AS VOCAL duos go, Daryl Hall and John Oates were one of the biggest only the Everly Brothers had more hits and they were more successful than Simon & Garfunkel, or for that matter, Wham!. Hell, at one point in their career they were even bigger than The Carter Twins, if you can possibly imagine such a scenario! But then the hits dried up and they parted ways, with Hall opting for a moderately successful solo career, and Oates retiring to Aspen, Colorado, to bring up a family.
Now they re back again, performing live and releasing their first new album since the big split seven years ago. But for Daryl Hall, it s not so much a reunion with John Oates as a reacquaintance with the wider listening public.
The truth is, we never really stopped working together, he explains, on the line from the Bahamas (it s a tough job, etc, etc). At least once a year we d get together and do a mini-tour of small venues in the States. In the past year or so, we found that we were doing more and more touring, so the logical thing was to make a record.
That record, Marigold Sky, has already yielded a US top five single, Promises Ain t Enough , and has been hailed as a return to their distinctive 70s rock n soul sound. And indeed, Hall confirms that there was a conscious effort to recapture that early feel. We tried to get to the essence of what we created in the early days, so yeah, I d say the heart of the album is the Hall & Oates sound of the 1970 s into the 90s. Apart from one person, the band is virtually the same, most of them have been with us for ten years some for 20 years. Even on my solo tours I used members of the Hall & Oates band. It s a real organisation as well as a band and we come together really well under it.
Their string of classy white soul hits include She s Gone , Sarah Smile , Rich Girl , I Can t Go For That , Maneater , One On One and Private Eyes all of which dominated radio and later MTV in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their last real success came in 1985 with Live At The Apollo, a tribute album of soul covers featuring The Temptations Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin. Ironically, around the same time, Brit soulster Paul Young scored a hit with Every Time You Go Away , an obscure Hall & Oates album track that they d somehow managed to overlook themselves.
Given the heights they ve achieved in the past, surely it must be difficult, if not impossible, to return and try to emulate their past success after all these years?
We re not really trying to do it that way, Hall offers. We ve had to re-establish ourselves in a completely different manner this time around. We didn t want to be pop stars again that s for sure. But I think people are perceiving us in a different light, more in the role of the classic artists that we d like to think we are. We ve gone for the AC (Adult Contemporary) charts rather than CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) charts. Once we ve become established there, we ll branch out to other formats.
He also feels that the time was right to reclaim some of the territory that Hall & Oates had mapped out in the early days and which others had laid claim to in more recent years.
The thing was, we d had all these years of playing and making music together that we were proud of and I never wanted to see it slip away, he says. I think that there s a kind of essence in American music that makes it uniquely American whether it s chords, melodies, or grooves. We invented another element of that with our own music, which has in turn influenced another generation of artists people like Tony Rich and Babyface.
I think America has caught up with itself when it comes to the mixture of white/black music that you can hear today. Blackness isn t as black as it used to be and rap is declining in influence. There s a renewed acceptance of the kind of stuff we ve always done. On the current tour we re doing everything from House Of Blues clubs to 15,000-seater arenas and we re getting a wide spread of audiences which is what we ve always had anyway.
Even though the new album is a fully collaborative effort, with both Hall & Oates contributing songs and vocals, the blond singer is clearly in the driving seat for this reunion.
In the past we had a very even, balanced approach in terms of our input but I took more control of things than I normally do this time around, he confirms. We were out of the studio for so long as a duo but I was a little more in touch with the whole recording world than John. He s not the obsessed musician that I am. He combines music with his family life.
But I live for it, he concludes. I express my whole life through it. I started singing when I was two so I ve been doing it for almost 50 years! n