The Darkness - London, UK, Autumn 2003
By: Toby L
Justin Hawkins, hero of 2003, reclines in a swish, leather office-chair amongst the grounds of his major record-label, peering out the window on to the street below. He's ordering a drink.
'... Not just a crappy smoothie with a bit of orange and apricot badly crushed together... A real smoothie,' he demands.
Seemingly, after all the years of pacing up and down the morbid dinginess of the British toilet-circuit, The Darkness have made it. Now, though, the question is just for how long?
Arguably, we don't really care too much at present - we're all having such a great time, the band included. A sensation in every possible convention, '03 is the year when a million record-sales was a plausible target for the Lowestoft, Suffolk quartet. Just twelve months before, 100 copies of a single and packets of pork-scratchings all round would have sufficed.
And the only thing that hasn't changed, seemingly, following the release of the band's iconic, heavy-metal boasting 'Permission To Land' LP, is the stage-craft with which they exert their endeavours. Utter showmanship. During thirty minutes, we reflect and pay homage to the band of the year's implausible, victorious ascent to the rock super-league - in their own summaries.
'A lot of people are moved by that gesture,' Hawkins grins wildly, commenting upon his 'piggy-back-'round-the-audience-whilst-playing-a-guitar-solo' trick. 'And it hurts. I weep.
'I used to hand-pick a different member from the audience,' he continues romantically. 'I'd choose them beforehand to the show, and say, 'You are the chosen one... for the walk-about.' It was like a knighthood. Only instead of a sword, I'd have my... Erm, you know. But most of the time now, it's our sound-bloke (Pedro), who produced our album, that carries me, because he's got broad shoulders. He's not averse to having a sweaty old scrotum against his neck.'
Erm, and looking back at that first record of yours...?
'We had a lot of ground to cover, and two weeks to do it in, basically,' sighs guitarist Dan, swinging his hair backwards. 'We just rehearsed the songs as much as we could, and went in and nailed it. I don't think we got a lot of sleep in that fortnight.'
'We were under pressure,' quivers bassist Frankie Poullain, 'and we had to finance it ourselves. It was tough.'
Especially with some of the, at first, reticent press-attention yourselves garnered across specific publications...
Hawkins performs another of his ghastly, cocksure smiles. 'There is a weekly magazine that we've quite happily boycotted,' he boasts, not for the first time in an interview. 'We've made a lot of friends by doing that. We don't dance with people that stand on our toes, because otherwise you end up with clown-feet. And then people call you, 'Penguin-boy'. Stuff that.'
'In the early days, when we were just releasing independent singles, there wasn't that much to write about,' concedes Dan. 'But we'd get a good single-review, and that'd lead to a great live-review. We got a lot of interest early on.'
'But I liked 'The Guardian,' specifies Justin smugly. 'Because when we did 'Get Your Hands Off...' as a single, and it went number 43, which was above all our expectations - with no poster-campaign or anything, and bear in mind it features the word 'motherf**ker' eight times and the word 'c**t' twice - but this guy said (adopts gravely voice), 'They almost infringed on the top-40, and based on this performance, I can't see them going much better than that...'
'Yeah,' deadpans Frankie, who today isn't donning a headband, 'they misconstrued us as being a non-hit wonder. In terms of being misunderstood, you have some people that interpret it as being glam-rock and then people seeing it as a horrible, Andrew WK-type thing.'
'I think we like proving people wrong,' affirms Dan. 'It doesn't really matter how people perceive the music or the show.'
'When it comes to reviews, we can take a bad review - fine,' shrugs Justin. 'The idea is you get built up and then knocked down; as long as it doesn't go the other way, we're happy for people to write what they want about us, really.
'But by the time we start getting bad press, we'll already be the biggest band in the whole world, and it'll be like water off a duck's back, you know? It'll get to a point where you can't knock us down. We won't be the most exciting thing since sliced-bread forever - we will be sliced bread, but that's not exciting. At the time of its invention, it was, it was all the rage, the kids loved it - it was a buzz-bread. Beyond that, it's had the staying-power. It's still selling, and it's got a lot of fans.'
But what about that fateful first meeting of minds between the foursome; was The Darkness a project set for world-domination, or merely an outlet for personal, internalised enjoyment?
Justin looks at rockfeedback as if we're insane. 'We were always after the big bucks.'
