“WE DELIVER ROCK BEFORE BREAKFAST!” A strong claim to make by any standard, but watch the demented Spinal Tap cabaret – The Darkness - opening act, Pyramid Stage, Friday Morning – and any thoughts of grabbing something from the Jordan’s Country Crisp tent are vaporised in an atomic explosion of metal riffery and industrial strength hairspray.
Man, I don’t know...some people say The Darkness are a über-camp novelty metal pastiche, all mouth and no spandex; others, that they’re deadly serious about what they do and how they do it, but God alone knows how a straight face can be maintained when every heinous cliché and crotch bulging rock pose is being thrown out at you. I loved it.
Yeah, because that’s what reviewers are supposed to do, isn’t it? Go and see something that should, by all rights, have been drowned at birth and rave about it because then it looks like they know something you don’t, that you aren’t cool enough to know what’s REALLY going on...I’d read enough about The Darkness to think that maybe they sucked just enough to be embraced by the trend setter types, like an embarrassing cousin at a wedding: You don’t really want to talk to him but he’s so pathetic that you feel you owe him at least that much for having the balls to turn up at all.
But none of this crappy one-upsmanship can withstand 45 minutes of The Darkness. Even if you hate metal and despise Queen’s flamboyance, even if The Darkness do turn out to be a bunch of clowns, I really dunno how anybody can fail to have an awesome time and simply smile.
Its all here – the falsettos, the two guitar-harmonised riff, the wind milling, the strutting, the handle-bar moustaches, the guitar behind the head, the costume changes, the mullets, the arse hugging spandex and as the sky turned an ominous shade of grey The Darkness cranked the amps to eleven and gave the people one of the highlights of the festival.
“Give me a D, give me an ARKNESS!” Head ‘Ness Justin Hawkins hollers, sounding not unlike the roadie burnout from Wayne’s World 2, before launching into another song taken from their debut album Permission To Land and the murky vaults of their back catalogue. Their recent single, ‘Growing On Me’, gets the second loudest reception of the gig, topped only by the inspired metal re-construction of ‘Street Spirit’ by ‘The Radioheads’. Any words of mine flail and wither at trying to describe what it sounded like...Justin’s voice is incredible, scraping at notes that Thom Yorke himself could only dream of; the hair flew and the BPM blew off the chart.
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If you’re going to ape a musical genre, you better be one hairy mother of an axe-man if you’re taking on metal. Fortunately, The Darkness are a hairy bunch of mothers. Lightening solo’s erupt from nowhere, stop, ignite somewhere else. Between songs Justin struts around like Mick Jagger, jamming away to himself, fighting some kind of savage axe-battle with the ghosts of a thousand dead, bloated hard-rocking casualties of war.
And they’re spent...the obligatory end of gig soloing freak out bridging the five minute mark...there’s high fives and strutting and they’re gone in a whine of feedback, off to revise from the Oxford Dictionary Of Motley Crüe Groupie Abuse. The clouds burst and the stinging rain swirls down. And like I was saying before, this isn’t some oh-so-trendy thing to say, but The Darkness really was one of the peaks of the festival. They came on first, knew nobody really cared, and branded a burning devil horn on the forehead of every bleary-eyed punter watching, like some kind of drug ravaged 1980’s Zorro.
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