Hi, Welcome to the Christy Cast. I hope you're wearing something comfortable or maybe a pointy bra, because I'm about to spin the wheel and see who is coming up on this episode.
God, I love it when it lands on music makers.
They are the best, the dreamers, the best of us all. And I'm thrilled to tell you that today's music maker has been in our ears.
And in our hearts and in our minds for twenty or thirty years.
Hailing from the very working class suburb of Logan, he has released a book, very very recently.
It's called Unlovable.
It is a memoir from the voice of Savage Garden, and I'm thrilled to welcome Lave from Los Angeles.
Darren Hayes, thank you for having me.
I don't know if folks can see, but you have a very fancy studio. I mean, I'm in my studio, but yours has graphics and all sorts of stuff, so I'm quite jealous.
Well, get on it, Darren Hayes.
No, right now, that you're a celebrated author as well as a life changing musician, how have you been enjoying talking over and over about some pretty hard stuff your book I'm Lovable is out at the moment I have it in front of me. Does it make the agony and hard bits of your childhood easier to deal with the more you talk about them.
That's such a great question. I know that writing the book was definitely you know, this is a cliche, but it was definitely cathartic because you think if you do something like that, you know, you get it off your chest, you'll set this heavy burden down, all of those things. You expect that it will be a low off your mind. What I didn't expect was how many people would reach out to me and tell me, oh my god, you're describing my childhood, You're describing my relationship with my parents.
And so that level of kind of camaraderie has been really beautiful. And I got a lot of that in Australia, just at the book signings, just people coming up to me, like holding my hands, you know, and just I drove to security mad because it took hours, you know, to meet everyone, and I was like, I just leave it because I understood what people were. They needed to tell me,
you know, their story, and I got it. You know, I forced them to read my story and these what were strangers became just for a minute, like kind of like family for a minute, because it really made me feel in the same way that music has done this for me. It made me feel less alone. Yeah, because I met so many women who had dads like my dad, you know, who'd suffered from the same kind of domestic violence, and so many or adults but who had been children who had grown up like I had, And so it
was a really it's actually been really lovely. I know that sounds strange in hindsight.
In hindsight, do you think that if you'd had less if you've been raised with less adversity, that it would have impacted your creativity and knowledge of yourself in a negative way?
This is such Oh God, you're good at this, do you know. I'll tell you something. My sister and I had this conversation about her kids. Now I'm not speaking out of school when I say this. My sister, I think it's now been probably eight or nine years that she's been divorced, But before she was divorced, she thought she had the perfect family. And we used to sit around and say, do you think your kids are going
to be boring? Because you guys have just got like the perfect family, you know, And we used to ask that same question because you know, she had this seemingly perfect family, two kids, boy, girl, everything was perfect or whatever. But then this sort of semi trailer just harpooned them, and it was their divorce. And you know, now, my niece is an astrophysicist, and you know, my nephew is
this amazing young kid. And we wonder did that sort of tragedy force them, Did that adversity force them to have to tread water.
And draw on their toolbox?
Yeah? Maybe maybe. I don't know, because I know for me, I had two ways that I could have dealt with what was happening to me as a child. I could have just gone completely inward and kind of just just crumpled up like a deflated balloon. Or I could have chosen what I call the peacock route, which was just I decided that my life was just this magical, colorful, glittery movie. It wasn't. It was horrible, but I just decided no, I was going to thrive in these conditions.
And if anyone has had a chance to read the book My Memories of my Childhood, even though I had really horrible things happened to me. I kind of chose to remember them as these kind of almost like baz Lumen like movie sequences because that's how my brain chose to survive. It was, and it's an amazing thing. I think that the human brain.
What a great brain. Thank you, Brian. Yeah, but I.
Think we all have that capacity in us. You know, we're all survivors. And it's a very dangerous.
Game because, let's face it, Logan in the eighties, YEP was fucking depressing.
Yep, very tough, it was, you know most of us. Well, I didn't know I was poor.
