Sananda Maitreya, the artist previously known as Terence Trent D’Arby, is currently touring the UK and is about to have the four albums he released under his old name reissued. And he’s been talking to The Telegraph about the his swift rise and equally rapid fall in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Older readers may recall that D’Arby/Maitreya (he changed his name in the early 2000s) was big big news in 1987. Young, good looking and beautifully arrogant, he was fond of proclaiming his own genius – on one occasion he claimed that his debut album, Introducing The Hardline According To..., was the “most important album since Sgt Pepper”. It wasn’t. But it was a very good pop-soul album that justified the considerable hype.
It was, he suggests, all a deliberate move. “All I was doing was my Muhammad Ali impression [saying he was the greatest],” he explains. “It was working. It was selling. It was getting attention. Nobody dares tell you that you’re wrong while the stacks [of money] are piling up… So, no, I didn’t think it was the most important album since Sgt Pepper. But I certainly knew saying that brought more attention to it, and more sales to it. So, whatever it took. [And] you’re too young to understand the degree to which the cost will add up later.”
Maitreya’s career crashed after his second album, Neither Fish Nor Flesh, flopped in 1989. Although he returned with a string of UK hits from a third album, Symphony Or Damn, in 1993, he never regained his momentum.
Somewhat contentiously, he seems to blame Michael Jackson for this turn of affairs – Maitreya alleges that Jackson “leveraged” his superstar status at Sony to compromise his young rival. “I don’t have any empirical evidence that I can point to in a court of law and say his fingerprints were all over some of this,” he admits. “But of course, he wasn’t very comfortable with me.”
Hmmm. Anyway, Maitreya now says that Jackson may have done him a favour after all. “Quite frankly, it might have turned out that he, in fact, saved my life. Because all of my colleagues who went through [this] – George (Michael), Prince, Michael – they’re no longer here. It may very well be possible that I’m still here because of Michael’s interference.”
Those first four albums are repackaged as a box set, Juvenilia, which is out in December. Maitreya’s tour goes on until November 6. Tickets are available from his website.
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