Attitude Magazine (UK)
Darren Hayes - I owe my coming out to Michael Jackson
July/August 2007 Issue

(Thanks so much to Laurie and Geo for these scans. And a HUGE thanks to Geo for typing the article up for us.)

Ex Savage Gardener is back with his most self-revelatory album yet. He tells of the events that inspired him and his momentus decision to come out.

Until one fateful and in many ways astonishing day in 2003 the pop star Darren Hayes had had a clean run at promoting his music. As the singer in Australian pop duo Savage Garden and the star of one successful solo album, Spin, Darren had previously enjoyed an astronomical level of success (total career sales 25 million+). He is still Australia’s third most popular musical export of all time, after INXS and Kylie Minogue.
But Savage Garden operated in a different milieu to their cooler antipodean brethren. It would not be unfair to say that Darren Hayes defined the very notion of the transatlantic musical middle-of-the-road for the period between 1997 and 2001. Darren was a housewife’s choice of the mumsiest vintage. Your lovely Auntie Lil probably still has a soft spot for him for his output at this time.
There was something Darren wasn't telling the adoring knickers-throwing female fan-base that listened to his music in a similar manner to which they might listen to a sympathetic hairdresser. For the duration of his big mainstream years, there was something of the modern Barry Manilow/Cliff Richard about him. Was he or wasn't he? Gay, like. And, furthermore, did it really matter? After all, Darren was just a nice bloke who sang pretty and popular songs, largely about being unloved, unlovable and caught in all manner of unrequited love kerfuffles.
The titles of his most popular songs said it all really – Truly madly deeply, Insatiable, I knew I loved you, I want you. There is even a song tucked away in his back catalogue – to this day a hardcore fan favourite – called Unlovable.
At his commercial peak, in terms of simple, bold, high street pop sentiment, Darren was both a master of craft and delivery. Even now, he says he will “Defend anyone over their ability to write a great pop song”. Lofty critics hated Savage Garden, obviously, but the people who make up the bread and butter of the core international pop audience recognised a rare authenticity to his work. Even when his heart was muddled, as it was often, he could not fail to sing from the bottom of it.
So what was the fateful day that turned this daytime TV pop dream into a temporary nightmare? The day that he agreed to be interviewed for Channel 4’s irreverent music magazine show. Pop world. “Ah, Pop World”, muses the singer now, in his Nottingham Hill kitchen, one eyebrow ever so slightly arching at the memory. There are some things that you never get to see on TV. That must, be necessity, be left out in the edit.
“Up until that day with that presenter”, he explains, referring to its wry, curly anchorman Simon Amstell, “not one journalist has asked me ‘are you gay?’ I justified my stance by saying to myself I'm not lying because I've never been asked the question directly. I took pains to neutralise my personal pronouns. When I was asked in interviews what girls I liked I'd say ‘well, I like people who are dot, dot, dot…’ I felt that through my lyrics, my outfits and my hairstyles I had pretty much rented a bog billboard that said ‘I am gay’ and that no-one had really got it.”
Then Amstell entered Darrenland. The encounter would prove to be an explosive episode. Let Darren pick up the tale. “I was promoting (his last solo record) The Tension and the Spark. The record was largely a diary of my time in therapy. I had undergone two years of it and was on anti-depressants. That was the headspace I was in. So I sat on Simon’s couch and we were in the middle of the interview and he said ‘so, when are you going to come out then?’”
He visibly bristles at the memory of it. “I said ‘Excuse me?’ and he said ‘well, you're obviously gay, but why won't you come out?’ My reaction was so violent. Rather than deny it I said ‘Oh, you want to talk about my sex life, do you?’ He blinked and I said ‘Yeah, I like to fuck, actually. I'm probably more of a top and if you lay on your back I'll show you how I like to fuck.’” This almost certainly was not the response the presenter of a show aimed predominantly at the early teens was expecting. Neither was it one Darren had prepared in his head for the inevitable day that it would come to haunt him.
