Darren Hayes on his past with Savage Garden and their last show in Sydney Australia before Daniel Jones would call it quits:
“There was never an official audience head count, but I could not see the end of the audience. It reminded me of very famous concerts I’d seen as a child, like Michael Jackson at Wembley.”
The show took place towards the end of the “Affirmation” tour, which started in Tokyo, Japan. It was there that Daniel informed Darren of his desire to leave the band. Darren later shared how deeply this affected him emotionally and how it also influenced his career as he started his solo journey in his book “Unlovable.”
Despite knowing the band was disbanding, Darren still aimed to please his devoted fans.
“We had to take our arena show and transform it and make it so wide so that it would be a stadium-sized production,” Darren goes on to recall, that he’d not anticipated the toll the size of the stage would have on him. I was very out of breath a lot of the time because the sheer width of the stage was massive and I started to lose my voice during the show.”
“I’m very critical of myself. I was so devastated. I felt like I had given the audience a bad show. At the end of the show I did lose my voice.”
“I just gave everything I could give. It was extraordinary.”
In his book, he talks about how he created a persona during his Savage Garden days, which he imagined as a child to shield himself from his difficult childhood with his abusive and alcoholic father. This persona was inspired by his favorite pop stars from the past, such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, Elvis, and others.
“Everything about me was armour to protect me from being seen. I was suffering from imposter syndrome and a lot of that was because of my sexuality. And my fear was if you really knew who I was, would you hate me? I was slowly trying to test that if I showed the world who I really was, could I get closer to loving myself? What I was trying to do was take away everything that I felt was a mask to see if people still loved me.”
Although Darren feels more at ease with himself and his sexual identity, he still enjoys wearing costumes; he even uses four different perfumes to make a lasting impression on fans when they are close to him.
“Everything I do is carefully curated and thought about because I love fans. And when I meet people, I want to leave an impression because the magic is still so important to me. Fans are literally sacred to me. If I have a chance to lift someone up, I’m gonna do it, because who else has that job? It can be a very corrupting power because it can just serve your ego.”
Darren also shares a story in his book about him and his older sister, Tracey, meeting Stevie Nicks in 1990 outside the Hilton Hotel before a Fleetwood Mac concert.
“I remember how Stevie made me feel,” Hayes says, adding that he wants his fans to walk away from an experience with him with similar feelings of elation. The fans make me feel so loved and that’s real. It’s beyond flops … those people are there, no matter what.”
Darren characterizes his book as more than just a celebrity memoir; it is a story about overcoming abuse and dealing with trauma.
Although Darren has previously discussed his difficult childhood, his book provides a deeper insight into how challenging his upbringing truly was.
Darren wants his readers and audiobook listeners to understand that
“it’s possible to break cycles of abuse”.
“It takes one member of the family to be brave enough to speak out and it’s so hard to do that because families don’t mean to do it, but they gatekeep secrets because of shame.”
“I’ve been through so much in my life, but it’s a testimony to how if you are brave enough to really look at those parts of yourself that are in pain, you can survive.”
“I just wanted it to be a tribute to my mother.”
When asked how his mother helped shape the man he is today, Darren responded with:
“My mother never had romantic love, which is heartbreaking. She never felt love. She was beaten up on her wedding night. My father was a police officer at the time. That was a secret we were never allowed to share. She could never leave him and I just know, as a songwriter and as a romantic, how much love and romantic love has meant for me in my life. And she taught me all about that.”
“She sacrificed any sense of romantic love in order to protect her children until such times as the law, and then the miracle of my career, gave her the financial means to leave him.”
As for his sister, Darren had this to say:
“sacrificed a childhood, she didn’t have one.”
Darren said this his mother and sister:
“Had to confide and conspire with each other to survive”
Darren also said this about his mother:
“She sacrificed most of her life and her happiness so that I could be here today”
One of Savage Garden’s most powerful songs is “Two Beds and a Coffee Machine,” which tells the story of the abuse his mother faced while with Robert Hayes. It describes a mother who had to escape with her three children to stay in hotels.
“one of the best songs we’d ever written”
Darren nearly chose not to release the song, as he was still hiding his difficult childhood from the fans at the time.
“I called her back in the day and said, ‘Mum, I’ve written this song and are you OK with this?’ back when it was anonymous, back when she was still under my father’s thumb.”
His mother initially allowed Darren to release the song, but later had a change of heart. However, by that time, the band had already spent more than $100,000 on the recording, making it too late to cancel the release.
“And it’s the only time I’ve said ‘no’ to my mother. I said, ‘Mum, think of what this will do for people’.
“She thinks I’m so brave for being honest about that, she feels the same way about that song as she does about this book.”
In 2000, the year the band disbanded, Darren was invited by the famous Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti to sing a duet.
