MUMBAI: British rock band Duran Duran's Roger Taylor says his late friend Princess Diana was an "ordinary and real" person.

The 55-year-old musician became close to the British royal because she was a fan of the band in the 1980s. He said that she would often refer to the media storm that followed her and led to her untimely death in 1997 as being "crazy", reports dailymail.co.uk.

“I spoke to Diana in private at times. I used to see her at a health club we both went to in Chelsea. She thought it was crazy that people with cameras wanted to follow her around taking her photo. She was a very real, very ordinary, person going through something extraordinary. Something similar to what we had been through,” Taylor said.

Diana also attended a Duran Duran concert that became the target of an IRA bomb plot.

Taylor said finding out about the planned attack on the show - at London's Dominion Theatre in July 1983 - was one of the "scariest moments" of his life.

“They wanted to kill Diana and Charles and everybody in the room. It was so shocking. We were only made aware of it years later, but it was very frightening,” he added.