It is Justin Hawkins’ birthday. He is 50 years of age today. And for almost half of that time, he has been front and centre of The Darkness. Alongside his three fellow sons of Suffolk – surely Lowestoft’s greatest export since Benjamin Britten, the famous English composer who was born in the coastal town – they take to the stage to the familiar strains of ABBA’s ‘Arrival’ before firing up The Darkness engines for a feral blast of ‘Rock and Roll Party Cowboy.’
It is the first of seven blistering tunes they play tonight that are destined for Dreams on Toast, The Darkness’s eighth album which will see the light of day come the last Friday of the month and which also lends its title to the current tour of the UK.
Justin Hawkins is determined for the new record to follow in the illustrious footsteps of the band’s seismic 2003 debut album Permission to Land and reach number one in the charts. To this end, he implores the sell-out crowd to buy a Darkness lanyard from the merch stall for the princely sum of five English pounds. This will not only furnish the buyer with a download code for Dreams on Toast it will also prevent “those right-wing, neo-Nazi pricks” Mumford & Sons from beating them to the summit of the charts.
The Darkness do not lack in confidence. After ‘Rock and Roll Party Cowboy’ and rather than leave them for an encore as most bands might do, they then play their first two charting singles, ‘Get Your Hands Off My Woman’ and ‘Growing on Me.’ During the former, riddled with industrial language, headstands from Hawkins, and the first real evidence of his incredible falsetto voice, he breaks into a call-and-response interaction with the crowd which is clearly redolent of Freddie Mercury at Live Aid 40 years earlier. Probably mindful of the tiresome comparisons that are often made between The Darkness and Queen, he then sings the opening line from the second verse of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before saying “Oh, fuck that shit.”
By then, save for his neckerchief, Justin Hawkins’ is stripped down to the waist and he and the band are really getting down to business. ‘Walking Through Fire’ – the fourth and most recent single to be taken from Dreams on Toast – sees him, his brother Dan Hawkins on guitar and bassist Frankie Poullain, who would surely be cast as the rather dandy Jason King if ever they remade the British spy-fi adventure series Department S, marching on the spot whilst choreographing the audience to do exactly the same thing. It is all hi-octane rock’n’roll married up to some rather high-class entertainment.
Drummer Rufus Taylor isn’t going to miss out on the action either as he steps out from behind his kit to take lead vocals on the power ballad ‘My Only.’ And The Darkness surely have to end their fabulous set in the only way possible with their biggest hit single, ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love.’ And of course this they do.
But wait, there is more. It is Justin Hawkins’ birthday, after all. Three more songs are to follow. ‘Weekend in Rome’ sees Hawkins – who by now has ditched the neckerchief and donned a rather fetching two-piece suit – presented with a birthday cake and the front of the stage becomes festooned with flowers. ‘I Hate Myself’ has him first twisting the night away before jitterbugging furiously back and forth across the stage. And this most wonderful of celebratory occasions then draws to a close with Hawkins astride the shoulders of a burly roadie as he is paraded through the crowd like some all-conquering Roman emperor. Fantastic fun.
Oh, and it’s St. Patrick’s Day too so who better to have opening up proceedings than Ash. Those three guys from Downpatrick, County Down have been at this game for quite some time now so know exactly what they are doing. They tear through a cracking set of pop-fuelled magic, opening with ‘Goldfinger’ from their 1996 debut, and what is surely still their best album, 1977, and ending eight songs later with ‘Burn Baby Burn’ whilst also including a raucous reading of that old Lord Kitchener calypso classic ‘Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora).’
