Darren Hayman :: I’m Your Team

The DX7 came to Darren Hayman the way furniture does when someone wants rid of it: Pete Astor handed it over because he no longer cared to have it underfoot.

The drum machine, too, was a gift. With You Will Not Die finished in 2022, Hayman picked out the least loved machines in his music room: a Yamaha DX7, a Roland TR707, a Rickenbacker bass. The DX7’s electric piano was everywhere in the eighties; the 707 is brash and hard to bend. With these three objects and his voice Hayman recorded ten songs alone, then left them for years on a shelf. I’m Your Team came out on 16 October on Audio Antihero, unannounced.

Its working title was DX707. Hayman changed it at the last moment: after twenty years of themed albums, from witch trials to William Morris, he knew how readily a constraint hardens into a label. The record is about staying. The verb returns in “Say if You Want Me to Stay” and “Make Love Stay”, and Hayman has acknowledged that the album turns on the wish not to leave while knowing that something is already over. The machines nobody wanted become the material shape of that wish: instruments kept, tended, learned long after anyone stopped asking for that skill.

“I Refuse” runs almost eight minutes over the DX7’s most recognisable piano preset, a sound Hayman meant to turn into some other instrument and which went on asserting its own character until he gave up the fight. The song is about the relief of giving in, and instrument and lyric arrive at the same surrender. The voice, dry and deep.

“Close Your Eyes and Face the Sun” is the heart of the record. It was written for someone dear whom Hayman now seldom sees, and who, on bright days, would stop with eyes closed, face turned to the sun. The arrangement admits the instruments one at a time, each recognisable for what it is and for what it does. The 707, built to fill dancefloors, here keeps time for an absence.

What seems to hold the whole album up is something of the Velvet Underground with the grit taken out, the same insistence on very few elements. Soul and lovers rock come in through the patience of the tempos, and the nearest ancestor is Timmy Thomas: in 1972 “Why Can’t We Live Together” grew out of a Lowrey organ and the rhythm preset built into it, parlour soul made on a mass-produced appliance. Hayman is after the same intimacy.

“Say if You Want Me to Stay” stretches past six minutes on a melody that keeps coming back unchanged, over a reggae lilt that is barely sketched in. Here the record loosens its grip a little: the tune is simple almost to the point of childhood, and the repetition asks for more than it gives back.

Hayman paints in watercolour, and these songs take after him: the colour goes down once, the paper breathes beneath, and where the hand hesitated a bloom remains. They are beautiful songs, written in a low voice, the way one speaks to someone asleep in the next room.