In 1996, the duo released their debut single “I Want You,” a strange and addictive piece of dream-world bubblegum. Woodruff helped Savage Garden get signed to Roadshow Music, a Warner Bros. Savage Garden sent demo tapes to labels all around the world, and they caught the attention of John Woodruff, a manager of a few fairly prominent Australian rock bands. Eventually, they renamed themselves Savage Garden after a line from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books, a pretty clear sign that these guys were dorks. First, they called themselves Crush, before learning that a British group already had that name. In 1994, Hayes and Jones both realized that they wanted to write original music, so they left the band and formed their own duo. During his audition, Hayes’ voice broke, but he still got the spot in Red Edge musicians, it seems, will forgive certain flaws if literally nobody else shows up to audition.įor about a year, Red Edge played the pub circuit around Australia’s Gold Coast. (When Hayes was born, the #1 song in America was Roberta Flack’s “ The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”) Hayes was in college when he auditioned for Red Edge, but all he wanted to do was make pop music. Only one person responded to the ad, and that person was Darren Hayes.ĭarren Hayes, a Brisbane native, had been a nervous and fragile kid, obsessed with pop music and Star Wars. Red Edge needed a singer, so they put an ad in Time Off, a local music newspaper. They were called Red Edge, and they mostly played covers. As a teenager, Jones started a band with his brother and some friends. Multi-instrumentalist Daniel Jones was born in England, and his family moved to Brisbane when he was still a baby. The two members of Savage Garden found each other by happenstance.
At the top of 1998, one of those songs went all the way to #1, ending the long reign of Elton John’s “ Candle In The Wind 1997.” But they had songs, and those songs crept into your brain and stayed there. They never had buzz, or at least they didn’t have the type of buzz that was legible to my teenage self.
Savage Garden weren’t part of a cultural wave, and they didn’t belong to any particular genre or scene. You’d hear these songs out in the world, and you might enjoy them without becoming the slightest bit curious about the people who made them. The duo made lighter-than-air earworms that would simply become a part of your environment. For a while, though, Savage Garden had radio programmers under their spell. They were two faintly anonymous-looking white guys who would occasionally pop up on VH1, and there was nothing especially outwardly interesting about them. Nobody knew much of anything about Savage Garden. That’s what the Australian duo Savage Garden did in the late ’90s. But under rare circumstances, a nobody can become a somebody without even having to invent some kind of narrative or persona.
In the music business, professional hooksmiths who aren’t obvious pop stars usually play behind-the-scenes roles, writing or producing hits for people who do have those qualities. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen. He has to perform the absurdity of his own stardom.Įvery once in a while, though, someone relatively normal sneaks through the system and conquers the charts. Even a pop-star everyman like Phil Collins has to be able to communicate a whole lot with, for instance, a waggling eyebrow. Pop stars come in many different sizes and shapes, but in just about every form, pop stardom involves some sort of majestic, mystical charisma.
The world has to project lust and fantasy and anxiety and parasocial friend-feelings and all sorts of other things on these people, and these people have to be able to support all of those projections. To rack up any kind of sustained success, pop stars have to be larger-than-life figures. Pop stardom is, among many other things, a cult of personality. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.