Yeah, I was poor.
I didn't know it. I thought I was a prince. I would walk around with my I got teased for being a snob, you know, I was. Kids at school would call me a snob.
Because you had a lunchbox with a lid.
No, just because I walked around like I walked on goal like I just I just chose that. I decided that the circumstances that I was born into, I was that was not it for me. You know, I was just so I probably walked around with my nose in the air, you know. And I you know, we rented the the absolute pinnacle of our Like, uh, I guess like when we were really rolling in, you know, like.
Well you were living in the lack of luxury what to have?
Yeah, the luxury we had was the rented VCR. We had the video record from radio rentals. Rich. We were up to our eyeballs in debt, you know, and we had this rented VCR and I just thought we were so much and.
Then you would have got even more in debt with the you know, five videos for a week from Blockbuster that you never returned and then you get taken to court over it.
Of course. Oh and that just the car that you know, my dad was just terrible with money. So like, you know, we had a we just had so many debt collectors. I learned to, you know, lie to the debt collectors and all the police. You know, when the police would come to the front door, they would they would come to ask.
For my dad.
And I remember being very young, and I only told the truth once because I got in trouble for it because the police came to the front door and said, you know, is your father here, And I went he just ran out the back and jumped over the fence. So I got learned, you know, I got that lesson.
Very big, little Darren.
Do not say that, Just say that I'm out, Say that I'm at the video store getting five waklies.
Exactly did the debt collectors come? And it's like mom and dad are not home, I'm not home. You know that's what it was.
Can you lie now? Are you?
Are you a good liar? Or do you avoid that? Because it's all yeah, me too.
Terrible, just terrible, and it's a guilt thing that comes up. There's there's a section in my book where I talk about there was this kid who was, hilariously call him like a bad influence, Like how do you name a kid a bad influence at the age of like eight or nine? But he was. He was like a bad influence.
But he will there's totally bad influences, of course at any day.
Fair enough, Okay, So he was. He was a bad boy. And I remember mom sent us. This is the seventies, Okay, so we get sent to the local shops to buy essentials milk, bread, and cigarette.
Can you remember your order for your for your parents?
Yeah? It was, oh, I forget the name.
I could remember mine.
It was the first order I ever make hello? Can I please have a paget of Benson and Hedges Extra Mile please?
Oh my god, mom had the same thing, Benson and Hedges Extra Mile. What was extra Mile?
What was it?
Was it just less necotine? No?
I don't think so. I think it was just a fancy gold pack.
And you know, my mum was pretty fancy, and obviously yours, what's too fancy?
See the other ones? What were the really and there was no difference, but the real cheap ones.
Oh god.
We looked down upon Long Beach.
I remember when Long Beach came out, because they came in like a tissue box. They were so there was so many. I think it was the first one that were fifty or.
Holidays anything menthol seemed to be a bit like low class to me.
Except Saint Maurtz. My friend's mum smoked Saint Maritz. And they were to get packs of twenty and they were a little divided into tens.
And would they were they thinner?
Were their thins a longer cigarette? Yes, and slightly thinn on that in diameter?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, but yes I would get yes, I would get those and U but mum essentially sent us to the shops really as a favorite because we were just bored and you know, gave us like fifty cents so that we could buy you know, like a drink pack of mixed lollies. Yeah, that was enough to get like a can of coke and some mixed lollies back then.
Do you know what I missed about mixed lollies A the extraordinary value? And also you actually got to choose your selection. Someone you would go, I'll have three, I'll have two musks sticks, No, one musk stick and a snake.
And now you just get a bag. It's not the same. Do you know what?
I think you probably lived in a more let's just say affluent. Didn't you get to two neighborhood?
Because no, I just got ripped off hayze away.
There's only no, there's only one place you could choose, and that was a local pool. And they did have the jars that had you know, one cent, two cent or half a cent or whatever. That was pretty cool, but that that was really posh and the pool was expensive to go to the pool really Yeah, so no, but at the local shops there'd be one for like twenty cents and it was mixed bag of lollies and you just got.
