A few years ago, an interviewer asked The Darkness’ Dan and Justin Hawkins a question that cut close to the bone: “What was it like when you were making hit records? Did it feel better then than it does now?”
“We still make hit albums,” Dan shot back, quick as a flash. “It’s just that no c**t fucking buys them.”
A less sweary version of that line is the knockout punch at the heart of Walking Through Fire, an exuberant glam-tinged arena rocker from The Darkness’s eighth album, the excellently named Dreams On Toast. It’s an outrageously great record that includes anthemic songs about farting before sex, rivalries between electrical shops and even, on orchestral closing ballad Weekend In Rome, a spoken word part from a real-life Hollywood actor, namely Backbeat and True Detective star Stephen Dorff.
Anyway, Walking Through Fire. This is a song that humorously but brutally lays bare the travails of being in a rock band in 2025, the rock band in question being The Darkness. ‘Our next long player, it’s coming out soon,’ wails Justin. ‘I’ll be honest, I’m under the moon.’ It gets better (or worse, depending on where you stand): ‘I don’t even think my mum bought the last one.’ And a little later, there’s that zinger: ‘We never stopped making hit albums. It’s just that no one buys them any more.’
This is classic Darkness. Their gags-per-song ratio has always been way higher than other bands, but those other bands would be less inclined to hang out their dirty Y-fronts on the washing line of public scrutiny.
“No, that’s not how we operate,” says Dan Hawkins today, sitting in a basement-level boardroom of his band’s record company. “If it makes us laugh or cringe, it’s worth pursuing.”
Despite what they say, The Darkness do still make hit albums. All five of the albums they’ve released since reforming in 2011 have gone Top 20 in the UK. Three of them have gone Top 10. And Dreams On Toast? “I think it’ll go to number one,” says Dan.
He sounds confident. “I am confident. We’re up against Mumford & Sons. We’re going to beat those c**ts.”
But old fashioned chart positions are only part of the overall story. The five year gap when they didn’t exist aside, The Darkness have been consistently charismatic, funny and brilliant for more than two decades. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, The Darkness know that rock’n’roll is far too important to take seriously.
A thick black line runs down Justin Hawkins’s throat, disappearing down behind the neck of his T-shirt. A new tattoo? “Very perceptive,” he says. “Nothing gets past you. I had it done on Saturday.”
We’re speaking via Zoom, even though he’s in London today. He’s in the capital on a flying visit from Switzerland, his home for more than a decade. There are things he misses about living in the UK, but there are things he definitely doesn’t. “I don’t miss going to the hairdressers and coming out and there’s a fucking long-lenser [paparazzi] across the street from the fucking Daily Mail to rehash the drug stories,” he says. “Half the people in the village I live in don’t know who I am and the other half think, ‘There’s a rock star here, leave him alone.’”
Justin Hawkins is definitely a rock star. On stage, off stage or on his successful YouTube show Justin Hawkins Rides Again, he’s funny and charismatic, egotistical but self-aware. At gigs, he can turn a conversation with one person in the front row into a performance in its own right. Every musician starting out should be forcibly sat in front of footage of any Darkness performance between 2003 and today and told: “This is how you do it.”
All that stuff is obvious. What’s less celebrated is what a fantastically funny and unique lyricist Justin Hawkins is. It’s hard to imagine anyone else writing a song about foreplay being interrupted by a burst of flatulence brought on by the after-effects of the previous night’s rich meal (as on the new album’s appropriately breezy Hot On My Tail). Rock And Roll Party Cowboy is a spot-on caricature of the kind of big-hatted, leather-jacketed, ponytailed human cliché that bands have attracted since the dawn of time, which manages to rhyme ‘cowboy’ with ‘Tolstoy’ and throw in homoerotic allusions to ‘pool boys’.
“It’s got that gay undercurrent,” he says. “Rock can be so straight and misogynistic, it drives me mad. I wanted to subvert those tropes.”
