Music > Interviews
Interview with The Darkness
01/11/11
If there’s one band, and indeed a band of brothers within it who knows the depth of the phrase ‘blood is thicker than water’, it’d be The Darkness. For them, it’s proved so thick they could grout their bathroom tiles with it – as unsanitary as that may seem. It had been four years since we’d spoken with Dan Hawkins, raw from the messy break up of The Darkness, chomping at the bit on his new adventure with Stone Gods. At the announcement that the band were back together, and fresh from some barnstorming comeback performances, Dan would probably attribute his calm optimism and candid nature to recently becoming a Dad but we know from old, he’s the gent he always was…
You were rehearsing yesterday, and you’re rehearsing again today… That’s right, yeah, trying to get our songs together. It’s funny because we’re just fresh out of the festival season, which is this weird thing because you play once a week, and usually in a different country each time. All your gear is permanently in transit, your guitars and stuff, then you turn up at these venues and have to be great on the spot, having not played for a week. It’s funny ‘cause you come out of festival season and you realise how sloppy you are in rehearsals because you’ve just sort of been turning up and playing about once a week. Playing every night, like touring, touring is really different. The first day back in rehearsals is always really bad!
How disciplined are you all in a rehearsal studio? When you know people so well, is it difficult to keep your mind on the job? Yeah, I guess so. We have different roles in rehearsal and it’s my job to crack the whip – it always has been. It’s my job to keep the thing going, you know; I used to be a real disciplinarian, I’d have us in for eight hours straight, no break and so forth, but today’s a classic example – we were supposed to start rehearsal at 11 and I’ve only just left, haha! It’s a bit more relaxed now, but you’ve got to remember that some of these songs we’ve been playing for ten years, so if we still need to rehearse those then something’s gone seriously wrong! It’s more about getting the new stuff for the November tour sounding really good, and the other part is just mucking about. I’d say it’s about 50% routine, going over certain sections of song again and again and again like a broken record, then 50% pissing about!
It sounds like a good balance there, especially with you, Dan ‘Whip Crack Away’ Hawkins at the helm… Haha, I’m far less like that nowadays though since having kids; I guess the band used to be like my children, but now I’ve got real children I guess wiping their bums is more than enough!
We’re coming into a period of a full-length tour where The Darkness still has as much relevance as ever, I mean, ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ was on X Factor the other day, did you know? Yeah, I got a load of texts while it was on; that song has become… if you look at the songs it was up against, my friends were telling me they did ‘Purple Rain’ and various other classic rock songs, then our song, so I think it’s just like as much as I don’t have a particularly great view of X Factor and despise what it is essentially, it’s good to be played amongst other such great songs. Being murdered by someone like that guy… haha!
Yeah, your songs have become kind of public property now – it must be quite inevitable that you lost control of it a bit when they’re that big… Yeah, another example of that is the Christmas song, which has taken on a life of its own. Those songs sort of exist independent of the rest of our career as well, you know. That was just a moment in time but you can pretty much guarantee that it’ll probably be played forever I think! I’ll be trying to avoid watching the TV at Christmas and that awful sweater I was wearing for the rest of my life, hahaha!
Yes, you need to pick your jumpers carefully in this industry. Haha, yes. If only I had something else to wear… I mean it was very nice of Phil Collins to lend it to me, haha, but I kind of regret it somewhat.
You guys don’t have to wait for certain musical waves to come in and out of fashion because you tend to buck the trend and stamp your own style on proceedings… We’ve never been relevant really; we’ve never been fashionable – again, the Christmas jumper incident is a prime example but I dunno, we’ve always existed outside of it really – in our heads, anyway. I think we’re one of those bands who, and it’s quite strange, became a pop, or popular thing despite being influenced by, or aspiring to be like hard rock acts. So yeah, we stand the other side of fashion as you can probably tell from our stage outfits most of the time!
