HOW'S FAME AND FORTUNE? IS IT EVERYTHING IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE?

Darren: I don't think we feel very famous at the moment. We feel very fortunate, absolutely. Of course it is, it's the biggest dream that we've ever had in our lives and we're in the process of starting to achieve it so it's amazing.

Daniel: It's kind of good, it's exciting. There are a lot of things that have opened up for us recently like opportunity to travel, enjoying life outside this little world that we used to live in so it's good.

IS THERE A DOWN SIDE?

Daniel: Being exhausted at the end of the day, end of a 17 hour day and you lay down and know that as soon as you go to sleep you're going to wake up and do it all over again, there's a little down side but you've got to ride it when it's there.

Darren: I always try to put it into perspective and I think for one, we're being paid to do something we'd do for free anyway. You get up every day and you love what you do and if you put it into perspective in terms of working in a factory or you know really hard jobs and I've done some of those hard jobs, this is so easy and so fun and we're so lucky to be here.

We spent some time just on tour I guess really having time to think about where we were and what we were doing and like any job you know there are some days when you wake up and you don't want to get out of bed and I think everybody feels like that. I think this is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me.

Daniel: Likewise.

Darren: I love it.

YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW EACH OTHER INCREDIBLY WELL AND SPEND AN AWFUL LOT OF TIME TOGETHER. ARE THERE DAYS WHEN ONE OF YOU IS HAVING A BIT OF A DOWN DAY, DOES IT PAN OUT?

Daniel: .It's actually good because it works a little like that. If I'm a little down, Darren is usually up and he'll come round and pick me up again and vice versa so we actually work really well together in that way as well.

Darren: I think we've learnt so much about each other. Working with each other is like holding up a mirror because I see myself in him and I see the things about myself that I maybe don't like or the things that I do like and somehow we've worked it out where we tend to, you know if I am in a crazy, crazy, happy, happy mood he's usually not there and vice versa. If he's feeling a bit grumpy I can pick him up. It just happens.

Daniel: It works well.

WAS THERE A DAY WHEN YOU IDENTIFIED THAT SPARK WHEN YOU THOUGHT THIS IS SOMETHING PRETTY SPECIAL?

Daniel: Yeah. For me it was when we wrote 'To the Moon and Back', our second single here in Australia. That's when I knew that this was working and it was buzzing and that's when I sort of sat down and thought I can really do this, this is my chance here, I can take this to as far as it can go.

Darren: I think we knew. For me it was probably the first time I went over to his house to write a song together. I actually walked home and I imagined my whole world changing, like I could see it from there. I thought one day I won't be able to walk down the street like this and everything will be different and that was 6 years ago I guess, 5 years ago but I could actually feel it. It was a weird thing.

WHEN DO YOU THINK YOU BECAME AWARE THAT MUSIC WAS GOING TO BE SOMETHING BIG IN YOUR LIFE, SOMETHING REALLY SIGNIFICANT?

Darren: It's so strange because I wanted to be a performer since I can remember, since 5 or 6. I remember putting on little plays and I used to put little signs up on the neighborhood forest 'Play Here - 3 o'clock - Be There' and no one would turn up and stuff and I used to think the world was a movie about my life. It wasn't until I got into high school that I realized that not everybody wanted to do what we do for a living. Probably, music probably not until I was 13. I remember I got a walkman for Christmas and I got Purple Rain by Prince and it just changed my life and listening to the stereo mix and it did something to me that music still does to me now. It physically stops me from being able to concentrate. If a song is on the radio and I really like it I can't actually finish a conversation because I have to sing it or whatever and so that carried on through high school and then in musicals and I realized that when I sang people would stop and listen to me but I don't think my decision to be a musician was as clear as Daniel's at all.

Daniel: I was brought up in a household where in one room there was a drum kit and in another room there was a guitar rig and another room there was a bass so I had older brothers in music so I'd walk in and sort of I'd be a little threatened by my brother playing drums better than I would so I'd go in and I'd practice when he wasn't there and then I'd go into the guitar and play guitar and so this was at the age of about 10, even earlier on the keyboard so I guess I've always known that I would do music and I survived on it throughout my late teens in pub bands and things like that so it was just a matter of time before I found something that I could really sit with and go okay, I'm going to work this as hard as I can.

