Nina's Darius World

WHEN Darius Danesh first bothered the nation’s consciousness as a rather smug and arrogant presence on Popstars, the music industry was a different place. It was only four years ago, but much has changed in that time. The explosion of reality pop shows – Popstars, Pop Idol, Popstars: The Rivals, Fame Academy – was yet to come. Label bosses were tearing their hair out over the supposed crisis of downloading music, yet refusing to tackle the problem head-on. Franz Ferdinand was still the guy whose assassination kicked off the first world war. Now, things are substantially different. Reality shows didn’t lay bare the tactics of the business so much as confirm everything most people knew or suspected about how things worked: young, innocent things are put through the emotional wringer for fun (ours) and profit (the industry’s). What they did change, however, is the speed at which business moved. The careers of some whose names were made on Saturday night TV burned out in less time than it took to download their debut single. The pace of the celebrity treadmill had moved up.

Scotland’s own Darius – bless his daft goatee beard and his terrible Britney Spears impersonation – was expected to fall by the wayside. After crashing out of Popstars, he reappeared, minus the ponytail and beard which he claimed made him look “like a Greek waiter”, on Pop Idol. He made the finals and toured with Will Young, Gareth Gates and the cast of nonentities which comprised that show’s first series. He turned down a deal with Simon Cowell. Most people expected he’d be back in Glasgow within weeks pulling pints or waiting tables.

“In the last few years a lot has happened,” says Danesh. He talks at a measured pace, with the sincerity of a politician breaking bad news; he inspects his hands and the chunky bracelet that weighs down his wrist before every sentence, as if he’s trying to find the right words. You know, just for you.

There was the very first audition, he says. “Then there was … tabloid ridicule, through to … national public support, and a tide. A sea change, that swept me up and changed my life, and a stubborn determination that my parents would define as one of the reasons why I now have a five-album deal with Universal.”

Danesh might have grown up a bit, but some of that old arrogance is still there, the arrogance that once led him to say: “My voice is a gift to the world; it would be unfair of me not to share it.” The record deal is one of the first things he mentions; within five minutes of sitting down, he’s talking about how one of his friends told him that his new album reminded him of George Michael’s solo work.

Later, he’ll say: “I want to aspire to the male solo artists that inspire me, and specifically they are Seal and George Michael.” Two years ago, Danesh’s first single Colourblind went to No 1. It was then, he says, that he knew he’d made the right decisions. “To not accept certain deals after Pop Idol, to not go down the commercial route, to not accept a record deal that was for a lot of money but meant I would have no creative control.” Now he feels almost vindicated, he says.

He got the platinum album he craved (his debut, Dive In, sold 1.25 million copies), had some time out of the public eye, and now hopes to follow the Will Young route: attempting to establish himself as a serious artist with his second album, Live Twice, and prove that there’s more to him than being a figure of fun on TV.

He started recording a second album; played a couple of demos to his label, who said “right, that’s the first two singles”. But when he came back to Glasgow a year ago he began to have doubts. “I played the songs to my parents and for the first time in my life I wasn’t proud of the material I had written,” he admits. “I realised I was going through the motions of writing songs rather than being creative. It was so frustrating” – he uses the word frustrating a lot over the course of an hour – “because I wasn’t proud of the songs, yet I was getting good feedback from the industry on them. But my heart and gut were telling me that I wasn’t proud of them, even to my immediate family.”

Danesh talks like this a lot; it seems like there’s a bit of him that thinks he’s a maverick tendency here to shake up a stale industry, or an antidote to the mainstream rather than a slick embodiment of it. Anyway, he says, he scrapped what he had written and seized up with writer’s block for five months.

“I was like the stereotypical novelist, with screeds of scrunched-up paper on the floor,” he says. “I was hopeless. I’d built up such a pressure on myself, and every emotion, all the experiences and relationships and the places I’d been and the things I’d seen over the past three years that I hadn’t managed to express, had just been … bottled up.

“I thought I was a failure,” he continues. “I thought as a songwriter I couldn’t cut the mustard.” He lost perspective on things, he says. And then, in February of this year, his father was diagnosed with cancer. “It’s something that people hear every day,” he says, looking at the floor. “Families up and down the country receive the news, and I was part of one of those families and it changed my life. Suddenly there was a huge swelling of anger and regret and emotion in my head and it was hugely frustrating.” He decided to put off releasing anything, which, he says, “took the pressure off writing a hit”. He spent time in hospital with his father, wrote a song for him, which ended up being the title track on Live Twice.

An album of highly-polished pop where every chorus announces, with the marketing man’s eye firmly on the bottom line, the title of the song, Live Twice has the potential to sell by the truckload. There are nods to The Beatles in the jaunty pianos of the first single, Kinda Love. Save Me and If I Could both see Danesh slipping into serious rock mode, his (actually pretty good) voice imitating Michael Hutchence. And that title track is the kind of ballad that expresses obviously heartfelt emotions in the insufficiently insightful language of the modern pop song.

Danesh talks a lot about his father; about how his illness affected the family, about not being “knocked off the path to achieving your dream”. He navigates this territory with the same sincerity he brings to everything else; he utters his words as if he’s sticking to an internal script, because that makes everything easier to deal with, easier to rationalise. He applies the same logical process to talking about the industry. He wasn’t dazzled, as so many are, by the promise of a big fat record deal and the patronage of Simon Cowell.

“I could see it,” he says, sounding steely all of a sudden. “I could see what would have happened if I’d signed Simon Cowell’s deal, which was for a shedload of money. I’d have been under the control of a marketing man who told me what to do and what to wear, what to sing and what to be. It would have driven me nuts.”

He would have had an initial hit, he admits, off the back of a hugely successful television programme. “But I wouldn’t have been a real artist. I wouldn’t have been representing who I am as a person, or the values I have. I wouldn’t be fulfilling my dream”.

The dream, such as it is, is to be a singer-songwriter. “If there had been a programme called Singer-Songwriter Idol I’d have been there,” he says wryly, “but there wasn’t.” The dream crops up often, a nebulous thing that Danesh seems to chase with both abandon and determination. He was willing to risk humiliation on live television in pursuit of some far worthier goal. The means, for him, seem to justify the end he’s always pursuing.

He refers, jokingly, to being put through the reality-show mangle as his “training”. It was work experience before getting the job. “I just chose a very different job on the same … you know, in the same building. But on a different floor.”

It’s a moot point whether Live Twice will mark Danesh’s card as a serious artist. He’s certainly confident it will, but its success owes as much to the vagaries of the market as it does to whether the album is actually any good. Still, he talks about his career like he’s in for the long haul. If he’s come this far, the reasoning seems to go – and put up with tabloid ridicule and being called “a twat” in the supermarket when all he wanted was a loaf of bread and a pint of milk – then commercial failure isn’t going to put him off. It takes more than a little chutzpah to enter a reality TV contest not once but twice. And negotiating the ins and outs of the record industry is no walk in the park, particularly when you’re headstrong enough – at 21 – to turn down a deal from one of its most powerful figures.

However, underneath Danesh’s serious demeanour and his apparent openness, there’s a persistence and a knowledge of the music business’s realpolitik to rival the most ruthless industry player. One gets the feeling that he took on Simon Cowell simply to prove that he could beat him at his own game. Danesh has a game-plan to climb to the top. If it takes him a while, so be it; he’s got the five-album deal and the instinct to present himself exactly the way he wants. The figure who had the judges laughing at his first audition might be the one who’s laughing last.