“I just remember that the world stopped. The director and producer came running over and where like ‘Whoah!’ Somebody was up in my face saying ‘are you OK?’ and I just remember the whole thing becoming a bit of a blur”. His emotional response to the question was clearer. “I was seething.”
Why specifically? Didn't it come as some sort of relief? “No. I was seething because he is a gay man and I felt like I had been humiliated and hurt and especially from another gay man, I thought that was incredibly unfair. A record company person came over and said ‘look, we'll cut all this out and just continue the interview’ and I looked at Simon and he looked at me and said ‘sorry about that. Do you want to continue?’ I was cold and icy. I didn't react. I was robotic. I said ‘Yes, I'm fine.’ And I was seething. It continued as if he'd never said it.”
An edited version of the item ran on the show. “And if you look at it on you tube now you'd have no idea that the minute after it finished I said to everyone on the floor ‘Can I ask a question? Does anyone else think that what just happened there was really horrible?’ There where a few mumbled apologies and nodded heads and I said ‘Look, I'm a gay man. I have no problem admitting that I am a gay man and everyone in my life knows I am a gay man. I've just never held a press conference about it.’” Following his Wagnerian outburst, Darren got up off the couch, walked out into a waiting van, where the rest of his band were visibly, tensely waiting for him “and I broke down. I sat in the back of the car, curled up like a baby and cried.”
I ask Darren what he would have done if Amstell had done the reasonable thing and forewarned him that he was going to ask about his sexuality rather than trying to get a cheap rise out of it?
“I would have said politely and firmly that I completely understand that some people want to know about my private life but I hope that you can respect the fact that I am not comfortable talking about it. I would've given the answer that all obviously gay men in the public eye give when they aren't ready, emotionally or mentally, to come out to a mass audience. My take on it is that there is a huge difference between lying about your sexuality and not wanting to talk about it. ‘I don't was to talk about it’ means ‘I'm not ready to talk about it.’ When somebody says they aren't ready to talk about their sexuality it is a confession that they are gay. We shouldn't punish people for that.”
There is, of course, another legitimate argument that by avoiding the admission and not saying those three little words, Darren was associating homosexuality with a tacit sense of shame.
“You're absolutely right. That is exactly what you are doing by not saying it. But it is a sensitive thing. In a situation like this you can't be responsible for the gay world. My coming out was a deeply painful psychological progress, as a lot of people’s is. My admission to myself that I was gay took years to reconcile. I was suicidal over it. You don't turn to anti-depressants because you have a flop record. It was because I was mourning the loss of a life that I thought I was entitled to, that I'd never had as a child. I wanted the girl and kids and the white picket fence. It took me so long to admit to myself that that wasn’t going to happen. Coming out is such a fragile process. To suddenly give this precious part of myself to a complete stranger – to a fellow gay man – and for him to squash it completely in front of a room full of strangers was a really painful thing.”
This particularly cloudy episode has a silver lining. “I had to come out after that,” he says before carefully adjudicating why exactly it was that he had to come out. “I couldn't let any other complete stranger have that power to rubbish me in the public again. If it taught me one thing it was that I was not going to let somebody who had never met me make me and everything I am not legitimate. My love for music and performing was too strong. I couldn't allow my sexuality to be this flimsy carpet underneath me that could be ripped out at a moment’s notice.”
Darren Hayes has not bumped into Simon Amstell since. “No. But if I did, I'm sure I'd tell him the truth.”
Which is?
“That I thought he was a total prick.”

