DAN HAWKINS REVISITS THE MURKY MUSICAL LANDSCAPE THAT SOMEHOW GAVE WAY TO THE DARKNESS’S 2003 BREAKTHROUGH RECORD, PERMISSION TO LAND
By Andrew Daly
NEWS + NOTES
BEFORE DAN AND Justin Hawkins became modern-day gods of glam with the release of 2003’s Permission to Land, things hadn’t gone to plan. That’s not to say that Dan, who was working as a session player, and Justin, his older brother, who was making waves in the jingles game, had failed. It’s more to say that the dream of becoming heroes via hedonism hadn’t yet materialized.
“It’s probably important to remember that we’d pretty much given up by the time we started this band,” Dan says. “We’d been in all sorts of different bands, and there were a few different incarnations of the Darkness before we were the Darkness. We always seemed to be chasing the tail of what was popular, but it just wasn’t working out.”
In retrospect, Hawkins’ admission of near-defeat is hard to fathom, given the breakneck success he’d experience in the wake of Permission to Land. Then again, the Darkness were literal outliers in the early 2000s, when boy bands, the garage revival and the sad tail end of nu-metal reigned supreme.
“We weren’t being true to ourselves,” Hawkins says. “We weren’t being honest, so we decided to try one more time, but this time, we’d do the stuff we loved. This was the stuff we were brought up on, like Seventies glam rock. Don’t get me wrong — I loved Radiohead, and Coldplay put on a great live show, but that dominated the U.K., and that was the big reason we hadn’t done what we loved. A lot of miserable-sounding stuff dominated the scene, and what we wanted to do wasn’t popular.”
The position of making an old-school glam rock album in the early 2000s no doubt seemed wild to most, as evidenced by the fact that there was no buzz surrounding the band and that “no more than two labels” showed interest. It seemed the Darkness were seen as decidedly uncool.
It’s a good thing the Hawkins brothers were resourceful, as no label would have them, and no big-time budget would be available to record the album that would lead them to infamy. “We were lucky,” Hawkins says. “Justin had been making money writing music for adverts, so we could purchase instruments and get some time in a small studio in North London called Chapel. Once we were in there, it [Permission to
