Darcy Clay, Ten Years On — New Zealand Sunday Star Times, April 23 2008:
Darcy Clay was the outsized alter ego unleashed on the music industry by 24-year-old unknown Daniel Robert Bolton, when he emerged from the bedroom of his Clarence St, Ponsonby flat having home-recorded the Great New Zealand Single.
Jesus I Was Evil - a raucous, playful and strikingly original ode to hedonism - was the strongest of a clutch of raw-boned songs he wrote and recorded on a four-track in late 1996. It got in your head like an earworm. It bulged with killer lines. “I used to crash parties and Maseratis and-uh / I was evil,” Clay howled. The maverick, transgressive spirit celebrated in the title helped win over many before they had even heard the opening power chords. “Just to write a song called Jesus I Was Evil is awesome,” says actor Joel Tobeck, who was drafted in as Clay’s guitarist for a couple of the few live shows he ever played…
…Then, on March 15, 1998… Clay’s girlfriend returned home from an exhibition in Christchurch and found him dead in her Grey Lynn flat. There was no note, no drugs found in his system. He was 25.
A nice overview of our man Darcy Clay’s brief, short career with previously unavailable biographical detail, plus some sad moments with Clay’s Pa. Like everything re: Clay, the article focuses on “Jesus I Was Evil,” the freak single, but I, for one, am a firm adherent of the other five tracks on Clay’s only studio release. (I write studio, but this is a misnomer– in this case, the studio was dude’s bedroom.)
Like countless other musical discoveries, I heard about Clay from the mouth of my old pal Andrew Harrison. This is dude’s radio show. This is the blog of dude’s show, which he never ever updates.
