, Nov. 5, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Other inductees included Harry Belafonte, Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo, Eminem, Eurythmics, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Judas Priest, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, and Carly Simon.
