Let there be Darkness

THERE are thousands of people who would love to be where I am today. They would give their eye teeth, and the eye teeth of a bat, after biting off its head. They are quite literally dying to be in my shoes, dying in a glorious dry-ice hell. And they’d gladly bring their daughters to the slaughter as well if it meant they could be listening to the first playback of the Christmas single by The Darkness.

"Here it comes now," says Frankie Poullain, the Scots-born bassist with the band being hailed by many as the saviours of rock’n’roll. I imagine him to be activating a volume lever, as big as the handle on a garden spade, in the manner of Smashie & Nicey. Then, down the telephone line, a force-10 guitar squall erupts.

It’s a true Spinal Tap moment: The Darkness are in a car, singing along to a tape of ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)’, which is being played to me, in late summer, via a mobile belonging to possibly the only man to hail from Milnathort who sports a bandana and a gringo moustache.

But then things get really Tap-like. Singer Justin Hawkins grabs the phone and, with his disembodied self still yodelling in the background, asks if I’m recording - and therefore potentially bootlegging - this exclusive preview. I am, but assure him I have no intention of attempting to flog it on eBay. "Sorry mate, but we can’t be too careful," says Hawkins, who then cuts himself off in his prime, as if he was strung out on a rack in a torture-chamber and a giant swinging axehead had just sliced through his testicles.

The copyright anxiety is no mere pose - The Darkness are that big. If you haven’t already guessed, they’re heavy metal - high-camp heavy metal. Some people are trying to work out if they’re for real, or just having a laugh in spray-on spandex, but they’re outnumbered by The Children Of The Darkness, who’ve witnessed the band steal the show at almost every summer festival they’ve played. They’ve also helped propel the band’s debut album, Preparing To Land, to the No 1 spot, from where the group look down on the rest of the charts in classic, legs-wide-open pose. Meanwhile, the parents of The Children smile knowingly. They remember when all music was like this.

Today, The Darkness are en route to London’s Abbey Road Studios to record the B-side to the yuletide ditty. The previous night, the band were up for the Mercury Music Award, missed out to Dizzee Rascal, decided by unanimous band vote that the young rapper was a deserving winner - and ended up getting horrendously drunk.

"There was a food fight," says Poullain, previously coy about his age but now admitting to being 32, "and my woman got hit on the head with some green beans. Then later, when we were outside, the paparazzi took our pictures because they thought - wrongly - that we were having an argument. All of us in the band are having to learn about this showbiz malarkey as we go along."

As a would-be monster of rock, Poullain has got the moves down right. In soul music, a member of the fairer sex is "girl", in R&B "babe", in rap "bitch", in soft-rock "lady" - but in heavy metal she is always, always "woman". The bass guitarist has also formulated his look from what seem like impeccable HM sources, for when I ask him if he borrowed his headgear from Axl Rose of Guns n Roses and his tache from Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, he pauses for a reverential moment or two. "Thanks, man," he says, "those are big compliments."

Meanwhile, the 27-year-old Hawkins takes seriously the duties of frontman, focal point of the band. When he’s not stripped to the waist, bearing his chest to the wind-machine, he’s (almost) wearing a low-slung, leopard-print catsuit and matching boxer boots. All of this, everything about The Darkness, is classic heavy metal and a lot of care, attention and love has gone into the group’s creation.

So when they get labelled a joke band, as happened for the umpteeth time in the aftermath of the Mercurys, does it hurt?

"Nah, not at all," says Hawkins when I catch up with him later at his hotel. "Every morning I wake up and I say to myself: ‘Numero Uno.’ Then I dust off my boots and walk out the front door whistling."

If they are a joke, then they’re a very good one. But now would not be a good time to admit they’ve been winding everyone up. With record sales plummeting, The Darkness are just too important to the music industry, so they’ve probably been made to promise they’ll take the secret to the grave.

Judging by the video for their single, ‘Growing On You’, the fourpiece would have us believe they’re the offspring of pterodactyls, as they hatch out of giant eggs onto the screen - real rock dinosaurs. In fact, Hawkins, his younger brother Dan (guitar) and Ed Graham (drums) grew up in the unlikely, unrock’n’roll surroundings of Lowestoft, Britain’s most easterly town. But Poullain’s upbringing was exotic - certainly by the standards of Milnathort amid Perthshire’s gently rolling hills.

Half-French, he’s the son of a noted classical musician - and the step-brother of the stand-up comedian Phil Kay - so at one time he wasn’t even a household name in his own household. "Dad was a member of the Royal Philharmonic, but he left them in acrimonious circumstances and formed the Edinburgh Quartet. When I was seven, he walked out on the family as well and really left us up shit creek. We had to give up a lovely house on a farm and move into the town.

