Time Now To Spread Your Wings… Darren Hayes, A History, Part 2: Savage Garden – Affirmation

It’s a really tough question for me: which is better, Savage Garden or Affirmation? They’re so similar in quality but in sound they’re quite different. Savage Garden’s second album was an event when released in late 1999, and I bet many were wondering if they could overcome the sophomore slump. While the debut made use of electronic beats and was very nineties in sound, Affirmation was more at home with the sound of the decade that was just around the corner. The pop-rock hits were less abrasive but bigger, more confident, more adult.

The best example of this is the massive title track, a shopping list of beliefs, a mission statement for the album, a song tailored for radio that would, hopefully, still make a personal connection with listeners. ‘Affirmation’ has some of my favourite lyrics ever and captures the basic values of the world right before the turn of the century. It also lay down the foundations for some of the other themes explored on the album: sexuality, family life, death.

I was always a little disappointed that such a huge track was followed by two middle-of-the-road ballads. I never got too excited about ‘Hold Me’, either back then or now, though I don’t avoid it. It’s just not one of Savage Garden’s more interesting moments, and the same can be said for ‘I Knew I Loved You’, which became the duo’s second Billboard number one hit. Though while ‘I Knew I Loved You’ is safe, it is beautiful, and when I hear it I can’t help but be sucked in by the pure loveliness of it all.

“I’ve been having difficulties keeping to myself
Feelings and emotions better left upon the shelf” 

From there, a parade of radio-ready hits take us through the middle of the album. ‘The Best Thing’ and ‘The Animal Song’ are hugely energetic, with the sort of punch that recalls the more dance-influenced parts of the debut. I remember hearing ‘The Animal Song’ for the first time on the radio and being so happy that Savage Garden were back and that they were still as amazing as ever. That drum intro! My god.

‘Chained To You’ is an intense rush, and my favourite on the album back when I was nine. And having just discovered the magic of The Queen, I got a little kick out of the Madonna line. I remember being so disappointed when it peaked on the ARIA charts at #21, I thought it deserved to be number one for months. More success was given to ‘Crash And Burn’, a lovely ballad that was yet another radio staple – I’m so glad I liked them so much because I can see anyone who hated Savage Garden getting pretty annoyed with their dominance after a while. ’The Lover After Me’, then, is the last song on Affirmation that could have been a single, with jangly instrumental and a catchy chorus.

“Another bruise to try and hide, another alibi to write
Another lonely highway in the black of the night
But there’s hope in the darkness
You know you’re going to make it” 

From here on in everything got a little bit more experimental, setting the tone for the Darren Hayes albums of the future. ‘Two Beds And A Coffee Machine’ is, I believe, Darren’s favourite Savage Garden song, and I remember being spellbound by the simple piano-and-vocal. The subject – divorce from a child’s perspective – is not new, but the fragile lyrics and tone were a window into the life of a vocalist who hadn’t yet had much of a chance to get personal with his listeners.

Compare that with the song that follows, ‘You Can Still Be Free’, Savage Garden’s greatest epic. A dramatic, theatrical masterpiece of loss and hope for the future, it is best experienced alongside ‘Gunning Down Romance’, which takes a less optimistic view of the situation.

“Love come quickly
Because I don’t think I can keep this monster in
It’s in my skin”

‘Gunning Down Romance’ doesn’t even feel like it’s from the same album as ‘Hold Me’ or ‘The Best Thing’. A dark-and-moody tearing down of all the squishy lyrics on songs like ‘Truly Madly Deeply’, it was the darkest they ever got, and perhaps they felt like the album should end on a slightly lighter note. Hence, ‘I Don’t Know You Anymore’, which isn’t much happier but still feels less claustrophobic.

The tour in support of Affirmation was my very first concert, on May 20, 2000. The ticket cost $48 – how times change! – and it was pretty much the most exciting thing that had ever happened. I remember standing on the chair (what an annoying little twat I was) and jumping up and down and singing and marvelling at the spectacle of it all. When Darren ran from one side of the stage to the other during the climax of ‘Affirmation’, I experienced that rush that only really amazing pop music can provide.

In the end, Affirmation is probably not quite as good as Savage Garden, but we’re talking minimal differences in quality here. In 2001, the duo would split, citing a need to “grow”. They would never work – or, as far as I know, even appear in public – together again. Daniel Jones would marry a member of Hi-5, launch a production company and a recording studio. He has lived a private life since the end of Savage Garden, which you would suspect is how he always wanted it. Darren Hayes, on the other hand, immediately started working on a solo career. But the first chapter of his career was over, and with Affirmation, Savage Garden went out with a bang.