Dan is with his brother on the issue. 'It was our mission to sell out as soon as humanly possible.'
'Yup,' the singer returns. 'To sell out, as soon as we had a buyer.'
Have you sold out enough yet?
'Oh no - this is just the start of the journey,' winces Frankie. 'There's a long way to go yet. We haven't really explored other countries enough yet.'
'It's always been important to us to get into big venues and play to a lot of people,' Dan enthuses. 'That's what we've always been about.'
Yet again, it's Justin that delivers the inimitable punch-line. 'Since day-one, we've always considered ourselves a stadium-band. That played in pubs. Or clubs. But, now, it's turned around - we're a pub-band playing stadiums.'
For the first time today, 'elusive', 'mysterious' (but actually just knackered) drummer Ed speaks up, specifically regarding a notable, recent overseas encounter. 'We got in a dodgy situation with a troop of girl-guides going on a ferry to Holland the other day. On the way back, because of the intensity of that experience, we had to upgrade to club-class on the ferry, absolutely pissed out of our heads, and being a total disgrace. Throwing peanuts at the waiters.'
'It's responsibility that you have to keep your eye out for,' adds Justin, sobering (sarcastically, no less) the conversation. 'There are people that come up and ask for us to sign things, or who have a tattoo of our logo on their arm, which demonstrates the fact we have people whose lives we have changed. To that extent, that's quite a head-spinning thing to fathom. But once you realise you owe these people something, you can't f**k it up. The fans are like our kids in that sense, and we can't let them down. Because otherwise they've got the logo of a shit band on their arm. It would also be wrong for us to change our logo now, as well.'
Frankie keeps it cheap. 'The only thing we'll be letting down is our hair. We're just waiting for the right moment.'
Returning to the topic of performance, Justin is analytical. 'Just from gigging a lot, we've adapted to larger stages. In the olden days, we'd play in clubs where we had no option but to stand reasonably still because there was so little room; Frankie and Dan would just try and keep out of my way when I was running around. But, now, we've all got a greater understanding of what the other one is up to and command our space with a bit more...'
'We're more good-erer than we were before basically,' notes the drummer.
And songwriting for The Darkness - does it follow a specific pattern, a strict regime?
'Lyrics come last, if they come at all,' outlines chief-songsmith Justin.
'A lot of times,' explains Dan, 'I come in with some music and we go from there; but, sometimes, the lyrics don't happen - if Justin's not inspired to sing on it, it gets dumped and we work on something new. We've got a lot to choose from. It comes from different guises. We can write on acoustic's around the table. It doesn't always start with a riff, or us just kicking arse right away - the songs go through a lot of stages in their development.'
'We've done a couple of acoustic-gigs, actually - three, in total. They were quite good,' unveils Frankie, perhaps totally unbelievably.
'We decided against doing it anymore,' addresses Ed, 'because our gigs were a big monthly thing to come and see, but then playing an acoustic in a little bar, it's not really a big event, is it? It didn't suit us very well.'
'One thing that was nice about performing that way, is that the songs came across even more, and people remarked about them,' Dan continues. 'They could be sung by anyone, and they'd sound great. But the thing is... we're a rock band - that's what we do. I wouldn't mind experimenting with some more medieval, ominous folk-rock, though.'
'It's been said elsewhere,' details the handle-bar-moustached bassist, 'but we've got this whole thing going on during the record - like 'Black Shuck' - where there's these lyrics venturing into folk-myth, and folk-lore, a very English strain of the medieval.'
'The Tolland Man... Beware of the curse of The Tolland Man...' starts up Justin, seemingly at random. 'If you research into 'Black Shuck', you'll see it's accurate right down to the last detail. Apart from the number of eyes, and that what he'd done wasn't quite how I wrote it...'
'Well, yeah. Poetic license,' justifies Poullain.
Speaking of which - Frankie, on an obscure, British Airways in-flight interview you conducted for aircraft-fliers on transatlantic journeys this year, you remarked on your fondness for Justin's wordplay.
On cue, the moment is of course dampened - by a loud, if abrupt, fart from Justin himself. The room erupts with guffaws.
Frankie, regaining train-of-thought, manages to persist. 'I was talking about the whole Dad-rock thing; it's incredibly cliché the way that Noel Gallagher or Ian McCulloch write their lyrics - apart from maybe their first records - yet, they're given that kind of credibility, an indie-credibility. It is farcical really. They're not taking any risks. Oasis are a decent rock-band, but I was making the point that Justin's lyrics in relation to such a style are very underrated.'
