EXCLUSIVE: It was October 1, 2000, and Savage Garden was on their way to performing what would be the biggest show of the band’s career.
Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones had just come off stage at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics and had to rush to The Domain across the city, where a free concert was being held to celebrate the end of the games.
It would also be the last time Savage Garden would perform in Australia before the band abruptly ended when Jones decided he’d had enough and wanted out.
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“That’s so interesting. And I never realised that,” Hayes tells 9honey Celebrity when asked about playing for the final time, as Savage Garden, on home soil.
“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.”
While official numbers aren’t known, estimates at the time suggested there were more than 150,000 people crammed into the park.
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The show came towards the end of Savage Garden’s massive Affirmation world tour, which began in Tokyo in April when Jones told Hayes he wanted to leave the band.
Hayes details the earth-shattering effect that moment had on him at the time, and the repercussions Jones’ decision would have on his solo career, decades later, in his new memoir Unlovable (published by Penguin Random House Australia, out now).
But at the time, despite the demise of the band Hayes had worked so hard to make a success, all he wanted to do was give the fans what they deserved: the best night of their lives.
“We had to take our arena show and transform it and make it so wide so that it would be a stadium-sized production,” Hayes remembers, adding 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.
“Do you remember that? I’m very critical of myself. I was so devastated. I felt like I had given the audience a bad show.”
As someone who was there that night I can attest it was not, even slightly, a bad show.
“And at the end of the show I did lose my voice,” he says.
“I just gave everything I could give. It was extraordinary.”
‘Armour to protect me’
What many didn’t know was the popstar they saw on stage that night, and every other time they had seen Savage Garden perform, wasn’t entirely real.
Hayes had created an image for himself that he’d dreamed up many years before, to help him escape his traumatic childhood, which was plagued by domestic violence, bullying and a struggle to accept his sexuality.
In Unlovable, Hayes describes his look as “a carefully curated superhero – an amalgamation of all the popstars who had came before me” including “hair by Elvis and Michael Jackson” and “stage moves by Madonna”.
“Everything about me was armour to protect me from being seen,” he writes.
Hayes tells 9honey Celebrity while in Sydney for the launch of his memoir: “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?”
When Hayes went solo out of necessity, he stopped dying his hair and let it return to its natural dark blonde.
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“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.”
‘The magic is still so important to me’
Hayes is much more comfortable with himself these days but still loves costumes and the creation of image. And perfume.
Hayes mentions the perfume (he is wearing four different types today, but won’t disclose the names): “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.”
In 1990, Hayes and his older sister Tracey met Stevie Nicks outside of the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane before Fleetwood Mac’s show.
“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.”
‘A secret we were never allowed to share’
Hayes’ sister, and their mother Judy, feature heavily throughout his book, which he describes as being about “navigating trauma and surviving abuse” and not “a celebrity memoir”.
While Hayes has spoken about his difficult childhood before, Unlovable goes into extraordinary and – at times harrowing – detail about his alcoholic and violent father and the torment and power he wielded on the family.
He wants readers, and listeners of the audio book in which he voices, to know “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.”
But, Hayes says, it’s also a story of success.
“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.”
Equally, he says, “I just wanted it to be a tribute to my mother”.
Hayes dedicated the book to his mother, who is 79.
I ask how his mum, and sister, contributed to the man he is today and there is a pause of nearly 30 seconds before Hayes answers, his voice breaking slightly.
“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, Hayes says she “sacrificed a childhood, she didn’t have one”.
“She became my mother by necessity, she became my mother’s best friend and then a second parent to me.”
His mother and sister “had to confide and conspire with each other to survive”.
Hayes says his mother “sacrificed most of her life and her happiness so that I could be here today”.
One of Savage Garden’s most powerful songs and an enduring fan favourite, Two Beds and a Coffee Machine, details the abuse his mother experienced from her husband and having to repeatedly flee to a hotel with her three young children.
It is, Hayes says, “one of the best songs we’d ever written”.
But the song was nearly shelved. He and Jones wrote it for the Affirmation album and at the time, Hayes was still protecting his family secret.
“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.”
She agreed but weeks later, changed her mind. By then, it was too late. Hayes and Jones had spent in excess of $100,000 recording the song.
“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.”
Most ‘cherished memory’ of his career
Savage Garden was a phenomenon and in 1997 won an unprecedented 10 ARIA Awards, a feat yet to be repeated by a single act in one night.
With two US Billboard number one singles (Truly Madly Deeply and I Knew I Loved You), the band remains one of Australia’s most successful acts.
In 2000, the year the band ended, Hayes was asked by Italian music legend Luciano Pavarotti to perform a duet.
“It was a very significant because it was the beginning of me being a solo artist,” he says.
“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 ‘Pavarotti and Friends’ and in vision from the performance, it looks as though Hayes is reading the Italian lyrics from a teleprompter.
“I learned it phonetically so a teleprompter wouldn’t have helped me,” Hayes says, smiling.
“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.”
Hayes, in his book, calls the duet with Pavarotti his “most cherished memory” from his career.
‘It broke my heart to leave’
That’s a big call from a man who has sold more than 35 million albums in the band and as a solo artist.
In 2022, Hayes released his fifth solo album, Homosexual, and embarked on a tour, following a 10-year break from music.
“I had retired, I just didn’t tell anyone,” he says.
Although Hayes’ re-emergence was seen by many as triumphant comeback – which it was – he was also experiencing a deeply personal loss.
“In my private life, I was going through the end of a relationship,” he says.
In May, 2023, Hayes announced the end of his 17-year marriage and their divorce was finalised a few months ago.
Hayes is careful not to go into too much detail about what happened “to be very respectful about this”.
But, he says, “I did make a lot of sacrifices in order to get married”.
One such sacrifice was selling his beloved seaside home in Sausalito, California, and moving 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,” he says.
“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.”
Of his time out of the spotlight and that period of his life, Hayes says: “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 realise was that … my marriage was ending at that time and, but I had made peace with that.
“And I realised that I completely turned my back on music, which was this complete source of joy for me.”
‘I’ll always give people what they want’
It was music legend Madonna who helped Hayes see just how much he loved being a performer and entertaining his fans.
“She had a similar epiphany,” he says.
He had seen Madonna (“one of my idols”) perform in Los Angeles in 2024 where she spoke on stage about her near death experience and being put in an induced coma the year before.
Hayes he feels that he, too, has been “given a second chance” and says he will always give fans what they want, and that includes performing Savage Garden’s songs on tour.
He recalls seeing “people crying in the audiences” during his 2023 tour because they “were my age who’d never seen Savage Garden in concert and they never thought they would”.
“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 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.”
New music…and a musical
Hayes confirms that he’s in the studio now working on a new record and has also written a musical with 21 brand new songs.
“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.”
And will Hayes star in it?
“Only if an investor needs me to be,” he laughs.
“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.”
Knowing what he knows now about fame, success and survival, what would Hayes say to his younger self if he could?
“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.”
Of his best quality Hayes says: “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.”
Unlovable, by Darren Hayes, is out now.
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