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Q MAGAZINEISSUE 81 - June 1993
By Adrian Deevoy "I'VE ALWAYS SAID AN ARTIST SHOULD HAVE HIS HEART IN ONE HAND AND HIS NUTS IN THE OTHER." From nowhere, his first LP sold like thermonuclear cakes and he became the most sexy, mouthy, loppy, self-promoting star in pop. Then his second album bombed. Has failure changed Terence Trent D'Arby? Adrian Deevoy invites you to judge, if you will, for yourself... "HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN YOU GO DOWN ON Terence Trent D'Arby is in London to "spread my ass cheeks" and promote his new LP, Symphony Or Damn. He ushers you excitedly into his hotel suite, the living room of which is cluttered with musicianly ephemera: an electric piano and a black Fender Telecaster, a small amplifier and a huge tape deck that is pumping out Led Zeppelin. A joss stick smolders in the corner ("Il snuff it out if it bothers you") and there are bottles of water everywhere. "I drink water almost constantly," he shrugs, every skinny fibre of his body glowing with near-unnatural health. "It's purifying." He's been out the public eye for three and a half years since the flop of his last album, Neither Fish Nor Flesh, which, in its time, made Heaven's Gate look like a bums-on-seats box office sensation. It came as quite a shock to the fellow who boasted that it would easily outstrip, artistically and commercially, his eight-million-selling debut, Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby. The "psychedelic masterpiece" sold 360,000 in Britain where it is currently deleted. A period of reassessment, wound-licking and spiritual stock-taking commenced in a house in Hollywood which was previously home (with an out-house for their egos, presumably) to two similarly misunderstood intellectual colossi: Billy Idol and Mickey Rourke. Maybe it's called "Dungeniusin". (Page 69) On the surface, little about Terence Trent D'Arby has changed. The clothes
have undergone a certain dandification, shirt sleeves swell and trouser
legs flare. The micro-dreadlocks are a little shorter, framing the unpardonably
pretty features and long, Egyptian eyes. even as he begins to speak, it
would appear that everything has remained true to the original blueprint.
He is still inordinately pretentious, brimful of bullshit and reassuringly
arrogant. Asked breezily, by the way of secondary small talk, if he's
happy, he replies: After 10 mintes he's saying: "I am an artist. Absolutely. And people
cringe when you use the word. It's not hip or fashionable any more. In
fact, the last thing people want right now is an artist. But it's what
I am, and my first responsibility is to my art." "Having turned 31 three weeks ago, I feel I am at an age, and have
been for a few years, that I have to start answering questions about myself
that I before would have postponed. I believe there are certain challenges
in life that we can't choose to walk away from. If a man finds himself
in a situation where his only means of survival is by re-evaluation, then
he throws himself into it in a way that a man who is on fire would throw
himself into a pool. "I had to get out of London. If you get shot in a war zone, would
you try to heal your wounds in the line of fire or would you pull yourself
behind a tree? There was no real reason for going to Los Angeles. It was
instinctive. And at every point in my life so far I seemed to have been
in the right place at the right time for whatever I had to go through
at that particular stage. Skifully twisting the question edgeways, you enquire whether or not drugs
had been involved in the recording of Neither Fish Nor Flesh and for once
he is silent, flummoxed even. And does he still take drugs now? "I can see that argument," he counters immediately, "but
if Sony could control me in that way then they would have a long time
ago. How can I explain this? With newspapers and magazines you're always
dealing in angles. So it's The Ego Has Landed or they think, Since he
didn't say anything outrageous this time like, I'm better than God, then
they get into this thing where he says he got songs in a dream from some
dead person so we'll present him as a nutter!" But wasn't it more a case of D'Arby, a former journalist, manipulating
the press? "If I hadn't said that stuff, I wouldn't have created any friction," he reasons. "I think it was Socrates who said, An unexamined life is not worth living. Actually, it could have been Aristotle. One of them heavy dudes, anyway. I've learned from experience that the media doesn't handle subtlety very well. You have to use broad brush strokes. A lot of people realised when I was saying those things I was taking the piss. that it was tongue-in-cheek, ironic. Some people didn't take it that way and thought that I was a complete and utter cunt. (Page 71) Indeed they did. they were heartily sick of this good-looking, vocally
gifted bloke banging on about what a great talent he had and how thousands
of women wanted to sleep with him. "I really want to work on my relationships with men. I've never really liked men that much. I sensed that the female side of me was in check and pretty much up and running but I had to balance myself paying attention to the male side of my persona. So I started playing basketball, and hung out with guys more while not relinguishing the female side of me. "I've always been a ladies' man. I don't mean that in the cad sense but I've always had a receptor for women. Women do seem to really love me. I innately trust them more, I respect their motivations, I crave their affection. And as I get older I realise that although sex is a very wonderful option, that it isn't really sex I miss - a good wank can always sort that out - but the affection. As a quote unquote poet, someone who has a poet's soul, I can just write reams about a woman's lap. Although that can be dangerous and in its own way sexist and demeaning and de-humanising because you lose touch with the belching, farting reality of what women really are." Does he have a girlfriend now? Could this not be construed as the talk of a man who is
frightened of commitment?