'People that say we're a shit band haven't listened to our music,' protests Justin. 'They don't like the image, and may find something unpalatable about a man wearing the sort of stuff that I wear. 'I don't really know where to look,' they may say to themselves. 'I feel a bit inadequate.' And they let that get in the way of the fact that we are a brilliant band. They are wrong, and we all know it.'
'When I see things that are totally inaccurate or people don't get it, I do feel sorry for them in a way,' grimaces Dan. 'I think to myself, 'You're one of those people that should be working in the dole-office.'
'But, occasionally,' balances Frankie, 'you get an inspired piece of journalism. Like, on Teletext - which described us as 'delusional twerps'.'
'And I can live with that,' states Justin. 'It's genius writing. I'm just pleased it wasn't published on Ceefax.
'Essentially,' he goes on, 'we don't want to become a coffee-table band, like The Lighthouse Family, where you go, 'Oh, I like that new album. I don't love it. But I'll bloody well buy it anyway.'
'We haven't got fragile egos,' Frankie informs. 'We've got earthy egos.'
'Terracotta egos,' backs up Justin, who soon descends upon an admirable display of double entendres. 'We've always had our knockers, and our ups and downs in this industry. You know, but we've got to know the ins and outs, and it's very easy to get screwed in this game. We've learnt the hard way.'
'But, luckily,' rounds off Dan, 'things haven't gone tits-up for us yet.'
'Really, the point is... when you have detractors, especially in the band's infancy, it must have been tempting for others at a similar stage to do some Turin Brakes-y type stuff, because it's popular,' dictates Justin. 'But we've never been like that - we just do what we do, and if you don't like it, you are wrong, and you'll find out eventually that you are wrong. And you can only apologise to yourself so much, having forfeited the time to really enjoy music.'
'The people that don't like our music are people I wouldn't want to know or be friends with anyway,' spits Dan. 'You just can tell the people who are cynically unable to get into it, and people that are just basically tired of life.'
'Perverts,' accuses Justin of the disaffected few that aren't buying the band's music. 'Sex-offenders.'
Frankie: 'It's a lifestyle choice.'
Justin's getting agitated. 'People think we appeal to the lowest common denominator and the high-brow. But I think we have an appeal to everyone in between, too. Everyone across the board.'
The crux occurs. He bangs his hands on the desk in unison to the syllables of his following sentence.
'I DO THINK THAT WE ARE THE BEST BAND IN THE WORLD.'
We all bellow our laughter once more.
'Well,' the frontman relaxes, 'We've done all our modesty now; it's time for us to crack on. The truth is, we are as good, if not better, than many of today's top acts. Crisp and true, the sound of champions running through.'
What's most important to yourselves about your work?
'None of your business,' Frankie retorts. 'People need to know that we're very private individuals.'
Justin: 'And we won't, repeat, won't, accept leeches.'
But, then, after an entire stand-up routine's worth of one-liners, truth is spoken. Albeit for just thirty seconds.
'Nah, the point is we strive to make our performances all-encompassing, fun events, that work on different sensory levels,' remarks the leader of the clan. 'It's bombastic, it's showy, but beyond that, there's class songs - well-written songs. That was always our plan: to have a product, a catalogue, a repertoire that we're very proud of, that's gig-fit.'
Frankie is more music-journo at the comparison. 'It's the missing-link between Queen at Wembley and The Stone Roses at Spike Island.'
'We've all known each other for a long time,' begins Ed, 'and I think if you get four people in a room, it creates a certain ambience... But that shapes a lot of things; if one of those people were different, the whole atmosphere would be different.'
'You're talking about chemistry, aren't you, Ed?' enquires Justin, prior to the definitive closing-statement. 'Like that secret ingredient that keeps the Frosties crunchy at the end of the f**king bowl. No-one knows what it is. But, to a certain extent, there's no point finding out, because Frosties do what Frosties do. If you want to craft your own breakfast-cereal, then (begins to bang desk once more) find your own magic-ingredient. That's what I'm saying. You can't buy what we've got.'
Seemingly not. The Darkness, it can be concluded, are quite, thankfully, unique.
Artists in this article: The Darkness