Boyish Charm From Savage Garden

There’s nothing savage about Savage Garden. Like its most obvious forebears, Wham! and the Spice Girls, the Australian duo dishes out danceable pop dressed up in gleaming electronic frippery, and projects a kind of airbrushed, nonthreatening sexuality that even William Bennett would approve of. Which is why the Greek Theatre was populated on Friday by hundreds of breathless young girls who squealed on cue to Savage Garden’s every audience-milking gesture.

And who could blame them? With their boyish good looks and relentlessly cheery dispositions, singer Darren Hayes and guitarist Daniel Jones could have emerged straight from the teen-idol gene pool. Because Hayes sings every song while Jones strums a guitar and stands around looking cute, Savage Garden is decidedly Wham!-like. At the Greek, the duo supplied updated variations on Wham!’s early ‘80s saccharine pop heartbreak, lacing forlorn love songs with quasi-disco rhythms and verses that crescendoed into big, sing-along choruses.

To the band’s credit, however, more than a few of its songs boast memorable melodies, and Jones and Hayes showed good taste in cover songs by performing tunes that were hits for Joan Osborne (“One of Us”) and Bonnie Raitt (“I Can’t Make You Love Me”).

Chances are the kids in the audience weren’t familiar with those songs, but they nonetheless sat rapt though them, eating up Hayes’ brooding man-child shtick like so much cotton candy.