The band quickly outgrew Britain and became a global concern – I remember watching Darkness videos in Hard Rock Café in Washington DC – do you think you just ignited the imagination of a worldwide audience? I think so yeah, I think there’s very few rock ‘n’ roll bands around and rock ‘n’ roll is such a wide sound, really but essentially it stands for something a bit rough and ready and doesn’t necessarily conform and I think that’s exactly what we are, you know; we’ve never really… I dunno, like Coldplay for example has always sat categorically in the middle of what they’re trying to play, but we don’t fit nicely into that AC/DC type of rock category, I think we’re just an oddity. I guess the bands that you could compare us to are not around any more, so I think the fans of our type of music only really have one place to go for it, and that’s us. So if you’re into bands like Queen and to some sense, Slade and Thin Lizzy and various styles of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and whatnot, then you’re probably gonna want to go and see us, especially seeing as you can’t go and see any of those other bands anymore. You can see various sort of versions of, but not the real deal. I think we’re kind of not to everyone’s taste, but there is a huge need for that – whatever type of rock it is that we do! There is, and we saw that in ‘Permission to Land’, which went five times platinum – did that elevate you to a level that was just too difficult to maintain? Yes, actually it went more than that as it goes! I think it was like eight times in the end! Sorry what was the question again? I was just trying to count my platinum discs, hahaha! Oh yes, yeah I think the level of success probably would have been easier to maintain had we not found it so hard to maintain our drink and drugs schedule, you know! I think one thing had to give and unfortunately it was the band and the band’s success really. I think the main thing is that we had a fantastic sort of ride; it was like holding on to a jet engine taking off, but ultimately going at that speed and being up that high, you’re gonna get covered in ice and fall off. Well that’s a weird analogy, but it’s a similar thing, you know. I thought we all dealt with it pretty well, but really we all struggled. It’s difficult really to be in that lifestyle and to be on the road that much, going from living in bedsits in London to having too much money and too much time. But yeah, it was kind of a crazy time; we talk about it sort of fondly now and it’s almost like we had to lose it all to appreciate it properly, you know. It’s that classic story, which I’m sure you can appreciate, that you’ve got to lose something to appreciate what you had. I think ultimately we were just caning it really, really hard and we paid the price for it! None of us regret what we did and I think for everyone, this is just part of life and we’re glad to be back together. There’s camaraderie there where we still can’t actually believe we made it through and we’re still making music. We laugh about it; we laugh about the fact that it’s only ever one of us that can seem to remember something that happened in the past at any one time. Someone will tell a story and the other three can’t remember it!
So you have to be together, don’t you, just to thread it all together! Exactly yeah, just to remember what happened and we usually realise that the person who can remember it wasn’t nearly as hammered. It’s one of those things; it’s a rock ‘n’ roll band, what are you gonna do?!
We’re a magazine that really did like the Stone Gods so for us, it wasn’t a bad thing; the adversity of the split prompted, I think, your most creative chapter. Creativity often comes from hard times, don’t you think? Definitely, definitely, I think in a similar way the excitement that I had going into that studio with Richie and Ed to do the Stone Gods project reminds me of going into The Darkness again. You’re really up against it and there’s a really unique opportunity to do what we do; we know that that what we’ve done for the new album is gonna get out there – there’s a lot of people really interested in hearing this record, and it’s a really exciting place to be. I think when we all went off after The Darkness, it was all about making music for ourselves, that we really liked and not caring too much about what happens with it really. When you’re writing and you know it’s gonna be heard by lots of people, it really spurs you on and it’s a really, really good pressure, if you know what I mean. It’s still a creative time at the moment, you know, everything’s at stake and we’ve got one chance to get it right, you know, so it’s really exciting times.
Is Leeders Farm the breeding ground for your new material then? Well yeah, but Leeders Farm has always been my home as well, even though I haven’t always lived there, if you know what I mean, but the studio is no more unfortunately. I had to shut it down because I’m basically moving in to it! I’m trying to work out what to do with it, and I’m selling a lot of the equipment. I’ll be relocating it somewhere else, I think, it’s just a matter of finding the right premises. But it can’t be in my house any more because that’s what kids do to your dreams… haha, no, it’s what they do to your house! They take it over – what you want doesn’t really matter any more. But yeah, The Darkness album – basically we’ve just finished it. We’re gonna do a little bit more in December and January, but it’ll probably be just be B-sides and you know, oddities, but the album’s essentially done. We’ve just done the last thing that went down, which was probably a guitar solo, then we went, ‘right, OK thankyou, you’ve been great. Now I’m gonna have to start moving stuff!’ It’s quite sad; it’s the end of an era.
