Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  John Woodruff: I thought they were brilliant. I thought the discussions that we had together were some of the most honest and frank – albeit somewhat naive from their perspective – that I’d ever had with a new artist. That was what got me, even more so than the music. I was still debating that with myself, because the closest thing to a pop band that I’d ever looked after before was Icehouse.

  Woodruff shopped the demo around: ‘It wasn’t that I got a bad reaction, it was that I got no reaction.’ He decided to sign Savage Garden – renamed after Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles – to his own start-up label JWM Productions and publishing company, Roughcut. At around the same time he played the demo to producer Charles Fisher. Fisher had worked on a diverse array of Australian albums by artists yet to find their way in the studio, from Radio Birdman through to 1927.

  John Woodruff: Charles was good with people who had no studio experience [because] he believed that if you taught them how to make a record and they were as talented as you thought, they’d give you back a brilliant recording. But that takes serious time, because it means you’ve got to record every track a number of times.

  Savage Garden took eight months to make. It was a costly exercise: Woodruff relocated the duo to Sydney for the duration, and studio musicians needed to be hired to fill out the sound. Most of the money was spent on the mix by Los Angeles hit-maker Chris Lord-Alge. Woodruff refinanced his house to complete the project, but by then he had Village Roadshow interested in doing a licensing deal to take care of the album’s distribution. Roadshow’s advance helped cover Woodruff’s outlay. He was also sure that, in the end, he would get more than his money back.

  John Woodruff: This was the first record that I’d ever owned at that point; I’d always signed the band away to other labels. But I knew what royalty structures looked like, it’s just mathematics . . . It’s not unknown to be able to get four or five dollars per record. So if it costs you $120,000 to make an album, that means you’ve only got to sell 25,000 and you’ve recouped. And I had no doubt we were going to sell 25,000 albums.

  Savage Garden’s first single, I Want You, was released in August. The song was utterly beguiling – the lyrics were delightful fluff, the melody was equal to the seductive promise of the title, and Darren Hayes’ vocals were George Michael via Michael Jackson. ‘It’s part of the hardwire,’ Hayes says. ‘That’s how I learned to express myself, how I learned to perform.’

  The song climbed to number four on the charts; in December To The Moon And Back went all the way to number one. The song was Savage Garden’s calling card – not even the ersatz acoustic guitar solo and synthesised string section could overwhelm the synth-pop heaven of the chorus. But the song that sent everything over the top was Truly Madly Deeply. As simple and natural as breathing, the lighter than air ballad showed the depth of songwriting mastery at work, even as it hugged the white line in the middle of the road.

  John Woodruff: I remember saying, ‘Well guys, Magical Kisses is not going to make it I’m afraid, that lyric is just not gonna do it for anyone.’ And they went, OK, and changed it to Truly Madly Deeply. And I thought, well, it’s a little better than Magical Kisses – I’ll take it!

  Savage Garden was not the first Brisbane band to export high-gloss teenage pop from Brisbane. In the late ’80s, Indecent Obsession had several hit singles after signing to Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum’s label Melodian. The band achieved more success overseas, especially in Asia and, notably, South Africa, where Indecent Obsession made history as the first western act to tour the country post-apartheid. Led by the fey, blond-haired David Dixon, Indecent Obsession were a boy band ahead of their time.

  Savage Garden’s timing, however, was perfect. In the UK the Spice Girls had just broken through the Britpop phenomenon to reclaim the giant slice of the pop market reserved for early teenagers. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones were as striking as the songs they created. Hayes’ almond-shaped blue eyes and delicate features were as boyishly innocent as his persona. Jones was taller, with streaked blond hair and a lean face that broke easily into a smile.

  While videos for I Want You and To The Moon And Back clogged early morning video shows, Woodruff took off for the United States. Scandinavia, it turned out, could wait: for every A&R executive who thought their label was too cool for Savage Garden, another one badly wanted – even needed – Savage Garden. When Arista’s Clive Davis and Columbia’s Donny Ienner squared off over the band, the game was well and truly on.

