Terence Trent Darby

A peculiar character, Terence Trent D'Arby – remember him? Quite a few years have passed now, that name doesn't even exist anymore today, but there was a period when his voice was one of the most instinctively recognizable on every radio and TV frequency. This is the story of a man, an artist, and the tribulations of a talent as explosive as it was uncompromising.

Born in Manhattan, New York in 1962, Terence is the illegitimate son of Frances Howard, a deeply religious African-American gospel singer, and a man who was already married and probably white, with whom he would never have any relationship. A heavy situation for his mother, but abortion was of course out of the question given her faith, so young Terence began his journey on Earth already carrying a long and complex series of emotional, social and cultural baggage. The boy grew up with his adoptive father James Benjamin Darby, a preacher by trade, and the couple's four other legitimate children. As with any family steeped in church life, young Terence's childhood was at once communal and vaguely alienating, rigid and subject to a strong sense of order and discipline.

(...) I've spent much of my life unconsciously feeling in competition with Jesus for my mother's attention. Which is difficult, because first of all I couldn't see him, except in depictions, and second because he was never really there, and it's hard to compete with someone invisible.

With the arrival of adolescence, the boy found himself venting all his pent-up energy through boxing, and he was so good that at seventeen he won the Golden Gloves in Florida in the featherweight division. From there it was a short step to being recruited into the army, and he ended up stationed in Frankfurt in the early '80s, in the very same regiment in which a certain Elvis Presley had once served. But Terence's military career didn't last long: the young man was too stubborn to take orders from people he considered, in his own words, "less intelligent," and after a series of warnings he was officially kicked out, finding himself alone but finally free, drifting around Europe.

Luckily there was music; having grown up on the gospel that played around the house as much as soaking up like a sponge the art of Sam Cooke, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, the young Terence had a natural gift for rhythm and melody, moving with ease between guitar, piano, saxophone and percussion.

But above all, the young man was possessed by an unshakeable artistic vision that guided him like a lighthouse in the dark. Anyone who met him in those years had the impression of standing before an ego of Napoleonic proportions, but for Terence this was simply the natural outlet for a communicative urgency bursting out of his chest. There's one anecdote in particular, told by the man himself years later in an interview, that borders on the tragicomic but which, true or not, certainly gives an idea of what was swirling around in the young artist's head at the time: on the night of December 8, 1980, Terence dreamed he was walking through the streets of New York, and at a certain point he ran into John Lennon; he reached out to shake his hand, but Lennon passed right through him like a ghost. Terence woke up the next morning to the news of Lennon's assassination splashed across the front page of every newspaper. In his own words:

Since the age of eighteen I've had a strong sense of what was supposed to happen in my life. I can only say this with relative humility: I've always felt like a Beatle

With that kind of conviction, destiny practically writes itself. His first band was called The Touch, and in 1984 an album called "Love On Time" was released in Europe, a work straddling synth-funk and boogie that achieved exactly zero success but showcased undeniable vocal talent and an unstoppable thirst for the stage. Within months Terence landed in England, the country where he would find the most lasting success of his career – so many listeners, especially in an America that would take time to acknowledge his success, would remain convinced for years that Terence Trent D'Arby was an English native.

Meeting Martyn Ware, already a veteran of Human League and Heaven 17, convinced Columbia to sign the young man. The synergy worked instantly: Ware came from synth-pop but had just worked with a resurgent Tina Turner and wasn't afraid to take on performers with commanding vocal power and rock guitars. Terence showed a religious devotion to studio work, polishing every detail of his artistic language with obsessive care, both in songwriting and in how he intended to present himself on stage, in videos, and through his image.

The result was a debut album with a title honestly bordering on the ridiculous – "Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby" – but one which its author believed in unconditionally, to the point that he announced it to the press with one of the most famous boasts of the era:

This is the most important record since the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's"!

Which is clearly debatable, especially when comparing this chaotic psychedelic hodgepodge to D'Arby's lean, precise music. But it's precisely this straddling of classic 60s and 70s rhythm'n'blues and the technological frenzy of Reagan/Thatcher-era industrial careerism that makes the record a chapter unto itself.

In a scene of the era besieged by Prince, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael & Janet Jackson, and the thunderous beats of new jack swing, our man Terence counterattacks as every record executive's most ambitious daydream made flesh. It couldn't be otherwise; with that angelic face buried under a cascade of braids and a leather jacket worn over a lean, sinewy frame, the guy oozes carnal masculinity from every pore, yet carries himself with the elegant bearing of a gentleman from another era. In his hands he holds a fistful of instantly recognizable songs, and he delivers them with a voice in a class of its own: a timbre as vibrant as the blackest blues, yet with enough breath to chase gospel's tireless melismas, plus all the wide-reaching, thrilling energy of radio-ready rock. Whether behind a wall of electric guitars or during a cappella moments, D'Arby is a rockstar able to command the listener's attention with enviable ease.

Just three days after hitting the shelves, "Introducing The Hardline" had already sold a million copies worldwide, proof of the feverish public response perfectly stoked by Columbia and an excited MTV, which kept his videos in heavy rotation.

Between rousing, riotous funk singles like "If You Let Me Stay" and "Dance Little Sister", and leaner but never sparse, ear-grabbing moments like "Wishing Well" (which hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart in America in 1988), Terence proves himself a consummate entertainer, vocally exuberant and physically equipped to put on a show, working the mic stand just like his idol James Brown used to.