YOU'VE SAID THAT MISERY WAS A VERY IMPORTANT EMOTION IN YOUR WORK.

Darren: I think it's a more intelligent emotion sometimes. I think we all enjoy wallowing sometimes, I certainly do. I look for a bit of misery in my life and I'm not saying my life is miserable, I think it's fantastic but I think what I mean by that quote is that I would rather talk about love lost than love gained. I think it's a much more romantic and infatuating notion.

I HAVE TO ASK YOU ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR LINE BECAUSE I'M QUITE TAKEN BY IT AND I'D LIKE TO KNOW THE BACKGROUND. IT'S TO DO WITH TALKING AND YOU SAY IT CAN BE LIKENED TO A DEEP SEA DIVER WHO IS SWIMMING WITH A RAIN COAT.

Darren: What am I saying in the lyric there, I'm going, time of talking using symbols, using words can be likened to. What I'm trying to say is that attraction at the very core, like at its deepest level it actually surpasses language and communication and you can liken it to something as fully inappropriate as a deep sea diver who has got a raincoat on because what's the point of that and sometimes I think that attraction and romance, it actually surpasses the spoken word so that's what I'm saying. It is a nonsensical song. It's a song about a dream that I had and it's a song that lyrically, really my voice is like a bass instrument in that song. It's just stuttering along like a rhythm instrument and so the symbols will come first and the lyrics were something that I did pour through a thesaurus and I did look through my dictionary. I thought of as many colorful, fantastic adjectives and analogies that I could use to describe this thing.

NOW YOU'RE FRESH BACK FROM THE STATES. HOW WAS THAT? THERE WERE A FEW BIG EVENTS THERE?

Daniel: Yeah we did the Nickelodeon, the Kids' Choice Awards on the Saturday night.

THAT WAS PROBABLY ONE OF THE BIGGEST THINGS YOU'VE EVER ENCOUNTERED?

Daniel: Yeah it was kind of very L.A. like. The film stars were there and to perform in front of 7,000 people was our biggest thing that we've done to date and it was a buzz, I enjoyed that.

SCARY?

Daniel: No, it was actually really good. Because the way television works live, it's so quick and we had to just go out there and do it, get off and go God, we've just done it. We were out there for 3½ minutes. I wanted to go straight back on and do another one, that's how I felt like but it was exciting, it was good fun.

Darren: I was scared. It was exciting but it was, I always feel that before I go on stage. I mean my stomach just sort of dropped 2 seconds before we went on and we did it and it's only now that I realized how many Americans actually watched that show that I think

Daniel: See you don't think about that.

IS IT FAIR TO SAY THAT YOUR EXPECTATIONS KEEP MOVING UPWARDS? I GUESS WHEN YOU WERE SITTING IN THE BEDROOM A FEW YEARS AGO WRITING; ALL YOU WANTED WAS TO GET A SONG DOWN THEN IT KEEPS GOING UP.

Daniel: I think that's naturally our instinct is to keep going for that little bit more all the time otherwise you would have stopped when you did your first live pub gig or something when you were 15 so yeah, the standards are actually getting a little higher for us now and we have to keep pushing ourselves to make it and the second record is going to be a fairly high pressured record to go in and to try and produce because this one has been successful but we're looking forward to it and we're just ready to tackle it really. I mean there's no point being scared of the challenge; you've just got to go and do it and see what results you come up with.

THERE MUST BE ENORMOUS PRESSURE THERE THOUGH. I MEAN YOU GUYS KNOW YOU CAN WRITE AND YOU BELIEVE CAN WRITE MORE GOOD SONGS BUT YOU KNOW WHAT PEOPLE SAY. THEY SAY IS THERE ONLY ONE ALBUM IN YOU? THESE GUYS HAVE ONLY GOT ONE ALBUM IN THEM.

