In 2005, the irreverent glam-rock band The Darkness were on the verge of releasing One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back, the follow-up to their No 1 debut Permission to Land. The band were unlikely superstars, riding the wake of the smash hit single “I Believe In a Thing Called Love”, with its falsetto earworm of a tune, and dazzling in their sequin-laden neo-glam style against the backdrop of a chart scene otherwise dominated by sleek American RnB and selfconscious adolescent nu-metal. It was the all-important second album moment, at a time when CDs were still a thing, charts still mattered, and music leaks were a big deal that could cost you a lot of revenue. So when a copy of One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back turned up on eBay before the record had even been released, the band’s flamboyant frontman Justin Hawkins bid on it and won. It cost him £350.
“Sometimes you gotta take matters into your own hands,” he says with a shrug. He wanted to know who the leaker was, and went full Columbo on it. It turned out – and here’s where I shift a little uncomfortably in my seat – to be a copy that had been sent to a journalist. “They’d reviewed the album and slagged it off, but it was still sealed! So they hadn’t listened to the record. You can’t slate an album without listening to it, then sell the f***ing copy before it’s even out!”
Evidently, a music critic had assumed that the second album was a half-baked replica of the novelty-adjacent pop-rock that had made The Darkness one of the biggest bands on the planet, before filing their review and putting Animal Collective back on the three-disc changer. The dismissive attitude this exemplified, of both wilfully misunderstanding the band and refusing to afford them critical respect, is one that has dogged The Darkness throughout their entire career. “[Even when we were huge], people were accusing us of not taking it seriously,” Justin recalls. The band’s potent mix of glam rock, stage theatrics and novelty vibes left A&Rs cold in the hyper-image-conscious era of the early 2000s. Nick Raphael, who was a big cheese at Sony at the time, famously recalled: “The business as a whole thought they were uncool. In fact, people were saying that they were a joke and that they weren’t real.”
And yet, not only are The Darkness very real, but against the odds and the prediction of many a music journalist, they have survived. Yesterday they released their eighth studio album, Dreams on Toast, a blistering whirlwind of sound that darts from anthemic stadium rock to Seventies pop, heartfelt Beatlesy ballads, and occasionally even a bit of country. “There’s [experimental] stuff that I’ve been trying to do since the first record that I’m finally allowed to do,” Justin says. The sonic footprint contains monologues and weird noises hidden deep inside the arrangements.
“No disrespect to the noble profession of journalism,” Justin adds from his studio in Switzerland, leaning back in his swivel chair with sinewy arms raised above his head. “I’ve always adored you guys, but some of you have little to no scruples. And I spotted that on eBay, and decided to deal with it, really.”
It’s almost impossible to quantify just how big The Darkness were in 2003. “I Believe In a Thing Called Love” was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, a song with such staying power that last year Taylor Swift was filmed singing it to Travis Kelce at the US Open. Permission to Land stayed at the top of the UK album charts for four weeks, and that December, the band released a Christmas track rife with juvenile double entendre that has since entered the realm of classic festive songs – “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)”. They raked in three Brit Awards, two Kerrang! trophies, and an Ivor Novello, and, by the end of that year, found themselves to be bona fide rock stars.
It was an unlikely trajectory for a band from Lowestoft, which had formed just three years previously and comprised brothers Justin and Dan Hawkins, Frankie Poullain on bass, and a schoolfriend of the Hawkins brothers, Ed Graham (who was replaced briefly in 2014 by Emily Dolan Davies before Rufus Tiger Taylor joined the following year). Much of their rise came on the back of their attention-grabbing parodying of traditional rock’n’roll tropes and their blistering live shows, which amplified the music’s catchy hooks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge lyrics. They were having the time of their lives, and their refusal to toe the party line in terms of what a British indie band should look and sound like is precisely what made them so alluring.
It didn’t last long. By 2005, around the point when Justin was buying back his own promo CD, the wheels were starting to come off. The second album didn’t do well, and the excesses of the rock’n’roll lifestyle led Justin down the path to addiction, alcoholism, and rehab. In 2006, the band split, and the dream seemed to be over.