Page 2

In The middle of last year, Darren Hayes promoted a major swell of fan sentiment on his website when he declared that he was not only gay, but a full civil partnershipped-up gay to his partner of two years, a funny and handsome animator from Nottingham called Richard. Darren posted a message on his site – he is almost Pete Doherty-ish in his commitment to breaking down the barriers between artist and audience – took the red-eye from Bangkok, where he had just finished a world tour, and worried all the way back about the impending response.
The housewives reacted with predictable delight. Is there anything a British housewife likes more than a nice guy who finds happiness? Yet the whole episode came as a shock to the pop star who had lived for a decade under the dubious spell of record company warnings of commercial suicide that may accompany a mainstream outing.
But the mainstream was not where Darren’s story was going to end. In some ways his outing is a story of personal survival, but in others it is about artistic necessity. The Tension and the Spark had alerted a more literate pop audience to Darren’s evident talents, previously coddled in the cosiness of the ironically named Savage Garden. This was something that was too irresistible for him not to capitalize on. If he was to become the open and expressive soul that had been discreetly hidden behind blissfully pleasant, anodyne artifice of Savage Garden, he needed to cut his own demons loose.
In the interviewing years of between Spin and The Tension and the Spark, Darren had not only found love but moved on in incremental artistic steps. On the back of his relative flop of his last record (200,000 international sales as opposed to Spin’s 2 million), he was faced with a personal conundrum. He knew that there was some talk as his former record company of his being dropped. Sessions with hit making songwriters The Matrix and Rob Davis had failed to recoup anything to the singer’s true tastes. In the event, he afforded himself the opportunity of breaking out of his contract and taking the independent route. For someone incubated at the top tier of the record industry, this was bravery verging on lunacy. But Darren Hayes needed to come out of his music closet, too.
He began fashioning his own record, to his own taste, with his own agenda, to be released eventually on his own label, unencumbered by major label histrionics and strait-jackets. As the author of 25 million sales during his career, it was financially viable option to make an album in the image of himself, to promote it with purity and honesty and to basically bugger the consequences.
Which is where we come in, really. This Delicate thing we've made is a kaleidoscopic pop opus of monolithic proportions. In terms of audience perception, it will confuse everyone. Which is partially its very point. Darren’s stellar pop chops remain at its centre but the record veers off in every kind of wild tangent imaginable, from pure air-punching pop rock ballast (On the verge of something wonderful) to intricate, Air-ish spook ballads (The only one) whilst keeping one ear permanently cocked for the killer chorus. Its musical centrepiece, the multilayered pop symphony How to Build a Time Machine is everything you wanted from Madonna’s misfiring Mirwais years and is neatly offset by the audacious white funk of Me, Myself and (i). He’s included one of those familiar, forlorn ballads that seem to come to him in his sleep, I Just Want You To Love Me, but amidst chrome plated 80’s power pop (Casey) and what sounds like the missing track from Cher’s Believe album (listen all you people) it is the exception, not the rule. Sometimes his influences are worn clearly on their sleeves (Prince on Bombs up In My Face, Kate Bush on his almost plagiaristic homage, Future Holds A Lion’s Heart, even a cheeky Kylie steal at the tether end of Casey) and sometimes they are subtler, as one the dutiful ballad Who Would Have Thought, a song that either Bedingfield would give a limb to record at this stage in their careers. Look if you like pop music, you're in for a labyrinthine ride here.
Lyrically, it is a loose concept record, about travelling back in time to his childhood, to a place where he last remembered happiness. To a time when his mother let his abusive father and decamped the Hayes clan to a Brisbane trailer park. Imagine a really heart-rending Home and Away story-line and then flesh it out with proper, broken human beings. You're a quarter of the way there.

All This musical and lyrical redemption has got Darren Hayes to very nearly the place he should have been when he started out as a pop-star, as a shy, determined and gifted emerging gay boy in his early twenties. In many ways, he has lived his career in reverse. It is very rare a breed of proper pop star who finds their proper pop voice in their mid 30s.
Not only does Darren Hayes sound like a different kind of pop star now, he looks and seems like one, too. He is gentle and has no defensiveness but there is a rippling camp undertone to his humour. Like all therapised people, he has a steely resolve about his honesty and he comes replete with an occasional ‘too much information’ moment. But he’s himself. The old middlebrow rock cliché uniforms of shades and overdyed hair that use to scream ‘I'm a pop star, me! Honest!’ have been reined in and given away to a gentlemanly crop and end Metropolitan wardrobe. The surface only began a window to the soul, a further point should be made. For the first time in his life, you suspect, Darren Hayes is comfortable in his own skin.

Is this the best record you've made?
Of course. I think it is. It isn't a competitive thing, but in all the stabs I've had at making a good record, this one is the most informed. Emotionally, in terms of craft, in terms of feeling in command of my limitations and really embracing what’s good about me, in terms of loving of hating what it is to be me and embracing the whole lot. Yeah, it’s the best. It’s the only record I could have made at this moment.

You can't stop the pop, can you?
No, I can't. And I'm not ashamed of that, either.

There is a heavy 80’s feeling to the record. Is that because you consider the 80s to be the last time that pop music had real meaning beyond its marketing?
Hmm. I think my attachment to the 80s and its music has got a lot to do with my life and childhood at that time being quite horrific and so my imagination was vibrant. So was music and so was fashion so it all just chimed together for me to become this release. It was an escape. Pop stars like Madonna and Kate Bush and Prince were so ideas driven. The 90s was quite cold and beige and white and minimalist time for music. Maybe the 80s was the last time that music represented an escape in such a vibrant way. If you look at celebrities back then you could actually perpetuate the myth that you where in the promo shot. There was no extreme electronic media. It was the days before the paparazzi. There was a massive gulf between the artist and the audience which, used in a positive way, could be a beautiful thing because there was a pedestal and role model element to pop music. I own my coming out to Michael Jackson, basically. He came from a similar upbringing and family to mine, he was a sensitive young thing with a stern and violent father who forced himself down a creative avenue as a means of escape. I connected to that gorgeous, wonderful creature that he was. Prince did the same thing. There was a sexuality to his clothing and make up and the way his records were presented that as a child was amazing. There’s another thing going on here. And that is until Richard, and it makes me sad to admit this, honestly the 80s were the last time I was really happy.

