A nostalgic trip through The Darkness’ nostalgia.
Whisper it quietly, but writing about a 20th anniversary edition of an album is a pretty straightforward gig normally.
In the streaming era your audience now almost certainly has a passing knowledge of the material, whatever artist history there is probably is also known, so you just focus mainly on the nostalgia bit and the extras. Job done.
But what happens when the original work was a wholly dedicated exercise in nostalgia in the first place? Time for instance has largely eroded the Marmite fever of The Darkness and their early noughties rise to a position – briefly – sitting on the gold encrusted throne of biggest band in the country. That they achieved it largely without assistance from the music press was both admirable and a shock to the system.
At first it was near impossible to work out whether the quartet – singer Justin Hawkins, his brother Dan, splendidly moustachioed bass player Frankie Pouillain and drummer Ed Graham – were straight up parodical or not. Their music was an absolutely shameless amalgam of Queen, AC/DC and lots of other bygone dandruff shaking outfits, but came equipped with some deft pop touches seemingly inaudible to their many haters. Hawkins’ falsetto also added a layer of theatre, and show-by-show they built a following in an appropriately old-fashioned style.
Released in 2003, their debut album Permission To Land was a far cleverer record than many would’ve had you believe. Ridiculous and overblown? Yes, but it was also tough; bluesy opener Black Shuck strutting with studs and leather intent, whilst the axe-wielding heartbreak of Love On The Rocks With No Ice gave truth to the notion that Hawkins could play.
But its special sauce was in evocation; music at the start of the century had become too cool for itself, from Brooklynite cheekbones to conscious hip hop, with the previous decade’s course setters – from Oasis to Blur to the Manics – all seemingly in decline.
CD buyers had largely grown up in the eighties and nineties, and somebody who could write songs about Friday night youth clubs, throw in some mild sexual innuendo and take the piss out of themselves and their older brother’s record collection was the perfect bullseye for a (lack of) taste meeting opportunity.
Still, all this wouldn’t have been enough had they not backed themselves with some memorable numbers. Get Your Hands Off Of My Woman warmed their jets, a punk n’ profanity scramble, but the double-barrelled hit guns were loaded with I Believe In A Thing Called Love and Growing On Me, the former a worshipful Aerosmith rip-off but one that made the band a household name.
Unrepentant, they soon gained for themselves the wisdom Freddie Mercury had thirty years previously: that if you get big enough, critics were for little people.
Much to their chagrin, Permission To Land sold four million copies worldwide and The Darkness swept the board at the 2004 Brit Awards, earning them gongs for Best British Group, Best Rock Act and Best Album. The only cliché left to enact was a rapid, substance-related implosion and, as if reluctant to disappoint, that was exactly what followed.
Twenty years later it remains Hawkins’ ‘honest snapshot of where we were’. For scholars of The Darkness, Permission To Land…Again has an additional disk of live material, taken respectively from a 2003 on-the-rise show at Knebworth supporting Robbie Williams to a made-it one five months later at London’s Astoria. Hardly essential, the material is nevertheless interesting if just for Hawkins’ richly self-deprecating patter.
How do you write about a record being reissued that was old sounding when it came out? You remind everyone that it’s still amazing fun, and that everyone has to laugh at themselves sometimes, and that’s all.
