Darius World

The Monday interview

I was brilliantly naive'

He laughed off relentless ridicule on TV's Pop Idol - and the public loved him for it. Since then, Will and Gareth have both had No 1s. Is it now the turn of Darius Danesh, Britain's most famous loser?

Simon Hattenstone

Monday July 1, 2002

The Guardian

At the far end of a posh photo studio in Fulham, Darius Danesh is posing like a demented escapee. One bent knee ahead of the other, mouth frozen in a silent scream, startled eyes agape, he could be the world's hammiest B-movie star. The photographer clicks away. This is the Darius of Popstars, the talent show that made him infamous. The Darius who sang Hit Me Baby One More Time in acapella falsetto - an unforgettable, unforgivable television moment; the Darius who asked millions of viewers, "Can you feel the love in this room?" as he was kicked off the show; the Darius who promised he would be back with a platinum album.

But he doesn't look like the Darius that became a national laughing stock; Britain's most famous loser. The ponytail and goatee have long gone. He looks like Darius mark 2; the handsome, half-cool cheeseburger who almost won Pop Idol; the nice guy who wowed us with his wiggling hips and Vegas voice, and who took Will and Gareth all the way. That Darius sang sensibly, occasionally beautifully, took his criticism on the chin, and suggested ridicule had taught him humility.

But this is actually Darius mark 3, the singer-songwriter launching his career with the single Colourblind. This Darius hopes to compete with Ronan and Robbie for teeny love.

He's wearing black top and black pants with a thick silver chain, possibly a dog's lead, dangling from a pocket. I think it's a fashion item. He straddles the sofa, looks seductively into my eyes and begins to exercise his charm. He asks me where I am from, originally. I'm not sure whether to giggle or blush.

Manchester, I say. "No, originally. Let's go back further. I like to know a little bit about personality." He's got a right bedside manner, this Darius Danesh. So I take him back to the shtetls in Poland, and he takes me back to his roots. "My dad's from a Persian family, but my mum's Scottish." It's so Darius, so romantic, to talk of Persia.

He asks if I've heard the single. Yes, I say. "Do you like it? Give me your honest opinion. Don't humour me." It's not something I'd go out and buy, I tell him. "OK. OK. Taken." But my kids like it, and it's pleasant enough, and it's great that you kind of wrote it. (He shares the writing credit with two others.) He perks up. "Really, oh bless them. Great. How old are they? I've got a seven-year-old brother, Cyrus."

Cyrus played one of the great cameos on the TV shows. Is it true that he became Darius's image consultant? "He did. Bless him. Never a truer word was spoken by a child." So what did he actually say to him? "I went to give him a goodnight kiss, and he was half asleep, and he opened this huge face and squinted at me. I said, 'What's wrong?' and he said, 'Darius, you're rough'." In every sense? "In every sense. I thought he summed it up. The goatee was off next morning."

Amazingly, his makeover did the trick. He returned a new man and almost won; almost became the Pop Idol. Well, yes, he says, but not a true pop idol. "I think the term 'pop idol' is really deceiving. It's become a term that we can just slap on anybody that goes through a competition and wins, but there are only one or two living pop idols who I would say have earned that title. Madonna is a pop idol."

I ask him whether he is glad he didn't win. Well, he says, it taught him so much about PR and management and TV, and he met so many people such as Will and Gareth who mean so much to him, but yes, it would have been disastrous."If I'd won I would have been the biggest nightmare. I wouldn't have fitted the mould. If I'd won, either the Pop Idol logo or I would have imploded. I have to be the person I am."

For starters, he says he wouldn't have been able to record his own music. After Pop Idol, Simon Cowell said he would offer him a contract with his company BMG. Then there were stories saying Cowell had broken his word. Darius says this is rubbish. "He only didn't sign me up because I turned down his very gracious offer." He pauses. "You look surprised?" I am. "Well I was encouraged to release not only a cover, but two covers. Imagine, I could have done a cover of Gareth's cover of Robson and Jerome's cover of the Righteous Brothers. How great! You know, that doesn't inspire me."

He says he has waited five months to release a record so that people will buy it because they like it, not because it's off the back of Pop Idol. "I felt if I'd signed with BMG I would have been cashing my chips in. It was essentially, 'Here's a suitcase full of money, take it and ask no questions, cover this song, yadi yadi, yadi'. I didn't put myself through two years of being hassled by the press, I didn't put my parents and family through two years of this, just so that I could do a cover of a song."

But why did he put his parents through it all in the first place? How did he manage to make such an idiot of himself? "I was naive," he says. It's something of an understatement. But he's not finished. "I was brilliantly naive, and very overenthusiastic, and the combination of that and the editing made me look..." He trails off, unable or unwilling to say the word, and starts to talk about how his fellow contestants wept when he left. He says the programme-makers decided to make him into a tragic hero. Which is something of an overstatement.