They reconciled in 2011 and quietly built back up some of the momentum they’d seemingly frittered away. In the 14 years between then and now, they’ve recorded six studio albums, occasionally courting controversy with titles like such as 2019’s Easter Is Cancelled. They largely existed in that liminal space between nostalgia act and current band, but mainly they felt beholden to their former selves, and to fans who wanted more of what had made them big in 2003.
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Justin dismisses much of what The Darkness produced during this period. “I think when we re-formed, we were very apologetic, we were very conflict-shy,” he says, when I ask whether the band were fixated on recreating the same alchemy that had made them so mesmeric at the start of their career. “We were making albums that didn’t really challenge anybody. Every record is like a journal entry for every band – and you could tell from those records we weren’t really firing on all cylinders. We weren’t fighting for the things that we’re passionate about. I don’t really care to listen to them at all. But now we know what we’re supposed to do is be The Darkness, I’ve completely changed my feelings about it. Now I want The Darkness to be like an art thing.”
One new track, in particular, backs up this change in approach. “I Hate Myself” is a roiling rock song with a jazzy, wedding-disco energy and lyrics thick with self-loathing. The video features Justin in prosthetics that suggest a heavily Botoxed, homogenised Instagram aesthetic gone way too far. He spends the video sitting in front of a white backdrop, smoking a rollie while the song whips around him. The radical thing about the video is… nothing happens. It promises that at some point, there will be some sort of epiphany or resolution, but nothing comes.
“It’s obviously somebody who’s really suffering with some body-image issues and self-hatred, and it’s mental-health stuff, you know? This is proper,” he says, vaguely gesturing at what is quite a broad spectrum of societal issues. “We’re doing something [else]. I think it’s quite interesting.” The reaction among fans has been largely positive, but a vocal minority were scathing. “And then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s become an egomaniac. You must be back on the drugs,’ and all this kind of stuff,” Justin adds with a guttural half-laugh. “F*** you, guys. F*** you. So I don’t play for the audience any more, and I don’t write for them. I think we’ve ended up with some real bangers, and stuff that sounds different to what we normally do.”
Justin is talking over Zoom from the studio where he records vlogs for his YouTube channel, Justin Hawkins Rides Again – rollie constantly in hand, hair pointing in all directions. A producer friend suggested he start the channel in 2021, and Justin thought it might be an outlet for his “encyclopedic asshole knowledge” about music. His outspoken rants and thoughtful, knowledgeable deep dives into artists as disparate as Lola Young and Viagra Boys have proven wildly popular. With 600,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, the channel has an entire subsection called “Music Industry Observations” that has probably got one or two execs feeling a little hot under the collar, while a vlog about Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” is titled ‘I’m sorry, it’s just s***’. The channel has helped to shift perspective on Justin: it’s hard to dismiss someone who knows this much about his own profession. “It’s been interesting,” he agrees. “I mean, people don’t think I’m as much of a dumbass as they thought I was in 2003.”
All the same, Justin remains afflicted by the 21st-century curse of being wilfully misinterpreted whenever it suits the internet. I’ve been specifically asked not to bring up Liam Payne, and I haven’t. Instead, Justin raises the topic himself. In March 2023, he posted a video titled “What a F***ing Muppet” in which he deconstructed Payne’s appearance on Logan Paul’s podcast. Payne was in full bro mode, and Justin wasn’t impressed, mocking his attitude and answers and calling him arrogant. When Payne died in October 2024, the video went viral. Justin faced a backlash and calls to take the video down. He refused.
“[The way Payne came across on that podcast] did not look to me as a grim portent for an untimely demise,” he says. “Instead it looked like somebody like me, trying to make an impression in an interview and getting it wrong and coming across like David Brent. And it was funny, because it was funny, you know? So I laughed at it.” He argues that to have taken it down in the wake of Payne’s death would have been the equivalent of rewriting history. “Why would I lie about having laughed at that stuff? I didn’t see [Payne] as an individual who was in a decline; it didn’t look like that thing when you voyeuristically and morbidly watch someone like Amy Winehouse fall apart and go, ‘Oh, it’s only [a matter] of time’ instead of trying to intervene.
