Music magazines like to publish supposedly embarrassing photos of bands in their previous incarnations. The Stone Roses were once an embarrassing Goth band and Jimi Hendrix dutifully wore a suit and tie serving as a back-up session guitarist for sixties soul singers. Even Pete Doherty played in a dodgy school band once – apparently they were called Baby Shameless and legend has it they still turn up for the odd gig from time to time. (If you’re reading this online, you may have to adjust the joke filter on Outlook Express so this one gets through.)
However, just like Wet Wet Wet – who reportedly started life playing Joy Division covers (presumably as Dry Dry Dry) before Marti Pellow’s perma-grin lent them a white-soul direction – The Darkness band members found themselves becoming progressively more embarrassing in order to make it. There were key differences, of course: our ace in the pack was Justin Hawkins and his poison was the gack,* whereas grinning Marti (being a Glaswegian), at one time in his life, admitted to preferring the smack. What is it with guys who smile all the time?
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, our former guise was a band that was kind of spontaneously planned. Justin Hawkins was on keys and second guitar, with Dan Hawkins on lead guitar and yours truly on bass duties. Two South London likely lads filled in on drums (Steve Sergeant) and vocals (Paul O’Keefe). An accountant at Savage And Best, Music Management and PR, heard our cassette and liked what she heard. Her name was Sue Whitehouse, and she decided to get out from behind her desk and look after us.
If I told you that the best soundbite our PR guy could muster up was the hugely underwhelming ‘Like Rick Astley fronting the Pixies’, then that should give you a rough idea of why, like almost all other bands will tell you, ‘We nearly made it.’ That, of course, translates as: ‘We failed.’
The fact is, we were much of a much-ness. Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. But the point I’m really trying to make is that our previous incarnation, Empire, was a million miles away from what became The Darkness. You could say we didn’t make it because we weren’t embarrassing enough. Or that, when it comes to music taste, one man’s cheese is another man’s meat.
Truth be told, sometimes you just have to make a fool of yourself in order to entertain other people. And, if you try to be cool, you just end up like everyone else. Therefore, it’s plainly obvious that ‘embarrassing’ is the real cool.
* ‘Gack’ is slang for cocaine, as is ‘Snow White’, ‘Party Powder’, ‘Moon Dust’, ‘Ching’, ‘Bolivian Marching Powder’ and a lot of other tiresome references to impoverished South American countries. In fact, cocaine tries so hard to be interesting, you mighty say ‘the powder protesteth too much’.