So have we got over the joke yet? Thought so. What on earth happened there? 2003 may yet be remembered as the year when we all went completely nuts about a band who otherwise would barely have gotten a pistachio.
We shouldn't be too surprised that the Darkness were briefly successful. After all, they did have a lot of goofy charm and it was good to have a band around who genuinely put a smile on your face; something they shared with the Stone Roses, who arrived at the arse end of various goths and Smiths clones who didn't realise that Morrissey could be pretty funny. Sometimes. The Darkness were a great antidote to the cooler-than-thou non-posturings of 2003's other big bands: the Strokes and the Coral.
But once the smile had inevitably faded, what was left? Good Lord, I've put up with a lot of bands who have stolen a previous band's act like a scall in Lewis's, but even with the worst of these chancers there was something else there. If you're going to recycle a previous musical epoch - as the Darkness did with Queen and various 80s poodle rockers - then you've got to at least try and bring something to the table, as it were. Even the worst Radiohead bandwagon-humpers, such as Coldplay and Travis, at least brought the metaphorical equivalent of a cheap bottle of Lambrini when they sat down at Uncle Thom's smorgasbord.
The Darkness have got absolutely nothing going for them now. Even before the spangly excrescence that was their Christmas single they were looking woefully short of ideas. They could plead (as they frequently do) that they're not taking the piss all they want, but the fact is that the Darkness can't write a decent song to save the lives of a whole litter of puppies. Growing On Me, I Believe In A Thing Called Love, Love Is Only A Feeling... these are awesomely bad song titles, folks, and the lyrics are as bad as a whole refectory of college students. This is the sort of stuff that you have to have a lot of balls to get away with; just as most people would veer away from calling a song Stuck In A Rut lest it be seen as an unconscious little cry for help from someone who's ran out of ideas (Stuck In A Rut is track 2 side 2 of Permission To Land).
It now seems that balls is just about all that Justin Hawkins and his mates had, as those tight jump suits grotesquely attest. It takes some nerve to release an all-out Christmas single that practically reeks of tinsel, and then to title it with the sort of childishly pathetic double entendre that used to keep Ben Elton in TV shows.
Aside from their lyrics, the music itself, whilst undeniably a bit thrilling, is merely a reheat of 80s 'pop metal' riffs, which were themselves reheats of the original 70s stuff. If nothing else the Darkness gave DJs an excuse to dust off those old Kiss and Warrant singles that had been banished to the back of the box. That wouldn't be so bad but that's all the Darkness have. There isn't any song on the album that you won't have heard before, no lyric that makes you sit up and take notice, no attempt to try something a little new to keep people interested once the joke's worn off.
Okay, we're getting increasingly cynical about our music these days, and people seem to like everything about music except the music itself; preferring bands who make a noise rather than make a sound. I could decry the complete absence of bands getting signed because they have something original about them (the reason why American music is currently light years ahead of ours in terms of critical and commercial popularity), but let's just take the Darkness as an object lesson in what not to do. When the Darkness got beaten to the Christmas no. 1 spot by a turgid cover of a Tears For Fears song, there were plenty of smirks all around. "It's not even a proper Christmas song!" decried Justin, further adding to the humour. The Darkness may well have been taking the piss all along, but people are now laughing at them, not with them. And nobody can withstand that sort of ridicule. The Darkness are as good as dead; there's nowhere they can go now and they can't really reinvent themselves on the meagre talent they have.
I don't want to criticise the person who signed them(particularly as I know him and I've still got a 7" he did years ago and I wouldn't mind selling it on for a hefty profit off the back of his continued success) but what was he thinking? Did he really think that the Darkness would be a band to inspire a whole generation of pop kids for years to come? And if he wasn't thinking that, why not? Probably the Darkness were signed as a way to make a quick buck out of a passing nostalgia fad. Or more likely he was taking the piss as well. A cynical signing of a cynical band for cynical times.
Photos by Rico Isseppi
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