The 11 best songs by The Darkness

The Darkness is for life, not just for Christmas, so here are the 11 songs that will make you believe in a thing called live

It’s a thin line between genius and lunacy – and The Darkness have walked it like a tightrope for two decades. Landing in 2003, when nu-metal’s dour drop-tuned chug was all-dominant, the Lowestoft rockers felt like a glitter cannon going off in your face, reminding us of the simple joys of mammoth riffs, flashy solos, smutty lyrics, choruses that milkmen can whistle and a wardrobe spilling with man-made fibres.

Catch The Darkness live in March and you’ll find a quartet of crack musicians who also happen to be the world’s greatest entertainers. Led from the front by the prancing, preening, glass-shattering frontman Justin Hawkins and his riff-machine kid brother Dan – with backup from piratical bassist Frankie Poullain and rocksteady drummer Rufus Tiger Taylor – they turn every night into cheerful anarchy.

But that megawatt charisma wouldn’t be worth a damn without the songs, and from classic debut Permission To Land to upcoming eighth album Dreams On Toast, no modern band has given us more reasons to throw the horns. This one goes up to 11.

11. ‘Black Shuck’

(Permission To Land, 2003)

The first song to shake the speakers when you played The Darkness’s debut, Black Shuck also set out the band’s modus operandi. A beefy AC/DC-style riff, a helium-high falsetto, a lyric about the mythical hellhound said to prowl the East Anglian coast (‘Black Shuck! That dog don’t give a f*ck!’): nobody else was writing songs like this in 2003, and only the terminally joyless could resist.

10. ‘Open Fire’

(Last Of Our Kind, 2015)

Borrowing and twisting the spooky riff from The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary, this full-pelt rocker seemed like a macho ode to fighter jets and hypersonic missiles – until you dug into the lyrics and realised the ‘open fire’ sung of by Justin Hawkins was actually the kind with chestnuts roasting on it (‘Give me a hug on a sheepskin rug’).

9. ‘How Can I Lose Your Love’

(Easter Is Cancelled, 2019)

For all the songwriting ambition of the band’s sixth album, it’s this gloriously simple moment you need on your playlist. With its typically Hawkins take on pillow talk (‘I thought we’d be together when we’re drawing my pension’) and thrilling gearshifts from jawbreaker riffs to fairydust balladry, this is mid-period Darkness in excelsis.

8. ‘Every Inch Of You’

(Hot Cakes, 2012)

Friends again after their late-noughties split, this Hot Cakes highlight stomped like a dinosaur in diving boots while catching us up on the band’s unlikely success story so far (‘Baby, I was a loser/Several years on the dole/An Englishman with a very high voice/Doing rock ‘n’ roll’). It felt like a sunbeam after a long, bleak winter.

7. ‘Solid Gold’

(Pinewood Smile, 2017)

Heralded by the crunchiest riff that AC/DC never wrote, this route-one rocker clapped back at the humourless haters who dismissed The Darkness as a joke band with a snowball’s prospects. ‘We’re never gonna stop shitting out solid gold’, Justin assures us, and sure enough, eight years later, the anthems are still flowing.

6. ‘One Way Ticket’

(One Way Ticket… To Hell And Back, 2005)

White-hot overnight fame would soon knock The Darkness off the rails, but Justin brilliantly lampooned his real-life excesses on this second album opener (it literally starts with the sound of chopping and snorting). Where else will you find pan pipes, a sitar solo and the lyric: ‘Now my septum’s in tatters/And I’ve still got the runs’?

5. ‘Love Is Only A Feeling’

(Permission To Land, 2003)

Like the ’70s behemoths they worshipped, The Darkness always offset their face-melting moments with overwrought power ballads – and their first one is still the greatest. With its heaven-scraping riff, flutters of bucolic mandolin and genuinely touching lyric (‘Oh, the first flush of youth was upon you when our eyes first met’), it’s likely that no song has burnt more lighter fluid this century.

4. ‘Barbarian’

(Last Of Our Kind, 2015)

During writing sessions on the Irish coast, the band found themselves staring out to sea and imagining the horn-helmeted pillagers of yore. You can hear the violence in this brutal setlist perennial, which makes you bang your head while telling the story of the monarch who lost his. “Barbarian is about what happened to King Edmund of Anglia,” Justin told Kerrang! “He tried to be diplomatic and give the invaders land and horses, but they chopped off his head and booted it into the forest.”

3. ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)’

(Single, 2003)

Most post-millennium bands were too cool to touch a Christmas single: not a problem for The Darkness, who capped their breakthrough year with this gleefully frivolous yuletide rocker. Harmony guitars, child choirs, church bells, vocoders: it all gets thrown at the wall in the turkey-stuffed production, although Justin took most pride in sneaking his double-entendres past the censors (“We managed to get ‘bellend’ into a Christmas song without it getting banned!”)

2. ‘Growing On Me’

(Permission To Land, 2003)

Their first stone-cold classic single, marking the moment when even the sceptics had to admit these spandex-wrapped maniacs had something. The lyric remains open to interpretation (Justin has shot down the popular theory it’s about pubic lice), but the music is undeniable, with the biggest shivers reserved for the split-second of silence before the chorus plunges in.

1. ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’

(Permission To Land, 2003)

Two decades later, The Darkness’s signature tune is not only seared onto the brains of rock fans, but so all-pervasive in mass culture that even your gran joins in with the ‘touching you’ bits. Written collectively by the destitute band in their rathole flat, but going on to conquer the world, it’s still a riot of a song: hard, hooky, hopelessly optimistic and wrapping up with arguably the best guitar solo of the past quarter-century. Listen out for the first chord on their March tour and prepare for lift-off.