Darkness - The start of something good

We meet Justin Hawkins during a promo day in Milan last March 27th. Listening to this album makes you think Darkness are at their absolute best, and the frontman's answers show that they feel exactly the same way.

I've only been able to listen to the new album this week, but I've been listening to your music since the very beginning, since 2003, and I get the feeling this is your best record.

(High-fives me) I agree with you. I know there are a lot of people who love the first album, and probably just as many who love the second one - in America, when you talk to fans, that's their favourite. As for me, once we've made something, I can't listen back to it, I'm already thinking about the next thing, but I've been listening to this record a lot, I'm really proud of it. I don't know if it's because I'm older or because it really is the best one. Maybe it's the start of something good for us.

When the band stopped playing for a few years, did you feel it was gone for good, and so do you now feel like it's living a second life? Or did you always sense that sooner or later you'd do something new again?

I don't know, because I don't usually think in such absolute terms. The situation has always been quite fluid, and I think there's a trajectory a lot of bands follow: you burst onto the scene, you keep making things and working, you have success and then a gradual decline, over a long stretch of time. I always thought the story wasn't over, but I had no idea where it was heading.

Before this album, the second one was the most ambitious, because you'd added a ton of instruments. Now I get the feeling this record is just as ambitious but in a different way, because it seems like you took an almost traditionally rock set of instruments and wanted to do different things with your rock instruments, apart from that synth used in the intro to "Mighty Wings".

It's not a synth. It's Dan's guitar, but it runs through a system that generates synth-like tones, but it's actually Dan's guitar. There are no synthesizers - there's a piano on "Sarah O'Sarah", there are keyboards on "Conquerors". That's partly down to budget restrictions, we couldn't afford a sitar or some special bagpipes or anything like that, but also I think it's important to make sure the sound on record still works for the four of us when we play live. I've always been pretty resistant to the idea of having a fifth person on stage, I don't like it - when I go see a band, I want to see the band, nobody else. We tried to make sure we could get a sound we'd actually be able to reproduce live.

There's a lot of variety in your vocal delivery, much more than in the past. There's your trademark falsetto, of course, but there's also a lot, lot more - sometimes you sound angry, and I've never heard you sing that angry before.

It's strange, what happened was more or less that, while I was writing, I had to come up with melodies and I'd pretend to be an angry character, and then I thought, there's no reason why I can't actually sing this song like that. Then I thought about Freddie Mercury, he used to sing with so many different vocal tones, sometimes even within the same song, he really changed character. So I'm really happy to explore this side of things more, singing in different styles and even doing thematic monologues. I think I'll develop this even further in the future. This is the first album where we've experimented in this direction.

The only song I found hard to appreciate at first, but which is starting to grow on me now, is actually the opening track and first single, "Barbarian". I was quite surprised when I listened to the rest of the album, because I found "Barbarian" the least immediate track, yet it was the first one released to let people know Darkness were back. How did you choose that song?

We chose it on purpose, because we didn't want to put out an easy song, one that could get played on the radio. Some people might have seen that as a failure, because if you have a radio song and it's too simple, people would say "oh, your first single is just radio-friendly stuff". Instead, this was the chance to share something more challenging, something that would take a bit more effort from our fans to appreciate. It was a deliberate choice.

So, based on what you said before, we can expect the live sound to be pretty faithful to the record.

Yeah, I think you'd be surprised at how close we're able to get.

And are you still the same charismatic frontman on stage, with the costume changes and your moves?

We still have to think about how to approach the visual side of the live show, but yes, we're the same Darkness with new songs that we're really keen to play. We've already done a few shows in Ireland and we played "Barbarian", "Open Fire", "Roaring Waters", "Hammer And Tongs" — we played these songs live and for me they went really well. It was tough because when you play a song and no one has ever heard the record, you really have to stay faithful to the track, it's tiring because you have to sing so clearly, so precisely. Once the song is out, you've got fans making noise and it doesn't matter if you skip a beat, but anyway we did it and it was a lot of fun playing the new songs.

When you read the reviews of the record, you'll probably read that your musical style is clearly connected to the kind of music called adult-oriented rock. Would you be happy to be described purely as an adult-oriented rock band, or would you want people to understand there's something more to it?

I think adult-oriented rock is a very broad spectrum, and probably most of our influences come from within that spectrum. So I'm fine with that as far as it goes. There are a couple of things that influence us which fall outside of it, but not enough to warrant excluding us from that spectrum. So, if we really have to find a category, adult-oriented rock is fine, because there's so much freedom within it.

Listening to the record and trying to pay attention to the lyrics, it seems to me that their style is more or less what stays the same across all the albums. Epic attitude, grand scenarios, tumultuous events...

Before we started writing, I'd started writing a lot of poems and I was determined to have them as a working basis, so that when truly complete ideas emerged they could stand on their own in a poetic context. I wanted the lyrics to be strong from that point of view. So, I had books of material to draw from, and when something came up I was able to pick out the lyrics. It's still the same style as in the past, but this time I was much better prepared, so I'm particularly proud of it. I think it's a Darkness record, but in high definition.

When you read or listen to interviews with famous bands, they often say that to become successful you have to want it from the very beginning, from when you're playing in a tiny rehearsal room in a basement, playing just for yourself. Is it the same for Darkness?

Yes. There's ambition in Darkness, for sure, but it's funny because we never imagined we'd become this famous. But there was always a goal. At first it was getting a record deal, and we got that, then it was playing Reading, got that, then headlining Reading, got that.

I saw you at T In The Park in 2004, do you remember that time?

Yes, it was great, we were headliners there too. So the goals we'd set for ourselves had been achieved and now I think we're ambitious in a different way, I think those kinds of challenges aren't there anymore, no one dares say things like that anymore, it's more a case of we'll make a record we're proud of, full stop, that's what we can do, that's what we have control over. It's ambition, but in a creative sense, and we're happy to work with labels that simply appreciate where we come from and don't even try to interfere with the creative process.

Many famous artists have an opinion on streaming services for listening to music. Some don't like the business model and the cut that goes to artists and so on. Do you care about this, do you have an opinion, or do you just think people are free to listen to music however they prefer?

I got into this Spotify thing and I had an account and now I don't have it anymore, because it makes music something totally disposable and that's a shame. I've never talked about it much, but one of the things I've done over the last couple of years is buy a turntable again, and I'm really glad vinyl is becoming popular again, the ritual of putting on a record is something special. I have a young daughter, she's a year and a half old, we put records on together and she gets excited watching the needle drop and then she dances. So, now, records are part of her growing up, just as they were part of mine, and I think things eventually come back around. We're lucky to have probably been the last rock band able to spend money on a music video. In medieval times, before turntables existed, musicians provided a service, you'd get paid with a chicken to play a song and live music was the service you provided. Then turntables came along and there was ownership over what got recorded, so music became a product. Now music is a service again, because you have to do gigs to survive. I think there's something special about records.

The photo above is by Scarlet Page

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