How was it when you eventually came out?
God, it was so much more emotional that I thought it would be. I remember sitting on the floor in this exact room. I'd flown back from a show in Bangkok where I'd announced on my Blog that I'd had a civil partnership with Richard and I had no idea how it would be received. Because of the time difference it took two days for me to sit down with the responses on bulletin boards and I remember crying and feeling slightly ashamed that I'd underestimated my audience.

Why then, though?
All the experiences I'd had in love and with career were all quiet desperate and earnest need to fill this hole or pretend to be something slightly different than I was. There was something about holding my stomach in that bit too much on a photo-shoot or dying my hair so far away from my natural colour or just pretending to know something a bit more about a subject than I did on a date. That was the 90s for me. I was always slightly attempting to change myself in order for someone to love me. When all I wanted, which is what I found in Richard, was somebody to love me for the person that I was. The same thing happened with the music. It’s just about learning to be myself.

Are you the gay Robbie Williams?
(laughs) How so?

Experiencing that high level of success within the strait-jacket of a record company endorsed band and then breaking free to do your own thing and hand the consequences?
I adore Robbie Williams. Even just saying his name makes my heart give a little jump. I don't really listen to his records and I'm sure he doesn't listen to mine but I totally relate to him as a person.

Because he’s everybody’s pain.
He is. His vices have been more tangible than mine but my addictions were abusive relationships and still are to a certain extent food and drama. I've never even thought about this.

Final Page

Why were the Savage Garden years tinged with so much personal sadness?
Because it was all about escapism in a fraudulent way. I was pretending to be an extrovert when in fact I was an introvert. Getting on stage to this day still gives me an almost nauseating feeling and I have to become someone else. I became a pop star because I knew I had to become something extraordinary to escape where I was and the choices I would have been given in the town I grew up in and with the family I had and the peers that I had.

When did you know you where gay?
The extraordinary thing about being gay is that people notice it before you do. But the odds were against us all to survive growing up in the 80s. You see kids who are 16 now and they can tick a box on myspace and it’s done and thank God, because there was such extreme oppression then. The moment that I realised I was gay which was when I saw Steven Carrington on Dynasty. (Laughs) He had entrapped a straight man and there were all sorts of close ups and recriminations and my mother would make this tsk tsk tsk sound and I just filed it away for as long as I could after that. The knot in my stomach said ‘that’s me. I'm the bad one.’ So the 90s for me and my success were really trying to erase that for myself.

Who was the first gay man you ever met?
Okay, another time pivotal moment I realised I was gay was meeting (Kylie’s long-term collaborator) William Baker. It was on a photo shoot. I was just so captivated by this beautiful young thing who breezed into my life and dressed me in junior Gautier and was teaching me about fashion in such an overtly, beautiful gay way. I think he was actually hitting on me and I remember absolutely loving it. Being so enamoured with him. He represented this very gentle hand that tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘do you think you've missed something here?’ It wasn't aggressive, he was just unlocking something. There were atoms in my body that where glowing and spinning, thinking, this is who I am, but I resisted it and was quite miserable about it. But then realisation about my whole career as a big commercial pop artist was fed thought self-hatred.

How much of this had been infected by your relationship with your father?
A lot. I learnt thought therapy that the single biggest thing about my depression was not being gay but about my father. That has been the thing that drove me in my past and that’s been the ting that most of my songs have been about. In this record I've said ‘maybe I am too hard on you’ but talking about my childhood caused a lot of pain in my family. There’s a sadness that I have talked about it. And these things are all tied up together. It was when I came out that I really addressed my relationship with him. He was really the kindest of everyone when I came out. He felt that it was his fault and it was my opportunity to tell him how I felt as a child. So I did. I told him I couldn't remember a single happy memory. Me coming out was just this watershed of emotion and it wasn't until years later that we sat down and had that conversation.

How’s your relationship with him now?
It’s a very obligatory and strained thing. I care for him and its very hard to see his reaction to me talking about our relationship because he take it in a very ashamed way. He wishes that I never spoke about him but in many ways he’s a hero to me because he’s paid a lot through the choices he made in his life. He’s sober. He changed. I always underline that. Having said that, it was horrific. The violence that I saw as a child was horrific.

