Darius World

THIRD TIME LUCKY

Mail on Sunday 24 November 2002

He was rejected on popstars and lost to Gareth and Will on Pop Idol but Darius Danesh is determined to outlast them all.

Some words go hand in hand with a visual image. The name Darius Danesh is one of them. Say it and a metnal picture lurches into view of a cheesy 19 year old with a pony tail and goatee beard singing Britney Spear's Hit Me Baby One More Time on the hit tv show Popstars before going on to declare how much 'lurve' was in the room. He later announced that his voice was a 'gift' and that it would be 'unfair not to share it with the rest of the world'. After being rejected from the show at the semi-final stage, he declared, undaunted, that he would have a number-one single as a solo artist and a triple-platinum album by the time he was 35 whatever the judges thought of him.

Darius also featured on the Popstars follow-up Pop Idol, despite being warned off by the judges, and came third to will Young and Gareth Gates. On one show he advised pop critic and judge Simon Cowell to undo his notoriously high waistband becuase he might be restricting the bloodflow to his head and has been described by Julie Birchill as 'the horror, the amazement, the sheer molten glee that is Darius'. His first single Colourblind saw off George Michael and Britney Spears to each number one in July.

Ironically the winners of Popstars went on to form Hear'say who split last month after limited chart success. Darius is keen to remove himself from the manufactured pop category - he uses the description singer-sonwriter with determined frequency - and refuses to comment on whether Hear'Say's demise and the disappointing ratings of such shows as Fame Academy, mean such music is coming to the end of its natural life.

I meet him as he prepares for the release of his second single, Rushes. In the flesh he is unexpectedly charismatic. His six foot two inches unravel to a lean frame clad in a grey Levi's vest, a Ted Baker shirt, vintage Levi's jeans and Nike trainers, with silver dog tags round his neck and bracelets and beads around his wrists.

Now 22 Darius looks different from his Popstars days. The lack of goatee and ponytail was to be expected - both were already conspicuous by their absence on Pop Idol and on the release of Colourblind. His look now is fresh and beguilingly boyish, without a trace of the 'David Seaman does Elvis' of three years ago. What is more surprising is that, along with the facial hair, he has apparently lost that coating of smarminess. He seems to have discovered humility.

You were arrogant, I suggest. ' I was cocky,' he says. 'I was 19 and I was reacting artificially to an artificial set-up. I was very insecure as a person and I was throwing out this cocky front. I was hiding behind the goatee and ponytail. They say you hide behind facial hair and it's completely true. I wasn't comfortable with being me.'

So that wasn't the real Darius? OK, he says since said that when he saw his rendition of Hit Me Baby One More Time he bit his knuckles until they bled. But surely he thought he was pretty hot at the time? 'It wasn't me,' he says. ' My friends and family said to me, "We've seen you on Popstars but we don't recognise you.' And I cringed when I saw myself. People forget we did it six months before it was shown on TV so by the time it was screened, in January 2001, I was back preparing for final exams at university. It kind of knocked me off my feet. I was offered a record deal, and before I knew it I was on the front page of four national newspapers. It was bizarre, going from being a student to being thrown into the limelight. And thinking, 'I'm not really like that!'"

The story of Darius's 'second coming' won him unexpected support from the British Public which loves a loser - especially one who won't go away. Spurned from Popstars, he retreated to a cottage in Derbyshire to lick his wounds. 'I gave up. I was deflated,' he says. 'I didn't want to sing again, I didn't want to write music. I gave up the guitar.' His abiding image on Popstars - fuelled by shots of him staring coldly at 'Nasty Nigel' Lythgoe as he was dismissed - was, it emerged, not the whole story. He had collapsed in tears off-camera, devastated. He returned to university to finish his degree in English Literature and philosophy, his career in music apparently at an end. It could all have finished there, but reality TV was ripe for a second instalment of public humiliation, and Darius found himself planning a new approach.

