Interviews

Not taking anything away from the fantastic show, meeting the man himself for a quick chat before the gig was the highlight of my night.

He had just finished his tea and came in to the room with a big smile and introduced us to his partner Richard Cullen. Darren started off by telling me that the gig in Newcastle almost never happened:

"Newcastle was the city I insisted on playing [...] and because the stage show is too big for the venue, I had a choice of not playing the city or just changing the show slightly, so I decided to play here, which I'm glad.

"The City Hall is always an amazing gig, I love the people. I think it's a northern thing and as an australian I kind of relate to the honesty." he said.

"The album is about looking at your life, looking at what is broken and looking at ways you would go about fixing them.

"I talk about the idea of going back in time and building a time machine. Of course that is just a metaphor for accepting the past. You can't changed what's happened, but you can accept those things and move on." says the former front man of Savage Garden.

Darren is well known for hitting those exceptionally high notes and I asked him what his secret was:

"Honestly, I can't take credit for the singing, it's a freak of nature. There is something in my voice that allows me to use falsetto quite a lot [...] but it's nothing special." he said modestly.

The gig

Support came from James Murray coming straight from the school of James Morrison, who seemed a little nervous which was perfectly acceptable as he explained he'd only found out he was doing the show just weeks before.

The cheeky chap from Southampton tells the late-comers to go home, but I can assure you he means no harm as he entertained really well and wasn't short of a quick line or two between songs.

As expected the lights go out, and Willy Williams' direction from the very beginning pulls you into Darren's universe with vibrant colours and an atmospheric build up to the first song.

The whole band burst on to the stage to The Future Holds A Lion's Heart with the greeting of Hello on the backdrop. The mood soon changed with the performance of Who Would Have Thought which shows a new side to Darren's sound which is much darker than I've seen before.

Darren handled it well, laughed it off with the audience and a last minute Prince cover before giving a pitch-perfect performance of Words, arguably the centre piece of the new album. It's definitely a fan favourite as one lady thanked him personally from the rafters as the song came to an end.

Mixing it up

Reincarnation is certainly the word because it took me a few moments to realise that he was playing Popular from The Tension and the Spark album. The arrangement was completely different to that on the original recording, which takes a great talent.

This also shone through for the other Savage Garden songs such as Affirmation and I Want You which had a much heavier bass and synth sound.

A special extra just for the Newcastle gig (or so we were told) to make up for the smaller stage show, Darren and the band performed Madonna's Ray of Light which ended with a high note some male performers can only dream of hitting.

Before the show I didn't quite know what to expect with Darren taking a two year break between albums, but regardless of what Darren says the performance and his voice is something quite special.