Yes, and Leeders Farm has given us some brilliant albums as well – one of my favourite albums by Wild Beasts was recorded there and I feel really happy it came out of the studio. Now, talking of the album, I’ve heard new tracks ‘Cannonball’ and ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us’ – they sound full of driving momentum… Thankyou very much, yeah, they’re quite rocking songs and I’m just quite excited for people to hear the whole album, but yeah we picked those songs as ones that had the most momentum and would do the job at festivals, if you know what I mean, but the album’s quite varied. Everything’s kind of on a cliff edge of power rock ballads and then some of the darkest stuff that I ever thought we would do. But yeah, those two tunes have gone down really well at our warm-up shows and it’s good that people seem excited to hear something new. That’s a good example of what we’re doing, which is probably a bit more towards the old-school riffing of the first album really, you know. I don’t think Darkness fans are gonna be disappointed by this album and I genuinely think it’s probably our most heart-felt album that we’ve ever done. A lot of passion’s gone into it. We produced it with Nick Brine, who I produced the Stone Gods album with, so the co-production has worked really well again because I’ve known Nick for years now and he’s not one of those over-bearing producers; not as over-bearing a producer as I am! So it’s been much more of a team effort really, like the first album, I mean Pedro and I primarily were producing that first album and Pedro was more of an engineer than a producer, so he sort of facilitated our production ideas really well, I must say. It was sort of a band collaboration production and it’s sort of the same deal with Nick, and he’s even more of a producer. So basically it’s been total freedom really even though we’ve had major labels sort of banging the door down to hear stuff and get involved and deal offers and whatnot. We have a really great worldwide management team now though and they basically realise that we have to be left alone to do this and we weren’t even planning to do anything ‘til next year anyway; it was only the fact that Download came along that we thought, ‘well, this is a great opportunity to re-introduce the band’, and that had the knock-on effect of us doing loads of European festivals. We kinda wanted to be left alone this year to do it, which we have, so the end result we’re just excited for people to hear.
You can’t rush such beautiful things, Dan… It’s true, like with the first album we did, like, half of it in the first two and a half weeks, which is not a very long time these days, but then the other half of it took nearly a year, you know. So on the first album you get songs like, ‘Love is Only a Feeling’ with pretty big productions and that song alone we probably toiled over for two and a half months, then ‘Stuck in a Rut’ off the same album, we put down in two hours! We’ve tried to do that on this album as well, you know, like there’s a song on there that’s still being toiled with that we started recording in April, and it won’t be done ‘til December! Yet there’s another song on there, which we literally knocked out in half an hour, and for us that seems to work; the big songs that need a big production get it, and the stuff that sounds like it’s being played live and sounds a bit dodgy, does!
Dan, you’ve retained a humility that has constantly delighted fans round here as you continue to play dates in our region’s venues. Do you think that humility comes from years of slogging it before the band made it? I’ve read interviews where you’ve said you came close to thinking ‘fuck this, this is taking too long!’ Haha, yeah, probably, yeah; I can empathise with bands and musicians who are trying to make it because I didn’t make it at the age of 19 and stuff, and at 27 I still hadn’t made a penny from music and at 27 years old, you’re balls deep aren’t you? It’s not like you can suddenly become an architect or anything. It’s either gonna happen for you, or you’ve wasted your life, but you know what, I didn’t give up and I’m glad I didn’t. I think there aren’t enough smaller live venues in these parts specifically now as it’s more expensive for venues to have licences and there are less people going to pubs because of various reasons – beer’s not as cheap and people can’t smoke. I just think I can still remember what it was like and it’ll always be a thrill to play the Waterfront and the UEA because they’re the places that I always aspired to be in. I always thought that if I’d headlined the Waterfront, I would have made it, you know and I think that that’s no different to probably thousands of kids across East Anglia right now. Just to be back there brings back all those memories. I’d like to do more to support the local music scene if I can.
Well we’ve lost a couple of our feeder pubs like the Ferryboat and The Marquee, but we still have some flying the flag like The Brickmakers, which just won the music pub of the year nationally again. Did you ever play the Brickmakers? I didn’t play there no, but I’ve been many times. That was the great thing about Leeders Farm too, is that a lot of local bands had come through there. I think the Brickmakers is great. It’s just madness that we seem to be losing these places for young bands to play; there seems to be more and more kids going into these music academies and less and less places for them to play!
We’re thrilled you’re coming back to the UEA and you’re gonna bring an amazing show for us, aren’t you? Don’t you worry; I think this is one of our most creative live sets that we’ve ever done. It’s gonna be a real Vaudevillian, Victorian freak show! And that’s just the crowd, hahaha!
Emma Garwood
The Darkness make a triumphant return to the UEA on November 24th. For details, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview at Outlineonline.co.uk