But he’s great at using the cover of humour to smuggle in something approaching serious subjects too. Middle-aged male angst is hardly a rich seam of inspiration for most rock bands, but it’s all over Dreams On Toast, not least on Mortal Dread, a song whose ebullience masks more existential questions. ‘I wake up, I just don’t matter/Shed an invisible tear,’ sings Justin, his naturally arch delivery masking the fact that it’s a men’s mental health song.
“The world’s changing,” says Justin. “The perceptions of what’s toxic, the things you were taught to be when you were younger are now unacceptable, you’re losing your raison d’être. You get to my age and you go, ‘If I’m not a man, what am I?’”
The Darkness themselves have had their own share of existential crises over the last 25 years. An illustrated graph of their mid-2000s career looks like the Matterhorn: nobodies, biggest new band in the UK, nobodies again, all in the space of three years. It was enough to fry anyone’s mind, which is what it did to him.
Their reunion in 2011 came after Justin had gone through rehab and repaired his relationship with Dan, which had fallen apart at the end of the band’s initial run. The comeback was weirdly underwhelming: 2012’s comeback album was titled Hot Cakes, but Lukewarm Buns was closer. Follow-up The Last Of Our Kind was more like it, bristling with defiance – a quality that has come in handy at various points along the way.
“One of the first tours we did with Rufus [in 2015] was in America,” says Justin. “The tickets just weren’t selling. The promoters said, ‘If you want to make an excuse and pull out, we understand.’ We went: ‘No, we’ll come and do it; it doesn’t matter if it’s half-empty.”
Stubbornness or stupidity? Either way it paid off. “The momentum built, and by the end of it we were selling out,” he says. “We put the work in.”
Despite the tours and the Top 20 albums, Justin isn’t deluded as to the reality of The Darkness’ place in the grand scheme of things. Hence the nuclear-strength self-deprecation of Walking Through Fire – the song where he claims his mother didn’t buy their last album. Are bands not supposed to be salesmen who are hawking the rock’n’roll dream?
“I think ambition is a little bit ugly,” he counters. “When you lay stuff bare like that and you talk about the experience of doing things, that’s nearly as interesting as the music itself. If anyone is inclined to pay attention to the lyrics, they’re getting an experience of what this existence looks like and feels like.”
Did your mum really not buy your last album?
“No,” he says. “I’m pretty sure she didn’t.”
So is it actually worth being in a rock’n’roll band in 2025?
“Financially or spiritually?”
Both.
“Yes and no.”
In that order?
“No,” he says with a laugh. “Definitely the other way around.”
It’s tempting to view Frankie Poullain, moustachio’d and urbane, as a square peg in the round hole of The Darkness. The bassist is unlikely to be caught wearing a Thin Lizzy T-shirt or a catsuit; elegant vintage threads are more his style. When The Darkness unveiled a new Showaddywaddy-style synchronised dance during Walking Through Fire at an in-store gig in London before Christmas, it took all of Justin Hawkins’ powers of persuasion to get the bassist to grudgingly join in.
Except all of that ignores the fact that The Darkness are basically four very different, weirdly shaped pegs attempting to squeeze themselves into randomly misshapen holes.
“What I love most about this band, is the surreal, absurd ridiculousness of it,” says the bassist, sitting the label’s basement boardroom. “You can’t say everything we’ve done has been perfect, but we’ve always meant it. Who cares about being cool? We’ve always been uncool.”
Frankie was there even before there was a Darkness, playing alongside Dan in Empire in the late 90s. He echoes the latter’s view of the scale of the band’s mid-00s success, when they were a million-selling, Brit Award-winning hard rock juggernaut. “I’ve no idea how that happened,” he says. “I look back now and think, ‘What circumstances could have led to that?’ But we felt like we deserved some kind of accolade for all the years of sacrifice.”
That first run ended sooner for Frankie than it did the others. He left during the recording of the band’s second album, 2005’s brilliant, cocaine-encrusted blowout One Way Ticket… To Hell And Back. “I didn’t like the atmosphere, it felt wrong,” he says of the end of his original time in the band in 2005. “The love and connection we had was threatened and then poisoned and then broken.”
