The Darkness opened their British tour on Tuesday with plenty to prove. The phenomenal success of their first album, Permission to Land, earned them three Brit awards in 2004 and a UK sales tally of 1.5 million copies. But the follow-up, One Way Ticket to Hell . . . and Back, released at the end of November, floundered among the heavy hitters in the Christmas chart. It peaked at No 11, and has so far sold a comparatively modest 280,000 copies.
Statistics aside, there is a nagging suspicion, still, that the Darkness cannot be considered as contenders for the long haul. It is an impression fostered to some extent by the group themselves. When the singer and guitarist Justin Hawkins stripped off his billowing top at Alexandra Palace and proudly displayed his beer belly, or broke off from singing the piano ballad Blind Man to ask “Is anybody weeping yet?”, it was hardly as if he was inviting us to take him or his songs too seriously.
But the two bands whose influence was most clearly on display in the Darkness’s music — Queen and AC/DC — were both given to absurd flights of fancy in their day and managed to sustain careers of surpassing longevity. And, joking aside, the Darkness paid close attention to putting on an entertaining arena show.
Brilliantly lit in cascades of white, and relayed on screens at the side, the performance was regularly enlivened by orchestrated bursts of fireworks and other pyrotechnic displays. The guitarist Dan Hawkins and the new bass player Richie Edwards, together with drummer Ed Graham, conjured a classic hard-rock sound, while Justin Hawkins sang in his piercing falsetto. This counter-intuitive, operatic vocal style has become the Darkness’s trademark, but also their liability. It’s hard to listen to it continuously for 90 minutes.
Still, the new songs generally passed muster, particularly the pop chorus of Girlfriend and the impossibly ornate English Country Garden, during which Hawkins played a church organ at the back of the stage with steam billowing out of the pipes.
For the finale of Bald, Hawkins was literally in full flight, playing a guitar solo while twirling on a trapeze over the heads of the audience. He looked oddly like Icarus, flying too close to the Sun.
The Darkness tour continues at Hallam FM Arena, Sheffield, Feb 11. Tour details www.thedarknessrock.com