Australia's latest overnight success, Savage Garden are unashamedly poppy- and a top ten hit with their first release indicates they're on to a good thing. Darren Hayes sings and Daniel Jones programs and arranges the music. They plan to follow up to the single, I Want You with an album early next year.

"Were here for the main arena," Hayes says. "We love commercial music. We're not into arduous, tortured, independent- we're not into that."

Two years ago the Brisbane pair left behind undistinguished Brisbane bands to write songs. Hayes dropped out of a postgraduate education course and Jones quit his job.

"We wrote one song and knew the path to take," Hayes says. We spent every day for a year at each other's houses, recording songs. It was so suicidal."

"We gave up everything, spent quite a bit of money on recording equipment, printing and tapes and put out a mailing list of 150. We sent them our five songs and sat back and waited."

Hayes says every song they write must stem from deep emotion. He says passion is the backbone of every good track and "the whole naked balance of power thing"

The writings of Anne Rice, author of the Vampire Chronicles, provided the name of the band.

"Vampires describe their world as a savage garden," Hayes says. "Their world is beautiful but underneath it is primitive and savage. The core reality is they have to brutally kill people to survive."