Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Garden Savaged?
We went to see Darren Hayes on the first night of his tour yesterday. Here’s a pic:-
We are, of course, joking, although the potentially racist pop star probably genuinely is regretting his decision to have “fascist uniforms as designed by Mondrian” as the costumes for this tour. Mind you, the “When I say ‘heil’ you see ‘Hitler’” call and response section was probably a little misjudged, and the less said about the duet with Jo O’Meara, the better.
Potentially libellous jokes aside, it was, all things considered - and we include the fact that we were seemingly never more than two songs away from another ballad - a pretty good gig. Darren has a fair set of pipes on him and his newer, more electro poppy stuff is really rather ace and most of the Savage Garden stuff hasn’t dated too badly. Certainly age hasn’t dimmed the passion of much of the audience for him, many of whom took every opportunity possible to declare their love for the man by the not exactly verbose form of unintelligible screaming. This was probably for the best though, as when it did become intelligible, well, ‘intelligible’ doesn’t really cover it. One girl seemed convinced that by informing Darren that “I want to have your babies”, he would readily acquiesce. Perhaps she never got the memo.
Despite being a relatively small scale tour, the stage show was quite impressive, although in most arena settings there aren’t usually problems where the set gets snagged awkwardly as the roadies attempt to move it by hand, but there were lots of pseudo deep images flashing behind him, including a bookcase - we looked but couldn’t see if a copy of Mein Kampf was lurking there - and lots of images of origami birds, which were presumably there to represent, childhood, innocence and the simple desire to fly away from the stresses and strains of modern life. Either that or he just really likes folding paper. Most of these stemmed from the ‘theme’ of the show, the Time Machine tour, although theme is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, as it mainly consisted of two brief speeches to the audience, one where Darren told us that he’d quite like to have a time machine so he could sort out all the mistakes in his life, and the other where he told us “The thing they don’t tell you about time travel, is that it’s all the mistakes you make that make you who you are, and if you undo them you unravel your self”. Darren has clearly never ever seen a single film about time travel as everyone knows that by changing the past you screw up your present. It’s the only plot time travel films have! Someone going back to the past, having a pleasant time and then going back to an undisturbed present doesn’t really provide a lot of dramatic tension and ticking plot style plot driving.
Anyway, it was all good fun and, after a storming discofied version of Pop!ular - the lyrics of which may or may not have been changed to “My friends are all Caucasian”, we could be wrong, we could be right. Arf - the whole thing came to an end and the audience all goose-stepped out. In summary then, electropopness good, ballady nonsense bad. And all Animal Songs are equal, although some are more equal than others.
We are, of course, joking, although the potentially racist pop star probably genuinely is regretting his decision to have “fascist uniforms as designed by Mondrian” as the costumes for this tour. Mind you, the “When I say ‘heil’ you see ‘Hitler’” call and response section was probably a little misjudged, and the less said about the duet with Jo O’Meara, the better.
Potentially libellous jokes aside, it was, all things considered - and we include the fact that we were seemingly never more than two songs away from another ballad - a pretty good gig. Darren has a fair set of pipes on him and his newer, more electro poppy stuff is really rather ace and most of the Savage Garden stuff hasn’t dated too badly. Certainly age hasn’t dimmed the passion of much of the audience for him, many of whom took every opportunity possible to declare their love for the man by the not exactly verbose form of unintelligible screaming. This was probably for the best though, as when it did become intelligible, well, ‘intelligible’ doesn’t really cover it. One girl seemed convinced that by informing Darren that “I want to have your babies”, he would readily acquiesce. Perhaps she never got the memo.
Despite being a relatively small scale tour, the stage show was quite impressive, although in most arena settings there aren’t usually problems where the set gets snagged awkwardly as the roadies attempt to move it by hand, but there were lots of pseudo deep images flashing behind him, including a bookcase - we looked but couldn’t see if a copy of Mein Kampf was lurking there - and lots of images of origami birds, which were presumably there to represent, childhood, innocence and the simple desire to fly away from the stresses and strains of modern life. Either that or he just really likes folding paper. Most of these stemmed from the ‘theme’ of the show, the Time Machine tour, although theme is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, as it mainly consisted of two brief speeches to the audience, one where Darren told us that he’d quite like to have a time machine so he could sort out all the mistakes in his life, and the other where he told us “The thing they don’t tell you about time travel, is that it’s all the mistakes you make that make you who you are, and if you undo them you unravel your self”. Darren has clearly never ever seen a single film about time travel as everyone knows that by changing the past you screw up your present. It’s the only plot time travel films have! Someone going back to the past, having a pleasant time and then going back to an undisturbed present doesn’t really provide a lot of dramatic tension and ticking plot style plot driving.
Anyway, it was all good fun and, after a storming discofied version of Pop!ular - the lyrics of which may or may not have been changed to “My friends are all Caucasian”, we could be wrong, we could be right. Arf - the whole thing came to an end and the audience all goose-stepped out. In summary then, electropopness good, ballady nonsense bad. And all Animal Songs are equal, although some are more equal than others.
Labels: Darren Hayes, Live, Reviews, Savage Garden
