THE DARKNESS TRIVIA
Trivia
On the band's first visit to Japan in November 2003, Justin bought a microphone-shaped costume at Tokyu Hands and wore it on the bullet train to Nagoya. Warner Music Japan told the story during the band's next visit, the following year.
Performing at the MTV Video Music Awards Japan on 23 May 2004, Justin wore a costume made from vintage kimono. Warner Music Japan said it echoed Freddie Mercury's kimono on Queen's first visit to Japan, and that it was Justin's first show since an operation on his oesophagus two weeks earlier. During the same trip the band appeared live on Fuji TV's Waratte Iitomo! on 21 May.
The band were due to play SUMMER SONIC 04 in Tokyo on 7 August and Osaka on 8 August 2004, but Justin's reflux oesophagitis and gastritis worsened, and Warner Music Japan announced on 4 August that they had pulled out.
On 23 January 2024 the band played a one-night show at Spotify O-EAST in Shibuya for the twentieth anniversary of Permission to Land. As Gekirock reported, it was their first visit to Japan since LOUD PARK in 2011 and their first headline show there since 2006; the promoter H.I.P. billed it as their first headline show in eighteen years. The reserved balcony seats sold out.
"Barbarian", the opening song of Last of Our Kind, tells of the Great Heathen Army of the Viking Ivar the Boneless invading East Anglia in the ninth century and Edmund the Martyr being killed. It takes its story from the history of the band's own East Anglia, and its video opens on a tombstone recording that Edmund was cut down by a Dane.
The verses of "The Longest Kiss" on Dreams on Toast come from a song Justin has been working on for decades for an unfinished musical, The Collapse Of The Lowestoft Fishing Industry. The lyric came to him one morning in Nairn in Scotland, and he wrote the chorus with Dan after a long session in the pub.
The Darkness grew out of Empire, a progressive band Dan Hawkins put together in London after moving there at sixteen. He started it with Frankie Poullain, a bassist born in France and raised in Scotland, and his older brother Justin later joined on guitar and keyboards. Empire had a different singer, so Justin did not sing in it. When it broke up, Dan took session work, Frankie went off to be a tour guide in Venezuela, and Justin wrote music for films and advertisements.
Justin became the frontman on New Year's Eve 1999. At a party the brothers spent at home he took on Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", and Dan realised he had found the singer he had been looking for. The BBC in 2003 and Classic Rock in 2013 described a karaoke contest; Justin, interviewed in 2023, remembered it instead as a dance he did to the song at a party at his aunt's pub.
The catsuit that became Justin's trademark made its first appearance on 16 November 2001, in the back room of the Castle pub in Tooting Bec, south London. Justin traces the idea to his mother's memory of Brian Jones in a pink catsuit.
Interviewed by the BBC on the day the debut came out in July 2003, Justin said he had three catsuit tailors, one of them on call around the clock for repairs.
Supporting Disturbed at Brixton Academy in London in 2002, the band were pelted with shoes, bottles and coins. After Justin looked back on the night on his YouTube show, Disturbed's David Draiman apologised in July 2022, saying there was a lot he regretted saying at the time.
"I Believe in a Thing Called Love" was written in the top-floor flat in Primrose Hill, London, that Dan shared with Frankie. In Dan's account it was Justin who brought in the riff, and Dan's own first reaction was that the chorus sounded ridiculous.
The video for "I Believe in a Thing Called Love", spaceship and all, was made without CGI. According to Justin, the only prop carried over from the cheap first version to the reshoot was a garlic sausage.
Permission to Land was produced by Pedro Ferreira, Dan's best friend. They began cheaply in a room of their own at a studio in Willesden, north London, but after six months only four or five songs were done, and Dan recalls that they took so long the money ran out. They moved to Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire and finished the album in seven days.
"Black Shuck", which opens the debut, tells the East Anglian legend of a black hellhound said to have burst into the church at Blythburgh in 1577. In 2003 Justin introduced it as a song about a red-eyed East Anglian hellhound that attacked a church.
Bruce Brand painted the sleeve of Permission to Land. The band asked for a classic 1970s-style cover in the manner of ELO, and Justin acted as art director.
On 7 July 2003, the day the debut came out, the band played at HMV on Oxford Street in London to 1,500 fans. HMV called it the biggest crowd it had ever had for a band's debut in-store performance.
"Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)", released in December 2003, entered the UK singles chart at number two in Christmas week, behind Michael Andrews and Gary Jules's "Mad World".