'I was a figure of ridicule,' he says. 'And yet, in my personal life, I was on top of the world. I raided my mum's vinyl collection, listened to great songs by the Beatles, Marvin Gaye and gradually started writing again. Emotionally and personally, I was on a complete high. At the time, I remember watching a documentary about Robbie Williams. He was successful, but miserable - the opposite to me. He was abusing his mind and body with alcohol and drugs, and he wasn't happy. I had a long chat with Mum and Dad and by the end of it I realised that the only way to hold on to that feeling of contentment and excitement about the future was to keep the most important things in my life close to me, and not let anything else shake that.'

He may have been happy, but he still had something to prove to the outside world. ' I had made a fool of myself publicly, so I had to redeem myself publicly,' he says. The answer? To put himself back in front of a potentially mocking public on Pop Idol.

His parents advised him against it. 'My family were petrified that I'd go through the same thing again. But they understood. When I was three, I was fascinated by fire and candles. We were in the Louvre museum in Paris, and there were these beautiful candles, this glow from the corner of the room. I was drawn to this corner and was trying to touch the candles and my dad had to explain to me, "No Darius, it burns." He kept putting his finger in and saying "Ouch, ouch." At the age of three I didn't understand this, and I insisted on putting my finger into the flame. Apparently I didn't cry. I just looked at the flame and went to touch it again. My Dad has since said to me, "You always insist on doing things your way, even if it means you get burned."

At first, it seemed his family's fears were justified. Cowell, Pop Idol's Mr. Nasty, called him 'corny' He didn't make it into the final ten competitors. But then another contestant, Rik Waller, fell ill and Darius was invited to take his place, sailing through the public voting process week after week until he was defeated by Will Young and Gareth Gates.

Despite his third place the offers came flooding in, including one from Andrew Lloyd Webber to play the lead in Whistle Down the Wind. He was also offered a record deal with Cowell's label BMG which would have seen him following the Pop Idol route of making a debut album peppered with saleable cover versions.

He stood his ground, though, clinched a �1 million, five album deal with Mercury Records that allowed him to record his own songs, and decided to wait six months until the end of the series to release his first single - a move many thought was disastrous.

'People thought I was crazy, that I should have taken advantage of the hype,' he says. 'Commercially, it would have made more sense. Pop Idol was the most incredible marketing tool a major label had ever used. We could have sold Baa Baa Black Sheep on the back of it.'

Wasn't it foolish, then, to spurn such an opportunity? There had to be space,' he says. 'There had to be a pause so that the public could breathe, and so that I could breathe.'

Colourblind was a hit - a catchy song that sold 112,000 copies in its first week. Darius found himself working with legendary producer and Mercury managing director Steve Lillywhite, renowned for his work with Scottish band Travis and rock giants U2. Delirious to have been given the chance to be a singer-songwriter like his role model, David Gray, he threw himself into every aspect of the recording process.

He can't bear to leave any detail alone - last Wednesday, he was at Victoria station at 11.30 pm with a tape recorder, recording the sound of a Tube train for the start of his track Sliding Doors. He insisted that the sample be added to the song before the CD was sent off to be cut the next day. 'People wondered what the hell I was doing' he laughs. 'Normally, with someone like me, the song is recorded and sent off to a Swedish production team to be finished, and you don't have any more input, but I don't want to do things that way.Instead he has stayed on at the studio every night, learning about mixing and production, even producing one song on the album himself.

'Although my CD will be on the shelves at Woolies, it's a very personal thing to me, ' he says. 'I'm not on national television any more, and I'm glad I'm not. now I have the opportunity just to be me, to hold on tight to the values instilled in me by my parents. If I'm going to do this, it's all or nothing.'

Darius often refers to his family - to his parents Booth and Avril and his brothers Aria 18 and Cyrus 7. From a large Persian family, Darius's grandfather was ambassador and confidant to the Shah of Iran, and Booth remembers singing Happy Birthday to the Shah at the age of seven. the family lost everything in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown. Booth had already moved to Scotland to train as a doctor, where he met and married Avril, a Scot who now works as a GP. They brought up their family in Bearsden, Glasgow.

Booth went on to invent the first heart, lung and kidney machine for babies but switched to gastroenterology. As a Muslim, he is teetotal, and much has been made in the press of the family's strict, clean-living ethos.

'It's complete rubbish,' says Darius. 'my Father doesn't drink but he doesn't mind if I do. I've always been encouraged to have a good time. My household was very open - there were family meals around the kitchen table, trips out with the family, doing things very much as a unit. I've got wonderful memories of my childhood.'