What you got, okay, all right, But the kid.
Whispered in my ear and he was like, oh, we should get one of those, you know, you put the twenty cents in and you get the furry ball, like the ferret on the ball. Oh yeah, yeah or whatever, and me like, not even realizing I was gay clutching imaginary pearls, going oh, I can't do that, that's stealing,
and my friend going she'll never know. But literally the second we got home, full confession, Mum, Mom, Mom, we put twenty cents in the machine and I got a ferret and I'm so sorry, and like did the whole confession.
Like what a sweetie?
What was it like, Darren to suddenly have a shit ton of money?
Oh well, I always say this because I think most people are good and kind, right, I think I did what most people would do when they win, if they win the lottery. I was just discharging guilt. So I immediately paid off the home loans of all of my family, so my brother, my sister, mum and dad just immediately, like when you're in a position where you can just suddenly just buy any house you want. I grew up where no one in my lineage could ever pay off a home loan ever, that was never.
Going to happen, and then all let alone, you know, get one, you know, but back then you had to really go through totally.
And so all of a sudden, you know, after maybe a year after say the Arias, when Savage Garden won all those awards, that first paycheck, I remember just looking at it going this can't be real, this is real, Like, oh my god. So I think there was a lot
of sort of deferred Catholic guilt about money. I wasn't raised Catholic, but mum was, and there was that natural Australian thing that we still have, I think, where we don't really maybe it's changed a little bit, but you know, we aren't like the Americans, where we're sort of like, you know, we get up to the podium and we're like, thank God, or do I want to thank myself first? I'm not quite sure, you know, Like we're.
Not like that.
We're very culturally sort of embarrassed about success.
Well I feel like we don't.
We it's sort of in built in our you know, hard wiring that we don't deserve anything, right, isn't that strange.
I wonder, you know, I would love a sociologist because you know, now we're starting to discover that there are memories that are passed down in DNA, right, yeah, and this is just basic survival. And it makes sense really if you think about when we were just you know, cave creatures, and we learned certain behaviors just not to get eaten in the night. It would make sense that. I wonder if because so many of us and I'm just thinking about colonizers here, I'll just talk about the colonizers.
I wonder if so many of us because we were thieves and just like low lives, that we just put on ships, you know, for stealing stuff. I wonder if there is that sort of in built class classes.
That's very interesting. We spent our whole lives waiting to be found out, yes, and.
Also being told that we were not of the ruling class. You know, we were just that, yeah, you know, we were just the ones that were put on the ships and you know, meant to sort of just feel inferior. I wonder how much of that's just in the lingering DNA. But yeah, it's a naussy thing. It's definitely a white Ozzy thing to.
I want to ask, what did your family?
What words came out of their mouth when you said, oh, hey, I've just paid off your mortgage, And was there a feeling of like, I don't know, some people get mad when you do them with a financial favor.
Well, look my relationship. I mean, I don't have a relationship with my father anymore. And his reaction was always entitlement, Like he went from being having zero interest in me at all all my life to suddenly, you know, swarming around town like he was the father of Savage Garden.
Like it was Ah, that would have felt really gross.
Did feel gross. But I think at the time, you know, we're talking thirty years ago, I was so desperate for father's love that I think I was purchasing it and it felt like, yeah, but I really was doing it for my mum, you know. But I got to say my brother, my sister, my mother. It was tears. It was just.
Absolute just so you gave them the gift of peace of mind, yeah.
And gratitude and just And the truth is, Christy, I don't think I could have lived with myself. There's no way. Like I was living in San Francisco, I was living in this palatial palace looking over the ocean, and how do you reconcile that with like half of my family were still, you know, living in suburbs of Logan. You know, there I was Elton John's calling me up and Kylie has my phone number and very very strange things. So it had to happen for me to sort of feel
okay with my life. But their reaction was just so beautiful. And I got to say, apart from my father, you know, my family to this day are so down to earth and grateful, and my mum blessed her. She wouldn't have cared what I did for a living, like to this day, she's you know, I could have been a plumber or a teacher and she would have been just as proud of me.
