Darius World

Time & Place: Going for a song

Stuart Wallace The Times Online 18 May 2003

Darius tells Mike Wilson of the ultimate student flat where nobody was studying

It was the ultimate student flat. It is now the flat of legends in that it’s no longer available to rent. It was the top floor flat of 150 Royal Mile and it looked out over Edinburgh and down the Royal Mile. To your left, you’d see the castle. To your right, you’d look down the Royal Mile towards Holyrood Palace. It had been handed down from one group of students to the next over 12 or 15 years. A lot of people knew about it but very few had been to it. To get in, you had to be invited to a party there. I remember being in my first term and I got an invite and I thought, “Oh, my God. This flat is amazing.” And it wasn’t because it was posh. It was pretty grubby. And then Simon, my best mate, got pally with two of the girls who lived there, who were in their final year. We thought we were flying because, here we were, two first-year students, going out with them. And they ended up passing the flat to us, which was a coup. Once there, we did everything. We had the “phattest” parties in it.

It was partly the space and size of it that was amazing. One room I wrote songs in because the acoustics were excellent, because of the wooden floors and the high ceilings. It had beautiful cornicing but one wall was entirely stripped of plaster. It hadn’t even been painted and there was hardly any furniture in there. But that made the sounds incredible. I wrote one of the songs on my album there. The flat was our office and our home. It was also our sanctuary. It was the place we’d get pissed, the place where we’d pull. The flat itself was on two levels. It was all wooden floors. It was like something out of the movie Shallow Grave but even more amazing, mainly because of the goldfish tank which separated the kitchen and the living room area. And the sitting room was big enough to get a band in. We did once: we got one to come round with all their equipment at the end of our second year and we had a jazz and funk all-nighter. It was one of those summer nights in June when light was coming up at 4am and the police came round because of the noise. So we invited them in for a beer and because it was the end of their shift, they stayed.

I used to go to Poundstretcher and buy a bag of tealights and just fill the room with them when we had dinner parties. We had this huge oak dining table that sat 24 people, and we had these big pots in which we’d make pasta. We’d get a few discount chicken fillets from Tesco, add lots of pesto and then have a really nice meal. It was easy to clean up because you would put a bin bag in each room and mop it down, open the windows and air would circulate. It kept itself tidy. You could wreck it but the next day, everyone would chip in and it became tidy again.

I was studying English literature at Edinburgh University but the flat was a study-free zone. Below the fishtank was a library with Shakespeare, Encyclopedia Britannica and great American novels. But it was more a place where we honed our creative ambitions. One of the girls who stayed with us was an artist and she used to get these huge canvases back and do these striking oil paintings.

In my bedroom, there was a futon bed, an open wardrobe rail to hang all my clothes on and a pine drawer to throw my stuff in. And then my CD rack, which had hundreds of CDs. My Marshall amp was in the corner with a 1960s cabinet.

It was a steal, rent-wise. What had happened was that the first students who had lived there did so for three years and handed it down. We were paying rent to the person who originally moved in; so we never found out who owned the flat or what the deal was. In our last year there, the owners sold it so we were the last to enjoy it. I’m very proud that I was part of student legend. That flat is a place I’ll never forget. I miss it. We were living a rock’n’roll lifestyle. We just never knew it then.

Darius has a number one single, Colourblind, and a bestselling album, Dive In. He is touring the UK, ending in London on May 25.