  It must have been a particularly galling loss for Clive Davis when Columbia won the battle for Savage Garden’s signatures. Within months of the album’s release in March 1997, Savage Garden’s Australian success was multiplying at an exponential rate. I Want You and To The Moon And Back broke the US top 10, while Truly Madly Deeply vaulted to number one, enjoying a record-breaking stay of 134 weeks on the Billboard chart.

  In Australia the band was up there with children’s entertainers the Wiggles: one year after its release, Savage Garden had sold more than 750,000 albums in their home country alone. The album spent a historic 12 weeks at number one. In October the band swept the ARIAs, taking out eight awards, including a gong for Best Independent Release. With guitar-based indie rock slowly being ground under corporate wheels, it was a telling irony.

  Hayes and Jones were also on the road for the first time. Accompanied by a full touring band, the duo had entirely bypassed the traditional live circuit, going from the studio to entertainment centres and stadiums, all with a set created by the designers of U2’s Popmart tour. It was an extraordinary fulfilment of two boyhood dreams.

  Darren Hayes: We were never apologetic. At the time it was part of indie credibility that you had to pretend that everything was all an accident. But it’s not . . . We were very honest about the fact that we were extremely ambitious, extremely positive thinkers – dream it, be it.

  John Woodruff: If you want to compete in a worldwide marketplace, the people that you’re competing with, they don’t think about anything else, they’re possessed. And Darren in particular has always seen his competition as being Michael Jackson, Madonna, George Michael, Bowie [and] U2.

  Even the relatively cautious Jones had never placed boundaries on what Savage Garden might achieve.

  We didn’t think that it wouldn’t work, because we had to think it would. It’s like a kid not having fear . . . A kid will do something absolutely stupid, because he has no idea what fear is. We didn’t know how to fail.1

  It was a rare insight from Jones, who was already taking a back seat in promotional duties. Jones liked making music, not talking about it, and while he enjoyed performing, travel wearied him. He was essentially a homebody. ‘He was very much about the family,’ Woodruff says. Hayes, too, increasingly sensed Jones’ reluctance: ‘I always felt guilty that I was dragging him along for the ride.’

  Hayes was battling his own demons. Although infinitely more comfortable in the spotlight than Jones, his private life was collapsing under the strain. When a tabloid journalist broke the news that Hayes was married, press reaction varied between disbelief and derision, as if the fact that Hayes had managed to keep his wife of three years out of the public eye was evidence he himself was in the closet. The couple’s split in late 1998 only fanned speculation about Hayes’ sexuality. While Jones simply melted away into the anonymity of Brisbane’s bayside suburbs, the naturally gregarious singer felt he was slowly suffocating.

  Darren Hayes: We were thrust head-first onto this roller coaster . . . I mean, we’re talking 20 million albums sold in the space of four years. We played in basically every single country in the world. We became millionaires several times over, became celebrities. The ability to walk around Brisbane was taken away from me – I couldn’t walk around Brisbane and feel comfortable in my own skin.

  Hayes dealt with the situation like a true pop star. He moved to New York.

  M
uch of Savage Garden’s second album Affirmation was written across continents with the aid of a hard disk recording system. Jones would send his songwriting partner zip disks of information, allowing Hayes to record guide vocals and melodies over the top. Hayes would then do rough mixes which he sent back to Jones by post. The first song to be written this way was The Animal Song, a glorious romp that showed the duo had lost none of their childlike enthusiasm and infectiousness.

  As the album started to take shape, however, the mood changed. Hayes began to pour out his heart and hurt, writing increasingly literal accounts of loss and grief. The Lover After Me and I Don’t Know You Anymore saw him sifting through the rubble of his marital separation with heart-tugging honesty. Not that the subject matter was all first-person navel-gazing: on the ghostly Two Beds And A Coffee Machine, Hayes sang of a woman packing her kids in the car and leaving her violent spouse in the dead of night. It was a long way from the froth and bubble of I Want You.