“It was a very significant because it was the beginning of me being a solo artist.”
“I remember performing with him and him just looking over at me and beaming like a proud father. And he said ‘bravo’ at the end of the song which apparently he doesn’t say to many people.”
They sang O Sole Mio for the concert together. At times it looked like Darren was receiving the Italian lyrics from a teleprompter.
“I learned it phonetically so a teleprompter wouldn’t have helped me. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the maestro, but I believe the teleprompter was for him. He was absolutely charming. This sounds like I’m giving myself a compliment, but he just loved the quality of my voice.”
In his book Darren, calls the duet with Pavarotti his “most cherished memory” from his career.
Although fans were excited about Darren’s return with his album “Homosexual,” he was dealing with a personal loss.
“In my private life, I was going through the end of a relationship.”
In May 2023, Darren and his husband, who had been together for 17 years, decided to end their relationship.
To show respect, Darren kept the details of the relationship brief, but he mentioned:
“I did make a lot of sacrifices in order to get married”.
One sacrifice he made was selling his seaside house in Sausalito, California, and relocating to the UK.
“It broke my heart to leave, but I was willing to give up my green card and give up the one place in the world where I really felt at home, for love. Well, it didn’t work out, but I managed to somehow get back to the US, which was sort of a consolation prize. And living in Santa Monica was a consolation prize because I’d written that song about Santa Monica in Savage Garden and magical things ended up happening because of that, that I could not have foreseen.”
On his time out of the spotlight:
“I made myself very, very small for lots of reasons that I regret.”
“You witnessed me flourishing and coming back in 2022 and what you didn’t realize was that my marriage was ending at that time and, but I had made peace with that. And I realized that I completely turned my back on music, which was this complete source of joy for me.”
For Darren, Madonna was the person who made him realize how much he enjoyed being a performer. After watching her perform in Los Angeles in 2024, where she talked about being placed in a medically induced coma just a year earlier and how she received a second chance at life, Darren felt as if he had also been granted a second chance.
“I will always give fans what they want, and that includes performing Savage Garden’s songs on tour.”
Darren recalls fans crying during his 2023 tour. They were older and had never seen Savage Garden live, and they never thought they would have the chance to see him.
“They told me personally, ‘I never thought I would get to hear you sing this song live’. And that really hit home for me, that I hold this sort of lever of happiness, which I can shut it off forever, or I can just leave it open. And I think as long as I’m healthy, as long as I can, I’ll always give people what they want because they gave me this extraordinary life.”
Darren has confirmed that he is in the studio creating a new album and is also developing 21 fresh songs for a musical he hopes to produce.
“It’s essentially my book Unlovable, but as a Steven Spielberg film, it’s fantastical. It’s this magical version of a boy who just happens to have a very similar life to mine.”
When asked if he will star in it, laughing he says:
“Only if an investor needs me to be.”
“It’s been written and I now I want to make it clear that hey, if the investors are out there and they want to talk to Darren Hays about a musical, I have one. So let’s talk.”
Darren on his days of being bullied:
“What I realised, just through bullying, is that the thing that makes you a target is actually the thing that makes you extraordinary. I was bullied because I stood out and I thought I stood out because there was something wrong with me, but I stood out because I just shone.”
“If you stick your head up above the crowd, you see the view.”
Darren on his best quality:
“I just seem to be very resilient and I love that about me. Even in the worst moments of my life, I seem to have what I call these glass-half-full cells that annoyingly start to multiply. At the depths of my lowest, lowest moments, I will allow myself to wallow for a while and then all of a sudden these cells start dividing and they start saying, ‘hey, but what about this? What about that?’ And I get that from my mum.”
Kristin’s thoughts: Darren Hayes’s book “Unlovable” was launched on November 5, 2024. If you haven’t grabbed a copy yet, you really should; it’s an incredible read that explores Darren’s life in depth, including his difficult childhood marked by severe abuse from his alcoholic father, the bullying and mockery he faced due to his sexuality, and the traumatic domestic violence his poor mother suffered at the hands of her husband. It also revisits the Savage Garden era and the betrayal Darren experienced from Daniel Jones, among other things. This book is truly a tearjerker; I found myself needing to pause several times while reading it.
Unlovable truly is one of my favorite books; it is just that darn good.
Bless Darren’s heart; he has truly faced a lot, but like a phoenix emerging from the ashes, he has come out resilient. His willingness to share his story and his courage will undoubtedly assist many others who have experienced similar hardships, just as I have. I also grew up facing physical and emotional abuse and was relentlessly bullied in school, so I understand all too well the deep pain that comes with such experiences.
Click on the link above to find out where you can purchase Darren Hayes’s book “Unlovable.”