You know, Oh god, I would have I would kill to see Darren Hayes plumbing services.
Well, there would have been a butt crack for sure, a nicer one. Although actually there's a lot of trade's that are really hot now. So my memories of trade's in the seventies where they were kind of you know, not in the best shape, but they're pretty hot now I got to.
Say, yes, they are really hot.
So I want to talk about You've just mentioned that, you know, Elton and Kylie were calling you and all of a sudden you were, you know, in the very upper echelon of music, and I'm guessing that but wh'ere of a similar age, similar vintage, And I think music meant I'm not musical, but music meant so much to me. Australia in the seventies and eighties was so far away from the world. The Internet has obviously changed that, but music gave me like a glittering idea of what life
could be like. And I feel like that's what it gave you. Who is the person that you've been having a conversation with and in the back of your mind, you've.
Gone, holy shit, I am talking to blank.
Oh gosh. You know. The one person I never got to have that with was Michael Jackson, because Michael was the reason I got into this, but in a really bizarre way when I saw him in nineteen eighty seven, he came to Australia for the first time and you got to imagine, like, what was that too?
U was that bad? Yeah?
But you know, Thriller had happened, biggest album in the world.
What was your favorite song of thriller?
Just by the way, Oh human nature.
Human nature me too. Just beautiful, Ah.
Yeah, just so beautiful. But you know you got to think about it, like he never he only toured America, that's it, and it was his first ever world tour and whatever. I'll cut the story short. But I saw him in concert freak of Nature that I got a ticket to the front row because I wasn't supposed to happen, so I got to see him up close. And all of my life was just misery. But just seeing this glittery pop star like you described him, was just like, oh my god. So that changed my life. But it
was Madonna. Madonna was that person where I ended up at a dinner party of hers. And I've had been a fan obviously for years. I mean I remember.
Jog years forever.
Yeah, but I remember jogging because I'd seen in bed with Madonna and how fit she was. Right. So, when I was like fifteen or sixteen, jogging around my parents, you know they lived on eight Regional, jogging around this hideous block of land that we lived on. We literally lived in a tin shed while my parents tried to build a house. It was just misery, but I was imagining that I was getting ready to play Wembley Stadium, and I had hordes of photographers and paparazzi following me around,
and I was jogging because Madonna jogged, right. So, all these years later, I got invited to a dinner party for fifteen people in London by my mutual friend, a guy called David Collins, who was a famous interior designer. And I met him just randomly at some event, didn't know who he was, and I was at a table full of posh assholes. To be completely honest, everyone was so stuck up. I'm not going to name their names
because it'll seem like I'm really really cruel. But there were some really famous people who did not and could not give a shit about me. And I remember feeling really lonely and just really out of place, and this sweet man, David was just so nice to me. And it turned out he was one of Madonna's best friends. So he's this interior designer who designs hotels and whatever and just happened to be her home interior designer. And he kept in touch with me, and one day he
just calls me. I'd been out with him a couple of times, been to his place and whatever. When I was living in London and he phones me and he says, Darren, would you come to a dinner party? And I hate stuff like that, Chrissy like, I hate famous people, and I'm just like, so no or whatever. And I went, oh, god.
David, why do you hate famous people? Do you feel like it's that thing you're so normal observing.
It's that thing of feeling I don't deserve. I just don't belong in that room, you know. And I was like, oh God, who's going? And he says, well, I mean I don't think Chris are going.
To be there?
And I just went who all right? Exactly Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin and I just go.
What are they like?
I love that they've had an amicable split and they, you know, seem to be so grown up about it.
I love that.
So sweet. They're lovely. I mean, Gwyneth Paltrow, the first time I met her, I dismissed myself. I met her and she wanted to meet me, and she was like, oh my god, Like she held my hands like this, and she's like giving me all the compliments and I was going, has really nice to miss you bye, and amtual friend just went, what did you just do? And I went, I just said thanks, And he's like that looks so rude. You were so rude to.
