Sounds From The Junkshop #100 - The Darkness

 

"I had seen, I had touched, I had tasted and I truly believed…" - The Darkness - Love Is Only A Feeling

Hands up, I could've put this article out a few weeks ago when we first stumbled into 2003 on the Sounds From The Junkshop retrospectives but I held it back, knowing that instalment number 100 was coming up here. Similar to what I did with number 50 when we looked at the Backyard Babies and Buckcherry, I wanted to make sure that our hundredth edition of SFTJ wasn't just with some band who'd made a big but brief impression on your writer's tastes but a group who were genuine game-changers...

I seem to remember it was autumn 2002 when I first encountered the Darkness opening a three band bill at Bradford Rio's with Sugarcoma (woah, now THERE'S a name from the past!) and headliners the Wildhearts on later in the evening. I literally just caught the last two songs of their set (then-current single I Believe In A Thing Called Love and its B-side Love On The Rocks With No Ice as I would later discover) but I remember being impressed by the fact that this band were playing as if they were headlining a stadium gig (complete with lead singer Justin Hawkins going full Angus by jumping on a roadie's back as he walked into the audience to do the outro solo for the latter song) even though they were playing to a couple of dozen semi-interested Wildhearts fans at quarter to eight in the evening while most people were still queuing at the bar. This was the infamous gig I referred to in the 2nd part of the Wildhearts story where Danny was still chatting at the bar as the rest of the band came onstage as he thought it was a four band bill and ended up crowd surfing to the front after Ginger gently "reminded" him from the stage!

Anyway, the band were starting to get a couple of mentions in the NME and Kerrang! around this time and most people just didn't seem to know what to make of them in the era of Korn, Blink 182 et al. General consensus seemed to be that they were certainly entertaining but a bit naff and style over substance. Slowly but surely though (not least by virtue of the fact that they seemed to be a band happy to play anywhere and everywhere that'd have them) they were starting to edge up the ladder. I picked up the group's second single Get Your Hands Off My Woman when it surfaced in early 2003 and it narrowly missed the Top 40. A fun rollercoaster riff-fest of a song with Justin liberally dropping c-bombs and f-bombs left, right and centre in his unmistakeable falsetto screech, it was certainly very different from anything else around at the time and left me intrigued to find out more.

I duly got the chance a couple of months later when the band played Leeds Cockpit for the venue’s 10th birthday party and me and a few of my drinking gang went along. I have to say they absolutely detonated the joint that night - as when I'd seen them supporting the Wildhearts six months or so previously, they really went for it as if they were headlining Wembley stadium and, to be fair, the venue was pretty packed out. I mean I'm not sure how much of that was for the party and how much was for the band but they pretty much got a standing ovation at the end of it and you could tell they were on their way to something special. Certainly I think it's fair to say that those of us from our gang who went along that night were pretty much converted.

And indeed, the rest is history - the group's next single Growing On Me would go Top 10 and a re-released I Believe In A Thing Called Love would narrowly miss topping the chart altogether. The group were arguably the darlings of the festival circuit that summer getting rave reviews across the board with their shameless harking back to '70s glam and stadium rock (Queen meets Van Halen meets AC/DC to all intents and purposes) well and truly killing the already ailing nu-metal and fratpunk movements stone dead. Thank Christ for that I thought.

However, even this early, it was pretty clear that the Darkness were proving a pretty divisive band among both the indie kids and Kerrang! readers. Even in our drinking group, for every person who thought they represented a much-needed breath of fresh air with their gleefully OTT theatrics after the lumpen dirges of yer Creeds and Puddle of Mudds and the bozoisms of Sum 41, Good Charlotte et al, there was someone who absolutely detested them for exactly the same reason. I still remember one of my friends (a spiky haired Machine Head fan) angrily protesting that "Rock music ain't supposed to be fuckin' cabaret man!" when talking about the band. I think their run-in with Lemmy during this period which led to Ginger Wildheart and Dave Grohl having to act as involuntary peacemakers between the two when the Darkness played L.A. probably didn't help their cause either.

The arrival of the group's debut album Permission To Land only seemed to add to the division - it seemed to reinforce either everything you loved or everything you hated about the band. For me, it was another example of what we here at Nite Songs like to call Sonic Temple syndrome with a killer side one (the storming AC/DC style opener Black Shuck, the three singles and the fist-in-the-air power balladry of Love Is Only A Feeling, arguably the album's high point and another Top 5 hit when it came out as a single that summer) being followed by a side two which, to be honest, was a bit anonymous* apart from the aforementioned Love On The Rocks With No Ice and the joky ballad closer Holding My Own. As the year wound to a close, it kind of felt like it could go either way with the Darkness and the fact that they put out a decidedly cringy festive single Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End) didn’t help matters. Infamously it was beaten to the top spot by Gary Jules' dark piano-led cover of Tears For Fears' Mad World and Justin throwing his toys out of the pram a bit over this after spending weeks telling anyone who’d listen that they’d got the Christmas number one in the bag definitely felt as though it cost them a bit in terms of their public image. Whereas six months previously the Darkness had come across as the plucky upstart underdogs taking on the music scene on their terms, they now seemed to have turned into exactly the sort of self indulgent pampered establishment rock stars they were supposed to be saving us from (Fred Durst et al) and the fact that Jules’ much more understated and low key release upset the odds by beating them into second place felt as if Justin and co had deservedly been taken down a peg or two for their arrogance.

