John Taylor (bass guitarist)
Nigel John Taylor (born 20 June 1960) is an English musician who is best known as the bass guitarist and co-founder of new wave band Duran Duran. Duran Duran were one of the most popular groups in the world during the 1980s due to their revolutionary music videos that played in heavy rotation in the early days of MTV. Taylor played with Duran Duran from its founding in 1978 until 1997, when he left to pursue a solo recording and film career. He recorded a dozen solo releases (albums, EPs, and video projects) through his company "Trust The Process" over the next four years, had a lead role in the movie Sugar Town, and made appearances in a half dozen other film projects. He rejoined Duran Duran for a reunion of the original five members of the group in 2001 and has remained with the group since.
Taylor was also a member of two supergroups: Power Station and Neurotic Outsiders.
History
John Taylor grew up in Hollywood, a suburb of Birmingham, England. As a child he attended Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic school and the Abbey High School, in Redditch, wore glasses (due to severe myopia, over -10 dioptres), enjoyed James Bond movies and the hobby of wargaming with hand-painted model soldiers. In his early teen years, he discovered music, choosing Roxy Music as his favourite band, and before long was collecting records and teaching himself to play piano. His first band was called Shock Treatment.
John Taylor
John Taylor, Johnny Taylor or similar may refer to:
Academic figures
The arts
Acting
John Taylor (manufacturer)
John I Taylor (1711–1775) of Bordesley Hall near Birmingham (then a small town in Warwickshire), was an English manufacturer and banker. He served as High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1756–7.
Origins
John I Taylor was the eldest son and heir of Jonathan Taylor (d.1733) of Bordesley by his wife Rebecca Kettle.
Career
Taylor became a cabinet maker in Birmingham. There he set up a factory in what is now Union Street to manufacturer "Brummagem toys", such as buttons, buckles, snuff boxes and jewellery boxes. He eventually employed 500 people and became one of Birmingham's leading industrialists. The output of buttons from his works was estimated at £800 per week. Taylor invested the profits of his business in local land and property, buying Sheldon Hall in 1752 and Moseley Hall and the manor of Yardley in 1768, and eventually owned about 2,000 acres. In 1765, in partnership with his neighbour, the Quaker iron merchant Sampson Lloyd II (1699-1779) (who in 1742 purchased as his country residence the estate of "Farm" within the manor of Bordesley), Taylor founded Taylor and Lloyd's Bank in Dale End, Birmingham, which eventually grew into Lloyds Banking Group, one of the largest banks in the United Kingdom.
John Taylor (Geordie songwriter)
John Taylor (1840–1891) was a 19th-century Dunston born songwriter and poet (whose material won many prizes) and an accomplished artist and engraver.
Early life
John Taylor was born in 1840 in Dunston, Gateshead, (which at the time was in County Durham but is now in Tyne and Wear).
John Taylor began adult life as a clerk at the Newcastle Central Station After several years he became impatient at not gaining, in his mind, sufficient promotion, and left to “better himself” as a traveller for a brewery.
Like many other short cuts this, in time, he found had its drawbacks, and possibly the slower progress of the railway might in the end have been better.
He was a prolific writer of songs and many won prizes in the competitions run by both John W Chater and Ward's Almanacs (Ward's Directory of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Adjacent Villages; Together with an Almanac, a Town and County Guide and a Commercial Advertiser).
It was to him Joe Wilson allegedly said whilst talking in the Adelaide Hotel, "Jack, ye can write a sang aboot as weel as me, but yor sangs divn't sing, an' mine dis."