At the time, Darius, now 21, was studying English at Edinburgh University. He loved music, but hadn't been to stage school and was new to performance. I ask him whether he was shocked when the TV show was screened and he saw his performance. "No," he says sharply. "Were you shocked when you thought, 'I've got a really original question to ask Darius'?" Oooooh!, I say, how bitchy.

"I'm joking," Darius says. "You must have read that question asked about me so many times, though. No, I was not shocked, I was cringing." He says he bit his fist so hard that he was left with teeth marks.

He claims that he's not a natural exhibitionist. So what came over him? "I hit the self-destruct button. It was kind of saying, 'I'm not going to fit into the mould you want'. It was partly nerves. It was partly [judge] Nicki Chapman saying, 'Darius, this is the last time you'll have to show any individual flair'. In a way, I felt bullied by the emotional manipulation of the shows. Now I look back on it and I laugh." But he doesn't. Not really.

Do you perform Hit Me Baby One More Time at gigs? "You're winding me up now!" No, I say, everybody would want it. "No, I don't think so," he says tersely. It was after the extraordinary rendition that he made the even more extraordinary proclamation about the love in the room and the platinum disc. No wonder Kym from the eventual winners Hear'say said he was like their cult leader. It seemed unbelievably arrogant. Actually, he says, it was the opposite. "It was the only way I could protect myself. We were all being bullied," he repeats. "I was naive, but I was also switched on enough to realise what was happening, and I wasn't going to be pushed into a corner and made to cry on national television."

After the show, things got worse. The newspapers hounded him - he tells me how they made up stories about him trying to sell the secret address where the Pop Star winners were living, walking in on his girlfriend making love to his best friend, and being a genuine cult leader. He says his parents, both doctors, were devastated. They were aspirational. They named their two sons after the great kings of Persia. They never expected their eldest son to become a national joke. "When I saw my mum upset by things they wrote about me, that really hurt me."

Did he not just think, ah well, all publicity is good publicity? "Whoever said that wasn't famous. That's just rubbish. I was knocked for six. My legs were chopped off before I could stand."

Still, he managed to finish his third year at university, and went to sign up with the record company that had promised him a deal. But by now the show had screened, and the company thought he was unmarketable, a liability. "I just disappeared for seven weeks. Went to Derbyshire, saw some family, grabbed my guitar, a bunch of CDs. I built up my passion for music slowly over those weeks. I thought I'd lost it."

Did he become self-conscious? "Jeezus!" he shrieks. "Yeah, of course. There was a time when I grew a fake beard so people wouldn't recognise me." And did they? He bursts out laughing. "Yeah, they still recognised me. I looked like a prat."

His parents begged him not to go on Pop Idol, but he felt he had to redeem himself. It was brave of you, I say. "I don't know if it was brave or just stubborn." I tell him I can't work out if he has the skin of a rhino or if he's hypersensitive, or a mix of both. "I think you've articulated it very well. A bit of both."

I tell him that my children bled for him when he lost on Pop Idol. "Really? Oh bless." He looks so chuffed. I ask him if he'll give them a ring because they have some questions. This is where he shows his star quality. "Alix, it's Darius. How are you? Did you have a good day at school? You had an outday? What does that mean? Oh wicked! A day of art! My brother had football all afternoon, and I'm going to give him a call later to see how it went, but I thought I'd give you a call first because I'm with your dad and he said you had some questions for me.

"Why do I not hate Simon Cowell? That's a very good question. Oh I hear screaming in the background. Tell Maya, I'll speak to her later, she doesn't need to get excited. Oh my goodness! Hey, are you fighting? The reason I don't hate Simon Cowell is because sometimes what you see on television isn't exactly what the person is like in real life, so although you've seen him be nasty on TV to some of the contestants, in real life he's a gentleman with manners. He's just brutally honest and quite cruel for the effect of entertaining, I suppose."

Ten minutes later, I take the phone off him. "Sweetheart! She went nuts on the other end of the phone. She was just really excited that it was me, I think." He says that his new record is for people like Alix and Maya. "The single is, I suppose, the most honest way that I can thank the public for their support over the last few months."

He says he would like to go back to university at some point and do his final year. I ask him what was the last book he read. "I reread the Great Gatsby. I love the ending." What happens at the end, I ask, trying to catch him out. He comes to a muffled stop. Great. "Well really it's quite tragic at the end," he says after a few seconds. Yes? "It ends up with the narrator summing up the book with just a few phrases. He says, 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -"

He recites it word perfect, quite beautifully. "'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' It's just so beautiful, so appropriate to, I don't know, every man's hopes and dreams." Darius World