“And, you know, I’ve been in a situation not too dissimilar to that myself, where the world is waiting for me to f*** it up and waiting for me to die or something. Some people think I did die. Some people are surprised I’m still going. So I think I’ve got a reasonable perspective to be able to look at a thing like that and make a judgement – and I didn’t see it. I’m sad I didn’t see it – but I’m not going to take it down and pretend I didn’t laugh at those things. That’s accountability, isn’t it, in a way.”
Actually, Justin is so sure of his motives and his beliefs, he thinks cancelling can be a good thing. “It’s an important thing, it’s a good tool. It’s something that people deserve sometimes – especially in the music industry, there’s a lot of real, real assholes. Since the beginning of recorded music, there’s been really exploitative behaviours and abhorrent misogyny, homophobia, racism… All that stuff has been rampant. And until you start punishing people for it, how’s it gonna stop?”
Now 50, Justin still radiates pent-up energy, though he now lives a relatively settled life: sober, vegan, spending much of his time in rural Switzerland when he’s not touring or on the promo trail. He recently split from his wife of 14 years, with whom he has a daughter, and is loved up in a new relationship with the singer Desiree Mishoe. If Justin speaks in thesis-length paragraphs, his brother Dan, guitarist and producer, is a tweet. He joins us partway through the interview from his West Sussex studio, which he keeps strewn with Christmas lights all year round. How is Dan feeling about the album? “Really good, yeah.” The discussion gets a little more esoteric as the brothers play off each other, and the possibility of The Darkness: The Musical even raises its head thanks to a song Dan makes up on the spot.
Yet the big questions tend to be tackled by Justin. In 2023, the band released a documentary titled Welcome to The Darkness. It told the story of a band on the comeback trail, who aren’t above playing to a room of five people; the underdogs in a feelgood narrative arc – with an affectionate but slightly condescending air. When I ask what the band learnt about themselves from watching their own documentary, there’s an awkward pause that I hadn’t really been expecting, and Justin says, “Want me to handle this one, Dan?”
They weren’t happy, basically. Once again, The Darkness weren’t being taken seriously. “It wasn’t [meant to be] a mockumentary. It wasn’t supposed to be This Is Spinal Tap: it wasn’t really supposed to be about the narrative,” Justin begins. “It was supposed to be a kind of set of character studies.” It seems that behind the scenes, decisions were made that morphed it into “one of those, ‘Oh, they were really, really big and then Justin took all the drugs and then they f***ed it up’ narratives”.
As soon as the band saw the first edit, they were devastated. “I was upset by it,” Justin admits. “So Dan steams in, as my brother, like he always does, and says, ‘Right, we’re not f***ing doing this any more,’ and tried to make it go away. So I think what I learnt was… you can’t f*** with brothers.” The final result is “a bit more sympathetic to who we really are”, but it still doesn’t feel true to the band, as far as the Hawkins brothers are concerned. The Darkness are happy to laugh with us, but like anyone, they hate to be laughed at. “In this life of ours, when we’re all together, we just have such a laugh,” adds Dan. “We don’t take anything seriously, really; it’s about having fun making each other laugh. And they just didn’t show that at all.”
It’s tempting to see Dreams on Toast, with its discomfiting undertones and willingness to throw the proverbial spaghetti at the wall, as the sound of the band starting over. Will they be taken seriously this time? Maybe. Will they shrug it off if they’re not? Probably. The record ends with a beautiful, weird song called “Weekend In Rome”; it’s part big Disney flourish, part “musical Jurassic Park”, according to Justin, and at one point even features Stephen Dorff reading Justin’s poetry written off the cuff and recorded in 10 magical minutes. It’s self-assured, and weird, and kind of cool, and kind of silly.
“It’s…” Justin struggles to reach for the words that really get his meaning across. “It’s… it’s The Darkness, Jim, but not as we know it.”
‘Dreams on Toast’, the new album by The Darkness, is out now
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