Blue Magazine (Australia) Issue #66
Darren Hayes
By Myles Wearring
January 2007

Thanks to Charlotte for scanning the article from the Magazine and also for typing it up! (The first image is a screen print from Blue's website and the other 3 are scans from the paper copy of the magazine)

Darren Hayes
Darren Hayes' sexuality was always an open secret – even to himself. All that has changed since he married his boyfriend last June. Hayes talks to Myles Wearring about coming out, leaving his record label, and recording an ambitious new album.

It may be 11pm but Darren Hayes is still hard at work. He has just returned to his London home after a day in the studio, where he’s recording his upcoming album, and now the Brisbane-born singer is on the phone to Australia for this interview to promote two new DVDs. The once very private star is also happy to talk about struggling with his sexuality, past boyfriends, his violent upbringing and his recent civil partnership, or marriage, to his partner of two years, Richard Cullen. (It’s Hayes’ second marriage the first was to a woman, his university sweetheart Colby Taylor, in 1995. They separated in 1999.)
The first DVD, the documentary Too Close For Comfort, casts Hayes in a rather unflattering light as it candidly looks behind the scenes on his first solo tour in 2002 following the demise of his wildly successful pop group, Savage Garden. The second DVD is a film of his 2006 concert at the Sydney Opera House, A Big Night is with Darren Hayes.

Blue+ In Too Close For Comfort you come across as somewhat angry and obnoxious, exhibiting behaviour you yourself described as diva-like. Will your fans be shocked by what they see?
DARREN HAYES You know, I thought people would be. I think I've had a reputation for being quite a nice chap and what's maybe shocking to the casual observer is I'm all those things you said. I'm not always nice because I'm: a) human and b) was going through a really tough time, not just on stage but off stage. It was a really turbulent period in my life.
But I think, to be honest, my fan base are pretty die hard and loyal and the people who turn up to a Darren Hayes show these days haven't really been scared off by much. They've been through the whole process with me, from the most palatable, take-home-to-your-mum kind of popstar, to the card-carrying homosexual that I am today. So I think most of my fans really appreciated the honesty.

You explained your bad behaviour was partly due to your solo career not going as well as you’d hoped, and you've hinted it was also due to you coming to terms with you sexuality. Was it these tings combines that made you unhappy?
Yeah, mostly it was just that I wasn't a happy person. I had really turned myself into a popstar to put my emotional development on hold. I mean if I look back on my life, now I'm 34 and when I was 24 I was famous and I looked like someone else, I had jet black hair, I was one part of a really successful band. I was running away from an identity in many ways. I was a child of a violent alcoholic upbringing, I was a kid who had suspicions he was probably gay but didn't want to deal with it, so I literally just didn't.
When I was at the peak of my fame there were always questions about my sexuality and I didn't even know the answer to it. I literally didn’t want to be gay. So there's all that going on on top of the fact… well, it wasn't as if I was disappointed in the album sales but I was a disappointment to my record company [Sony/Columbia].

Did they express that to you?
Not in so many words, but there was this very casual and long-distance withdrawal that happened, where suddenly I'd gone from selling 20 million records to selling a couple of million records, which today would be considered a smashing success, But because of the path I'd trod with Savage Garden it was definitely considered a disappointment, and I think a lot of my behaviour back then was really a reaction to trying to keep up appearances to everybody. Trying to pretend I was happy and confident in myself when I wasn't. I was so lost. It was a very trying period in my life.

You've touched on the fact your father was an abusive alcoholic. Do you still have a relationship with him?
Please, if you print he was an abusive alcoholic, also print he is reformed and my hero. It was very painful for my family when I spoke about that, but me speaking about that and coming to terms with that had a lot to do with me coming to terms with who I was and coming out. It was probably the catalyst for me being a performer. Growing up the way I did made me create this dream world, this fantasy world. It made me want to grow up and reinvent myself. To my dad's credit he went cold turkey. He stopped drinking one day and he became the gentle, beautiful man that he is today. But it was very, very hard.

Your managers didn't want the documentary released because it did show this darker side to you. What convinced you to release it in the end?
So many things. I think the biggest thing was probably my relationship. When I met Richard I became a much braver person. I think getting out of my record deal with Sony, getting married, coming out, all of those things are the end result of a period of really deep questioning in my life about what was making me happy and what wasn't. And one of the biggest things was taking back control of my career.
In the last 12 months I decided to go on tour and in English I played to 30,000 people, I sold out every show. I cam home to Australia and played the first two shows at the Sydney Opera House. I financed both of these films, I started the recording of a new record. And I did all of these things on my own without a manager, without a record company behind me and it made me feel the way I did when I was trying to get a record deal when I was a young kid just dreaming about my future. So I guess in some ways it's all sort of come full circle.

You left your record label just a couple of days before you publicly came out. Did they drop you?
No, it wasn't related. The last few years it's been no secret that I wanted to get out of my deal. I think everyone at the record company knew. I think if they asked me for new record I would have taken them to court. My last really official obligation was new songs for the Savage Garden best of and that was a huge relief. When things were great they were great. To be honest, all of the people I loved were fired. So none of the people I'd worked with, who had loved and supported me, are at the company anymore anyway. And there was never a problem with me being gay. Everyone knew I was gay, certainly in the last three or four years. It was just timing. It was literally just a coincidence.