How was your personal coming out, to yourself?
I came out but I was miserable. That was that. I was gay but didn't like what that was. I would go into a bar and even on the most superficial level, I'd just hate the music. Then add the one night stands in and, I mean, I'm human. I like sex just as much as everybody does. But I'd walk away from these one night stands and just feel hideous because all I ever wanted to feel was loved. So I went and sat on this therapist’s couch and explained my life very coldly and he was mortified at how analytical I was about it all. I'd reduced my childhood to a thirty second sound-bite. But it was incredible to have years of really sitting down and dealing with it. One of the things I realised is that one of the most important things that children can have is a feeling of safety and I never had that. Little things, like a birthday, were ruined by domestic fighting. Oh, there goes the birthday cake flying across the room. All these things play out in quite melodramatic slow motion montages in my mind and they all revolve around sadness, violence and blood. It was never directed at me but I always witness to it.

The worst thing that a son can ever see is their mother upset. You'd rather take it yourself.
We tried to. The reason I had such a great relationship with my sister was that she was breaking hockey sticks over his legs. We were jumping into cars and whacking my mum away to safety as children. What’s amazing about dad is that mum left him and we lived in a caravan park for 6 months and ironically those 6 months are in the 80s and when The Empire Strikes Back came out and Double Fantasy was on the radio and I just remember immersing myself completely in film and music and fashion and pop and they where the happiest six months of my life.

Why talk about this stuff now?
I guess there are all sorts of reasons not to talk about it openly but that’s how abuse perpetuates. It’s a very real thing.

What kind of pop star is Darren Hayes?
I'm not sure. There’s been a bit of a fear in me having to accept that I'm not Justin Timberlake. I think there was a part of me that thought three years ago that I was a contender for that role. Whatever that machine is that conspires to make it big, mainstream, male superstar, I think I wanted it. Letting go of that and realising what it is I do is probably a bit more interesting to me than that. But even if I could dance as fantastically as Justin can dance or I was as gorgeous as Enrique or I had whatever it is that I project onto these male superstars I kind of realised with this record was that I didn't want it.

Are you comfortable with yourself?
Yeah. I've become much more myself on stage now. I act and look and speak like the person that my friends know. I still look at people like Madonna now and see this impenetrable and incredible focused person that hits every single mark with their choreography and her energy and her punctuation and the way she diets and exercises are so regimented. I sort of applied that to my whole life, to my career, to the way I was on stage, to edit down everything. To make it impenetrable and to hide my weaknesses to become stronger.
But you're not that person.
No, I'm not

Is Madonna?
I adore Madonna, of course. But the moral dilemma I have from watching Madonna and then watching something like The Pussycat Dolls is that their sexuality is almost a little bit frightening. She sets up the premise that she is the master. When she got on a pole on her last tour it kind of worked because she wasn't the object of anyone’s desire.

She’s auto-erotic. Everything’s there to service her.
Yes, I guess.

It’s why that song She’s Madonna doesn't work. The lyric ‘what man on earth wouldn't wanna’ is a total misfire. It’s like ‘what man on earth would?’ Most straight men would have sex with Cher before Madonna. At least it'd be fun.
When Madonna was in her leotard, I mean, I'm like most gay men. I look at the hair first and if that’s pretty I'm like ‘wow, she’s beautiful!’ but I did ask a lot of straight men if they found it attractive and the general consensus seemed to be not. I wonder why as gay men we like it?

Because we love the idea of hot straight men being used as a vibrator. It’s completely disempowering to them. It’s very Victoria Beckham.
These amazing women that aren't the most attractive in the playground get these majorly, seriously hot boyfriends.
So maybe they secretly get to do those straight men what all gay men would like to do?

Do you think defining the behaviour of gay men is not how they relate to women but to straight men?
All the straight men I relate to – like (his manager) Boyd – are all really comfortable with my homosexuality. It doesn't bother them. I wish I had that relationship with my brother. I love straight men having a connection to me because there is no complication about them being turned on by it. It’s actually just because there is a connection.

And you feel approved of it in some ways?
(Laughing) Yes, you do.

Do you owe your awakenings in your 30s to you music or to your therapist?
Both. And to Richard, of course, who saved me in so many respects. Look, the important thing here is that I can be living and breathing proof that there is a happily ever after. You can be gay and be a pop star and be rich and have a cute boyfriend and a nice house and a dog and you can survive the upbringing and find redemption. You know, it isn't a Hollywood movie and sometimes things don't work out entirely as you wish they would. But the dust settles on everything eventually.

'On the verge of something wonderful' is out now followed by the album 'this delicate thing we've made' on 20 August on powered sugar records

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