Random Roar: Darren Hayes and That Time His Canadian Fans Were Lied To By A Music Channel

 

The year was 2002.  After the breakup of Savage Garden, lead singer Darren Hayes was getting ready to release his first solo music.  One thing you need to understand, if you didn’t grow up in the late 1990s, is that Savage Garden was one of the biggest bands to ever come from Australia in that decade.  Older bands like INXS, AC/DC and even Men At Work have sold more, but Savage Garden only released two albums during their lifetime and still managed to sell 23 million copies worldwide.  This was a band on top of it all.

When Darren Hayes started as a solo artist, he was able to continue riding on the popularity he’d generated as Savage Garden, although I recall him trying to distance himself from the band so that his solo music could stand on its own.  His first single was “Insatiable” and if anyone was worried that Hayes wouldn’t make it as a solo artist, it certainly looked like their worries were unfounded.  Insatiable charted very well, especially in his native Australia.  It didn’t seem to do very well in the United States, but here in Canada, it topped Much More Music’s daily user generated countdown list, the MMMTop5.com, for several weeks.

Then, one day, it vanished.

It had been understood at the time, although I suppose no one actually verified that this was a thing that happened, that if a video continued to make it onto the top 5, it would continue to appear on the ballot to be voted on.  It might’ve worked that way in the past for other popular songs, but Much More Music no longer exists so I can’t look it up and no one bothered to keep records of the chart.  Anyway, it came as a bit of a surprise to fans when Insatiable was gone from the ballot, despite having continued to place in the top five.  When fans reached out to Much More Music, someone from the channel responded and said that there seemed to be vote brigading going on.  In other words, they were saying fans were promoting Hayes’s music too much at the expense of other deserving bands and singers, and the way they chose to punish fans was to punish Hayes by refusing to play his music.

Since then, Much More Music dropped Hayes completely, refusing to play his music videos, including his follow-up single, “Strange Relationship”, as well as anything from subsequent albums.  Over time, his music became much more niche, both in Canada and elsewhere in the world, even in Australia.  The first two singles from his final album, 2011’s Secret Codes and Battleships, didn’t make it out of the bottom of the Australian charts and the last two singles failed to chart.

I don’t know what it was like in the rest of the world, but here in Canada, it felt like us fans had to walk on eggshells when it came to requesting a Darren Hayes song on the radio.  No one wanted a repeat of the MMMTop5.com fiasco.  Sadly, I lost contact with most of his fans when Yahoo shut down Groups and to this day, I have no idea how many are still active fans of his music, or if anyone’s still trying to broadcast it here in Canada.

Earlier this year, Hayes surprised everyone when he released new singles, and with those singles came a new series of interviews.  He opened up about the end of Savage Garden, as well as what really happened to him in the music industry in 2002.

When he finished filming his music video for Insatiable, he was told by his record label, “You look too gay” and they made him reshoot the video, forced him to change his hair (this is why his hair appeared straight in the video that was released) and circulated a memo telling everyone to cancel any promotion of his music in the United States because he supposedly moved in an overly gay manner.

When I found out about this, I felt like us Canadian fans were betrayed.  We were gaslit into feeling like we were the problem with Darren Hayes, like we were the reason no one wanted to play his music, and it turned out that the problem was all internal to the industry.  We were lied to and blamed for the industry’s homophobia and their reluctance to allow him to succeed.  Telling us that we were promoting his music too much was basically code for “any promotion at all is too much, cut it out.”

The industry seemed to win, too.  Not only did they succeed in forcing Hayes to change himself in order to make it as a solo artist, his sales tanked anyway.  Spin only sold about a half million copies, including only 118,000 in the United States, compared to selling three million copies of his previous album, Savage Garden’s Affirmation, in the US.  His next album, The Tension and the Spark, sold substantially less, and his career hasn’t been able to recover.

Now that it’s come out how Hayes was treated by the music industry, hopefully fans will be a bit bolder when promoting his new album, which released today.  Homosexual is Hayes’s first new music in more than a decade, and it feels kind of like a birthday gift from him.  The contents of the album feel much more honest than Spin and even more personal than any of his other albums.  There’s a candidness to the lyrics which makes it feel like we’re finally getting the second half of a story he began telling us before his hiatus.  It has always felt to me like Hayes’ music career was incomplete, like there was always meant to be at least one more album after Secret Codes and Battleships.  I’m not going to say his music career is complete now, but it feels more right somehow.  Like this is the album he was always meant to write.  It dives into more of a minor key at times, with introspective and brooding songs, but there are lighter and happier songs as well, all with a 1980s flavour to them.  The album showcases a Darren Hayes who is comfortable in his skin, happy with who he is, and wanting everyone else to be happy with who they are, too.

Hopefully, now that this new album has been released, his career will start to recover.  I don’t know if there’s been a shift in attitude towards homosexuality in the music industry, but if Harry Styles can sell a million copies of his new album in the United States while looking like this:

Then surely there’s room in the industry for Darren Hayes, too.