GWe ha ha ha.
But I just had to get out of there. But anyway, Yeah, so I say to David, I'm like, David, I can't, like, you know, I'm terrible with famous films, like just come, please, just come. Like it's just going to be a small dinner, Penny, It's going to be fun. I'm going to give you this boiler alert. He wasn't telling me it was a birthday party for Madonna because he knew I wouldn't come. What Darren, Yes, so she this is back then. Do you remember hung Up You? Remember?
Of course I remember everything she's ever done with her.
Hung up on You, her disco phase, her corn rows. Okay, this is Madonna. Yeah, six months beforehand, she'd fallen off a freaking horse okay, broken every bone and a body. So on her birthday she had to postponent. So her lovely friend David postponed this dinner party. There's like, I don't know, Chris Martin, someone who owns. I don't know Tiffany's. I think there's so many famous people there. I think that the lead singer of Texas God stroked me down in hell.
But I don't remember her name, but just Sharon someone there you go.
That'll do. No one was my name. I'm Darryl Haynes.
But the point is, haha, did Texas do? I want to love it? Charlette, That's it. I knew it was a little bogan name.
I think Sting might have even been there. I don't know. It was just, oh, Rudy Styler was there. It was just that kind of thing, right, And I am dying. I turn up in I'm like this, jeans, denim whatever.
They're all good on you.
For going, because I would have stayed at home with a cup of tea wearing an uddie.
Absolutely.
I didn't even know. And so I turned up and I walk in the room and she's there dressed as Madonna, because she's Madonna.
And there is only one Darren No.
But she says to me, I know you brain explodes, and she did. She came to a show early on in the Savage Garden sort of history in New York, and she came to see us, and because I had performed Ray of Light in our show and want a song, but she she had remembered, and she said tell everybody, and she was in a really cheeky mood and she said tell her on the story, and I so I was cheeky too, because she'd made a joke about what she said, did you know you were coming to a
dinner party about my outfit? And I was like whoa And I was like, no, I didn't. And so I told the story. I said, yeah, you came to my show, you were late, and as soon as I was saying your song, you got up and you left. And I never knew if you liked it. And she said, oh my god, I loved it. I thought it was great and it was just the perfect like you know, you meet your idol and they're just spunky and sexy.
And she's really the most extraordinary artist of our time.
I think I think you interviewed her, didn't you.
Well. In a weird twist, my Madonna story is my sister worked for a concert promotion company in Tokyo and Madonna's Blonde Ambition tour, which is stop around.
The time ever ever ever been held, and I never got to see it, but anyway.
I knew I saw it many many times. I know it never came to Australia.
So it's around the time of Vogue, and I remember I was at Yokohama Stadium when I first heard the song Vogue because it hadn't been released, but she ended the show with it.
I was like, what is this in my ears? What is happening now?
Hang on?
I got to ask you, was this during the rainy season or was this when she came back and redid the shows the year later? I'm a stand I know everything.
It was the first too, It was in Tokyo.
Was it raining the night you saw it? No? Okay, No, I have that tour. I have the original tour jacket, the eye on the.
Back, the velvety one. Yep. I wanted that so bad.
Anyway, I was like sixteen or seventeen at the time, and I was visiting my sister in my very first overseas trip. And because you know, probably you know she should have had a babysitter, she would just take me to work with her. And work happened to be the Blonde Ambition tour. And to get going, I know, to get home. I would catch the two of us with the dancers, with Carlton and Luis and Slam and all of them.
And for those listening, we call that the splitter Van. I can't believe it. You got in the splitter van. So the splitter van has called that because it splits the gig.
You split, you.
Leave as soon as the show ends. You all get into the split of van. And you were with the most incredible dancers in the world.
Go on, the most incredible And she would catch that bus too. Yeah, in her I.
Remember in a white terry taleing dress, dressing gown.
Yeah. Can we talk for a moment about the film Truth or Dare and how if we could have like put it in our veins?
We do something else? Do my eyebrows? Just somebody sat some fat man in the front row who was giving me dirty looks all night. I swear to God and Freddy get over here, because Freddy demand, Yes, it was in charge of the sound of my show. Somebody give Keith a new asshole because my headset kept cutting out during Where's the Party? And don't tell me you didn't notice? And there was nothing but industry in the first three rows. Freddy everyone looked like a goddamn William Morris agent.
Guys. Well, she goes, I hope I'm somewhere safe when it happens.
Yeah, she goes. You know, at the end of a tour, you know, everybody gets emotional, they get upset, but it's like, I've done this before. When people die, it's like I make my peace with it so that when it happens, I don't feel anything.
Oh my god, you don't even know.
I became really close to Alex Kashishian.
Wow.
I became friends with him. He's the director of that film because I did that impersonation I was just doing for you at a party for Matt Damon.
Hah. That's a sentence I was not expecting to hear today.
And I'm standing around doing that impersonation and this person taps me on the shoulder and it's Alec and I go, it's Alek Kashishian and he goes, you know, how to pronounce my name? And I go, of course I do, You're Alek Kashishian and he could not. He was just obsessed that I knew all the lines from that film. And that's how we became sort of friends.
It's really hard to fight.
I work with a young guy, Jack, who's like twenty seven, and sadly Madonna has not made the leap into that kind of generation, and she needs to because it's very important. Anyway, I have prescribed to him to watch that documentary because I know that he will love it. But it's very hard to find and we can't wear googling it try and find where to see it because now I need to see it again.
So great.
That's this amazing scene where she goes, Lauren, get over here, you pussy man. She's talking about Warren baby and she's cheeky with him much eating her salad, and she's going, I tell Warren I wouldn't have his babies unless it becomes a vegetarian. And it's like, and he won't be on camera and he's and then that scene where he goes, has no one talked to you about the insanity of this, of what the insanity of filming all of this, Like all of this that you're through this is a serious matter.
She says something like, if it's not on camera, it didn't happen.
It was the point of filming it. It doesn't exist. If it's not on camera, right, the first reality star. It was incredible.
She was the first of everything.
I mean, we could wax lyrical about Madonna, and I feel like we will eventually before the day we die.
I want to spin the wheel before I let you go. I'm so enjoyed. I mean I knew that, you know, we would connect.
I've just ever since I first saw you on you know, video Hits or count Dad or whatever. I was like, he's one of mine, and it's just taken a few decades to get in front of each other. We're going to spin the wheel and see what we're going to finish with a right, Darren Hayes.
Great, Oh it's turned up on. Tell me more.
This is a first Errand what is the one great story or thing about you that always surprises or delights people? Oh?
I mean it sounds a little. Oh, it's a little feel good. So let's get our cozy blankets, let's start crocheting, Let's let's get our crystals out and stuff. Okay, I'm fifty two. I still would desperately love to be a dad. I was married to a man for seventeen years and we tried every night to have a baby, but it just didn't happen. I don't know, I don't know. Why, what do you do?
You're doing something wrong?
I don't know. Maybe I was. I don't know. Maybe I was putting have.
To get out your world book and look up and just look up who puts what we're But anyway, I still would love to be a dad.
But this was a really beautiful thing that happened when I moved to La. So I moved to La in a very dramatic period of my career from twenty and twelve. I didn't really tell the world, but I decided I was retiring. It was very dramatic. I just didn't tell anyone. I was like, she's done's.
Leaving, Vivian Lean gone with the wind.
No more like I'm so tad, I'm so tad.
No.
I was probably more like Nathan Lane in the Birdcage.
I want nothing great performs. How do you think I feel devastated? Heartbroken? I love that, you know that.
But I got coerced in to auditioning to prefer go to the groundlings in prop school.
Oh wow, world famous.