Bob Ezrin produced "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)", and its choir came from Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College in London, the school the Hawkins brothers' mother had attended.
The Christmas single began as a bluff. As Justin told NME, Dan assured the A&R man Max Lousada that they had a Christmas song, and they wrote it on the way to support Metallica in Dublin. Its snowy video was shot in midsummer, on the hottest day of the year.
At the BRIT Awards at Earls Court in London on 17 February 2004, the band led the field with four nominations and won three of them: British Group, British Rock Act and British Album. The fourth, British Breakthrough, went to Busted.
At the Ivor Novello Awards on 27 May 2004, Justin, Dan, Frankie and Ed were named Songwriters of the Year together. An Ivor had been Dan's ambition, Justin said, and their parents were there to see it.
In the Official Charts Company's ranking of the biggest rock and metal albums released since 2000, published in October 2025, Permission to Land came third overall and was the highest-placed British release, with more than 1.45 million UK chart units.
When Classic Rock asked its readers in 2020 to vote for the hundred greatest songs of the century so far, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" came out on top, from more than sixty thousand votes.
In May 2005 the band announced on their website that they had parted with Frankie Poullain over musical differences. Frankie told NME the following month that he had been forced out against his wishes, and in Classic Rock in 2013 he described himself as having been quite abrasive at the time.
Justin left the band in October 2006 to deal with his addiction. As NME reported, he told The Sun that he was an addict and did not blame the band. Around the 2011 reunion he told Rolling Stone that the main reason he had left was that the band had stopped being creative.
After Justin left, the brothers did not speak for two years. Dan told The Guardian in 2022 that when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer at thirty-one, Justin offered to take him to chemotherapy, and that was what brought them back together. When Dan married in 2014, Justin was his best man.
The reunion of the four original members was announced on 15 March 2011, together with a slot at the Download festival. Justin told the BBC that the secret talks had been like a forbidden romance, and that he had been writing with Dan for a couple of years.
Around the reunion, Dan, deep in a Jethro Tull phase, got in touch with Ian Anderson, who played flute on "Cannonball". The song was then voted off the main running order of Hot Cakes and became a bonus track; Dan says he was simply outvoted.
From the summer into the autumn of 2012 the band opened for Lady Gaga on the European leg of her Born This Way Ball tour; according to Loudwire, Gaga picked them herself.
Rufus Taylor, who took over the drums in 2015, is the son of Queen's Roger Taylor. According to Justin, it was Brian May's guitar technician who suggested him. Dan said Rufus flew in from Australia and went straight into rehearsal, and his first show was the release party in London on 24 April.
On "Conquerors", which closes Last of Our Kind, the bassist Frankie Poullain sang lead for the first time. Justin said Frankie had needed a little persuading.
"Southern Trains" on Pinewood Smile is Justin and Dan's complaint about the Southern rail services in the south of England, which they had to put up with while making the album.
Justin has named two starting points for "Japanese Prisoner of Love" on Pinewood Smile. One was a visit to Alcatraz, where the flash photography of some Japanese tourists made a pitch-dark solitary cell feel all the more frightening; the other was writing songs with E Wing, a band formed in Parkhurst prison.
The title Easter Is Cancelled came from the band's manager, who answered an Easter poem Justin had written with the words "Easter is cancelled". Until then, Justin said, "Rock And Roll Deserves To Die" had been a possible title for the album.
The cover of Easter Is Cancelled shows Justin as Christ escaping the crucifixion while the band take on Roman soldiers. Justin explained it as a what-if from another universe, but some platforms refused it over its religious connotations, and a censored version was made.
Justin said that with "Jussy's Girl" on Motorheart he was aiming, sonically, somewhere between Def Leppard and Billy Ocean. In the video he plays a leather-clad biker who steps through a telephone-box time machine into a black-and-white silent-movie murder mystery.
At the tribute concert for the Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins at Wembley Stadium in London on 3 September 2022, Justin joined Queen and Foo Fighters to sing "Under Pressure", and in the same set Rufus drummed beside his father Roger Taylor on "We Will Rock You".
Dan reckons the band wrote around 150 songs for Dreams on Toast, and jokes that it was a huge failure rate. The closing ballad, "Weekend In Rome", has a spoken part by the actor Stephen Dorff.
The theme for the 2026 film Masters Of The Universe was written by Justin and Dan, and Dan produced it with the film's composer Daniel Pemberton. Announcing it, the band wrote that they had all bellowed "WE HAVE THE POWER" together, and added, in passing, that Brian May had been there.