"Dad lives in the Caribbean now - he’s a sailor and a pretty far-out guy. I haven’t seen him for a while - we had a major falling-out - so I’m pretty sure he knows nothing of what’s become of me."

In the credits for The Darkness’s fast-selling album, Poullain pays warm tribute to his mother, Catherine. "She’s an amazing woman. Our family’s riddled with divorce and I have seven brothers or half-brothers and mum raised us pretty much singled-handed. When dad left, she worked in the petrol station so we could eat, but then she went to university to learn foreign languages and is now a top tour guide."

Almost as influential to the young Poullain was the uncle, a communist and a biker, who roared into Milnathort from Italy one day with a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall in his napsack. "I loved that album, memorised all the words and the liner notes. It was produced by Bob Ezrin, so imagine how thrilled I was, turning up at the studios to do the Christmas record and finding him at the controls."

So what does Phil Kay make of The Darkness? "We’ve always been very supportive of each other," says Poullain. "I was around when he was trying to get started in comedy and he knows we’ve always been serious about our music. We take everything seriously, apart from ourselves. Although obviously heavy metal throws up certain comic possibilities..."

Moving to Edinburgh, where he attended the Royal High School, the teenage Poullain would play air-guitar to Deep Purple, Rush and Queen. A couple of hundred miles away, the bands that mattered to Hawkins were Aerosmith, Whitesnake and Thunder. "Most of the other guys in my school liked cooler stuff," he admits. "They thought I was a complete twat and there’s probably some truth in that."

But a born showman, too. The stage-humping, star-jumping singer claims he’s not fazed by large crowds because poor eyesight stops him from seeing beyond the first five rows. But when the band supported Robbie Williams at Knebworth this summer, he had 120,000 people hanging on his every high-pitched word.

He gives good quote. "Cock rock is our calling," he’s fond of saying. After the band finished another warm-up slot at Wembley Arena recently, he shouted: "Enjoy the Leppard!" The headliners that night were actually Deep Purple, but the audience got the joke.

About 20 years ago, Hawkins would probably have been greeted with stunned silence. Heavy metal bands and their followers used to take themselves terribly seriously. Making fun of such sacrilegious music would have been deemed a profanity, but then Spinal Tap changed all that - thank God.

The Darkness are putting the irony into Iron Maiden. They’re GayC/DC. But while they might give the impression of having been dreamed up overnight by a creative team on the orders of a desperate music industry, they’ve "paid their dues", in rockbiz parlance.

"There was one night in Wolverhampton where we played to only five people," remembers Poullain, who lists drug-dealer and landscape-gardener among his previous jobs (again, very Spinal Tap).

"My mobile phone went off during the gig and I answered it. It was my mum. But even in those days we believed in ourselves. I’d be lying if I said we thought we’d end up making an album that’s probably going to sell a million copies, but we knew we had good craftsmanship."

Craftsmanship. Only true heavy metal artistes use such terminology. And The Darkness surely can’t be faking it because they genuinely seem to believe in the awesome power of songs like ‘Love On The Rocks With No Ice’. Poullain again: "I think the reason people are turning on to us is that everyone’s sick of all the angst in music. For too long, mediocre talents have taken themselves far too seriously, feeding off the remains of the Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley legacy, and the public want to see and hear a band who are so intent on having the time of their lives."

The Darkness are living the gonzo dream. Their backstage rider includes absinthe but also fruit smoothies, so they’re in no hurry to join "that stupid club". They want to stick around long enough to, as they say, "crack" America.

Every other night, it seems, they get to hang out with a rock god. And it must be strange being the Rolling Stones and watching from the wings while Justin Hawkins performs a better Mick Jagger than the man himself. "Maybe he felt like he was watching his son win the egg-and-spoon race at his public school," says Poullain. "Or maybe he was seriously freaked out."

Poullain hasn’t been back to Milnathort in a while but is planning a trip soon. They’ll probably put him on the front page of the Perthshire Advertiser. Every time his band feature on the cover of Kerrang! it flies out of the shops.

"They’re back there this week - we love them," says Dave Everley, deputy editor of the heavy metal mag. "There’s an element of knowingness about them and their tongues are firmly planted in their cheeks. But they’re also fantastic musicians."

And if they do turn out to be a joke band - satirists not satanists, whose backward messages read: "Ha, ha ha! Just kidding!" - he for one won’t feel conned.

"I wouldn’t mind that. They’ve four completely over-the-top characters who’ve given lots of people a laugh. Personally I can’t wait for their triple concept album - it’s going to be a classic..."

I Believe In A Thing Called Love is released on September 22. The Darkness play The Barrowlands, Glasgow on October 17