![]() D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – prompted by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Terence Trent D’Arby achieved huge fame in the 80s – he now lives quietly in Italy as Sananda Maitreya. I didn’t give a fuck about it then, and even less about it now that memory has been kind enough to allow me to forget most of it.” ![]() When I speak to him – which takes six months to arrange – he suggests he was grateful to move on “from such excess and artifice. And so, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early 90s reportedly living the life of a tormented recluse in a Los Angeles mansion. His record company felt differently – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not someone easily restrained. Like Prince before him, he began to feel himself capable of anything, each new song he composed a masterpiece. If his ascendancy had the stuff of legend about it, then so did his demise. “I wanted adulation and got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, by now working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.” He became terribly famous, terribly quickly. To hear him sing songs such as If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to bear witness to the art of aural seduction the knees buckled. In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most arresting new pop star of his generation. We could learn a lot from them.Į ach individual story in popular music has a common beginning. (Many were divorced, too at least one was high.) All were humble, replete with wisdom, resolute. I sensed they enjoyed the opportunity to talk again, to be heard above the din of Ed Sheeran and Adele and Stormzy. It’s a difficult subject.” Those who did speak, however – 50 in total, from Joan Armatrading to S Club 7 Franz Ferdinand to Shirley Collins – were endlessly revealing and candid in a way they would never have been at the peak of their fame. The guitarist from one of America’s most stylish modern rock acts, someone whose skinny jeans no longer fit quite as well as they used to, was initially keen, but cancelled at the last minute because, his manager informed me, “his head just isn’t in the right place to discuss this right now. Others enthusiastically agreed, only to later bail out. So what’s it like, I wondered, to still be doing this “job” at 35, and 52, and beyond? What’s it like to have released your debut album to a global roar, and your 12th to barely a whisper? Why the continued compulsion to create at all, to demand yet more adulation? Frankly, what’s the point? Do I unashamedly want to still be one of the biggest artists in the world? Yeah, I do Robbie WilliamsĪnd so, armed with a batch of potentially indelicate questions – because who likes to discuss failure? – I began to reach out to musicians from various genres and eras, those who hadn’t died young, but were still here, still working, to ask them what it was like in the margins.Ī great many never bothered to respond. ![]() Despite his enduring success, Dylan has suggested he couldn’t write the songs he wrote in his 20s in his later years, at least not in the same way or with the same instinct, largely because, after that early momentum has fizzled out, things settle down into simply the thing that you do, with all the humdrum ennui associated with that. A songwriter once told me, citing Bob Dylan, that “artists tend to write their best songs between the ages of 23 and 27”. Like sportsmen and women, they peak early. ![]() They dared to dream, and then went out and made that dream come true.īut falling back down to earth, in this business, is an inescapable certainty. Artists may not always be the best people to operate the heavy machinery of adulthood, but they remain tenacious, driven and inspirational. But then perhaps all pop stars are? They’re fascinating individuals, compelling and gifted, not short of self-confidence and, yes, occasionally a little odd, too. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |