Personal: The Do You Remember? Tour – Brighton Dome

I’m taking a little break from the song reviews to talk about a specific memory from a few years ago.

The Do You Remember? Tour was Darren Hayes’ first live dates in over a decade, so naturally I had to go to more than one date on the UK leg of the tour. I chose my local venue in Manchester, but then went looking for a second location that I could tie in to a mini vacation, so it ended up being Brighton.

I really enjoy Brighton whenever I go, it’s a very progressive and fun little city and seemed fully appropriate for seeing Darren Hayes perform songs from his new ‘Homosexual’ album.

I think I just want to talk about how special this date was for me and some fun memories surrounding it.

Something I’ll always love about Darren Hayes fans is that the typical fan is probably a good 10 years older than me, and there isn’t a lot of people more fun than mid-40s concert going women. I’ve had this experience at his gigs before where I’ll stand or sit around chatting to some cool ladies before the actual gig.

At Brighton we sat with two women and were talking about how it’s been a long time coming and things like that, very quickly we got on to more personal stories about our favourite songs. One of the women talked about how she became a real Savage Garden fan when ‘Crash and Burn’ was released. I in turn replied that ‘Crash and Burn’ was the first ever Savage Garden single I bought, and although I don’t really think I became a ‘proper’ fan until his solo career, it made me remember listening to that song in my bedroom as a kid and I thought about how much that particular song seems to mean a lot to fans.

The concert itself was electric, I don’t know how Darren managed to dance with such energy and stamina, surpassing artists half his age. They don’t build artists like this anymore. It was such a high energy show.

My highlights mostly involved songs from the Homosexual album, as that was the main stuff I wanted to hear on the tour, a lot of the setlist was more focussed on Savage Garden’s glory days, which I felt slightly less enthused by having been really eager to hear the new stuff. But hearing the hits sort of reconnected me with them.

Then came the big moment of the concert. So a few months before this concert my best friend who I’d loved with for ten years came out as gay. It’s been a really positive time for us generally since then, but it’s also changed our dynamic in terms of spending a little less time together pretty quickly. It’s something we’d both been feeling.

Darren walks on stage with nothing but a briefcase and begins telling a story. It’s a story I know very well as a fan, but my friend didn’t. It’s the story of when Darren came out to his wife, his best friend from school and high school sweetheart. Already feeling emotional about the parallels, he then breaks in to ‘I Don’t Know You Anymore’. A song about spending less time together, going back and everything’s different. It was generally an emotional segment of the concert with few dry eyes around us, but we were kinda stunned in to silence and did a big hug. A few weeks later back in Manchester we bawled our eyes out hearing the story again.

Darren’s more personal songs have always come from a hugely honest place, and there’s a handful of songs I pin to specific life moments and now ‘I Don’t Know You Anymore’ is definitely connected to that one.

The concert on the whole was incredible, a much needed very late coming out party for Darren, timed so fittingly with things going on in our lives.

I also need to do a shout out for the production during ‘Hey Matt’, as it was amazing, you know how you always have that one song really stuck in your head days after a concert? For me on this tour it was definitely ‘Hey Matt’.

I can’t wait to see Darren again if and when he tours next.