The Darkness bring back the guilty pleasure of classic guitar rock
by Michelle Nikolai

Come on, don't kid yourself. You miss the spandex jumpsuits, the wailing Les Pauls, the falsetto vocals, and the acrobatic jumps that made '70s and '80s rock, well, fun. Fun is in short order these days, and The Darkness, currently England's most talked about band, are on a galactic mission to bring back three letter words, like fun and . . . sex in rock and roll (um, their debut album cover has no band photos). They released Permission to Land, stateside in September - it went triple platinum in England this year (300,000 copies) and has sold over a million albums world-wide.

The Darkness are frontman/lead guitarist Justin Hawkins, his rhythm-playing brother Dan, Scotsman Frankie Poullain on bass, and Ed Graham on drums. Justin and Dan hail from the seaside town of Lowestoft in England, and Justin spent much of his youth playing various instruments, not just guitar but keyboards and drums as well. "I'm an outstanding drummer, but mainly my resources go towards guitar," he says.

A bona fide Les Paul fanatic, Justin is quite realistic about how the band is perceived. There have been the inevitable comparisons to Queen, Sweet, Slade - even Spinal Tap. Their songs sport titles like "Get Your Hands Off of My Woman," "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" and "Love on the Rocks With No Ice." The spandex-clad Hawkins prances around suggestively in their videos, can jump higher than David Lee Roth, and his blazing guitar solos are quite skillfully executed, thank you. In their video for "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," a Les Paul literally drops into his hands though a chute in the ceiling of their schmaltzy spaceship. That's right, even their videos are ripe with '80s nostalgia.

"When we came out in the U.K. we were dividing people. And I think it's definitely normal for a band like us to have that response really, we're not a coffee-table band," Hawkins explains. "It's never going to be unanimously positive, there'll always be people who hate us. But that's good, in a way.

"I think we're a classic, British rock band with a lot of humor. And that's probably where people have the problem, really, because the current climate is such that having fun is not necessarily the done thing. But it's not going to stop us," he goes on to say from a gig in Bournemouth in southern England.

He's had so much fun, in fact, that he broke his finger jumping off the bar in a pub early in their careers. There were only 4-5 people in the pub, but that didn't suppress his over-the-top theatrics, and he literally did a spread-eagle on the floor, Les Paul in hand. He says it's only made his playing more musical, because now he has to focus on the tune rather than speed.

"Whatever you listen to, you sort of pick things up from it. You listen to stuff, and it filters into techniques that you adopt, and what have you, and you drop things," he says. "I think when I started off, I was probably a lot faster but not too melodic. I think I've become more melodic in my soloing with time."

His first guitar was a black Les Paul knockoff that he got from his father, who could play one song (wouldn't you know, it was "Drunken Sailor.") He played a few Charvels, but was always working towards a Les Paul, and the first bit of money he made as a musician, he bought two - a black Standard for himself and a sunburst Standard for Dan so he could play a Les Paul as well. Now Dan has them both, and Justin has moved on to Les Paul Customs and Goldtop Reissues. He has six on tour and is having some special guitars made: one with a silver sparkle finish and a replica of his flame tattoo inlaid on the ebony fretboard. Just don't ask him where the flame tattoo is . . . (Okay, if you really want to know, go their web site and find the video for their third single "Growing on Me.")

"You realize there's a quality leap between any other guitar and Gibson, which is the top," he explains. "I've never got into Fenders - even though some of their designs look cool, they're a bit too twangy and bit too country, and they really don't have the balls the Les Paul facilitates. Another thing about the Les Paul is the carpentry involved - somebody spent a long time crafting those babies, and it's an honor and a privilege to pick up a piece of wood that's been manipulated in that way."

He took lessons for a year, but has since had to unlearn some of the barre chords and other techniques that he finds useless for rock. He listened to a lot of Whitesnake records early on and moved on from there.

When it comes to the band's songs, there's nothing heavy or earth-changing about their lyrics. They conceive of their videos while standing around the pubs, and the director, Alex Smith, translates their visions into reality. "Women stuff, there's a lot of things explored there. Boobies, bums, drugs. Big dogs with one eye. We can write about anything, really," Justin says. "Sometimes it's nice to be purely erotic, think from the groin occasionally. It's primal, harks back to the glory years when you didn't really need to do anything other than grunt and carry women to your cave. It's always nice to keep in touch with that aspect of it."

They've got a new Christmas single and video, though it won't be released in the states. "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)" has all the trappings of a cozy Christmas by the fire, EDS-1275 doubleneck in hand, a choir outside the door, though their spaceship flies off in the end. What's the deal with the cheesy spaceship, anyway? The idea for Permission to Land came from the entire band, though Justin was thinking about doing a monologue over an instrumental. "It was going to be like, 'The Darkness request permission to land, they're hungry. Get that f--king Concord off the runway.' We never did that in the end, so we just kept the single in the title [of the album]."