The hidden, avant-garde side of Eighties hit machine Daryl Hall

There was a point in the early 1980s when Daryl Hall felt he had a target on his back. “As a journalist, you probably understand this. I was the victim of a journalistic pile-up,” says the blond half of 1980s hit machine Hall and Oates, as he prepares to release a new retrospective of his solo career, Before After.

“Sometimes people pile on people. It all started with [Rolling Stone editor] Jann Wenner and those jerks. And everybody joined the bandwagon of ‘let’s diss Daryl Hall’. It was outrageously unfair, totally stupid. And it showed those people for what they were and are.”

As pile-ons go, the one Hall and Oates suffered through was often vicious. “The Self-Righteous Brothers” leered a 1985 Rolling Stone piece. “What makes these guys so depressing is their definitive proof that instinctive musicality insures no other human virtue,” said critic Robert Christgau of their 1984 chart-topper Big Bam Boom. The NME labelled Hall and Oates a ‘cheesemeister duo”.

Forty years later, it’s clear who has had the final chuckle. Hall and partner John Oates are inducted in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. They’ve been embraced by hip hop, their music sampled by Wu Tang Clan, De La Soul and Kanye West. And hipster Millennials fell for them when You Make My Dreams featured in indie rom-com 500 Days Of Summer. With the possible exceptions of Fleetwood Mac and Abba, it’s hard to think of a more emphatic rehabilitation.

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'People [started] to relate to me as a pop artist. That is certainly not what I really am. I had pop hits, yes. That's not my motivation'

“I was frustrated and angry at the time,” says Hall. “But I won in the end.”

Hall and Oates always insisted on being called Daryl Hall and John Oates because they did not wish be perceived as joined at the hip. Before the pandemic they were at the height of their powers. A summer 2019 tour of Ireland was a triumph. Under blue skies, nuggets such as I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) and Maneater swept audiences back to the pair’s finger-clicking, jacket sleeves-rolled-to-the-elbows prime. Hall’s hair was luxuriant, as was Oates’ moustache. There were plans to record their first proper album since’s 2004’s Our Kind Of Soul.

But then the world shut down and Hall’s priorities changed. And so Hall and Oates were put on hiatus and he turned instead to his parallel, comparatively unheralded solo career. From all that soul-searching and spare time has come Before After, a 30-track celebration of his life outside Hall and Oates, released on Friday, April 1st.

Opening with the bubblegum punk of 1986 hit Dreamtime – think Huey Lewis fronting Sonic Youth –  the compilation hop-scotches across the decades. One moment it’s 1977, and Hall and King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp are collaborating on the Bowie-esque Sacred Songs LP. The next it’s 2011, when Hall was forced to complete his melancholic Laughing Down Crying LP in the aftermath of the sudden death of producer and friend T-Bone Wolk.

“I wanted to choose the songs according to mood and flow,” he explains. “To treat it like a double album.”

Hall and Oates opened for David Bowie when he brought Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars to America in 1972. Perhaps some of that stardust rubbed off. With Sacred Songs, in particular, Hall feels he was on a Bowie-style trajectory.

Recorded shortly before Fripp went to Berlin and laid down his famous guitar solo on Bowie’s Heroes, the project represents for Hall the road not taken. Had things gone to plan and Sacred Songs come out, as was intended, in 1977, his life in pop might have been similar to that of the Thin White Duke: one spent largely in the avant-garde margins rather than bang in the middle of the mainstream.

That didn’t happen. Hall and Oates were not yet pop royalty. They were, however, already knocking out hits such as Sara Smile and Rich Girl. Hall’s management – and especially his label – were reluctant to derail the gravy train. And so they vetoed Sacred Songs for three years and interfered with Hall singing on a Fripp solo LP.

“Robert and I were extremely frustrated. We were so proud of our work. We were ready to go with it. We were sort of unpleasantly surprised at the reaction of, especially the record company, and to some degree my management at the time,” says Hall. “It wasn’t that they didn’t like the record. They just thought it was interfering with their agenda, with their cash cow, Hall and Oates. It was angering and frustrating.”

They may have been angry and frustrated. Hall and Fripp refused to give up, though. And so, they distributed Sacred Songs, by hand, to music contacts in New York. DJs, promoters, journalists – whoever could help get out the message. Three years later, the label finally relented. Alas, the moment had passed: Hall was back in the Hall and Oates machine, cranking out twinkle-toed, 24-carat smashes. And so the career he might have had as a more avant-garde artist was taken from him.

