From singing Idol to author

Tim Elliott
October 13, 2007


AUTHORS WILL DO almost anything for publicity. Damien Leith might even do a little song and dance, which, fortunately for him, shouldn't be much of a problem. Leith, whose first novel, One More Time, has just been published by HarperCollins, is better known as the 2006 winner of Australian Idol, an achievement that shot him to stardom, here and in his native Ireland.

The then 30-year-old topped the charts with his debut single Night of My Life, selling 350,000 copies of his album, The Winner's Journey, and secured a worldwide publishing deal with Universal Music for his follow-up, Where We Land, which made its debut at No. 1 in August.

The Idol judges made much of his song-writing ability, notable in a field usually dominated by covers, and his "angelic voice" but also of his "Irish charm", of which I can vouch he has plenty. With his stubble and Celtic pallor, Leith is a scruffy and buoyant presence with that peculiarly Irish knack of appearing inwardly amused, as if he's just thought of a joke he's not sure he should tell you.

"Sometimes I can't believe all this has happened," he says, shaking his head. "But I'm damn glad it has."

Part psychological thriller and part boy's own adventure, Leith's book tells the story of Sean, a young man on a trek through Nepal, where his journey takes him through the spectacular Annapurna Mountains, deep into territory held by Maoist guerillas challenging the government of Nepal. As Sean's journey progresses, he finds himself thinking more about his home and family in Dublin and it soon becomes clear that the obstacles he faces are greater than gun-toting rebels and reckless tourists.

At HarperCollins, fiction publisher Linda Funnell says she saw the manuscript in late 2005, months before Leith appeared on Idol. "The Idol element certainly helps us. Normally you are dealing with a first-time author who nobody has ever heard of, so this is a pretty good platform to go on."

Leith agrees that Idol "definitely helped push it over the line".

And yet the writing stands up on its own, Funnell says. "I was instantly impressed by the freshness of it, and the fact that it's an unusual story. Sean is coming to terms with his own demons as well as the dangers he faces while trekking."

One such demon is Sean's obsessive compulsive disorder, which manifests itself in an irresistible urge to recite the same prayer while simultaneously pointing his thumbs and toes skyward. Any variation in proceedings - a slip in the wording, an inappropriate toe position - renders the ritual useless.

"It sounds ridiculous," says Leith, who suffered from the disorder as a boy. "But that's how it feels. It's like life is unbearable until you get this one thing done but then you have to do it again and again to make sure."

Leith was diagnosed with the condition as a 12-year-old, after his mother spotted him compulsively hand-washing. "There was no cure; they simply told me that I would get over it, which you never really do."

He still succumbs occasionally, mainly when he's rundown. "That's when I get caught up in strange finger-rubbing rituals, say, or I'll wash my hands or repeatedly check that I've locked the front door. The difference is that now I know what's going on and how to get on top of it; back then, as a child, I didn't know how to cope. I was always a hyper kid, too, a bit of a headache for my parents."

Leith was born in Ireland, the second of four children, but his earliest memories are of Africa, where his father, an engineer, moved for work. "The first place we got to was Libya, where we all lived in these camps with demountable houses in the middle of the desert. We had no TV or anything, which drew the family very close, because we had to entertain ourselves. Mainly I remember these terrible sand storms that were both terrifying and amazing at the same time. All the kids would run about outside, just to see how thick the sand was blowing in."

The family left Libya in 1986, about the time the Americans bombed Tripoli, moving to Botswana and South Africa, where Leith snr designed electrical systems in diamond mines. "We were there when the apartheid riots were in full swing and also when Mandela got released."

All in all, Leith attended some 14 schools in 12 years, returning to Ireland in 1992 to settle in Newbridge, County Kildare, about an hour south of Dublin. "That's when I started to really get into music."

He sang in a heavy metal band called Paradax ("sounds like a laxative, doesn't it?"), doing Pantera and Megadeath covers. "I had long hair, screaming my head off, the full bit. It wasn't me at all but I was just trying to find my star."

He then started Leaf, a family band "just like the Corrs" playing melodic pop, for which he did all the writing.

"Leaf was a bad name," he admits. "But it certainly beats the name we had at first, which was P45 [a reference to the unemployment benefits form used in Ireland at the time]. But P45 pretty much summed it up! We were all looking for jobs and struggling and doing gigs for nothing in the hope that we'd get more gigs that would pay."

At one stage Leith was sending off demo tapes every week. "I got a list of every major and independent record company and every radio station in the country, local and national, and sent a demo to every single one. In the end, we were getting gigs but we were always on the edge financially."

At the same time, he was experimenting with his writing, reeling off countless plays in almost every genre. "I found that it was really good for my [disorder] and my sleeplessness. I would get totally engrossed in situations and it would take me away."

He wrote comedies and one-acts, "Arthur Miller-type stuff" and period pieces, including a play called Count and Carvel, about a luckless 16th-century noble who suffers banishment, the loss of his sons and extended bouts of family intrigue. "Guess I was reading a lot of Shakespeare at the time."

Most of it was "atrocious" but some was picked up and produced by amateur theatres, with good reviews in local newspapers. "Whether they were doing that to be nice, I'll never know."

But making a living from municipal theatre was always going to be tricky and so in 1995, at the end of high school, Leith enrolled in, of all things, industrial chemistry at University College Dublin. He hated it at first: "It wasn't until the third or fourth year that I started to enjoy it."

Chemistry proved useful in at least one respect, helping him secure a job in a CD manufacturing company, where he met his future wife, the Australian-born Eileen. The couple married in 2003 (his sister, Aine, sang at their wedding) and moved to Sydney, honeymooning en route in Nepal, where Leith got the idea for his novel. "I actually handwrote it when I was there, in rice paper notebooks," he says, "but it took me the next two years to get it sorted out and submit it to a publisher."

Leith does a good impression of having stumbled across success, with a diffidence that camouflages his work ethic. "He really paid attention on the show," says Australian Idol judge Mark Holden. "A couple of times I really slammed him: like when he sang the song Celebrate and he started to pogo dance. I told him it was embarrassing, that he looked like Val Doonican on E." (Holden also called Leith "an ugly bastard".) "But he took it all really well. We had meaningful discussions and he improved."

Holden steered him away from pop and rock covers - or "U2 lite" - and more toward Jeff Buckley-type arrangements that suited his falsetto. "He started playing acoustic piano and doing stuff that was more authentically him, instead of going for the 16-year-old audience. Then I gave him Nessun Dorma as my judge's choice, which is a serious piece of opera, and he totally embraced it.

"If managed correctly," Holden says, "Damien has the ability to be the next Josh Grogan or Michael Buble. He's that good."

Leith starts a national tour for Where We Land next month. "In a perfect world, though, I would drop the performing altogether and just write books and songs."

He has already started his second novel, a father-son story. "I gave it to my wife, and she started crying," he says. "I'll take that as a good sign."

One More Time is published by HarperCollins, $27.99.


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