The Darkness plays glam rock to the hilt

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Justin Hawkins takes a drag on his cigarette and lightly scratches the part of his chest left bare by a pinkish top split low in the middle. An orange flame tattoo rides dangerously up from his pelvic area. His hair is classic glam rock -- long, scraggly, slightly oily, shouting for shampoo and a pair of unforgiving scissors.

As the flamboyant frontman for the Darkness, the hard-rocking, guitar-thrashing, ridicule-baiting band that came out of Britain this year, Hawkins is the first to advertise, onstage and off, his disgust with the dirgelike performances and navel-gazing lyrics that characterize so many of today's rock bands. He is ever the entertainer, and his performance screams camp: He preens, puckers and flirts with his audience. He leads them in over-the-head claps. He boldly wears zebra-striped spandex catsuits, flared at the ankles and wrists. He sings in a jaw-dropping screamed falsetto.

Go ahead, have a laugh, Hawkins dares his audience -- at him, at the wailing (but masterfully played) guitars and at the theatrics of it all. After struggling for three years, the band is selling millions of records and is in the middle of an American tour, at mostly midsize concert halls, that quickly sold out and had its tickets pop up on eBay. (The tour stops at the Verizon Wireless Theater at 9 p.m. Sunday.)

"I think we lost a lot of the glamour when it all came down to the boy next door moaning about this, that and the other," Hawkins says. "When it's all about catharsis and getting things off your chest, people don't want to be in bands anymore. It's not that attractive. It's just sort of standing around and whining all the time.

"If you're going to do that, you might as well sit in your bedroom."

Early on, the Darkness faced considerable criticism in Britain from a plethora of agents, producers and reviewers, all of whom called the band too déclassé, too flashy, too metal, too derivative. One critic likened the band to the one in Spinal Tap, the 1984 heavy metal mockumentary that featured a British group pathetically and hilariously past its prime. Another basically wished death upon Hawkins.

But the Darkness, pitching itself as a purveyor of anti-introspection, sneered at its critics and dug in, refusing to tone down its stage act, to pop-ify its metal sound and to swap its name for something catchier and less clichéd.

The band -- Hawkins, 29; his brother, Dan, 27, on guitar; Frankie Poullain, 32, on bass; and Ed Graham, 27, on drums -- persevered, mainly by putting on live shows. The band has sold 2.6 million copies of its debut album, Permission to Land, worldwide, more than half in Britain. It also picked up three prestigious BRIT awards this year, including one for best album.

MTV plays the hit single I Believe in a Thing Called Love repeatedly and made it the most-played single the first week of February. In January, the band appeared on Late Show With David Letterman. Meanwhile, Permission to Land has climbed the Billboard album chart, reaching No. 42 last week, defying predictions that a hard-rock band from Britain couldn't make a dent in American pop music.

Viewed as so last-century, the kind of rock that today's parents listened to as teenagers in hazy stadiums, the Darkness and its music hearken back to the glory days of overbites and air guitar: Queen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Aerosmith and, a bit more recently, Def Leppard and Guns N' Roses.

The guitars are the band's driving force, delivering the kind of charged-up riffs that have made critics and rock 'n' roll fans take notice. And while Hawkins' falsetto is easily mocked, he has a strong voice with great range. His eagle-jumps, sweaty hair, brashness and rapid outfit changes add to the sense of levity onstage.

The band's wacky B-movielike videos have also attracted a following, with the sort of low-budget images that popped up on MTV in the early years. One video features a pterodactyl having sex with a spaceship. Another shows Hawkins in a bathtub, adoring himself and the camera.

The Darkness' songs offer simple, rock 'n' roll lyrics, laced with expletives, about love and life gone wrong, including genital warts ("you're part of me now and I only have myself to blame") and heroin ("gimme, gimme, gimme that smack").

For a first album, done on a shoestring budget and recorded in two weeks, the music is surprisingly tight and amusing. I Believe in a Thing Called Love is melodic and catchy, atypical of most hard rock.

"We're not afraid of embracing concepts which seem ridiculous to other people," Poullain says. "We don't particularly see them as ridiculous. We just see it as enjoyment."

From: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/music/2491450