You've said it wasn't your decision to end Savage Garden. If you had your way would the group still be together today?
Oh god no. No, no, no. At the time, of course, I would have gone on forever. But no, my god, I just love my life and love the music I make today. I’ve grown up so much. I think the music I make is probably more sophisticated that the music we used to make. And I don't know whether Daniel [Jones] and I would have been able to do that together, but I dare say not.
I think what was beautiful about our music and our song writing was out innocence and we were both growing up together and there was an awkwardness to it and a chemistry that I'm sure was very special. The songs that we wrote I still marvel at their simplicity. I love those songs. Those songs are the reason you're talking to me today. If my career began with my solo career onwards, I would never have made a cent.

You said it wasn't until late in your life you realised you were gay. How old were you?
You know what, I totally respect you asking, but the autopsy of my coming [out] gay is definitely something I'll... maybe I'll put it in a book. I think it's kind of private. The most specific I want to be about it is that for me, maybe it was the lack of appropriate role models. Maybe it was being a Queensland boy, coming from the family I came from, it wasn't really an option for me.
I will say that I'm a very monogamous person. I love the fact I'm married because I was to grow old with Richard. I hope we stay together forever and we will. I think what I struggled a lot with about being gay was that I wanted very traditional things in my life. I wanted to be a dad one day, I wanted to have a house and the white picket fence and all those things, and maybe so much so that I pushed that to the back of my mind where I really denied it.
Before I met Richard I don't think I would've come out because I didn't really have a strong identity and I didn't really know who I was as a person. I definitely think the older I got and the more examples I saw of successful relationships, both gay and straight, I realised there was a place for me. maybe if I'd had somebody who had led the way and I looked up to, maybe I wouldn't have struggled so much.

Were you ever afraid the media was going to out you?
When I realised I was gay I told every single person in my life, I just didn't put out a press release. And maybe naively I kind of thought some of my stage costumes gave it away. There was one tour where I was wearing a lycra bodysuit, for god's sake. I just thought it was kind of obvious. I never lied about my sexuality. When people asked me if I was gay I would say, "Honestly, I'd rather be a blank canvas." I never said no and I never had a fake girlfriend. I think once, during the first boyfriend I had, someone tried to sell a story and we handled it brilliantly. My publicist at the time laughed about it, and someone rang up a record company executive and asked for a comment and he was like, "have you seen him live? Have you been living under a rock?"
When it got to the point where journalists would say, "How come you don't come out?" that's when I turned to Richard and said, "OK, this is becoming a bit of a problem." I didn't want my fans to think I was ashamed of it so I decided after about a month [of marriage] to post a blog about it, and that was that.

Can you tell us about your wedding day?
Our wedding day was the most emotional, incredible, extravagant, beautiful thing ever. When people talk about their wedding day being the happiest day of their lives I used to think fuck off, whatever. But you know what? It was the happiest day of my life. I had all my friends and family there, my siblings and nieces and nephews. I held my mum’s hand and I held Richard’s hand when we exchanged our vows, and it was a very empowering moment to stand up in front of the people you love and tell them you plan to be with this person forever.

What is it you love about Richard?
I love that he's my equal. Up until Richard, every boyfriend or gay relationship that I had, if I'm really honest, was always me finding somebody who was in some way my inferior, in that I was always protecting myself. I was always with somebody who either wasn't available, or somebody who didn't treat me well. I was always trying to compensate for things that were missing in my life, so I would choose people who would never make me feel good about myself.
Richard is as smart as me and is as warm as me and as generous as me, and he teaches me things, he’s a really intelligent person. The best thing about him is he's fucking hilarious. He has a great sense of humour and he's somebody whose opinion I respect.

You recently talked about adopting kids.
That was so taken out of context. I absolutely want to be a parent one day, but I don't plan to any time soon. We would adopt if and when we wanted to. I would put music on hold, I'd want to spend years with my kid. At the moment Richard and I have a relationship where we both work in the arts – he's an animator, he does a lot of visuals for music tours and things like that – and here we are at 11 o'clock at night and we're in our home office both working. When I'm ready to put that on hold for a while I will definitely adopt a kid, but no time soon.

What can you tell us about your new album?
I'm probably three quarters of the way through the recording process. It's a double album, it could be anywhere from 18 to 26 songs.
Most of it is based around the sound of a Fairlight synthesiser, which is a one of the first samplers and the centrepiece of records by Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel in the early ‘80s. It's a modern record but I've used that instrument as a kind of starting point for all of the sounds. I was writing for a lot of the time last year and kept stockpiling the songs. The truth is I wasn't entirely sure of how I wanted my next record to sound, so songs kept piling up. Then a pattern started to emerge and I thought there’s two very distinct directions that I'm taking, and rather than choose one I decided to make my opus and do something really ambitious.

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