Darren: The good thing is, you said it right, we know that we can write songs and whether we're performing them or not it doesn't really matter. I think we'll always be working in this industry. There are a lot of things that are so fickle about the music industry and there's a lot of fashion involved there. There's a lot of hype and you know the market can be very transient and I think to sit there and think about, focus on those things would be a danger. I don't think that's what we do. I think we just think okay, we'll put everything we have into this and you know if it doesn't work it doesn't work. If we stopped now what a fantastic ride it's been.

Daniel: Great fun.

Darren: It's been amazing now so I could stop right now and feel satisfied so anything else is a bonus from now on.

IN GENERAL THE COMPARISONS PROBABLY DRIVE YOU CRAZY BECAUSE JOURNALISTS SEEM TO OR MUSIC WRITERS SEEM TO FEEL THIS NEED TO COMPARE YOU TO OTHER BANDS OR A STYLE OR WHATEVER. IF YOU HAVE TO BE COMPARED TO ANOTHER BAND, WHO WOULD YOU LIKE IT TO BE?

Darren: Musically I don't think there is one because I think these are just songs. They're songs very strong in melody and I think that you can look at the date that we were born and the music that we grew up listening to and you can see similar structures. I think the '80s were a time very much like the '60s in which there is a real focus on melody and I think that's what we see in our songs but I think more than anything if I could have a career like a band like INXS or U2 because they manage to metamorphosize and change and they're always relevant but they're not repeating themselves. I think what we're doing, this is pop music and by that I mean we're taking the sum of our influences within pop culture and we react to them and then we make something. We don't reproduce the past, we react to it and I think that's what a band like U2 does and that's what I think Savage Garden would like to do.

BECAUSE THERE SEEMS TO BE THIS THING WITH THE TERM 'POP'. PEOPLE SOMEHOW THINK IT'S LESS SIGNIFICANT, LESS IMPORTANT MUSIC. DOES IT BOTHER YOU THAT PEOPLE SAY OH IT'S BUBBLEGUM POP MUSIC?

Daniel: I don't think it's quite bubblegum pop music to be honest but the word pop, I think pop has been around for such a long time so in some way people are like other pop bands. They keep surfacing every couple of years but we keep pushing them down, we don't let them have a career as such but I think we can change that with our song writing.

Darren: And I think too it's like asking Bob Dylan to apologize because his music is folk music. I mean pop music is what we do and we're very proud of it and we love it so to apologize for it or to explain it would be, it wouldn't make sense to me.

Daniel: No.

Darren: There's nothing to explain.

NOW YOUR GROUNDING AND I'M SURE IT WAS A LOT OF HARD YAKKA WAS ACTUALLY DOING THAT PUB BAND THING WASN'T IT? COVERS, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?

Daniel: It was a lot of fun as well as pretty hard and it came to the stage where Darren and I were both sick of it and that's why we made this move into a song writing partnership but it's good in its ways but I could easily give it a rest.

WAS IT THAT STYLE OF MUSIC? I GUESS TRADITIONALLY AUSTRALIAN MUSIC IF YOU LIKE HAS BEEN SEEN AS THAT SORT OF ROCK. WAS IT THE STYLE THAT DROVE YOU CRAZY AS WELL?

Darren: For me it was the style. I think it was the most important education that I've had as a singer. I mean bearing in mind that Daniel had a lot more experience in bands than I had and I spent two years in front of audiences that really would have preferred to listen to a CD or a jukebox. They don't care, it just depends on how drunk you are and I think for me I didn't know how to put up a mike stand and it was just like learning in real time with the lyrics on the floor. To this day I don't know the lyrics to but I sang it every night, do you know what I mean? It's just one of those things. I grew up listening to Prince and Motown records and here I was in a pub singing Aussie Crawl songs but I think the most important thing you can get out of doing that is that you do pay your dues, you do know what it's like to have to sweat and work for a living and put yourself on the line and have someone reject you sometimes. You can play to 2 people or you can play to 200 people and what you get from doing covers is that you see people react to songs that they recognize and for a little while you can foolishly believe that that's you that they're reacting to, that when they recognize a song that's applause for you but it's not. It's applause for the songs and I think that we decided from doing that, we wanted to write the songs and one day we wanted to be in a place where the first four chords of our song people recognized it and cheered.

