TUNE-UPS 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. Then again, the Darkness were literal outliers in the early 2000s, when boy bands, the garage revival and the sad tail