“I would have been perceived differently than the way I was perceived in the 1980s with Hall and Oates. What I wound up with was a string of pop hits. So people starting to relate to me as a pop artist. That is certainly not what I really am. I had pop hits, yes. That’s not my motivation. That [Sacred Songs] would have come out before a lot of the things Bowie was doing. It preceded all that. It would have had an even larger impact than it did when it came out in 1980.”

Hall was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1946. While at college in Philadelphia, he formed vocal group The Temptones and was soon a fixture on the local soul scene. He met Oates in 1967, reportedly during a street fight involving their respective bands. They began writing and recording together and in 1970 were signed by legendary Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun (around the same time he mentored Led Zeppelin and persuaded Neil Young to join Crosby, Stills and Nash).

A soul duo with pop chops and choruses as big as the Philly skyline, Hall and Oates were a unique proposition. And yet from the outset Hall was never happy with the pigeonholes into which they were stuffed. He particularly objected to the “blue-eyed soul” label.

“Soul music shouldn’t be categorised. It certainly shouldn’t be racial,” he says. “The whole blue-eyed thing implies somebody doing somebody else’s music or something like that. There are negative connotations. I’m a soul singer. That’s that’s just what I am. Whether I have blue eyes or not is irrelevant.”

'I knew history was being made in some way. And I was part of it and it was happening right in front of me'

Hall and Oates were never reluctant pop stars. In the 1980s, as chart-topper followed chart-topper, they embraced the lifestyle and its perks. They once raced each other across America in Learjets; they had an entourage; there was, Oates told the Guardian, “sex on tables or in lifts and stuff”. Yet as the blizzard raged, they grew ambivalent towards fame – as was apparent in that aforementioned 1985 Rolling Stone feature, which caught them squirming in the spotlight.

“Hall is clearly miserable. Oates is clearly miserable,” goes the piece, which starts with the duo enduring the purgatory of a guest appearance on a phone-in radio show.

“We were so popular in the 1980s, when we had all these hits, that we couldn’t go out in public. The demands on our time were ridiculous. I never had any personal life because it was so crazy,” Oates told me in 2019 as they were preparing to tour Ireland. “The 1970s were different. Everything was new. Every city was a new experience. We weren’t commercially popular and we could do whatever we wanted – playing all these obscure little towns, I loved it. When we started to get into the charts, very few people understood what it had taken to get there. They didn’t understand all the work – 10 years of it – that we had put in.”

“For a while there, I went with it,” says Hall. “I wasn’t trying to buck the trend, buck the tide. I went out in the Eighties full pop star mode.”

He moved around a lot, living for a time in New York and for a spell in London. In the UK he forged a friendship with peers such as Bowie.

“We were never in the studio together. We knew each other. We hung out together over the years, both in New York and London. We did have things in common. I’m not going to say this about myself but he was a very, very intelligent man. I respected his mind. He had a good sense of humour.”

Oates’ years in London also saw him strike up a friendship with Bob Geldof, briefly his neighbour. And so when Geldof was organising Live Aid in 1985, one of the first names on his list was Hall and Oates. Their performance in Philadelphia has gone down as a highpoint of the American leg of the event, for which they persuaded their childhood icons the Temptations to re-form.

“It was an out-of-body feeling,” says Hall. “It was one of those significant moments. A lot of the time you don’t realise what is happening until after the fact. In this case, I knew something was happening in the moment. I knew history was being made in some way. And I was part of it and it was happening right in front of me.”

Hall might be frustrated that his solo work remains comparatively obscure. Still, he doesn’t resent the shadow cast by Hall and Oates. How could he when he was the author of most of their hits?

“I’m proud of the songs I wrote for Hall and Oates. When you think of the Hall and Oates sound…it’s my sound. They’re my songs. So I feel like it’s all part of it. What I do in a Hall and Oates circumstance is just another way of doing things. I relate to them all equally.”

He and Oates were never best friends. They have, however, made the partnership work through many ups and downs. But when Hall decided to return to his solo career, did he call up Oates to run it by him?

“No, No. I don’t need John Oates’ permission to do anything,” he says. “We have a very loose relationship. He does his thing. I do my thing.”

Before After is released on Friday, April 1st