Darius World

Bigwideworld.com Interview 27 October 2002

We’re in Manchester, it’s cold but tea in a paper cup flows freely from the tea urn backstage at the Manchester Evening News Arena. 18,000 screaming people can be heard in the corridors and soon Darius is about to go onstage; no wonder he’s smiling. But for now he’s ours and thankfully he’s not wearing his kilt. And it turns out he’s actually not a bad bloke after all…

‘It’s nice to be back; this is probably my favourite arena’ he starts. ‘…because the acoustics and the big sides give a feeling of intimacy and it’s such a huge crowd. The last couple of times I’ve played here I’ve had the most incredible time. The crowd is alwayss responsive…even on a bad night it’s a great night.’

Having done the pop thing the right way and written your songs, what’s it like to be back with all these other pop acts? Do you feel like the big brother at all?

No not at all – I’m still learning. I’ve gone through a big learning curve the last couple of years but I feel like I’ve just taken the first step and Popstars and Pop Idol were like my training. They would allow me to better understand television management, media, being in the public eye – but I don’t see Popstars or Pop Idol as being what I was ever about. The were just lessons that I learned to allow me to get here today and to progress as a singer-songwriter. I’ve been writing since the age of fifteen, I taught myself how to play guitar and Popstars/Pop Idol – I had a wicked time on them but never once did they show what I was really about. I turned up to the Pop Idol audition with my guitar wanting to sing Colourblind and they didn’t want to hear someone playing an instrument, they didn’t want to hear an original song; they certainly didn’t want to hear an original song as written by the artist so as a singer-songwriter, there was a certain frustration that was pent up inside me throughout Pop Idol. But then, as a performer it was an opportunity to sing some of my favourite songs. Now I’ve signed with my hero producer, Steve Lilywhite, the man behind U2 and Travis, I’ve gone on to then face the challenge of writing the album, ‘Dive In’ which is out the 2nd December, but even that has been seven months to get together twelve original songs that I’m proud of and seven moths ago, I have to admit to you, I was peeing my pants! Thinking ‘how am I gonna do this?!’ An artist takes a year, maybe two years to put an album together. Craig David’s just been away for two. But I’ve been lucky – in a relatively short space of time I went through a lot and they say some of the best songs are written *clicks * just like that. It was just flowing and I’m lucky that I’m working with some of the best producers in the business. I’ve been out in LA writing and recording with the Matrix. Avril Lavigne, ‘Complictaed’ they wrote, recorded and produced that and her album so to then have that experience of American production, flying out to a different country, everything’s flowing, everything’s happening do fast. It’s just me and my guitar, on an aeroplane, on the road, on the back of a bus, anywhere I can I’m writing lyrics and it’s just flowing and that’s how I formed the ideas of how the songs should sound like.

So do you actually feel lucky you didn’t win Pop Idol?

Yeah!

If you’d have won you’d have been steered….

Nooo; you know, if I’d have won, I’d still be here because I’ve been very lucky to have been given the support by my family, by the record company that I have grown to work with in such harmony it astounds me because over two years I’ve learned how commercial and tough this business is. Major record companies don’t really care about the individual songs, they want to shift units. They treat albums like tins of beans; that’s why in the current pop market you listen to one or two songs that are great on the radio, so what do you do? You go and buy the album. You get the album and you’re disappointed. Why? Because the album’s filler. The album’s filler because many of the big labels, they grab a bunch of half-written songs, send them out to Swedish production companies and what is other the records that the record companies have put all their effort into, is not a great album. That doesn’t interest me. I’m lucky to be with a record company that cares about the artist, care about songs. I’m lucky enough to be with Mercury Records and Steve Lilywhite is the man. He’s worked with everyone from Bono to the Rolling Stones and if I look at the albums that I grew up with, it’s my mother’s vinyl collection. It’s The Beatles, Marvin Gaye and The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and if you pick up a Beatles album, every song on a Beatles album is a great song. A lot of the greatest songs on any album written in that era weren’t singles. So one of the things Steve taught me was ‘Darius, you don’t need to put your best songs out as a single.’ You can put them on the album and then when someone goes and buys the album, they feel that they’ve got something that they’ll listen to over and over again, and it means something, so by using my own lyrics, melodies and by having control over my creative future and my business future, I’m able to be in a position and say that I’m really proud of writing the album and I’m really proud to say it’s the first time I can say thank you to everyone for supporting me over the last year, for the public who gave me a second chance. I wouldn’t be here if people hadn’t picked up phones and said ‘we think this guy’s alright.’ The image painted of me before was so far from what is sitting here in front of you right now and I’m lucky that I was given a second chance.

