GILDED BIRDS

Darren Hayman, singer-songwriter and artist, on a lamp.

GB Tell me why you chose this.

DH I don’t think this is by any means the most beautiful thing in the world. I suppose I recoiled at the question initially because I like stuff as much as anyone else but also know that you’re not supposed to like stuff. I’m sometimes contrary about stuff. If you think about your own archive, like mine of records because I’m a musician, I sometimes give away my last copy of something because I don’t like the idea of being a completist or archival about my life and I don’t like objects having that power over you. Sometimes I do a sort out and I can be quite slash and burn about objects. I don’t like the idea that there’s a bracelet or a ring where I’d be devastated to lose it. There’s a saying that goes something like, you should own the object not the object own you, and another one that says you should never own anything that you can’t afford to lose. So if you’ve got an object in your house that would break your heart if you had a fire then you shouldn’t really own it. You should only own stuff that is transitory. Objects come in and out. Having said all that, I thought about it and remembered I chose this object for an interview about what I’d save in a fire. I think heirlooms and family things have usually belonged to someone who was very important to you or someone you’ve loved all your life but this object comes from someone I didn’t particularly like, so in some way it feels like a good consolation for a bad relationship. This used to be in my nan’s house, my mum’s mother, and I remember there being two of them. I didn’t like my nan and I don’t think she liked me very much. We used to stay with her at Christmas and at one point when I was quite young I can remember her saying to my parents, “He’s spoilt. He’s horrible and annoying. He’s spoilt.” So when she eventually passed away I quite enjoyed there being this pretty thing that this person I didn’t like had in their flat. Everyone was dividing stuff up and I didn’t want anything in particular but I knew no one else would want this because at the time it was considered garish or whatever. I used to like it as a kid so I asked for it. So for me, in a way, it’s consolation for a bad relationship. I thought, okay, I didn’t like her very much and it was quite a traumatic experience as a child but she did have a really good lamp.

GB So do you turn it on and think, who’s spoilt now, huh?

DH Well, it kind of has a red glow and I keep it in my bedroom up high, so I quite often turn it on when it’s sexy time because it gives everything a slightly Amsterdam glow. I like thinking, this is the last thing you would have wanted for your lamp. Then another part of the story of this object is that I once mentioned it in an interview about what I would save in a fire, then just after that I was moving house and I banged it against a fireplace and it broke. My dad glued it together for me and didn’t do an entirely good job. You can see cracks across it. But now my dad has passed away as well. He passed away during and because of Covid. So now it has another layer in that it’s this object from a person I didn’t like but with this crude sort of Frankenstein fixing of it is by someone I did like. I like objects when they carry scars. They carry a story. If I buy a guitar from new it’s often a kind of stressful thing to own while it’s pristine, but once you smack it against a wall or it falls over and it has a dink or a dent in it, there’s almost a feeling of relief, in the sense that, okay that’s happened now. I think that kind of relationship to objects also has a ‘contraryism’ to it. I don’t want things to have power over me. So now the lamp has been broken, now it’s no longer something I can take on Antiques Roadshow, it’s no longer eBayable and I’m stuck with it, it only has value to me. It no longer has value to anyone else. It’s not like I’d destroy things to prove a point or I think that beautiful old things shouldn’t be treasured.

GB Have you ever subconsciously damaged something, left it in a precarious position?

DH I might be that way about musical instruments. I think the conscious or unconscious nature of that is up for grabs. There’s something about, for want of a better word, rock ’n’ roll, the nature of those things is that you’re essentially hitting them, beating the shit out of them in pubs. So it’s kind of weird when a grown man is going,  “Oooooooh, a ’72 Tele! She’s lovely!” Especially if they start using she pronouns. I think, this isn’t really how it’s supposed to work. So, there’s a duality there, in that I do think I have some keyboards and things that are sort of expensive. So in answer to your question, yes, I can sometimes be cavalier. I have a Wurlitzer piano that I’ve just taken around England and left in venues. I reckon that’s worth four or five grand. But at the same time, what the fuck’s it for if not being played in a pub. So I can sometimes be deliberately careless with things as if to prove a point to myself. Both things are going on. If that Wurlitzer got stolen I would suffer some kind of shock for the loss of worth, but I would be conscious of the fact that it is only a thing.

GB I know Bob Dylan has never cared for any particular guitar. It was just a thing that allowed him to play his songs. Do you think that your music is more important than anything you could ever play it on?