You’ll Never Know What Hit You… Darren Hayes, A History, Part 1: Savage Garden – Savage Garden

Not many acts mean more to me than Darren Hayes. His albums and songs punctuate my life like little dots on a timeline, from 1997 right through to today. His new album Secret Codes And Battleships is out in October, and I thought it would be nice to look back on each of his previous albums. Where better to start, then, than the very beginning?

Savage Garden were one of my first favourite bands (Spice Girls beat them to being the very first), and Darren’s partnership with Daniel “not the guy from Silverchair that’s Johns” Jones produced some of the finest pop songs ever to come out of Australia. ‘To The Moon And Back’, the five-and-a-half minute epic that opens their self-titled debut, is perhaps the most immediate of all their hits.

“She can’t remember a time when she felt needed
If love was red then she was colourblind
All her friends, they’ve been tried for treason
And crimes that were never defined”

Like all their songs, ‘To The Moon And Back’ was polished, yet it had a raw quality that implied rambling, half-cryptic teenage writings, the kind of stuff you bring your own meaning to. I had a friend in high school who felt that ‘To The Moon And Back’ was parallel to her story, and she was basically right. I bet there have been a lot of people see themselves in the lyrics. All this was set to a bombastic, almost Meat Loaf-ian production, and it set the tone for the dramatic, involving songs that were to come.

You know the bit in Madonna’s ‘Nothing Really Matters’ where one of the people in the video levitates up in the air? That’s what ‘Carry On Dancing’ feels like, a soaring fairytale with lines like “the stars and planets taking shape/a stolen kiss has come too late”. It tended to get lost, however, because it was sandwiched between ‘To The Moon And Back’ and the three-tiered attack that followed: ‘Tears Of Pearls’, ‘I Want You’, ‘Truly Madly Deeply’.

‘Tears Of Pearls’ and ‘I Want You’ are frantic, with the former frenetically predicting Madonna’s ‘Ray Of Light’ and the latter famously crushing a huge word salad into a radio-friendly chorus. The day I mastered singing along to ‘I Want You’ was a very proud day. I loved the way the chorus was like a breather, and easy bit to counter the complicated verses. If you tripped over the verse, don’t worry, everybody can sing the chorus.

“And when the stars are shining brightly in the velvet sky
I’ll make a wish, send it to heaven
And make you want to cry” 

‘Truly Madly Deeply’ is not the best Savage Garden song but it is the most famous. It spent a full year on the Billboard Hot 100, with two weeks at number one, and had similar success elsewhere, including of course in Australia. It really is one of the nineties ballads, complete with cheesy love poem lyrics and a chorus that just melts through the speakers. They would perfect the ballad on second album Affirmation, but it is the universal appeal of ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ that caused it to reach more listeners that they could ever have dreamed.

‘Violet’ and ‘All Around Me’ anchor the middle of the album, and they would have been obvious singles on any lesser album, but the strength of the other songs unfairly pushed these two into the background. I remember thinking the drag-queen sounding rapper on ‘All Around Me’ was a featured artist, and scoured the liner notes for the name of this mystery woman. Of course, it was Darren, and it was fabulous. I was seven, okay? You can’t tell what’s what when you’re seven.

It’s around this point that you might think, alright, so there’s got to be a few crap songs coming, right? This is a nineties pop-rock album, and they’re supposed to be singles-plus-filler. But eight tracks into Savage Garden, and there’s still the slightly-more-sexual ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ sequel ‘Universe’, the strange, wonderful ‘Mine’, the hard-rocking (for Savage Garden) ‘Break Me Shake Me’ and it’s cousin ‘A Thousand Words’, plus the understated, underrated album closer ‘Santa Monica’. A compelling listen from start to finish, this might have been the first album I ever regarded as a classic, although at the time “classic” meant “an album I will sit on the floor and sing along to from start to finish”.

“You moved me in a way that I’ve never known”

Savage Garden was the soundtrack to so many long car trips, so many nights sat at my parents’ huge stereo before I had a CD player of my own, not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of listens over the 14 years (!) since it was released. This band were from Brisbane, the relatively small city where I live, and they were spending a year on the Billboard Hot 100? Seriously? That was beyond my comprehension and it still feels a bit odd now. I didn’t know at the time how much future albums from this duo and that guy with the funny hair who did the singing would affect me, but even if Savage Garden had split after one record, they would have left a huge impression on me, and on the Australian music industry. Their success wasn’t exactly the start of an Australian invasion in which The Mavis’s and Dannii Minogue were topping the Billboard 200, but they showed it was still possible. There was a surge of confidence in Australian pop post-Savage Garden that would eventually climax in Kylie’s world-conquering ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’.

As one of the foundations of my love for music, as a sound-of-the-decade album, as an album of fascinating and finely tuned pop songs, Savage Garden is close to perfect.