The years that Frankie and the others spent apart healed old wounds, though he thinks The Darkness’s reunion in 2011 was fumbled. “We managed the comeback really badly,” he says. “And it [Hot Cakes] wasn’t our best album either.” They hit their stride, he says correctly, with 2015’s Last Of Our Kind. “There was just a feeling of defiance, a lot of emotion on that. We showed people who we are just by sticking in there.”
They still argue, of course. “Oh, there are so many things to disagree about,” he says. “Videos, song order, what to play in a take, what T-shirt to wear.” But being in a band with two brothers is easier than it might seem, he says. “I looked at that psychologically when I started doing therapy, because I was sandwiched between two brothers who were very competitive when I was a kid, and I’m sandwiched between two brothers now. But they’re really creative and honourable and loyal and that always comes through in the end.”
There have been a lot of ups and downs for The Darkness since then. They’ve played their share of half-full venues on the path to today. “I feel like we’ve earned what we’ve achieved,” he says. “A lot of people would have fallen by the wayside, given up.”
Have you come close to that?
“No, never,” he says firmly.
Do you ever think, ‘What am I doing in a rock band in 2025? There are so many other things I could be doing’?
He digests the question like it’s not necessarily the dumbest thing he’s been asked this week, but is probably in the top five.
“No,” he says. “It’s the buzz. Seeing the difference you‘re making to people, the smiles on their faces. Why wouldn’t I want to be in this band?”
At the start of 2025, Dan Hawkins was considering quitting being in a band. He’d spent a year working on Dreams On Toast, not just as The Darkness’ guitarist but as the album’s producer too. This involved juggling numerous writing and recording sessions, a heavy summer festival schedule, and family commitments. And here he was at the beginning of January with two songs still to record and half an album to mix.
“I walked into my studio and thought, ‘Fuck this, I’ve hardly seen my kids over the last year, shall I just sell all this equipment and get out of the game?’” he says. “And then I remembered I’m not really qualified to do anything else.”
He’s probably joking, but Dreams On Toast did take an epic effort to make. He estimates they wrote 150 songs, the vast majority of which ended up on the cutting room floor. That’s an impressive work rate. He winces at the suggestion. “It’s a huge failure rate,” he says.
Dan is two years younger than Justin, less extroverted than his brother but no less self-deprecating. “I definitely had my head so far up my arse,” he says of the band’s success first time around. Back then, The Darkness had put in the hard yards in the pubs of London, unsuccessfully attempting to get a deal. “That’s why the first album was called Permission To Land,” he says. “We were circling for fucking years and we were never given permission to land. That success was completely against the odds.”
He can look back on the insanity of that period with some perspective. “At the height of the fame, I’d go out and meet my mates in Camden, and I’d have a security guard in the pub and a driver waiting outside the pub,” he says. “We’d have to leave after half an hour because there’d be a queue of people wanting a photograph. We’d get in the car, drive to another pub and start again.”
The Darkness’ second act is remarkable in its own, less vertiginous way. Reunions happen all the time, but few hold this long, let alone produce such a consistent – and consistently great – run of albums. “We’ve had those tough times, where we’re playing to 300 people in a 1,000 capacity venue, so we’ve got to make the most of this,” he says. “But we’ve always fought to take things up a level. We’ve worked really, really hard and we’ve seen it happen.”
Part of the credit for their longevity this time, he says, must go to Rufus Taylor, who galvanised The Darkness when he joined in 2015. “That guy does not give a flying fuck – in a really good way,” he says. “He and Justin have the same childish schoolboy mentality. They’re constantly pissing around. As a producer, it’s a pain in the arse. I’m like the supply teacher no fucker listens to.”
The best thing about The Darkness in 2025, he says, is “playing live”, which is a disappointing answer because it’s what every band says.
“Seriously,” he insists, “bands who say it’s hard being on tour can go fuck themselves. Being at home, having three kids, being stuck in a studio for 16 hours a day for a year, that’s hard. Being on tour, that’s a fucking holiday.”
