Sunday Life (Sun-Herald) (AU)
July 8, 2007 Issue
Delicate Balance
By Jessica Pressler

Thanks to Lynne fo these scans and thanks to Megan for typing up the text!

Sunday Life
On the cover...Regrets? He's had a few: Darren Hayes comes in from the cold.

"Delicate Balance"
Jessica Pressler

As one half of Australian pop group Savage Garden, Darren Hayes flourished as a songwriter and a star. Then came the break-ups -- of the band, his marriage... Eight years on, London-based Hayes is once again poised to enjoy life, and love.

Halfway through the interview with XM Satellite Radio in New York, Darren Hayes shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but can anyone else hear that?" No one can. "It's Justin Timberlake!" Hayes launches into a spot-on imitation of the singer's falsetto. "It ain't no lie. Baby, bye-bye-byyyyyeee." A technician is dispatched to fix the problem -- wires must be crossed somewhere -- but he can't figure out where, and it's only Hayes's headphones that are picking it up. They decide to ignore it.

Somehow it's symbolic that Justin Timberlake is haunting Hayes. The boy-band-member-turned-megastar is The Ghost of What Could Have Been. Not so long ago, Hayes was on the brink of such superstardom. As one half of Savage Garden, he wrote hits and sold out stadiums, the third Australian act to have two No. 1 songs on the US singles chart (after Men at Work and Helen Reddy).

After the band's split in 1999, it was expected that Hayes would continue on to become a pop star of Timberlake-ian proportions. Columbia Records (Sony BMG) had high hopes for his first solo record, 'Spin', in 2002. "I had my record company standing on their corporate desks doing the moonwalk, pointing at me, telling me I was going to win a Grammy," says Hayes, now 35. "It was a sure thing."

Except it wasn't. 'Spin' sold only a couple of million copies -- a pittance for an artist with a history of selling 10 times that amount. The failure sent Hayes into a deep depression, followed by two years of therapy, which he says 'saved' his life.

Sitting in the lobby of Manhattan's Parker Meriden Hotel, where he goes unrecognised -- "Most Americans probably think I died," he likes to joke -- Hayes is paler and softer than you might remember him. Fine lines are beginning to settle in around his eyes and his hair, once a canvas for ever-changing dyes, is its natural sandy blond. He's wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, trainers -- a far cry from the eyeliner-and-leather-trousered Hayes of Savage Garden. The new look telegraphs what he himself will tell you -- that after all he's been through Hayes is the happiest, the most comfortable, the most himself he's ever been.

The time out of the spotlight, he says, gave him the space to deal with some long pent-up issues. Although close friends and family had known since 1999 that Hayes was gay, when he divorced his wife of four years, Colby Taylor, it was only last June he came out publicly and married his boyfriend of two years, the British animator and designer Richard Cullen, 37, in a civil service in London.

Subsequently, Hayes says that, with its deeply personal lyrics, his new album, 'This Delicate Thing We've Made', is his most honest and he's hoping fans will respond when it's released next month. In fact, he's banking on it: having split with Columbia, he's releasing the album himself on his own Powdered Sugar label and this time his old urge to become a superstar has faded.

"I look back and think, 'Thank God I didn't become a Justin Timberlake,'" Hayes says, swigging from an enormous bottle of Evian mixed with echinacee. It sounds more than a little incredible that someone who has wanted to be a pop star since he was eight years old, who professes -- as he did moments earlier -- to "love attention", would not regret missing the chance to become one of the biggest stars on the planet. But Hayes insists he means it. "It would have pushed me into a corner. I would never have been able to come out. The pressure to be a teen idol or the be the object of heterosexual attention would have been oppressive."

Leonie Messer, his friend and former manager, agrees: "Darren was always turning down opportunities to promote himself. Meet-and-greets are so uncomfortable for him; he'll excuse himself rather than make awkward conversation."

Of Spin's failure, Hayes says, "At the time I was devastated. But in retrospect it was never going to connect because I was not connected. I was so scared and sad and I had this facade up, you know, 'I'm happy to be here! I've made this really happy pop record!' But I was kind of dying inside and people aren't stupid. They could tell there was something off about me -- that's why it didn't work. And that was a godsend."

Indeed, the hurdles of the past few years are a large part of 'This Delicate Thing'. Hayes now revels in talking about his personal life, saying it comes as a relief after years of concealing a major part of his identity: his sexuality. "I really missed being gay," he says. "I remember being a child and praying to God not to make me gay."

It's not hard to see why. Logan City, the town midway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where Hayes grew up, was hardly a hotbed of international gay culture. "There were basically two gay people," says Hayes. "There was the one who sang "Philadelphia Freedom" and he wore a lot of sequins. And there was the one dying from AIDS, Rock Hudson. Not a lot of options for a young boy to look up to."

