Turning back the rock

Retro-rocking band Darkness keeps things light and fun on US tour
By Steve Morse

Zebra-striped catsuits, monster-metal guitar riffs, helium-voiced lyrics about hedonism, David Lee Roth-like stage jumps, cheesy videos with crustaceans and pterodactyls, and a band motto that goes "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

The grunge era? Forget about it. Nu-metal angst? Nope, the Darkness can't be bothered with either latter-day movement. Instead, the British band has turned back the clock to the flamboyant 1970s and '80s when catsuits and hair bands were in vogue -- when Queen, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Thin Lizzy, and Bon Jovi roamed the earth in their pre-dinosaur heydays.

That was back when rock 'n' roll put a smile on your face -- even if it was the foundation of "This Is Spinal Tap" and other satires to come. As Sir Elton John has said of the Darkness: "They bring fun back to rock 'n' roll. They don't take themselves seriously."

"I think the fun aspect is important to what we do," says Justin Hawkins, lead singer of the Darkness, the retro-rockers who have won three Brit Awards and have launched their first, full-length US tour, stopping at a sold-out Avalon tomorrow.

"It's very jolly, upbeat music, almost escapist, really," Hawkins, 28, says. "It's almost like music has to be fun now for escaping. People have enough problems in their daily life and don't want to listen to that on the radio as well."

The escape mantra has been good to the band -- its album, "Permission to Land," has gone gold in the United States, sparked by the Queen-like hit "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." And the group has been even bigger in England, where it has sold 1 1/2 million albums.

"We're definitely A-list celebrities in the UK," says Hawkins. "We're the biggest band around at the moment there. And I'm like a tabloid entity. I can't go anywhere without paparazzi. One of the zoos has named a giraffe after me, and there's a street named after me in Lowestoft (hometown of Hawkins and his brother, Dan, a Darkness guitarist). It's absolutely bizarre how this has all happened in just the last six months."

It's also a testament to rock's ability to recycle its past. But the difference is that though hair bands were once the mainstream acts of the record industry, the Darkness had to employ the do-it-yourself ethic of the punk movement to capture attention in this jaded decade.

"The story is quite a fairy tale, really," says Hawkins. "We didn't have any go-ahead from the music industry. We started putting records out ourselves, independently. I used to write music for television [advertisements] so I used that money to record the album. And then we started putting singles out, and the second one ["Growing on Me"] went to No. 11 as an independent release, which has to be a record. At that point we ended up in a bidding war with Sony and Warners and it all took off. But we've only been signed since May of last year."

The band's signature has been playful songs such as "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" and "Love on the Rocks With No Ice," but also Hawkins's falsetto -- some would say castrato -- vocals, which can reach even higher than those of Queen's late singer Freddie Mercury.

"Yes, I do sing higher than Freddie at times," he says rather proudly. "I grew up listening to Queen. They were a legendary, inspiring band that didn't move with the times but was always completely separate from music's development.

"You'd have to say that you'd give your right arm for Queen's career, wouldn't you?"

Hawkins's top band of all time, though, is Aerosmith. "I was supposed to meet Steven Tyler before this tour started, but they couldn't give me 100 percent assurance that would happen, so it didn't work out. I think we're going to hook up with them when we next come to America in June." Tyler was pleased to hear such praise this week. "It's always nice to get a tip of the hat, ain't it?" Tyler says. "And [Hawkins] dresses up the way I used to in the '70s and '80s.

"They're trying hard and they're huge in London," adds Tyler. "I don't know what straws they're grabbing for, but my hat is off to them for even being in a band in this world today."

The Darkness saga started in Lowestoft, a seaside town that is the most easterly point in England. Justin and Dan's father built homes, and their mother worked as a bookkeeper. The boys plunged into their dad's record collection (where they first heard Queen) and got hooked on rock in their teens.

"I had quite different tastes from my brother," says Justin Hawkins. "What I liked was all flamboyant hard rock with big front men. We used to argue about it, because my brother was more into the songwriter-y types like the Byrds. He was much more tasteful in his choices, which he never apologized for."

The brothers were in a prog-rock band called Empire, but Justin Hawkins didn't start singing lead until the Darkness formed in 2000.

The band was rounded out by two friends, Frankie Poullain (bass) and Ed Graham (drums). The idea for the catsuits came from their mother, who has boasted of seeing the Rolling Stones's Brian Jones in a pink catsuit in a club.

"I actually won a style award a few weeks ago from Elle magazine," says Justin Hawkins. "Yeah, catsuits must be really fashionable at the moment. Everyone is wearing them -- not! It's bizarre, really, but I think if you wear anything and wear it with conviction, it can be stylish."

Hawkins now has 30 catsuits, which also were funded partly by his success at writing jingles in the advertising industry. "I wrote jingles for a furniture company, a bank, Mars bars, soft drinks, hard drinks, and even condoms," he says with a laugh. "I've been quite successful at it, really."

The Darkness was less successful with the media, however, when it first started. "They'd compare us to `Spinal Tap' or `Wayne's World,' " he says.

"But we've had approval from some established musicians, and that means a lot. We're quite friendly with Brian May [of Queen] right now. . . . And the surviving members of Thin Lizzy are big fans as well. Their seal of approval means a hell of a lot more than a good review. These are the people who have been through it and know exactly what's going on."

Finally, as if you couldn't guess, the name the Darkness is deliberately ironic, though some goth-rock fans have shown up at the shows. "It's always quite nice to see a lot of goths turning up for our show and looking at us with a combination of horror and despair," says Hawkins. "They've just come to see something with an absolutely misleading name."

From: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/04/02/turning_back_the_rock/