(* - Okay, slight confession time - there was one song on there I genuinely couldn't stand which was Friday Night but it was a bit personal. My punk band at the time, Brookside Riot Squad, also had a song of that name about smalltown violence in West Yorkshire which we considered to be our best song. Then Hawkins and co come along with a tune of the same title about going to sodding archery classes the gits. We ended up renaming ours as Another Friday Night)

And to be honest, it pretty much turned out to be the beginning of the end for the band. 2004 saw long time bassist Frankie Poullain unceremoniously fired after a lengthy spell spent across the Atlantic trying to break America and replaced by the band's guitar tech Richie Edwards (not to be confused with the Manics guitarist) and as the group reconvened in the studio for their follow-up effort in 2005, rumours were already spiralling of knock-down drag-out fisticuffs in the studio and egos running out of control.

When One Way Ticket To Hell And Back, the group's sophomore effort, surfaced in autumn 2005, unfortunately it turned out to be a real stinker. I remember reviewing this one for one of the 'zines I worked for at the time and being particularly savage about it (I seem to recall using the phrase "The main problem with this album is the tunes. There aren't any.") The title track and lead-off single just sounded like a Darkness B-side which wasn't promising...until you heard the rest of it and realised that depressingly it was one of the better tunes on the album. Listening back to it last year for our Worst Albums Ever feature, I was hoping that time might have been kinder to it but sadly no. Essentially it's the same wilfully OTT pomp rock as the first one but with the hooks notably absent - the two ballads Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (hilariously unintentionally ironic title alert!) and the Big Country-esque Hazel Eyes were at least passable but the rest was just a total cringefest with the nadir being the truly putrid English Country Garden which sounded like Colin Hunt from the Fast Show trying to write a Queen pastiche. Add to that the frankly ridiculous Be Here Now levels of over-production courtesy of former Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker including chucking pretty much every instrument under the sun in to distract from the general scarceness of actual memorable tunes and the picture is depressingly complete. Hideous really is too kind a word.

The fall of the band after that was frighteningly rapid. One Way Ticket failed to produce a Top 5 single (indeed, the third release, the dreadful attempt at '80s electro Girlfriend, tanked at a miserable number 39) and after hearing it most of us in the group who'd initially argued the Darkness’ cause were quickly revising our opinion and claiming that actually we'd never really liked them that much anyway (those who'd been on the "they're crap" side a couple of years previously were mostly just nodding knowingly at each other by this point). When the band came to tour the album they found themselves playing to half-empty stadiums - I remember a mate of mine going to the Manchester Arena gig on that tour to find touts desperately trying to flog off tickets for a fiver each outside it when they'd probably cost about seven times that initially! By the end of 2006 the band had split with Justin going on to Hot Leg and the others, led by his guitarist brother Dan Hawkins, going on to form the actually pretty good Stone Gods. Both of whom I'm sure we'll cover in future SFTJ's.

Of course, that's not the end of the story - the Darkness would reform with the original line-up in 2011 (I remember being a bit gutted as I was looking forward to a second Stone Gods album) and have stuck around ever since (albeit with drummer Ed Graham leaving after the group's third album Hot Cakes to eventually be replaced behind the kit by Rufus Taylor, son of Queen's Roger), putting out a further five albums to go with the original two. Surprisingly, nearly all of them have been decent enough (2013's underwhelming Last Of Our Kind being the only real exception) with 2015's Pinewood Smile being the pick of the bunch for me (I’d even go so far as to say I think it might actually be their strongest album in my opinion) especially the strutting foul-mouthed Solid Gold and the equally sweary riff-fest of Southern Trains being particular highlights. Suffice to say I ended up forgiving them fairly quickly for what a let-down that second album was and even managed to see them live for a third time in Northampton of all places with some friends on their Christmas tour in 2012 (even the inevitable festive encore of Bells End was fun that night)

It's a bit weird looking back at the early days of the Darkness story and realising that all of that happened two decades ago now but the main thing is that I remember when I first moved to London (ironically just before the band reformed) being surprised as to just how big a part they'd played in the musical education of nearly all of my drinking buddies from Bubblegum Slut and Pure Rawk back then*. I s'pose that while maybe some people still just remember them as being that naff screechy band who were everywhere for two minutes before abruptly disappearing again, those songs did mean an awful lot to a lot of kids my age and really, Justin, Dan, Frankie and Ed deserve a lot of credit for that. Well, that and the fact that they were the band who sent the atrocious likes of Alien Ant Farm, Limp Bizkit, Wheatus, Crazytown, Vex Red, the Bloodhound Gang et al packing off back to the job centre with their tails between their legs which is something we should probably all be grateful for. And y’know what, are even if time hasn't changed my mind that Permission To Land is a bit of an inconsistent album (unlike One Way Ticket which definitely is consistent but sadly only in how terrible it is), the fact remains that when the Darkness properly nail it on 70% or so of that album they really do nail it. Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't deny that they were definitely game-changers and provided a much needed force ten gust to blow away a lot of the cobwebs that were clogging up the rock scene at the time. And I'll always owe 'em for that.

* For proof, check out this article which is an interview with two of my then co-writers at said 'zines Dave and Karl, it's a good read and provides an enjoyable alternative tale to this 'ere article.