DH I think that in general with creativity and art I have found it not helpful to believe in magic or myth or muse. I find those things inconvenient. For some people, those things are really convenient, the idea that the muse has struck and that their might be magic in a certain guitar. I’ve never really wanted that to be the case because it means that you’re at the mercy of luck rather than intellect or hard work. It seems much more reliable to rely on those other things. Steven Hendry, the snooker player had a cue his dad bought him when he was 12 and it was a piece of shit from the local sport shop. That cue is what he won six or seven world championships with and then one day it snapped in a plane. He was devastated because although it was cheap he had imbued it with this magical value, so then there was this word thing where he was paying state-of-the-art cue manufacturers to try to recreate the action and weight of this cue that cost £5 in 1980. He got the worst of both worlds, to have an object that was cheap and had no value to anyone else but he’s imbued it with value which made it irreplaceable.

GB Do you wish you could have met him and snapped it in two much earlier on so he’d figured that bit out?

DH Exactly. So that brings us back to this lamp being broken. But now the contrarian in me wants to go another way. I have a Prophet 5 synthesiser that’s worth nine or ten grand and I know you can buy an app for your phone that makes that sound and if someone was to A-B it, I’m sure they could fool me. I’m not under any illusion. Those days died six or seven years ago. Once in a while I’ll talk to someone online or in a pub and say, “Guess what I’ve got,” in this slightly Jeremy Clarkson way. But the only reason it’s in this flat is because of what it does for me. I think it’s quite something to have objects in your home that are older than you. That’s quite humbling. I have a piano from the 1930s. The people who made it and the people who originally played it are dead now and it’s unknowable to me, who they are just as it’s unknowable to them who I am. It’s hard to completely discount that.

GB I’ve broken a piece of very rare porcelain but I suppose I still have the humble-bragging rights to the story.

DH I think stories are really valuable. I think losing or breaking something expensive doesn’t matter. You’ll still get old and die and then what you’ve got is the story about when you broke an expensive vase. It feels like that’s more valuable than the vase once you get to the end of your life.

GB But looking at your Thankful Villages project, people might think you’re quite sentimental about things.

DH I’m sentimental about stories. There are stories invested in this lamp. I am quite sentimental. I’m very interested in provenance and places but it’s too much of a burden to carry stuff with you. I think of my mum as someone who has spent her whole life being anxious about stuff and worrying about being burgled. That can’t be right. If there was a fire in the flat I’d pick up the dog.

GB I interviewed a philosopher called Roger Scruton who said that beauty was in things that gave him a feeling of home. Does your lamp give you a feeling of home?

DH I like that one of the coolest things in my flat is from one of the uncoolest people I’ve known so there’s some kind of corrective Karma about it. I’m better at understanding how the space around you affects your mood. I was quite late to that. When I got this flat after my marriage failed I found it very important to make a beautiful space around me. Now I’m quite surprised when someone new comes to my flat and finds it quite pretty. I think when you live on your own as opposed to part of a couple it needs to be a bit of a sanctuary, a bit uncompromised and something that reflects you. Friends and relationships are all reflected here and even some of my earliest memories like the Bay City Rollers lampshade and a Wombles lampshade. 

GB Light is so important in your paintings. Now when I see a painting in the dark I see it as one of your paintings. Is that another reason you chose a lamp?

DH Some people send me photographs of buildings at night saying they saw it and thought of me. It would be quite fun if everyone could do the work for me now and send me those images and I just do the paintings. Those paintings do have quite a bit to do with the idea of home and the idea of a sanctuary. They have quite a bit to do with lockdown and how we thought of home during that. There’s a kind of duality in them in that some people say they’re sad and some people say they’re happy. In the painting you’re outside someone else’s building who is at home, so they’re safe and you’re not. So whether you’re a person who wants to be inside or outside more has a relationship to whether you find them melancholy or happy. They remind me of doing a paper round and really hating it on cold November nights, going past each window and wishing I was home.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

DH I think beauty on its own, an aesthetic paragon, is a little tricky for me. Everything for me is filtered through experience, so it’s interesting that I chose something that had a story. Looking around this room, there are things here that are chosen purely for aesthetic reasons but I think to try and quantify beauty on it’s own without any anchors doesn’t work. The reason we choose anything has something to do with a life experience and some subjectivity.

GB How about a rainbow? Have you ever known anyone who can’t stand rainbows?

DH I don’t think so, but I’m very suspicious of people who spend an inordinate amount of money to go and see the Northern lights. I’m not saying the Northern light aren’t beautiful and I am lucky enough to have been in a car in Norway at one point and the driver said, “Have you ever wanted to see the Northern lights,” and I said, “S’pose…” and he pointed and said, “Well there they are.” So quite accidentally I happened to see them, but it seems strange. Is that it? Some vague fireworks? I don’t think you’re wrong about a rainbow, but the fact that no one has chosen one for Gilded Birds strikes me as apt because a rainbow seems like something perfectly nice and pleasant and nobody would say a rainbow is a shit thing. But precisely because no one would say a rainbow is a shit thing, it strikes me that a rainbow is a solid middle player in the world of beauty. I don’t think anything has objective, innate, undeniable beauty and I certainly would respect someone’s right to say, “That rainbow is ruining the sky.”