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Don't miss Darius guest starring as Gennaro Fazio in Hotel Babylon.
Babylon secures an exclusive magazine deal to host a Royal wedding with Italian glossy magazine Certo! When the wedding is called off Juliet is astonished that Sam plans to forge ahead regardless, but in spite of their fantastic efforts, the magazine editor, Gennaro Fazio, exposes their game.

Hotel Babylon Ep 6/8
Friday 31 July
9.00-10.00pm BBC ONE

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Sending you all a big Christmas hug and much love this festive season to you and yours...

I'm writing this from a snow covered log cabin in Canada, and I know you haven't heard from me much in 2008, but promise I'll be back in the New Year!

I'm returning to the UK to work with Pete Glenister soon (he co-wrote and produced Colourblind and my favourite songs on the first album) and you'll be able to catch me guest-starring on Hotel Babylon in February... Until then I hope you are all enjoying the Christmas holiday and wish you all health, wealth and happy times in 2009...

Thank you for your loyal and wonderful support, your incredibly generous support, birthday gift, cards and letters this year- and I hope that you and your families have a remarkable New Year...

God bless, Darius

Catch up with Darius over the next couple of weeks at The Big Sing, an event organised for the BBC's Songs of Praise which was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall last month.

Sunday 19th October on BBC1 Songs of Praise
backstage at The Big Sing chatting to Darius.

Sunday 26th October on BBC1 Songs of Praise
The Big Sing concert at The Royal Albert Hall where Darius sings.

Check out this video: Gone with the Wind - The Musical - Rhett Butler



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Find Darius on Facebook.

Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Darius-Danesh/6269374562 and add yourself as a fan.

Someone sent me something today that brought a smile to my face and a tear to my eye. I'd like to share it with you. It's for friends, family and fans who have all touched my life in some way, and if you like it, please copy it and send it to those who mean something to you...

"PEOPLE COME INTO YOUR LIFE FOR A REASON

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. When you know which one it is, you will know what to do for that person. When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually. They may seem like a godsend and they are. They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then, without any wrongdoing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away. Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled, their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Some people come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn has come to share, grow or learn. They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it, it is real. But only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons, things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

Thank you for being a part of my life, whether you were a reason, a season or a lifetime..."

Beautiful, and so true!

I'm very blessed to have been inspired and supported by special friends in my life. One of them in particular is someone well-known, and if you don't know her acting work already, then you still have the pleasure of discovering it! Can you guess who it is? She's a hugely talented, very beautiful British actress, who's appeared with Pierce Brosnan (After The Sunset), Colin Farrell (Miami Vice) and Johnny Depp (Pirates Of The Caribbean). It is, of course, Naomie Harris, and I am excited to say that she's been nominated for The Orange Rising Star Award for the BAFTAs 2007.

If you know me, then I'm sure you are all familiar with the concept of voting(!) and will all eagerly respond to my encouragement to vote for her! If everyone who reads this blog votes, it would make a huge difference in what is a very competitive and prestigious award, and I for one will be very grateful.

So what are you waiting for?! Log-on to

Orange Rising Star Award
(voting now closed - thanks for all your votes!!)

It's free and will only take 10 seconds of your day. If she wins, the drinks are on me...

Cheers!

Darius x

Why do we give up so easily?

That's what I've been wondering recently about the world on so many different levels- just switch on your television, open a newspaper or listen to a conversation someone's having the next time you're in Starbucks, and you'll find so many examples of people giving up. It's everywhere! In our politics, in our relationships, in our careers, in our faith of our own ability to succeed...

When we were children we lived in a very different world. We looked up, and believed in the innocence of our little hearts, that anything is possible! As we grow up our perspective changes, we all have bad experiences, some of us become more jaded than others- but life's lessons seem to teach even the optimists, that nothing is as possible as we once thought. That life is hard. It's a struggle. Achieving your dreams is difficult, if impossible.

We lose our ability to dream, to reach up to something greater than ourselves. It's easier to give up, to accept your lot.

