After touring constantly for 12 months, Darren Hayes is about to release a stunning live concert DVD of his most ambitious and critically acclaimed concert tour to date : The Time Machine Tour.
Quietly selling out London s prestigious Royal Albert Hall, Hayes audaciously toured a show that had more in common with Pink Floyd than American Idol.
The show, designed by legendary U2 and Rolling Stones designer Willie Williams featured, amongst other things, a 24 foot animatronic steel and neon origami bird and set pieces straight from a Jules Verne novel.
The DVD marks the completion of a project that has seen Hayes graduate from pop star to label head and CEO of his own independent record company.
A year before the likes of Radiohead decided to snub major label EMI, Hayes had announced plans to go it alone via his own label Powdered Sugar releasing his double album This Delicate Thing We ve Made with little fanfare. Just great songs, intricate art piece music videos and a blistering live band.
Accountants, managers and suits and ties advised him against spending so much of his own money on such a show. But Hayes famously ignored them and took the elaborate production all over the UK and Australia. The DVD was shot in his hometown of Brisbane Australia on the final night of the tour.
''This was the tour I've always dreamed of. Bowie and Peter Gabriel made the blueprint for this type of rock theatre and although it sounds morbid, doing a show like this was one of my before I die wishes. I simply had to do something like this once in my life and I couldn t think of a better moment than this period to try'', Hayes said.
Costume design stitched by makers from the Royal Shakespeare Company and set pieces by the folks who put U2 in a Lemon and George Michael in front of the largest video screen ever built the show was a spectacle that had to be seen to be believed.