Contents:
- SAVAGE GARN: DARREN HAY TOLD HE 'LOOKED GAY' MIC VIO
- SAVAGE GARN'S DARREN HAY SAYS MIC 'SAVED MY LIFE' AFTER YEARS OF DENYG HIS GAY INTY
SAVAGE GARN: DARREN HAY TOLD HE 'LOOKED GAY' MIC VIO
Sign up to Rois O’Connor’s ee weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the si track on all thgs micGet our Now Hear This email for ee“Y, baby I’m a homosexual, ” sgs Darren Hay over the shimmerg Eighti pulse of his first solo album a .
Shootg the vio for his last sgle, “Insatiable” (2012), he’d been told he looked “too gay”.
He realised how angry he was that his hard-won self-exprsn had been “extguished by men sus” the tle of his new rerd, Homosexual, is a proud and simple reclamatn of the word that once sred Hay, the nsely packed, slow-burng songs (most of which clock over five mut) tell a longer and more plited story, one that go back to his childhood. The vol chameleong adds to the sense of an artist reachg to pop’s pick’n’mix for an “Mic Vio”, he mimics a female vol to assume the personaly of the homophobic high school prcipal who bullied him as a child. When Hay tak issue wh his vlent, homophobic father on “Euphoric Equatn”, he builds a melody om the bon of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”.
SAVAGE GARN'S DARREN HAY SAYS MIC 'SAVED MY LIFE' AFTER YEARS OF DENYG HIS GAY INTY
“The feelgs are nsensual, ” he breath, “The chemistry is mutual/ The mood is homosexual. Home, Hay looks at ease a nim shirt as the fluorcent letters of the word “homosexual” peek out om jt behd him. It’s an apt emblem for the 50-year-old pop-rock sger — “homosexual” directly referenc his oft-discsed sexualy, but also happens to be the tle of his first solo album more than a .
On first listen, Homosexual (out Friday through Powred Sugar Productns) sounds like an ecstatic nostalgia trip — divg to early-2000s dance-pop wh wild abandon, Hay sounds like a man pursug pism s purt, queert form. Strikg out on his own, Hay watched as the homophobia om his team went om beg “secretive and tentnally kept om me” to beg much more overt “horrors.
“I had an ex-manager tell me recently, ‘Nobody at the label had a problem that you were gay — was jt how that would affect your reer mercially. That was their problem, not the fact that you’re gay, '” he rells, grimacg.