So we give up on relationships and out of hurt we stop communicating or we lash out and cause more pain; we give up on our politicians because nothing seems to change when we do vote and we feel unable to change the system; we give up on our dreams because striving for something is difficult and we fear the idea of failure and wasted effort... In so many walks of life we just... give up.

It's not that we've lost faith. We've just lost our true perspective.

Look back, and remember that feeling when we were children- that feeling of it all being possible. Of course the world wasn't really any different then- it was just a matter of our perspective. There were still bad things happening in the world: war, famine, pollution, crime, natural disasters, terrorism, politicians that lie, divorce, relationships ending badly- it all existed- we just looked at it differently. We didn't know as much then, but in a way we knew more. We looked ahead and thought "When I grow up I'm going to do good things with my life, and in my way I'm going to make the world a better place."

What happened to that thought?
Why don't we as adults, try to think more like children?

After all, without childish thoughts of anything being possible, we wouldn't have the wonderful Bob Geldof's and Bono's of the world, the Mohammed Ali's and Martin Luther King's would never have achieved their historic successes and Lance Armstrong wouldn't have recovered from cancer and go on to win the Tour De France seven times!

I hope the following inspires you as much as it inspired me, and that in reading it, we grow closer to understanding why Winston Churchill believed we should "Never, never, never give up"...

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centred
FORGIVE THEM ANYWAY

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives
BE KIND ANYWAY

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies
SUCCEED ANYWAY

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you
BE HONEST AND FRANK ANYWAY

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight
BUILD ANYWAY

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous
BE HAPPY ANYWAY

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow
DO GOOD ANYWAY

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough
GIVE THE WORLD THE BEST YOU'VE GOT ANYWAY

Wishing you and yours love and light in your life,

Darius

PS  If you haven't already, check out John Mayer's "Waiting for the World to Change" on the music side, a fantastic must-see movie called "Girl In The Cafe" (a very witty, heart-warming, thought-provoking love story from the makers of Love Actually which is set against the backdrop of the G8 summit) and James Lovelock's book "The Revenge of Gaia" for more info on global warming, why it's so dangerous, and what we can do to help stop it.

Hey, how are you all?

Thanks for all your messages and adds- it's been great to check out your pages and get lost in a sea of MySpace links!

I had a wonderful writing trip in Europe and spent time with my family in Scotland before returning to Los Angeles to set up a new home studio. I've had so many different song ideas recently, and didn't have my own studio in the States, so for the last three weeks I've been doing that while listening to John Mayer's new album Continuum on repeat ("Waiting for the World to Change" rocks!) and now it's complete... I can't believe the summer is over, and with the wonderful weather most of us enjoyed, we only have sunny memories to keep us warm as winter approaches.

The reason we had such hot weather was something I didn't really think about until I watched a film recently that changed the way I look at the world. It was pressing in my thoughts from the moment I left the movie theatre, and I felt compelled to find out more. Since reading 5 books on the subject by the world's leading scientific minds and searching the internet for more information, I now feel compelled to tell you about it. I'm sorry I haven't posted this blog sooner- I wanted to really do my research before posting this and getting on my soap box...

Bear with me though, it's a little long- so only read it when you have the time to absorb it..!

This summer I watched the most eagerly anticipated movie of the year. If you thought The Da Vinci Code was a must-see movie before watching it, and were in any way disappointed afterwards, believe me, the opposite will be true of this film.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is quite simply one of the most thought-provoking movies I have ever seen. Forget big budget movie-making and conspiracy theories. This is a humble film about simple truth. It's a passionate and inspirational documentary about global warming featuring environmentalist and previous Presidential candidate Al Gore, and has opened to rave reviews in New York and Los Angeles and standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival.

You might wonder, like I did, why you haven't heard more about it and why it's having such a limited release?

This is not a film Western government and big business wants us to see. It is a film the Bush administration tried to block, an administration who's last election campaigns were backed predominantly by the big oil companies. For years they have managed to cast doubt into the world's mind as to how important global warming is, or if it even exists. They weren't too keen on the truth about global warming coming out to the public in such a shocking and accessible way. And something tells us that Bush was none too happy to hear this truth coming from Al Gore's mouth, the man who he "lost" the 2000 Presidency Election to.***

As an artist, and as a compassionate human being, I believe that this is one of the most important films you will ever see. Not this year. Ever.

