‘Making it’ is a lot like an endurance event: it’s a triathlon of vocation, desperation and balls. If I was being cheesy, I’d say Dan had the vocation (talented and doing it for the right reasons), I had the desperation (getting on a bit and with a point to prove to my dad) and Justin had the balls (space-hoppers). As for Ed Graham, a hard-drinking but loveable school friend of theirs chosen to be the Darkness drummer, he was just desperate for the vacation, and maybe some cheese balls into the bargain.
If you are driven by only one of these factors, then you are doomed to fail. You may as well enjoy that endless vacation and a family-size box of cheese balls. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing: at the end of the day, we are all bitches to the record industry. And the record-company bosses are pimps who believe that the most important thing is to put on a proud face when sucking the collective cock of the masses.
London’s full of bed-sit geniuses going nowhere. And the other type – stubbornly determined ‘Johnny no talents’ ploughing a fruitless furrow. The former have vocation and the latter have desperation in spades. Of course, for desperation you can just as easily read ‘determination’, but the fact remains that there’s nothing sadder than unfulfilled dreams and, when it comes to fulfilling your dreams, chemistry is everything.
To some, our uncanny chemistry was a happy accident, but there was nothing accidental about Dan answering his vocation to be the guitarist. It takes talent to be the guitarist in a rock band, after all. Then there was Justin, with his balls, and only too delighted to put them on the line. Lastly there was myself as a bass player. If you’re so bloody minded that you can’t see you’re unsuited to performing in a glam-metal outfit, you’ll do anything, even play bass guitar, just to prove a point. As this book progresses, we’ll try to discover what that point was.