Gary Beltzel, who employed Hayes for four years at his Woodridge record store, remembers the teenager as "shy and quiet... always in his own thoughts". His friend since year 6, Nathalia Rayfield, says his schoolmates at Mabel Park State High School "just didn't get him. Darren was good at everything. It wasn't the easiest place to grow up for anyone who wanted to do something that wasn't 'normal'."

Hayes -- a Star Wars fan and heavily involved in school theatre -- was already a target for the bullies. He was not about to encourage them any further. "The idea that I was gay," he says, "was inconceivable." So he stifled his feelings and kept them stifled for 25 years. "In my mind, this was one tiny little part of me and if I never mentioned it, it was never real."

By 1997, Savage Garden was cresting the wave of its first massive hit. Hayes had trumped the bullies, becoming an international pop star. He was married to his best friend. He was rich. He was handsome. Life should have been wonderful. But he was miserable. "I was depressed and I was terrified that people would find out, so I pretended to be happy, which was incredibly difficult," he says. Then, he developed a crush on a man in his company -- he won't say who -- and this time, he was unable to hide his feelings.

One night, Messer, his assistant at the time, cornered him in a bar. "She was really drunk," says Hayes, "and she said, 'Are you gay?'" "He was shocked and appalled," recalls Messer. "He said, 'Oh, I'm married! Don't be ridiculous!'"

"And she said, 'Then how come you blush every time X walks into the room?'" says Hayes. "It was like somebody poking at my brain and touching a secret part of my thoughts that no one knew. It all came flooding out. That was really the beginning of the end. I remember going home to Colby and saying, 'You know, I think I might be bisexual. I think I might be gay.' She was completely cool. She said, 'You know, I think everybody is bisexual. It's cool. Don't worry about it.' And we went back to sleep.

But it was not so cool. "It was the start of a rollercoaster period," says Messer. "We didn't stop talking about it for a year." While Savage Garden toured in support of their second album, 'Affirmation', Hayes agonised over his position. "My coming out was a dark and painful psychological journey," he says.

When Hayes finally came out to friends and family, most were relieved. "Everything completely and utterly made sense," says Rayfield. "He was troubled and we couldn't figure out what was wrong."

After a year of not speaking, Taylor and Hayes have resumed contact. Hayes says they are "really good friends". Taylor has never responded to interview requests. "Colby is a great woman," says Messer. "Ultimately, she wanted him to be happy."

"I feel comfortable talking about it because I'm happy and I think I represent a 'happy ever after'," says Hayes. He also thinks his story might help others. "Had I had somebody like that to look up to while I was growing up, I probably would not have suffered from depression."

However, the depression was about more than just his sexuality. There was also his past: Hayes says his father was an alcoholic who abused his mother. Once a repressed memory, this, too, has now become a part of Hayes's narrative, so much that it appears in the biography distributed by his marketing team.

"Talking about [family] has become an issue," Hayes admits. "I love my dad and to his credit he's a completely transformed and reformed man. It must be very hard for him to know that's got this blabbermouth son running around the world, talking about him, but I mean it with love. The deal that I've made is that there comes a point where his story becomes my story. And the biggest epiphany I've had is that what happened to me is what made me want to be a performer. It's been the single most influential and motivating experience of my life."

Hayes believes airing in past torments. "I always hid who I was, both as a child of an alcoholic and the fact that I was gay. They were hard to admit. Getting past them has changed my life."

In 1999, soon after his divorce from Taylor, Hayes moved to San Francisco. Still, he was "painfully lonely" and therapy-friendly California proved a great place for healing. In 2004, he flew to London to work on his second solo effort, 'The Tension and the Spark'. He had been there only a short while when a mutual friend introduced him to Richard Cullen, who was then teaching film studies at university and finishing his Master's degree. On their first date, they watched 'The Empire Strikes Back' and Hayes decided he was in love. "I knew the second I looked at Richard I was going to marry him," he says. "It was bizarre."

The relationship moved quickly and Hayes was soon moving to London, one of the few places where they could legally marry. "It was an accident that I fell in love with a Brit," Hayes says. "But the civil partnership law was something I wanted to be a part of, politically. It's a very basic civil right: a very basic human right." Recently, the couple bought an 1880s Victorian-style townhouse in Notting Hill, which they share with their English cocker spaniel, Wally. While there are encounters with fabulousness -- they were guests at Elton John's wedding -- they can more often be found "shopping at Whole Foods for a night in front of the telly" and listening to records. It's a quiet life.

It's doubtful 'This Delicate Thing' will interrupt it that much, a fact Hayes says he's comfortable with. "In an ideal world the record would sell a million copies," he says. "That would be a failure for a major label, but for me, it would be amazing." He says he'd be happy if it only broke even. "Look, I'm not crazy. The idea of going broke from music keeps me awake at night. But at the same time I've suspended any notion of thinking that I'll become Justin Timberlake. That period in my career has passed. It will never come again." He thinks a moment. "Probably."

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