EARLIER THIS MORNING, Back at the hotel, he announces suddenly: "I'm trying to become dumber. You've got to become more like a child to get to that idyllic place. The intellect can get in the way of pure appreciation. Anything that brings me pleasure I try to keep my mind out of it: sex, music, good wine, affection, sunset, women's shoes - I'm a bit of a shoe fetishist - anything substantial that brings me joy invariably has nothing to do with intellect. The only reason you use your intellect in that circumstance is to digest and explain pure feeling, so it's a kind of redundant. Because music is the language of the soul it confounds us intellectually sometimes but really we should just allow it to move us. If music doesn't connect with us either spiritually or sexually then it isn't worth a fuck." We discuss music further. He talks about Prince, without drawing breath, for half an hour. D'Arby says the first time he heard Prince's music, he felt an inexplicable connection with it. He met him and Prince "talked his ass off, nothing like you'd expect" and told him he was a poet. D'Arby kissed him on the mouth. They speak on the telephone from time to time ("although there's still very much this big brother, little brother vibe"). He's very wary of repeating verbatim any conversations they have had as "he is a man who has assiduously avoided the big-mouthed mistakes I made and I don't want to blow it for him." He winds up his Princeathon simply and touchingly, saying, "I love him. I really do." Bruce Springsteen, he adds unexpectedly, played an equally avuncular role. "He was always there for me, offering advice, giving me the benefit of his experience. I met him during my first tour of the States and he was very supportive to me and then he re-entered the picture when I was going through all that confusion after Fish Nor Flesh. He said, The same thing happened to me at the time of my second album. It was received the same way. He took me under his wing for a while again and then, boom, the guardian angel had done his bit, and he was gone to concentrate on his burgeoning family." He says that he experienced the same protective emotion himself when he met first Seal two months ago. "It was very funny because he said the thing that people always say to me if we haven't met before and that's, God you're tall! Then after I'd spoken to him for a while he said, Man, you're really nice, I was expecting you to be horrible, an arrogant bastard. I thought, Well, I didn't mean to bring your Gods down, I'll tell you there's no Santa Clause in a minute. But I do think me being off the scene for three and a half years left room for Seal and Lenny (Kravitz) to come through. This industry doesn't like too many black faces around at one time. If someone puts me on the cover of a magazine, they ain't going to be putting another black face on the cover for a while because it wouldn't make commercial sense and that's the way of the world. I think Seal is a very good lyricist, for example, but with black artists no-one pays attention to the lyrics like they would if it was Morrissey or Lloyd Cole. Same with me. I've always silently bemoaned the fact that no-one has ever given me encouragement in that particular area. The other thing, in a weird way, that I liked about Seal was how black he was. He was really dark And he has a very manly, earthy sexiness. My thing is kind of androgynous but he's a big, masculine motherfucker." Even Leonard Cohen gets a look in. "I had dinner with him and we hit it off to well. He's beautiful. The way he attracts women, man, is just incredible. There's a very priest-like vibe about him. I said to him, As I get older I find regarding women and sex that the dog is wagging the tail now rather then the tail wagging the dog like it used to. That I now have some control over these things and it makes the situation all the more enjoyable when it happens. He said, Enjoy it, my friend, because when you get to my age you can't choose any more, just as long as something wags." (Page 77) "NOW I'M JUST SAYING WHATEVER
IS COMING We've been talking for four hours now and it's beginning to get rather crowded here: there's Jesus, Nietzsche, Goethe, Shakespeare, Buddha, Walt Whitman, Socrates, Queen Elizabeth I, Blake, Milton even Van Morrison all miling around waiting for this young man, who by now appears to have taken leave of his senses, to quote them. "If you read Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno and Goethe's Faust they're all basically describing the same thing, all trying to euphemise an experience so that people can try to understand it. Blake had a problem with this because people thought he was a nutter. He hadn't got smart like the other guys; he just said it like it was and people couldn't possibly get what he was saying. How could they deal with that? "I've had three experiences, this is hard to talk about, Walt Whitman got there and described it perfectly. I'll show you later. One lasted about 10 days and the intellect isn't boundless enough to encapsulate what happened. Without any artificial substances, I felt a sense of euphoria beyond anything I've ever known. The features of that euphoria were total and complete acceptance. The world wasn't limited to my vision of it; everthing was perfect the way it was, that was the way everything should be. There was a total lack of fear or judgement. I felt total love and I was in the moment." This heightened state came as the result of an esoteric philosophy he's been studying and practising for the last three years. "It's nothing do to with the occult," he stresses anxiously. "It's about self-observation, Shakespeare said, A man can't change himself until he first sees himself. The next step is not to express negative emotion." He's hit his stride now. "The director could call cut tomorrow and all this celebrity stuff could come down. But then I'd have to ask, OK, what is my next assignment? Let me ask you this: What is life if it isn't a collection
of moments remembered? As Jesus said..." Just one moment, Terence.
Can we pause there for a second and wonder what people are going to think
of you when they read this? But isn't Terence Trent D'Arby in a rather more privileged position than most to do that? "They said that to Goethe and he said, Therefore I have even more responsibility. The point is, we all have our roles to play. In the realm of the universe, nature, a weed plays no less valuable role than a rose. I happen to be a rose. That's how it is. Like Van Morrison said, It ain't why, it just is. "A star's role is to shine and if it ain't shinig, it ain't doing it's fucking job. Richard Bach, who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull said, There's nothing worse than a reluctant messiah. It's true. If the Gods lay on a spread for you and you don't eat it, nothing pisses them off more. Believe me." IINTERVIEW CONCLUDED, HE MARKS
A PASSAGE "It seems like a perfect idea, doesn't it?" he pants. "I swear to God, I knew it was going to happen. I was surprised at how quickly I agreed to it but I know that by doing this something will fall away psychologically and it thrills me as much as it frightens me. I've always said an artist should have his heart in one hand and his nuts in the other." He throws his head back and laughs excitedly. "I'm just going to have a couple of bottles of wine, man, and whip it out. If you're going to do, do it."
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