WHAT'S THAT LIKE BECAUSE THAT MUST BE PRETTY WILD.

Daniel: It's a buzz. That's one of the best things I've had out of this so far. We did a couple of warm up shows, Coffs Harbour and Murwillumbah and Brisbane and we threw out a couple of chords of our song 'I Want You' and the crowd just lifted and I just went, yeah this is it, this is it. It was amazing.

IT MUST BE UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU'VE EXPERIENCED BEFORE, THAT SORT OF SENSATION.

Daniel: It happened so quickly. The powerful medium of radio had taken this song to everybody's home and eventually turned up at one of our shows who reacted to it straight away in front of us and that was, they couldn't have said thanks any more.

Darren: The good thing is it's exactly what I hoped it would feel like. Like from being 10 years old and sitting in your bedroom with a cape on your back pretending to be Kiss. It's exactly what you thought it would feel like; it's such a great feeling.

WHICH ONE WERE YOU?

Darren: I was always Gene Simmons.

Daniel: I was Ace.

SO THAT'S THE SORT OF STUFF THAT REALLY REMINDS YOU OF WHERE YOU'VE GOT AND HOW FABULOUS IT IS.

Darren: I still feel like you know we're sitting in Daniel's bedroom writing songs because even though it's been 5 years it's been such a short journey really to where we are at the moment and I don't feel like we've arrived anywhere and I don't think that you ever will. I think to allow yourself to celebrate where you are would be complacent and I don't think, we're too scared of being complacent because we would sit on our laurels and we would rest and maybe we wouldn't be motivated enough to write songs and so we're not quite letting ourselves celebrate yet.

YOU NEED TO GET SOME MEDIA ABOUT TRASHING FURNITURE IN A HOTEL OR SOMETHING.

Daniel: Actually we were talking about throwing TVs out of a LA hotel so Darren picked up the TV Guide because that was the next best thing for us and threw it off the balcony.

Darren: I threw a TV Guide out of the window on Sunset Boulevard.

SO IS THIS ALL TO DO WITH BEING BOYS FROM BRISBANE AND HAVING THE BACKGROUND THAT YOU HAD AND THE UPBRINGING THAT YOU HAD?

Darren: I don't know. I don't think to be a performer and to be a good one has anything to do with...

BEING FROM BRISBANE.

Darren: Being from Brisbane, no.

I GUESS WHAT I'M SAYING IS THE FACT THAT YOU'RE SO GROUNDED AND THAT SORT OF THING IS TO DO WITH YOUR UPBRINGING?

Daniel: The majority of it, yeah I would say. We both had fairly stable parents, like sort of families.

Darren: I think yeah we're surrounded by good people. We have family that love us and we have friends that treat us like we're just two idiots from nowhere and that makes you realize who you are. It's funny, we were sitting in Los Angeles and I was talking to our guitarist and he said you know, he looked out because he was playing guitar in the background and he said I just saw the two boys from Logan in a bubble and all these people running around you and assistance and this whole industry that basically your song had given work to. You wrote this song and therefore there was a whole film crew there working for you and he said it just made him feel really proud and at the same time it was so ironic that here are these two kids from this little town and they're in Hollywood and this whole industry was revolving around them. Strange.

AND YOU SEEM TO BE MANAGING QUITE WELL ON YOUR OWN

Daniel: Yeah, exactly and nobody has sort of stood in to offer us any huge advice. I mean there are tips and there are, you know like you think about this if you do that and they let us know the reaction of something but they don't actually tell us what to do.

Darren: The good thing too is that, especially from an image point of view, I mean I still don't think we have one and we didn't have one when we started and you know if we've made any mistakes we can take responsibility for that because they've always been our decisions. We have a team of people who are really experienced and they offer advice just like a parent would but in the end you live and die by your own mistakes or your own decisions and that's what we've done so you know, I hope we can in 5 years time look back and cringe at what we've done because it would show growth.

