I thought it was finally over. The terrible CDs had finally run out, and if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have seen that it’s been a full year since we last paid a visit to the Four Word Review Auditorium. But no, it seems my luck ran out a little while ago when a jiffy bag dropped through the letterbox containing Dive In, the 2002 debut album from Popstars and Pop Idol star/idol Darius. Oh dear. Brace yourself, then: we’re going back in.
You remember this guy: Darius, or Darius Danesh, or Darius Campbell Danesh, depending on the circumstances. He was one of the very first people to find success off the back of the big TV music talent shows and had a massive smash hit called “Colourblind” that you probably still remember now, given how inescapable it was 23 years ago. (He died in 2022, a fact we will skim over because it’s not a good fit for the light and glib tone of these reviews.)
This is his debut album, which features “Colourblind” and three other singles that also did well, and the album itself went platinum. I’ll say at the outset that you can see why: it’s mass appeal pop music, yes, and one of the early products of a system that shortly afterwards became the X Factor production line – but it’s pretty good mass appeal pop music. He wrote the songs himself, which offers a level of credibility most plastic pop can’t match, and it has some real production pedigree too: among other very reputable personnel, the executive producer was Steve Lillywhite, who’s worked with XTC, Talking Heads, the Psychedelic Furs, Morrissey and many more of their kind.
They did a decent enough job, because it hasn’t dated nearly as badly as you’d think. In fact it’s not the plasticky sounding thing you might expect at all. But what it’s not is very varied. If you remember “Colourblind” – acoustic guitar, stuttery 2000s production, tasteful string section, oohs and aahs in the background, vocal style that frequently jumps into falsetto – then you know what the whole thing sounds like. It’s twelve tracks of that, to the extent that it’s hard to form any distinct opinion at all about most of them.
Actually – tell a lie – it’s twelve tracks of that, followed by 56 tracks that are all five seconds long and silent, and then a bonus song that is a different version of “Gotta Know Tonight”. The extra blank tracks are presumably there so that the bonus track could be (ha ha, ho ho) number 69. The bonus was so similar to the original, which first appears at track 7, that I haven’t bothered reviewing it.
| Track | Word 1 | Word 2 | Word 3 | Word 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Colourblind | Rainbow | themed | pop | smash |
| 2. Rushes | No | rushes | to | repeat |
| 3. Incredible | Soaring | break | up | whinge |
| 4. Girl in the Moon | Slow | with | much | sighing |
| 5. I’m Not Buying | These | all | sound | alike |
| 6. Dive In | More | guitar | more | falsetto |
| 7. Gotta Know Tonight | Tender | heartbreak, | same | sound |
| 8. Sliding Doors | It’s | about | the | film |
| 9. Simple Like the Truth | Quite | bland. | No | opinions |
| 10. Better Than That | No | better | than | others |
| 11. Mocking Bird | Colourblind | with | new | words? |
| 12. Mercury Rising | Slow | ballad | finish. | Standard |
Darius clearly had a good voice (and a falsetto he rather liked to use) and he played his own guitar, pictured inside the album sleeve. But he wasn’t much of a lyricist. “Colourblind” works its way through all the colours he can think of to describe lots of emotions, and he just about gets away with that, but then you’re into track 2, where every line clunks into place like a first draft:
She’s got a blind smile and a soft touch
A cute little dimple when she laughs too much
They say you fall hard when you meet her
Such is her allure
“A blind smile”? “Such is her allure”? Ugh. Anyway, that one seems a masterpiece when you get to track 8, “Sliding Doors”, which I thought might just happen to share a name with the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film – but then it starts with the sound of a tube train pulling in, and the whole of the song turns out to be a description of the film’s plotline. We’ve all been stuck for inspiration sometimes but this is a whole other level.
In summary, then, the album sounds pretty OK, especially considering what kind of music this is and how long ago it was made, but even so I came away feeling like one listen was more than enough for me. My favourite thing about this album was the fact that all the songs had gaps between them, which was the only means by which I could tell some of them apart. My least favourite thing was the backing vocal that appeared to say “when I look at you that way you feel naked”. I absolutely do not, thank you very much.