The Sunday Mail (Australia)
Secrets revealed
By Ritchie Yorke
November 04, 2006

Revealing: Darren Hayes says his new doco is `an inside
look at the person I've become'

ACCORDING to the promotional blurb, Too Close for Comfort presents its prime subject, celebrated former Brisbane singer/songwriter Darren Hayes, "like you've never seen him before. Backstage. Onstage. Out of his cage".

Too Close for Comfort, a stunning DVD documentary released by Roadshow Music this weekend, more than lives up to its claim of revealing "the private and normally guarded side of a performer at a crossroads in his musical career, from his first-ever post-Savage Garden solo tour to the present".

Hayes said from his London home last week: "It's an inside look at the person I've become today. And it looks back on a period which now, with retrospect, was a difficult time for the ego. It was a really transitional period in my life."

After a private family screening in Sydney, the singer revealed he would never recoup his production investment in the doco.

"I just love the (documentary) art form," Hayes said.

"It will never make back what I paid to have it produced. And that's OK. I've always had that passion. It was one of the things that drove (former Savage Garden partner) Daniel Jones nuts."

Hayes and Jones split up in 2002 after two phenomenal albums sold more than 24 million copies internationally, making Savage Garden the most successful Australian pop band of all time.

Hayes then released two albums (Spin and The Tension and the Spark) in a solo career that demonstrates enormous potential. Jones, meanwhile, has moved to Sydney with his wife, Hi-5 member Kathleen de Leon, and bought out famous recording facility Studio 301.

Hayes's new double album will be wrapped up next month, mixed in January and released by the middle of the year on a new label. The label deal will be announced next month.

"You know where I came from. We never had money. When I did get money, I thought what am I going to do with it? I'm not into cars. I'm not into jewellery. So I poured the money back into my loves, which are my family and my art.

"I've always thought that if you took that approach, somehow the universe would look after you."

Too Close for Comfort explores -- warts, private thoughts and all -- Hayes's career in the aftermath of Savage Garden dissolving.

"I wanted to have this material out there. I want to look back in 20 years and have these experiences really archived," he said.

Since his twin appearances at the Sydney Opera House in July (itself the subject of a performance DVD next month, directed by Brisbane film-maker Grant Marshall of Black Dog Productions, who also directed Too Close for Comfort), Darren returned to his home for the past 12 months in London where he's recording his third solo album.

"It's loosely a conceptual record that is based on my obsession with the Fairlight computer (digital sampling instrument)," he said.

"There's only about 400 of them left in the world. There is something about the limitations of having to use an old sampler.

"It's given the record a real sound of its own. It's not like I'm making a retro record, but there's definitely a sense of recapturing something."

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