BUT THERE'S BEEN NO SENSE OF YOU SHOULD BE CLEAN CUT OR YOU SHOULDN'T BE SO CLEAN CUT OR WE WANT YOU TO BE THE WILD BOYS OF POP OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.

Daniel: No.

Darren: No not really.

I mean, every now and then we need to get a bit more of a harder edge but...

GOT ANY PLANS IN MIND?

Daniel: No, I'm not going to tell you, surprise you.

Darren: In the end I think what it is that if you're not yourself it comes across as a bit fake and people pick that I think and even if, you know we talk about this in our songs. I think that there's a certain innocence to the way we write songs because there are little mistakes in there and it's the same thing with image and video. You know there are little things that aren't quite right but you know these are things that we did and that makes us human and I think that for it to be all glossed over and air brushed and whatever would be, you'd lose a bit of the soul.

THERE'S BEEN LOTS WRITTEN. BERNARD SEWELL, I DON'T KNOW IF YOU'VE READ WHAT THIS GUY WROTE ABOUT YOU.

Darren: No, tell me.

HE'S NOT VERY KIND.

Darren: Is he nasty?

WELL MAYBE THIS IS CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. WHAT HE SAYS, 'THEY WRITE COMPETENT BUT SIMPLE POP SONGS, BLAND IN THE EXTREME AND LYRICALLY EMPTY'.

Darren: They can't say that. Whatever.

Daniel: They can't say that.

Darren: They did?

RESPONSE?

Darren: Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Daniel: My best friends hated it, can't stand it but it doesn't change our relationship as friends. They just don't like that stuff.

THIS GUY IS BEING READ PRESUMABLY, HIS OPINION GOES FURTHER THAN YOUR FRIENDS.

Darren: Yeah I guess so but I mean everybody is a critic; everyone who comes to a concert is a critic.

IT DOESN'T HURT?

Darren: It doesn't hurt because I love so many kinds of different music. My CD collection is quite freaky really and Daniel likes some of it and hates other CDs that I have and I think that makes the world go around as corny as it sounds. I mean difference of opinion thank God.

HE WAS ON A ROLL, THERE'S ONE MORE LINE. 'SAVAGE GARDEN SELL AND IT WILL BE THIS YEAR'S HUGE POP SUCCESS. THEY ALSO HAVE THE SHELF LIFE OF WARM PRAWNS'.

Darren: I heard that, I think that's really witty. Look the thing is pop, what does that mean okay? Pop means popular okay and he's a critic but every single person who comes to a show and every single person who buys a record is a critic as well. You don't go and spend $30 on a compact disc if you don't believe in it. When was the last time you bought a CD that you didn't believe in? You just don't do it. When I purchase a song, it takes a lot for me to get in my car, go to the shop and put the money on the counter and the reason I buy that song is because there's something about it that I have to own. I physically have to own the piece of technology and have it forever because it fascinates me and I know that, you know look at our record, there's that many people that our music fascinates. People don't spend $30 to do you a favour. It's an opinion.

SO WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE IN FIVE YEARS TIME?

Daniel: Doing what we do, write good records, records that are popular, records that sell to the majority of people because the biggest audience you can have as song writers or performers is a better one to me. Darren: I'd like to be doing this but on a different level like I talked about before, I like to see growth and it's a debut record and I love it for all its imperfections and all its brilliancy. I love it because it's a time capsule and some of the songs are almost two years old and I see everything when I listen to it and I hear passion and I hear insecurity and I hear all the things that we were going through and the next record I want to see that there's been a growth and there's been something that happened and I know that we'll do it.

I KNOW THIS QUESTION HAS BEEN ASKED OF YOU AND OF A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THE INDUSTRY BUT A COUPLE OF GUYS SITTING IN A BEDROOM WRITING SONGS, IT'S HAPPENING ALL AROUND AUSTRALIA. DOZENS AND DOZENS OF PEOPLE ARE SITTING AROUND. WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED FOR YOU GUYS?

