Darren Burn was born at the Victoria Maternity Hospital in Wood Street, Barnet, Hertfordshire, England, on Monday, August 28th, 1961, the son of Colin and Johanna Burn. A child prodigy, he showed great promise from an early age and was a child model by the age of two years. By the time he was nine years old in 1970, he had already appeared in a large number of television commercials (most famously as the Heinz Baked Beans boy) and even a film, The Insomniac. By early 1973, at the age of eleven, Darren, by then a pupil at the City of London School, was living with his parents and younger sister Deborah at 17, Queen Elizabeth’s Drive, in the leafy suburbs of Southgate in north London, a house that backed onto the beautiful Grovelands Park. By this time also, he had been a choirboy at his local church, Christ Church, Southgate, for six years, where his unique singing talents had become wonderfully apparent. In fact, he had recently been promoted to Senior Chorister, a rare honour indeed for an eleven years old, but one which reflected the fact that he was their star turn. His father was by now a top executive at EMI records and, when the company was searching for a British weenybopper (or pre-teen) boy singer to rival such Americans as Jimmy and Donny Osmond, his mother suggested Darren and it was taken up from there.

And so, EMI plucked the talented ex-choirboy from obscurity and spent a fortune promoting him and launching him as a major record star. His first single, "Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart", released in a blaze of publicity on Friday, July 20th, 1973, was wonderfully produced by Eric Woolfson and beautifully sung by Darren and in November of that year, his follow up single, "Is it Love" was even better at showcasing Darren’s fabulous singing voice. For a few months, Darren was treated like royalty; attending record promotion receptions in chauffer driven limosines; having his picture in all the newspapers and music magazines; having his first single played every day on Radio One by Tony Blackburn as his Record of the Week and even starring in a BBC Television colour documentary in the "Man Alive" series entitled "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", a fascinating programme that covered the launch of Darren’s debut single. Darren, in turn, came across as the perfect little gentleman who would not have been out of place having tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle. His interview with John Pitman in the "Man Alive" programme showed Darren to be a wonderfully intelligent boy for his age; full of enthusiasm for the project and full of hope for the future. However, despite all the expensive hype, Darren’s first single reached no higher than 60 in the UK singles charts and within a year, with the release of another two singles in 1974 still making no impact on the charts, a rather insensitive EMI executive called the 13 year old into his office in August, 1974, and told him quite bluntly that his career was over and that he wasn’t wanted anymore. Reputedly, this lead to a row between Darren and the executive that in turn lead to Darren being thrown out of the office. Why his own father couldn’t have taken his son to one side and broke the news to him gently, instead of leaving it to someone else, remains a mystery, but Darren began to go off the rails from then on, even to the extent of coming home from school drunk.

In 1988, John Pitman, sent to interview Darren for the "Whatever Happened To…?" section of BBC Television’s "People" programme, tracked him down to a flat in Grosvenor Crescent, Southwark, south London, where, now living alone, he was a 26 years old unemployed computer programmer, suffering from depression and taking medication for it. He was also by this time a heroin addict, the drug altering his personality completely and causing chaos for his family. Pitman found Darren a pale shadow of the bright and bubbly little boy he had interviewed on the "Man Alive" programme fifteen years earlier.
"It didn’t work out particularly well. It didn’t make any money for EMI or for me. I mean I went through that experience and I had the power of a major record company behind me and it didn’t work out.", he told Pitman. "It left me with a feeling of failure. It was a very strange thing for a young child to go through." The whole 1973 venture had adversely affected him in the long run. When his records failed to sell, his fellow pupils at the City of London School started calling him "Top of the Flops", which had really hurt him and added to his humiliation. He was obviously unhappy and not very pleased with the way things had turned out for him. He blamed his parents, especially his mother, for the 1973 disaster at EMI and his last words on camera were: "I certainly wouldn’t allow one of my children to do that…should I ever have any." Three years after that interview, on Wednesday, October 30th, 1991, Darren was found dead on the bathroom floor of his flat. He had taken an overdose of his Dotheipin anti-depressant tablets, which had made him violently sick and he had choked to death on his own vomit. At the Inquest held at Southwark Coroner’s Court in January, 1992, the coroner recorded a verdict that Darren had killed himself and that a suicide note had been left by Darren. Darren’s funeral and cremation were held at the Enfield crematorium on Monday, November 18th, 1991, and his ashes later scattered at the base of a group of oak trees in Grovelands Park. This was done by his family because he had spent many happy hours in the park as a boy and because he had loved big trees. It was a terrible tragedy and a very sad loss of a wonderful, unique and talented person. It is a terrible shame that Darren died all alone and believing himself to be a failure, because he wasn’t in any way a failure. He and EMI had put everything they had into that 1973 venture, but no one knows why some excellent records become hits and others, just as excellent, don’t. No, it wasn’t through lack of talent that Darren’s records failed to take off as expected, it was just through plain bad luck. David Rayner.