And I was there for these two stories meld into another. But I was there full time for five years. What, Yes, that's what I did. That's why I disappeared for ages. I just disappeared. No one knew who I was. I was surrounded by twenty five year olds, right, had no idea who I was. And I made it through the whole program. I almost got into the Sunday Company, and in fact, one of my well, she doesn't take my
call anymore, but it's hilarious. But one of my fellow students all the way through is Chloe Fineman, who's on SNL. She's one of their. She does the best Nicole Kidman impersonations. She's yeah, yeah, she's amazing. But Chloe was one of my I came up with Chloe Finneman. But I also met one of my best friends there, Johnny. And Johnny did almost get into Sunday Company, and he almost turned it down because he and his why I've got pregnant now.
I have a teaching degree in early childhood, right. I had to get it because my father wouldn't let me be a musician unless I got a teaching degree, and.
So I have something to fall back on, son.
Right, which is so stupid. But I just said to Johnny, I'm not really doing anything why don't I mind her like one or two days a week while you guys just you continue studying and whatever. And that turned into like six years of me minding this baby. I'm talking like her mum would because his wife is a movie producer. She was working full time, so she worked full time.
She would express milk. They would give the baby to me from six weeks of age, and I got basically co parent he until she went to first grade.
And it was amazing, Like god, that's an amazing experience.
Yeah, So me and Johnny, like we were these two dads, you know, like where he would be going to school part time, but then I would get to have her, you know, half the time, and you know, i'd pick her up in the morning and it was like full time daycare. But like I did all the fun.
How old is she now?
She's turning seven, and I mean, we have to break it. So she calls me her best friend, and I have to sort of let her know that, like you're gonna need to get like a real like child best friend.
No, stop, you don't need to clarify. She is your best friend, and we know that that's true because she said it.
I just adore her, and we adore each other and we just we connect on this level. That's just like I've never had to be anything other than I don't know, like an adult that gets to love her in the way that I never got to be loved as a
child myself. I remember the first time she worke up from a nightmare and you know, the baby monitor went off, you know, and anyone who's been a parent, I haven't technically, but I sort of have now, Like you know, that fear I went through, all that fear of like, God, is she breathing, is she going to die? What if she dies on my watch? All that sort of stuff.
You know.
One day, playing with her with like a laser pointer because she's so into Peter Pan, and I was pretending that was tink, you know, and I accidentally pointed into her eyes and for about a year I lied to her parents and didn't tell her because that afternoon she was like, I can't really see out of my eye, and I was just thinking, not going to tell her
parents in case it's permanent eye damage. But now we laugh about it, but stuff like that, like we've just been through everything together, and yeah, she's just this extraordinary young.
Woman, and how lucky, how lucky she is to have you, because it's really it's really important and fortunate for kids to have somebody that is parent level but isn't a parent, so you are.
You are an extraordinary gift to her, and she is to me.
And yeah, when I tell people that story there you're like what. It was only recently that her mum said to me, go on, tell me the two. Did you taste the Express milk? And I was like, oh no, I never tasted the tasted the Express milk. And her dad was like, well I did. I'm like, yeah, you sleep with like the mother. I'm like, no, taste the
Express milk. You guys are widows. But that's how close we all are, Like we're that clothes where they would have been like, oh, we wouldn't have minded if you did. I'm like, yeah, no, I'll be.
Fine with that. I'm try that in it.
Darren Hayes, your book is available now. It is called Unlovable. You are so lovable. The title is a wonderful irony. It's a great book, of course, lots of pictures which jador.
Get your copy from all good bookstores and online. Can we catch up? And just talk specifically Madonna later.
Listen, I'll do anything next time in Australia. I'm just going to talk your ear off about the Blonde Ambition tour. I still need to know what happened in the van and if Madonna was nice to you. But let's not reveal this on the show. You have to tell me in secret, Okay.
I will, I will, even though we're not very good at secrets.
I've loved talking to you. Thank you for having me.
You are the best. Thanks for coming on.