But it's with the other big hit, "Sign Your Name", that the new Divo shows off a more seductive register, singing the memorable chorus over a delicate, tropical-tinged rhythmic filigree — the famous accompanying video, directed by Vaughan Arnell, drips with melancholy and romantic tension, capturing with innate poetry the delicate, often misunderstood complexity of a troubled male soul, and remains one of the most touching of the era. And speaking again of masculinity, "I'll Never Turn My Back On You (Father's Words)" hits like a punch to the gut: a conversation between father and son, two men as distant and independent as society dictates, yet bound by a mutual respect and a love that seems barely hinted at but runs deeper than any ocean.

"If You All Get To Heaven" and "Seven More Days" showcase D'Arby's inspired songwriting, songs with a more complex structure but kept firmly on their feet by vocal performances that constantly volley between piratical swagger and pleading, before launching into swirling gospel crescendos. Terence the incurable romantic takes no prisoners on "Let's Go Forward", a song that could pass for a Teddy Pendergrass ballad, then ratchets up the tension again on "Rain" with a lean synthetic skeleton that reveals the DNA of a melodic sense that's always damnably effective.

The sting in the tail comes from the last two tracks; the nearly six minutes of pure a cappella on "As Yet Untitled" is the artistic swerve you don't see coming, one it's easy to get lost in as you chase Terence's voice weaving eddies and silences in the echo of an empty church. The moment the full band kicks back in, it feels like opening your eyes for the first time, and from there we're carried toward the close on the notes of "Who's Loving You", the only cover on the tracklist, originally written by Smokey Robinson but also made famous in the version by the Jackson Five. Persistent backstage gossip tells of an eternally competitive Michael Jackson thrown into paranoia by this new interpretation, and frankly you can't really blame him, because Terence scales that melody with the ease of an acrobat, sweating out with real passion all the pain of a love so pure and fragile — and let's not even get into how he performs it live.

By the end of its album cycle, "Introducing The Hardline" had sold over five million copies worldwide, picked up a Grammy, and handed a fistful of singles to radio rotation for years to come.

In everyone's eyes, then, Terence Trent D'Arby was the new Divo of 80s soul, standing perhaps alongside the solo George Michael, who that same year, 1987, released "Faith".

So two years later Terence delivered his personal swan song, the sprawling, overflowing "Neither Fish Nor Flesh: A Soundtrack Of Love, Faith, Devotion & Destruction", a work once again grandiose from the title onward, this time steeped in intricate baroque textures and progressive leanings — all told, a shining forerunner of the "alternative soul" concept that in the following decades would go on to influence both the neo-soul crowd led by D'Angelo and Maxwell, and premium outsiders like Bilal, Van Hunt and Miguel.

But in 1989, the abstruse authorial subtleties of a Black man were not exactly the order of the day — quite the opposite: misunderstood by his label and largely ignored by the public, "Neither Fish Nor Flesh" would turn out to be one of the most spectacular commercial flops of the entire 1980s, immediately sealing the end of success for an artist who, in the collective imagination, would forever be remembered solely and exclusively as the man behind "Introducing The Hardline".

Terence Trent D'Arby was killed in 1989!

So says the man himself, with a bitterness that, to this day, seems not to have healed. That very same year, in fact, brought "Let Love Rule", the debut of another good-looking Black artist by the name of Lenny Kravitz, the new rocker of the moment, destined to dominate the entire 90s and gather the public acclaim that had been denied to D'Arby. Between the two artists a mixed relationship of respect and envy took hold — D'Arby doesn't deny being deeply embittered by the about-face he got from Columbia, while Lenny, under Virgin, was allowed to grow slowly, album after album, cementing a career that remains a rock-solid, money-spinning fortress to this day.

Granted, Kravitz is also a far more accommodating artist with far humbler radio ambitions — unlike D'Arby, for instance, Lenny never asked his record label to dunk a piano in a swimming pool at three in the morning to record the difference in sound compared to a normal dry room (!) — which perhaps helps explain, at least in part, why working relationships, for the demanding D'Arby, tended to fall apart within the span of a single album.

(...) it's only a matter of time before some cheaper version of you comes along (...) the record labels say — hey, if you like this asshole, you'll also like this other asshole — and with this other asshole we have a bigger profit margin. What they don't tell you is that, as you get smarter and start making demands, you're starting the countdown on your own career.

For D'Arby, artistic control and full support from Columbia in accommodating any of his requests was less than the bare minimum, but the record industry didn't see it that way. Just look at Prince, who in that same 1989 spent his days crying like a baby even as the soundtrack he recorded for Tim Burton's celebrated "Batman" reconfirmed him as one of America's richest and most famous musicians - as if the whole thing disgusted him - proof of just how hard it is to reconcile ego and artistic sensibility with the kind of business pragmatism that also demands patience and the ability to swallow a few bitter pills.

While Prince could still count on a catalogue ten times as large, for the uncompromising D'Arby the recording career immediately became far more limited, stumbling along in fits and starts until he changed his name to Sananda Maitreya in '95, moved to Milan after marrying former TV host Francesca Francone, and withdrew into total recording isolation as an independent artist - a state that continues to this day under his own label, Treehouse.

What remains for us is a gripping human story, a handful of curious anecdotes, plenty of pages of excellent music (the later "Symphony Or Damn" and "Vibrator" are also notable), and a debut that stands certainly isolated but undeniably charged with emotion.

Only its creator's success proved fleeting, because listening back to "Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby" more than thirty years after its release still releases all the frenetic energy of a young man caught at the very height of his artistic vision - the perfect musical staff of a record industry era that may have been ruthless, but was nonetheless still capable of leaving posterity moments of dazzling beauty.

Bibliography:

Newstateman.com

Sanandamaitreya.com

Classicpopmag.com

Albumism.com

Wikipedia.org

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28/02/2021