A photographer-turned-film-maker delivers an unmissable rockumentary about a band for whom everything went ‘horribly right’
Precisely 20 years ago, The Darkness were the biggest band in Britain — confoundingly, magnificently, and briefly. Formed in 2000 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, not traditionally a hotbed of world-frotting rock deities, by brothers Justin (vocals) and Dan Hawkins (guitar), they released their debut album, Permission to Land, in the summer of 2003. It was, in the words of Justin Hawkins, a “megasmash”.
On the back of an irresistible single, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” — “a massive, monumental, rock-classic superhit” (Justin again) — the LP went to number one, sold 1.4m copies, won three Brit awards, including best group and best album and, brief ly, made the brothers and their bandmates (bassist Frankie Poullain and original drummer Ed Graham, the first of four) world-famous. Everything had gone “horribly right” (Justin again).
Flamboyant throwbacks to the long-gone, even then, days of hair metal, cock rock, glam and every other daft and discredited (but fun!) genre of hard rock, The Darkness, depending on who one chose to believe at the time, were either a bombastic corrective to the po-faced earnestness of Nineties alt-rock, a sort ofanti-Radiohead, or they were a joke, a camp pastiche of the excesses of 1970s and 1980s guitar heroes. (Neither position accounted for the fact that they could possibly be both.) The riffs were epic, the lyrics were preposterous, the pyrotechnics were spectacular, the costumes were insane. As frontman, Justin Hawkins appeared to be simultaneously channelling Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Steven Tyler — and Dame Edna Everage.
Three years after Permission to Land took off, Justin was in rehab for addictions to alcohol and cocaine, and The Darkness had been dropped by their record label. They’d flown too close to the spotlights and become the cliché they were both satirising and celebrating. After the band officially split in 2006, the Hawkins brothers didn’t speak for years.
What happened next, and in the years following their fall from grace, as the band came back together and attempted to re-bottle lightening, is the subject of Welcome to the Darkness, a beautifully observed, funny and unexpectedly moving new documentary from British photographer and director Simon Emmett.
Almost a decade in the making (Emmett first talked to the band about working with them on a film in 2014, and he began shooting shortly afterwards), Welcome to the Darkness ticks some of the boxes of a traditional rockumentary — archive footage from the band’s imperial phase; rueful interviews about the aftermath; f lyon-the-wall rep