This isn't a film about the politics, or even the politics of global warming. It's about the morality of an issue so big, it will affect every human being on the planet. For years, the world's leading scientists have been screaming at our governments and big businesses that we are entering an era of potential disaster for mankind. Not until the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, record flooding in the east, and record melting of polar icecaps (and the irrefutable scientific conclusion that all of these were caused by higher than normal global temperatures), have our governments cared to listen.

We caused this.

The reckless burning of fossil fuels, without regard or care of consequences, has produced so much carbon dioxide that we have more than doubled normal global levels in the last 50 years. These levels were consistent and harmless since the last ice age- until man's industrial revolution. Think about it like this: it took from the first day man walked the earth to the early 1940s for the world population to reach 2 billion. Since then the total has risen to 6.5 billion. In thirty years it will have reached 9 billion. Today, nearly every one of these 6.5 billion people aspire to an increasingly greedy and westernised lifestyle which requires an increasing amount of energy to provide. As we continue to march to the beat of globalisation and pump unregulated levels of CO2 and pollution into the earth's fragile atmosphere, global temperatures are rising to unprecedented levels. The official line from a US-Government study was that this was a natural part of "global temperature cycles." They have been proved wrong by the scientific consensus: humans are the direct cause of global warming. If you look at the 10 hottest years globally in the last 10,000 years, I'm sure you'll be as shocked as I was to find out: they all happened in the last 14 years. We have reached a point in history where man's actions have had an undeniable and dangerous effect on the Earth.

"We are entering a time of consequences" tells Gore. Recently we have been given the warning signs. Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. Within the scientific community there is little debate: we have little time to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a downward-spiral of destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced- a catastrophe of our own making.  If we continue with "business as usual", temperatures will continue to rise, and the polar icecaps will continue to melt at an unprecedented rate. Within 40 years, every major coastal city from New York to London faces rising sea levels which will claim any land 20 feet above the current sea level. The area where the twin towers once stood will be totally submerged by water. Without prevention, in 80 years, sea levels will have risen 40 feet globally. Countries like England, the Netherlands, China (Shanghai), India (Calcutta), and the US (Florida) would be hit hard. Without gigantic levees, 100 million people living in these areas would lose their homes, and perhaps their lives. This is no longer speculation. This is scientific fact.

So... what can we do about it?

Start by logging on to www.climatecrisis.net to watch the film trailer and read up on the science behind it. We can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue, but rather as one of the biggest moral challenges facing our global civilization. It is our moral responsibility to take action. We can avert a global warming catastrophe with solutions that exist today, but we must open our ears to the scientists who have for so long been ignored, because it wasn't "convenient" for us.

Most importantly, there's a step-by-step guide to what we can do to help prevent global warming on www.climatecrisis.net

I know this sounds clichéd, but please forward this blog to as many people as you can. "An Inconvenient Truth" comes out on 15th September 2006 in the UK- go and see it with your family and friends, and spread the word to others.

And if you still think the Da Vinci Code was a must-see movie, think again. Watch both and see for yourself. Just be prepared to find that the truth is by no means convenient...

Love and Peace,

Darius

*** (In 2000, democrat Al Gore was announced on US network television as the new President, winning by one state, Florida. That is, until the republican Governor of Florida precipitated a recount, along with the disqualification of 1.9 million previously eligible votes. The convenient thing was this: the majority of those votes were black non-republican votes. Oh, and the Governor of Florida happens to be George Bush's brother... So no surprise when Bush was subsequently announced the "winner" by 25 votes in what was the closest US election in history. It has also been widely acknowledged as the most questionable election in history. Since then, the Bush family's firm ties with oil, and Bush's environmental policies, or lack of them, have led the USA to be one of only two countries in the world to ignore the Kyoto emissions reduction agreement. This is a big part of the problem: the US is by far the biggest contributor to CO2 production and global pollution, producing more than double the CO2 and pollution per capita, compared with the second worse offender, and five times as much as some of its eastern counterparts.)