  Hayes and Jones longed to bring an edge to the darker material, and expressed interest in working with William Orbit, who had just produced Madonna’s Ray Of Light. Don Ienner, however, wasn’t about to let his biggest new act reinvent themselves for critical favours. He introduced them to Walter Afanasieff, whose résumé boasted Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. Afanasieff’s Wallyworld studios in San Francisco were more suggestive of a theme park than a workplace, and the man himself was calm and reassuring. Hayes, stressed and unhappy in New York, was easily swayed.

  As the recording unfolded, those around the band grew concerned. The Animal Song had already been released as a single, and the title song Affirmation was cut from the same cloth – a musical update on Max Ehrmann’s famous Desiderata. Both songs highlighted Savage Garden’s sincerity and warmth. But the rest of the album was unbalanced. Those lured by the single would be in for a rude shock. What the album really needed, everyone agreed, was another Truly Madly Deeply. An insulted Hayes and Jones dug their heels in.

  Woodruff had seen what his charges were capable of when they were pushed.

  John Woodruff: They told me, we can’t do that – that was then, this is now, all the stuff you would expect. And my attitude back to them was, look, we’ll sell three million copies of this record, and that’s great. But if you give me a positive love song . . . ‘Well, we can’t!’ OK then, fine, we’ll sell three million. And about an hour later they came down from the guesthouse on the studio property, and Daniel turned to me and said, ‘Here’s your song for morons.’

  The song was I Knew I Loved You. ‘And I said, ‘Oh. Yeah, OK. That’ll do. Thanks!’ Woodruff laughs. The song would take Truly Madly Deeply’s place as the longest charting song in Billboard’s history.

  Savage Garden was already on borrowed time when Affirmation was released in November 1999. Daniel Jones had decided he’d had enough.

  John Woodruff: I sort of respected that decision, because I’ve always said to other bands, if you don’t want to do this, if you don’t want to be part of it, then don’t do it . . . So the fact that [Daniel] actually came to me and said he’d had enough I thought was admirable, really. The fact that he said it right at the point when we’d finished an album was unfortunate.

  In the end Jones and Hayes agreed to carry on with a planned world tour, after which they would take a two-year break to reassess their future. The writing, however, was on the wall. The burden placed on Hayes by Jones’ immediate and apparently permanent withdrawal from almost all promotional duties was untenable: at worst, Jones’ reputation as the quiet one who wrote the music left Hayes looking like a puppet.

  Darren Hayes: I can’t speak for Daniel, but I know that on so many levels he just rejected so much of it. Travel was the biggest thing that really got him down. He hated being away from home, hated promotion. In the end he wouldn’t do any interviews, wouldn’t do photo shoots, wouldn’t even do videos in the end. It was an incredible strain to put on a duo, because I was doing everything.

  While the band may have been in limbo, they were also at the pinnacle of their brief career. Approaching the end of what would be their final tour, the duo was approached to perform Affirmation at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

  Darren Hayes: That was probably the most important moment in my career, and not because of the prestige of it. For me on an entirely different level, it was the first time I’d ever really felt Australian, and proud to be Australian.

  Two days before the show Hayes purchased a T-shirt bearing the Aboriginal flag from a local community store. He was a passionate believer in reconciliation between white and Aboriginal Australians, and the issue was alive then as never before: three months earlier, 120,000 Australians had walked the length of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of the cause. The Prime Minister, a permanent fixture at the games, was not among those supporters.

  Although he wanted to wear his shirt on stage, Hayes knew there was a costume approval process, and he didn’t want to get in trouble. At the ceremony he kept the shirt hidden under a jacket, arguing with himself, pacing around. Nervously, he flashed the shirt to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett. Scheduled to play after Savage Garden, the Oils were guaranteed to make a statement and they did, famously playing Beds Are Burning in their black ‘sorry’ suits. Garrett grinned and gave Hayes the thumbs-up.