By the time you read this, The Darkness have finished their most recent fucking holiday, an old-school 21-date UK tour. It included a show at Wembley Arena – the first time they’ve headlined that prestigious venue since the glory days of the mid-00s.
“I mean, headlining Wembley, that’s the dream, isn’t it?” he says. “Five years ago, would I have thought we could play Wembley? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not.”
Are you surprised that The Darkness are still here, nearly 14 years after getting back together?
“It’s getting ridiculous now, isn’t it?” he says. “We’re the last men standing, unless some new wave of rock comes in and kicks the door down, which it doesn’t look like doing. Who knows whether trends will change and we’ll be the ‘thing’ again.”
And will you? “Probably not, but you’ve got to be in it to win it.”
In April 2015, Rufus Tiger Taylor got a call from Dan Hawkins asking if he fancied joining The Darkness. The band’s most recent drummer, Emily Dolan Davies, had suddenly left the band; oh, and by the way, they had a launch gig for Last Of Our Kind the next day and they needed someone to replace her. There was just one snag: Rufus was in Sydney with his girlfriend at the time. He thought for a second, and said: “Okay, I’ll do it.”
Today Rufus looks back on the decision to hop on a plane straight away, learn a bunch of songs he’d never heard before while in the air, then land and go and play a gig with a bunch of people he’d never met before with the same laid-back attitude with which he views most things. “I thought, ‘If I say no to this, it’s gone. Just fucking do it,’” he says, taking Dan’s place in the boardroom as his dog runs around our feet and occasionally farts.
It helps that he was a fan of The Darkness long before he joined them. Taylor, the son of Queen drummer Roger Taylor, was 12 when Permission To Land was released. “The video for Growing On Me was the first thing I saw,” he says. “It was a breath of fresh air. All there was in rock was Nickelback, and it was a bit dry and commercial. The Darkness gave me everything I wanted.”
When he joined The Darkness, there was some residual love for them from first time around, but they were far from the force they had been. “They were up for the challenge,” says Taylor. His first few tours with his new bandmates were a long way from the ones he undertaken as an auxiliary member of Queen, where he played drums alongside his dad. “There was the same stuff backstage, there was just less of it,” he says wryly.
A cynical view is that Taylor’s background as the son of a rich rock star means that the stakes are lower for him. The counter argument is that if he doesn’t need the money, why would he have stuck around for 10 years? His loyalty to The Darkness was put beyond doubt three years ago. When Rufus’s friend Taylor Hawkins died in 2022, his name was supposedly in the mix as a replacement. He doesn’t deny the rumours.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a weird thing. Taylor used to joke about it with me a lot: ‘It’s time, you need to take over from me now.’ But I think it would have been too close. I look like him – a lot like him – so it would have been weird for Dave [Grohl] and the band to turn around and see that.”
He’s adamant that his personal investment in The Darkness meant that he was never going to jump ship. Justin and Dan didn’t see it like that. “They both sat me down at one point and said, ‘When Dave asks you, we think you should do it,’” says Rufus. “I was, like, ‘What?’ I was blown away by that. But I would have never done it.”
Hearing him harrumph about the state of rock today is funny. At times he sounds like a 55-year-old-man in a 34 year old’s body. “I don’t think there’s a lot of good rock bands around at the moment,” he says. “It’s a bunch of shoegazers, and there’s nothing fun about that. Regardless of where we are on the bill, or the size of the show, we’ll fucking play it like it’s Wembley Stadium, every single time.”
Does part of him wish he’d been in the band first time around to experience that huge success?
“Yeah,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s out of our reach again. I really don’t. There’s a mantle that only The Darkness can wear.”
It sounds like fighting talk, and it is. The Darkness might joke that people don’t buy the hit albums they make any more, and maybe they don’t in the numbers they did all those years ago, but that doesn’t matter. As long as The Darkness keep Darknessing, rock’n’roll is in safe hands.
Dreams On Toast is out now. Get a limited edition glow-in-the-dark cassette version of the album only through the official Classic Rock store