Darren: A lot of our friends are musicians and really talented musicians and I'm sure a lot of our friends know lots of friends who are musicians. One of the first things that was said to us when we eventually got a record deal was that how many other kids do you think sent me a tape and I think the point I'm trying to make here is that we didn't just sit in a bedroom and wait for success to fall on our heads. We actively sought success. Our first demo drop was 150 tapes and we had 149 rejections so I think

Daniel: And we would have done another 150 if we had to. We would have gone on until we were 35 years old if we had to. At that stage we were just living and breathing it and we would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, we would get up in the morning and think about it, we'd go to sleep thinking about it. It was just; it was like a virus had taken over our brain.

Darren: It was actually an obsession and I'm actually trying to recreate that passion. That's the one thing I'm concerned about is that I want to want the next record as badly as we wanted this one because it really was, we would live, eat, sleep, breathe this thing and I don't think if you're honest, if you honestly do that and you're talented I think you'll succeed and so a lot of people that say that they're musicians who say that they want to do it, I would say, I would ask them the same questions. Do you live, sleep, breathe and eat this because if you do and you're halfway talented you'll eventually get there. I really believe that.

SO EVEN A FEW YEARS AGO COULD YOU IMAGINE THAT YOU'D BE WHERE YOU ARE NOW?

Darren: Without sounding arrogant, yeah because you had to. We talked about before about living and breathing it and obsessing about it. I mean really truly did sit down and say we'll get a record deal, we'll do this, I'm embarrassed to say it, we'll play Wembley, all that kind of stuff. I mean you have to do it and you look back now and you laugh about it but if you don't aim there how can you possibly get to there and so you know some of your dreams are a little childish and they seem unobtainable.

Daniel: They're dreams. Darren: But they're dreams and that's what they're for so yeah, we did hope for it but now if you ask me is it a shock that we've achieved, yeah of course it is. Every time I hear the song on the radio, the first time I heard airplay in this country was a shock. It was just like, wow. Daniel: And I think the secret was you do it and then tell the world because you could keep tripping up all the time. If we had sat our friends down five years ago and said what I just said we're going to be assigned to Sony worldwide, we're going to have platinum albums here there and everywhere blah, blah, blah, they would just laugh at you, like yeah right so you actually have to do it and then say we've done it. There are no problems; we just had to prove it to ourselves.

AND YOU'RE CONSIDERING LIVING IN THE STATES FOR A WHILE?

Darren: Don't want to, no.

Daniel: Brisbane.

BRISBANE IS A LONG WAY FROM,

Daniel: From the rest of the world.

Darren: It is but the thing is for us we travel so much that if we're home for two weeks a year we want to be where the dog is, where Mum and Dad is, where the friends are. Why be stuck in a really groovy city just because it looks good on an interview. There will be times when we'll be overseas for long periods, 4 to 8 months. We'll be travelling mostly in America and Europe and we may rent an apartment for a little while but I don't think I'd ever be ready to say that I live in another country. Daniel: We'll always be citizens of Australia.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL, LIKE THE MONEY IS GREAT BUT IT'S NOT A CASE OF TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN.

Darren: It can't be because like we said before if you average it out, it's not really that good and most performers, I mean I spend sometimes, Daniel: About $3,000 a year for me.

WAIT 'TIL NEXT YEAR.

Darren: When the tax comes.

THAT'S WHEN YOU LEAVE AUSTRALIA.

Darren: Yeah right. Some days are like 16 hour days, 17 hour days and you do that back to back and you don't take vacations and you do all that and you wouldn't do it if you didn't enjoy it and if you average it out the income I think is very justified. Daniel: Definitely.

AND JUST EACH OF YOU, IS THERE ONE BIG THING YOU'RE GOING TO BUY WHEN YOU'RE FABULOUSLY WEALTHY?

Darren: I think we both want to pay off people's mortgages and help people out to be honest. I'd like to buy a very moderate house, like an apartment or a house so that I can say if nothing else I bought a house and that's it. I'm not really into cars.

Daniel: Is the Swan River up for sale?

PERTH, MAYBE YOU COULD BUY PERTH.