How did you feel when you heard of Hear Say’s split?

I felt really sorry for them, because I realised the emphasis was on the packaging and not the product, so everything can look quite polished and sheened, but if you’ve not got the good songs, what happens? I wish them luck for their future, but it also made me realise I feel privileged to have taken the biggest step for me, which is taken the responsibility on myself as a songwriter, where my success will live or die, based on my songs. If I start putting out rubbish songs tomorrow, I’m not gonna be in the top 40, I’m not gonna have the opportunity to be on Top Of The Pops or performing in Manchester Arena. It’s a weight on my shoulders because I worry about what people think of this, but at the end of the day, as Steve’s told me, you can’t worry. As an artist I’m trying to develop so I could have chosen a more obvious second song to put out as a single, but I chose ‘Rushes’ because it reflects where I am right now. I’m in the middle of a huge adrenaline rush. As a songwriter I’m in the middle of being excited at realising my debut album, as a person I’m excited to perform with my band live in front of an audience of 18,000 people. The adrenaline rush, just people responding to a song, maybe sing the lyrics back – I can’t tell you the adrenaline rush; nothing else touches it. And also, ‘Rushes’ for me was a way of saying ‘look, I am different from what you thought before.’ I wrote ‘Rushes’ when I was 16; it’s a song that’s been with me for years and I’d forgotten about it. I wrote it about a girl; now it’s about something very different – but I wrote it about a girl who never knew; I never met her – I was on the bus home from school and I would get the bus home everyday from school and I saw this girl – she went to the all girl’s school, and she was pretty as a picture. She wasn’t the prettiest girl on the bus but there was something about her, so I started writing these lyrics down on the bus. I had this melody in my head, I was singing it on my way home, up my street when the bus crowd dispersed… and I had this song. By the end of the year I had the courage to just say ‘hi’ to this girl and I asked my mate on the bus, ‘where is she?’ And he said ‘didn’t you know?’ so I went ‘no.’ ‘She’s gone.’ ‘Gone where?’ Her Dad had packed up and the whole family had moved to Europe! So I’d just got the courage to say ‘hey I think you’re great’… so anyway, this song, ‘Rushes,’ it came from a crush I had when I was 16, five years later is now one of the songs where I look towards my upbringing as a songwriter. My grandad played a lot of Celtic music in the house, so the chorus when you listen to it, is very Celtic. And so I put that together with a song that I’d written five years ago and I reflect on the adrenaline rush that I’m having now, and it’s the obvious choice for me, although it’s not the most commercial choice. What does chart position mean anyway? I want this to be the first step for me and ‘Dive In’ is just something I’m really excited about.

New single, new album…busy days ahead then?

It’s gonna be mad but it will have been a whole year since Pop Idol was on and I almost feel that it was five years ago. It doesn’t seem real to me; what I’m doing now is what interests me.

Have you had the chance to speak to or gloat at the Pop Idol judges yet?

No, but I’ve received lovely messages of encouragement and congratulations. I’ve sent my regards to Simon Cowell for his success in America and I respect him as a businessman.

And then it’s time to go and attend to the matter of 18,000 screaming fans. Whether he likes it or not, Darius is something of a pop idol after all. Who’d have thought the man who wears a kilt and whom we knew as singing the worst Britney Spears cover in the world ever would have the girls screaming in adoration?