Dogs in Space: Mat Beal talks to Darren Hayman

Next month, Darren Hayman releases The Ship’s Piano, his sixth solo album. He’s already got two other records lined up for release after that, and back in January he wrote, recorded and released one song a day for the entire month. Is he the hardest-working man in showbusiness? No, he says, it’s just that everyone else takes so long to do everything.

“Some people are called prolific because they do an album a year,” he complains. “But an album is twelve songs; that’s a song a month, that’s a verse a week. What the fuck’s wrong with them? Why does it take them so long? It’s against the very spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s supposed to happen quickly, it’s supposed to be a flash of inspiration. And I’m sure it is, but it’s just the nature of the business, now everyone has to tour for two years before they can make another album. So it’s not their fault, it’s the industry around them.

“I do spend ages on things as well, it’s not that I’m slapdash. I do spend a couple of days getting backing vocals right, I do understand what it’s like to obsess over something until it’s perfect. And I still don’t understand why it takes people so long.”

The Ship’s Piano consists of eleven songs written and performed, unsurprisingly, on the piano. It has a warm, subtle, muted sound, rather different to Hayman’s earlier spiky guitar-based songs. The bulk of it was written after he was attacked while on his way to a gig in Nottingham.

“This thing happened about 18 months ago when I was beaten up quite badly,” he explains, “and for about two months after I was getting really bad headaches and dizziness. And it’s come back fortunately, but the doctors thought I’d been deafened, I’d lost some range. I really wanted to hear quiet, gentle music, and I found doing music very therapeutic for my brain, it made the headaches go away. So the lyrics aren’t about that, but the way it sounds is to do with that. It’s an attempt to write an album for people who have head injuries.”



Meanwhile, Darren has written another two albums, to be released at some indeterminate point in the future: The Violence, about the witch trials in sixteenth-century Essex; and Lido, his first instrumental record, inspired by outdoor swimming pools (that hoary old chestnut). Like The Ship’s Piano, a lot of his records take a musical or lyrical theme as their starting point.

“This would be a lesson I learned at art college, about limitations and working with a restricted set of tools. It would terrify me to have four months in a 48-track studio with unlimited money, I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be terrible. Not because it would be over-produced but because I’d be wracked with indecision. Perhaps sometimes I too religiously adhere to these rules and sometimes I think I might tire
my audience. I could understand someone who really didn’t have any time for me or my music: ‘Oh, what’s this one? Kettle drums and kazoos about the bus service in southern Italy?’ And I can see how that’s starting to become my trope a little bit. So I should be aware of that. But it seems like the most natural way to work. And, also, it’s not like loads of people are doing that kind of stuff.”



Hayman’s art background and his love of esoteric subject matter are also apparent in his recent involvement in the Vostok 5 project, “an exhibition of art and music about people and animals in space”, which he put together with four other arty, indie types. He contributed a series of illustrations of the dogs the Soviet Union sent into outer space during the Cold War. What drew him to Russian space dogs as a subject?

“It’s just a natural joining of two interests, really. I’m the perfect age to be interested in that sort of thing – I was born in 1970, I can’t ever remember not knowing the bits of an Apollo moon rocket go together; it seems like I learnt that at the same time I was learning two plus two or whatever. And Star Wars came out when I was seven, so I had a natural boyish wonder of space. But then I guess over the last twelve years since I got a dog I’ve become very much an animal person. I worked for a while at Battersea Dogs Home, and I’ve also become a vegetarian very late in my life, so it all goes together really.

“I think perhaps I’m not making it obvious from the pictures, but I am quite anti it, I think it was wrong. It just has a narrative, there’s this strange part of it where they start making statues of Laika and when you see the Soviet films they use words like ‘warriors’ and ‘soldiers’ to describe the dogs, so there seems an element of guilt or selective memory about the story. It’s interesting that they personalise it so much, and they have these heartbreaking names like Little Arrow and Little Squirrel. So it’s got everything that you want for a story. I’m surprised there isn’t more books about it.”



How did the exhibition come about?

“For a few years it’s been at the back of my mind that I’d do an exhibition. I thought that the most natural thing would be to do an exhibition of cover artwork, but I just didn’t feel like I had the guts to open the gallery and do it myself. So I decided to do a group exhibition, and I thought the most natural thing to do would be to get four other people who were much the same, people who were quite good at drawing but
were primarily musicians; the exception being Sarah [Lippett] who’s perhaps more of an artist who’s in a band. It was Duncan [Barett] who suggested the space thing, knowing I was into space. A little bit of me was, ‘Oh, I’ve done that, I’ve done a space song already,’ but then Sarah wanted to do space dogs and I wanted to do space dogs and we had a fight about that, so I realised I did care.”

After The Ship’s Piano, Hayman’s next project will be the physical release of his song-a-day project, January Songs. The album will be released in the new year, to mark the first anniversary of the songs being written, in suitably high-concept fashion.

“I have a crazy idea about how to do it. It’s going to be released quite simply, it’s going to be a card sleeve, two CDs, but the cover’s going to be blank and I’m going to do 1,000 and I’m going to hand draw every single sleeve. Not just a scribble, I will draw something. I think I’ve worked out how many I have to do a day. It’s not unbearable as long as I keep doing it. It’s as stupid as the original idea.”

Would you repeat the original experiment?

“No. You can’t do the same thing twice, can you? It’s done.”

Speaking of which… Most people probably know Darren as the frontman of Hefner, who split up in 2002. For some time afterwards, he was stuck in what he describes delicately as a “protracted legal problem” with Hefner’s record label, and by all accounts was thoroughly cheesed off with the whole thing. Are things better now, doing his own thing on a new label?

“I miss the guys, I miss being part of a team. And they were the best band I ever played in. But I think I write better songs now. I think there are some good Hefner songs, but they aren’t necessarily the ones people call out for. And some of it sounds quite gauche, quite young, quite bratty. A song like ‘Hymn for the Cigarettes’ is just a collection of pithy one-liners; I understand why it works, why people want to sing along to it, but it’s not hard to do.



“I remember playing quite a small show after I’d done a solo record, and I was coming home on the Tube and my wife said to me, ‘you hang out with much nicer people now you don’t sell so many records’. And I think that is true, and I do try to remember that. And I wouldn’t be able to do an exhibition with four people about space travel and dogs with anyone I was hanging out with when I was on Beggar’s Banquet.

“Although I’d get rid of all those nice people if I could have the money and success. Hand back into the flame like a shot!”

He’s joking, I think.

HANDY LINKS

Download the title track from The Ship's Piano by clicking HERE

Darren Hayman's official website

Vostok 5

January Songs