Darkness had to let fame go to their heads

Team effort: The Darkness

The Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins says his band had to let fame go their heads first time round.

The original lineup reunited in 2011 after a series of dramatic fall-outs that led to them splitting in 2006 – and he believes things had to happen that way.

Hawkins tells Billboard: “I think it went to all of our respective heads. But you’ve got to go there. What’s the point of being in a rock’n'roll band if you don’t take it to 11?

“We’ve settled into a nice groove. We feel like more of a team than we did before. Now the music is on 11, the gigs are on 11 – but the drug intake is on, like, zero to one. That’s how it should be.”

Last year The Darkness released their third album, Hot Cakes, and toured in support of pop queen Lady Gaga. Hawkins admits of those shows: “It was a really good laugh. But we were playing 45-minute sets every three days or so, which sounds like heaven but drove us a bit mad, really. We’re used to doing more.”

The band plan to tour and write for the rest of this year, with another album due out in early 2014. “I think we want to get even more old-school,” the guitarist says. “We want to make it even more of a performance record.

“We want to be really brave and do something as live as humanly possible, warts and all. We’ve lost a bit of that in music today. It’s time to get a bit of character in there – so we’ll be going for something as fucking route-one as possible.”