As The Darkness release their eighth full-length Dreams On Toast, the homegrown heroes reflect on a career of rock’n’roll ridiculousness, the unpredictable live experience and why alternative music needs to move on from its past…
“People used to think that we were taking the piss out of rock, didn’t they? Half the people said we were saving it. Half people thought we taking the piss out of it.”
For the past hour, Justin Hawkins and the rest of The Darkness have, by turns, arguably been doing both of these things. There’s been talk of the importance of being a real band, of not relying on triggers and automation, of the challenges for everyone involved of having a frontman like the Lowestoft livewire, for whom getting through a song live is never the same two nights on the bounce.
Even punk, Justin says, has its “sanitised” practitioners who wear the clothes but play it safe when it comes to actually ripping it up.
“Everybody's got stuff on tape. I know that it's part of production a lot of time, but get a fucking lighting director with a sense of timing and put a show on. Be human beings. Let the music breathe.”
So, who’s right: saving or taking the piss?
“Whatever you think,” he grins, “you’re right.”
Lounging on a sofa upstairs at Portsmouth’s Guildhall with drummer Rufus Taylor, Justin is in typically dandyish form. Normally, he would have joined guitarist brother Dan and bassist Frankie Poullain on a run along the Pompey seafront, were it not for shaking off the end of a nasty chest infection that’s caused two of the dates on the band’s massive UK tour to be rescheduled.
Still, things are just lovely for The Darkness. Last Friday, they released their eighth album, Dreams On Toast. A day later, they headlined no less a venue than Wembley. Twenty-two years since their Permission To Land debut made them one of the most talked about bands on the planet, followed by a second album, a split, and a reformation in 2011, The Darkness have worked their way back to greatness. Justin’s zinger on Dreams On Toast that ‘We never stopped making hit records, it’s just that no-one buys them anymore’ may be an indictment of the economy of showbiz in 2025, but also highlights quite how their journey here’s been. Either way, they’ve won, simply by being themselves.
“This is great, because it means that we weren't one of the also-rans – we actually made it through as kind of a ‘classic’ band,” says Dan when it’s put to him. “It hasn’t been easy. We've ground that result out. Ten years ago we played Download for free just to try and get a foot in the door. We haven’t been at this level the whole time. We've had to beg, borrow and steal to try get back to where we are now.”
Dreams On Toast is a very Darkness album. If you want big riffs and histrionic rock power, they are as reliable as ever. If you want very British Carry On humour, look to the country-ish Hot On My Tail, a lyrical one-and-a-half entendre about flatulence. “You have to write about what you know,” declares Justin.
There’s the banging Rock And Roll Party Cowboy (“I have to take credit, I added ‘Cowboy’” boasts Justin), a song every member describes, in part, with a synonym of “ridiculous”, with its meaty guitar and shopping list of rock‘n‘roll accoutrements.
“It came out during a writing retreat in Scotland,” explains Justin. “That riff was so much fun to play with, playing for hours, but we couldn’t find a melodic way to sing around that riff. So it ended up being just like a dramatic monologue type thing.”
“It was so much fun to play, we couldn’t stop,” adds Rufus.
“Yeah, we kind of knew it was both the shittest thing, but also the best thing we had. It's one of those weird ones where you can easily get it wrong by trying to make it something better.”
This is actually quite telling of how The Darkness approach music. Though they admit they can be particular, and say sometimes songs can hang around for ages before they find a home, there’s a gutsy instinct, a sense of running into it blind, where they find their excitement.
“What’s killed the original spirit of rock, if there was a word, it would be ‘solemnity’,” says Frankie. “In other art forms, too. Solemnity is actually the death of art.”
“I don't think there ever has been anything clever about this band,” adds Dan. “It’s never been like that. It's all been based through anger and joy.
“Making this album was akin to Queen making A Night At The Opera: ‘What can we get away with?’ You’d leave the room and when you came back something would have completely changed direction. The guys would go home from the studio, and Justin and I would work till, like, three in the morning. They’d come back in the next day and go, ‘What the fuck is that?’ And we’d go, ‘What that is, is fucking great.’”
Retro as these references are, The Darkness all say that they constantly strive to do something they haven’t done before, something new. It should be noted that on this tour, before the album came out, the band were playing sometimes half a dozen tracks off it. Again, it speaks to an inherent knowledge of what boredom looks like, and knowing how to dance around it rather than step in it.
It's something reflected in the song Mortal Dread. On the surface, it sounds like the familiar hungover thoughts of someone waking up with a dry mouth, still firmly in a rut. Which it is, but, Justin says, it’s also about the stagnation and risk of turning into a museum piece that rock’n‘roll faces.
“It’s about getting to a certain age and realising that the world's changing, and you’ve gotta change or that’s you fucked, you get left behind. And that's rock. It's actually from the perspective of rock – rock is a middle-aged guy in a world full of people who are just generation… whatever the fuck it is now, and it has to wake up and be part of it.”
As a band steeped in the rock of the ’70s and ’80s, though, aren’t The Darkness part of that? Not the way they do it, Justin reckons.
“I think we restarted an interest in it, and some bands started doing it because of us, but a lot of that music has quite a retrospective approach. It doesn't really push any boundaries, and it will always be sort of marginalised, until people start thinking about it differently and changing the way to perceive it.
“It's very misogynist, it's very homophobic, it's very white, it's really niche in in an old fashioned way. It's not the prevailing moment, and music [in general] is not the prevailing art form is it used to be. We need bands who do that kind of bombast and have that kind of approach to the composition, but with a lyric and with attitudes that aren't fucking from the ’80s. I'm not saying that our album is that, but I'm saying that if [rock as a genre] wants to flourish and be the best again, it has to sort of pull its head out of its arse and realise that, yeah, Led Zeppelin existed, The Rolling Stones existed, AC/DC existed, but you have to do that for now. That's what we are. I think that's why we're doing Wembley.”
And it’s live where The Darkness continue to be, if not the last of their kind, certainly among the very best. At 50, Justin remains one of the finest showmen you could see – an entertainer. As ringmaster, his impulsiveness onstage, his never-the-same-twice routes through the songs make the gigs the OTT riot they are.
“I think that’s where a lot of the danger and the energy comes from,” says Dan. “Justin will just stop a song in the middle to say something to someone in the crowd, or build up a sing-along, or whatever, and then just go ‘3-2-1’ and we have to all be absolutely on our marks to make it work. And it’s not just us, our lighting engineers have to react to it all as well. But that idea of anything can happen, maybe people crave that, and that’s why bands like us do well.”
“You don't see a lot of actual performers anymore, I don’t think, or people who are any good at interacting with a crowd,” adds Rufus. “You just don't see them talking to a crowd of people, like it's just you and them at a bar or something. You don't see that anymore. And Justin does that better than anyone.”
Perhaps The Darkness have made it to this point by simply being The Darkness. You know what you’re going to get, but not how they’re going to serve it up. Which is how you end up with Rock And Roll Party Cowboy. So, back to the question: are The Darkness still saving rock, as was first touted to them for Permission To Land?
“Still sneering at rock,” laughs Justin. “In a good way. We’re making it better, all the time.”
Dreams On Toast is out now via Cooking Vinyl
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