Have You Heard The News  (Ireland)                                                                Darren Holden remembers the day Elvis died

This article was published in the Toronto Star

Written by Richard Ouzounian.

He's always been the piano man.

Darren Holden is currently dazzling Toronto audiences with his keyboard pyrotechnics in Movin' Out, the Billy Joel musical on at the Canon Theatre. But he's been tickling the ivories ever since he was 7, in a career that's taken him around the world and covered every base from rockabilly to Riverdance.

For the 33-year-old Irish musician, his current assignment "is close to a dream gig," he says over lunch at a downtown hotel recently.

"Playing and singing Billy's music is a treat and a privilege. There's no one like him.

"The lyrics tell such great stories. Everyone has gone through something that he's written about.

"That's why people keep coming back to hear his songs."

But the relentlessly urban Joel might seem a strange match for the rural-bred Holden.

He was born on July 4, 1972 in County Killkenny, Ireland, in the village of Mooncoin.

"It was a very, very, very small town," he says with a grin, "but it was a good place to grow up, because you really appreciated things when they'd happen. If a fair came to town, or if they showed a movie in the local hall, it was a big deal."

So young Holden learned to make his own kind of music. "When I was 2, I could carry a tune in church and I was always trying to get up with the choir. And my parents loved music. Elvis was the big influence. I can still remember the day he died. I recall sitting under the kitchen table and my Mom was crying, just like Elvis had been a family member."

Then when he was 7, his curiosity changed his life. "We had an old piano in a spare room, just collecting dust. I sneaked in there one day and started playing notes. Before long, I was making up tunes."

His parents sent him for eight years of classical piano lessons. But it's not where his musical tastes lay.

"I started performing in local bars when I was 11 and by the time I was 14, I started a rockabilly trio called Breakaway. I guess I was a bit of a freak, because when everybody else had long hair, I was the one with the flat-top."

The group stuck together for three years, but by the end, "I got tired of playing just three chords; I wanted to expand a little bit."

But even the ambitious young Holden wasn't ready for what fate sent him next.

 

Tweed had been a popular Irish band of the '70s, cut from the same cloth as Chicago or Earth, Wind and Fire. In 1989, they planned a comeback tour, but their lead vocalist dropped out and so they turned to the 17-year-old Holden.

"My parents were horrified because these guys had real hell-raising reputations," Hammond says. "But they let me go and I grew up on the road with those guys. I saw things I'd never seen before and really learned the music business."

Two years later Holden struck out on his own, touring Ireland and the UK until 1994. Then he got signed to Polygram Records, a period he now looks back on with mixed feelings.

"They marketed me as a kind of Donny Osmond, David Cassidy type."

Now in his mid 30s, Holden's boyish good looks make you see how that was possible. "I had a lot of hits, but I was being sold as something I wasn't. It was fun, but it was too crazy for me."

The worst part was the obsessive teenage fans. "They used to camp outside my house at night and my Mom would take pity and invite them in. I'd come down to breakfast and discover a bunch of strange girls sitting at our table."

He shakes his head. "I didn't buy any of it. I realized I was on a fast track to nowhere."

So he dropped out and spent two years working as a clerk in a record store.

"Some people would come by to stick the knife in me, saying things like `You used to think you were somebody special, didn't you?' But I never did. That's why I quit."

By 1998, Holden knew he had to move on. Anxious to get back in the music scene anyway he could, Holden took a job with a touring show called Rhythm of the Dance, one of the endless Riverdance clones that followed that production's worldwide success.

"I had to sing five Irish ballads a night. I wasn't sure it was the right thing to do, but I stayed with it for 10 months"

Smart move. One night, the producers of the original Riverdance caught his act and offered him the chance to open as the lead vocalist in their Broadway company.

He stayed with that show for two years, both in New York and on the road, then came home to slip right into Movin' Out.

"I never get tired of it all. Every audience brings something new and re-energizes me."

And best of all, he finally got to meet Billy Joel.

"He came to see my third show on Broadway, just jumped on the bandstand right before the curtain went up and gave me some advice. He said: `Do your own thing; don't be a clone.'"

Words of wisdom from one piano man to another.