Darius trained as a classical singer and sang for the Scottish Opera when he was 11. He is accomplished on the guitar, piano an saxophone, and achieved good grades from the presigious Glasgow Academy - despite being listed in the yearbook by his peers as he boy most likely to become famous for 'being a giant plonker or a gay porn star'. He was brought up in a cultured atmosphere, where the arts and history were familiar (the names Darius and Cyrus are those of ancient Persian kings, and Aria comes from his parents' love of opera), but Darius also harboured a love of pop.

At nine, he heard the song More Than Words by Extreme on the radio, and promised to do his chores for a year if his mother would buy him a guitar. By Christmas he could play the song himself, and soon after he wrote his first song. He wrote Rushes when he was 16 about a girl he had a crush on, who would get the same bus home from school. 'I wrote the lyrics on bus tickets,' he says. 'By the end of the week I had five tickets and this melody in my head.'

By the end of the year, he'd plucked up the courage to say hello to the girl. 'She wasn't the prettiest on the bus, but there was just something about her,' he says. 'She wasn't on the bus that day, though. It turned out her dad had got a job in Europe and she'd moved. I was gutted. Now, five years later, that song described exactly how I feel at the moment - I have this incredible adrenaline rush about what's happening to me.

Darius spent his early childhood inspired by the adventurous bedtime tales told to him by his father about his Persian heritage. 'I would listen wide-eyed to the fantastic stories that he would tell me of his childhood, growing up in palaces, the wars, the revolution, the kidnappings. The stuff that films are made of. Persia was a multi-cultural empire that embraced different ideas, very much like the Scottish attitude to life.'

He was bullied at school but feels the experience toughened him up. 'It made me realise I was going to have to work much harder than I thought to get where I wanted,' he says. 'It meant that, when I was picked on by the press, although it hurt, although it knocked me off my feet, I knew I could get back up. People say you get bullied because of jealousy. But it's not jealousy, it's misunderstanding. It's the inability to communicate. And that's what I try to do now through my songs: communicate.'

Darius is touchingly tender when he talks about Cyrus, who has been credited with his change of image after Popstars. 'It wasn't a planned reinvention, it just happened,' he says. 'I was reading Harry Potter to Cyrus at bedtime. He was falling asleep and I went to give him a kiss on the cheek, and he opened his eyes and pulled a face. I said, "What's wrong?" He said Darius! You're rough!" That was it. The next morning, the goatee was gone. Cyrus did the top lip and I did the bottom. The ponytail went shortly after that.'

He is single and shares a flat with society girl Netia Hibbert, a friend he met at university, who also travels with him as his stylist. He prefers to travel by Tube, spurning the record-company car, and when we take him to nearby Parson's Green station to take some photographs, he responds with pleasure to a greeting from a delighted male fan before doing a redition of Oasis's Wonderwall without a hint of self-consciousness. He prompts much sideways glancing from the female passengers who would no doubt be gratified to know that he would much prefer a 'normal' girl to a celebrity date.

'It's much easier to balance things when you're in a relationship with someone who is doing the oposite of what you're doing,' he says. m 'Someone doing a normal job, someone hard-working, fun-loving. The girl next door is an image I find much more appealing than the girl in the magazine.' Now he's the sex symbol, I say. He shakes his head. 'Well, if that's what's being said, then wicked.' So is he worried that girls won't be able to see beyond that now? 'No, he smiles. 'I'm just a boy with a guitar.'

He seems quite different from Gareth and Will. 'Well Gareth in particular is a teen idol,' he says. And does he want something different from that? Yes, because what does being a pop idol mean? It's a great name for a TV show, but in my opinion there's only one person who lives up to that phrase: Madonna. And its taken her 25 years. So how can a phrase like that apply to somebody who wins a talent contest? It's great entertainment, and fantastic as a concept. But I don't want to be a pop idol.'

Darius has the air of someone with longevity. His new album is called Dive In, which he says describes how he feels about his life: 'It's scary, but exciting. It was the public, not the media, who gave me a second chance. And what people will see now is not being edited - it's just me.'