  As he watched Christine Anu singing the Warumpi Band’s Australian classic My Island Home, Hayes began to well up. He was going to do it. He had to do it. The call came. Hayes tore off his jacket. Two minders made to grab him, but it was far too late. Hayes was already on stage.

  Darren Hayes: I knew I was the vanilla ice cream of Australian music, and that I had an opportunity to say something, to mean something . . . I knew that we were going to appear after the flag-bearing ceremony, and there would be one flag that wasn’t represented.

  Savage Garden finished their touring commitments in December 2000. Hayes felt as though his second marriage was ending, and this time it wasn’t mutual.2 Unsure of his future, he relocated to San Francisco in the new year to begin work on a solo album with Walter Afanasieff. Jones, for his part, was already making good his plans to continue his musical career in a supporting role, writing and producing songs for Brisbane band Aneiki under the umbrella of his new label Meridien. But Savage Garden’s split – if indeed it was a split – remained under wraps.

  In the end, Hayes’ trusting nature got the better of him. Speaking to the Courier-Mail’s Cameron Adams in October prior to the release of his debut solo single Insatiable, Hayes told the truth, believing Adams would hold onto his scoop until an official statement was made. When Daniel Jones woke up the next morning, the news was out. Some reports even suggested Hayes had sacked Jones from his own band, with Jones claiming he had never wanted to close the door on recording with Hayes again.3

  It was a messy, undignified end for Savage Garden who, in every other respect, had never pretended to be anything they weren’t.

  Darren Hayes: We never faked anything . . . For us to get up again and make a third record just because it would sell more than a Darren Hayes record, that would be selling out. I mean, people can say what they want about pop music, but they can’t ever say we didn’t mean it.

  The simple truth was the two songwriters had grown apart. Both have long since moved on: while Hayes launched his second solo album in mid 2004, Jones continues to live and work in Brisbane. Perhaps understandably, he has even less interest in talking about Savage Garden now than ever. And while in purely commercial terms Hayes and Jones rank among the most successful songwriting teams of all time, creatively the duo was a spent force.

  Darren Hayes: For our first record we wrote 45 songs. For the second record we wrote exactly 13, and 12 of those were on the album and one was a B-side. Our chemistry and our passion to work together and our goals had shifted so much that it’s a miracle that those 13 songs were written.

  I honestly think we jus
t wanted different things. At the time I didn’t want it to end. It’s been reported a thousand other ways, but it was not my idea that it ended. But now I can’t imagine going back, and I have to commend Daniel for being brave about it.

  The dream was over.

  epilogue – no, your product

  Sydney, 11 September 2001. The Saints – Ed Kuepper, Chris Bailey and Ivor Hay – are at Fox Studios, on stage together for the first time in more than 20 years, grinning as they bash through a half-remembered version of (I’m) Stranded to celebrate their induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame. Hours later, unfolding events in New York will see them bumped from the front pages of the next day’s newspapers. Some bands never get their timing right.

  Clinton Walker nervously introduces the group to accept their statuettes. Kuepper mumbles diffidently; Chris Bailey – ever the diplomat – thanks ARIA for the butt plugs. The event is being pre-recorded for the main awards telecast in October, where fellow inductees INXS will command nearly 15 minutes of airtime. The Saints get about 15 seconds. It’s the barest of acknowledgments, but enough to raise the prospect of the long estranged Kuepper and Bailey working together again.

  Ed Kuepper: Chris was interested in me playing guitar in his version of the Saints, but not interested in working with me beyond that. I understood where he was coming from. I thought well, OK, if I’m back in the band I’m obviously going to be directing things, [but] he was really not interested in entertaining a working relationship along the lines of what we used to have.

  Chris Bailey: It was like peeling away 30 years; the relationships between the three of us were exactly the same! I’d actually discussed it with Ivor about 10 years ago, we were chatting about Ed for some reason. And [we thought] it was really weird how, when you hang out with Ed, you have to go back to being the guy you were at 14 and have the same relationship you had back then.