The Darkness – an unstoppable tornado of top-notch rock ‘n’ roll parody whirls through Friuli (2019)
Location: Majano (Udine) / Area Concerti Festival / Italy
Date: Sunday, 21.07.2019
It almost never happens, or at best extremely rarely, that The Darkness come this close to the Slovenian border. Well, OK. Last year the stars were already on our side and we caught the band for absolutely free at the Harley Davidson Biker’s Weekend at Faaker See in Austria (concert review HERE), where it drizzled the whole time… This summer, though, as part of their festival run, the band also stopped for two consecutive headline shows in Italy, and one of them landed in Majano, a charming little town just a stone’s throw from Udine.
The Darkness made their name as notorious rock’n’roll clowns and incorrigibly cocky show-offs with a generous glaze of first-class parody and a pinch of glam, right from the release of their debut »Permission to Land« in 2003, which was crowned two years later by its no less brilliant follow-up »One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back«. Then, thanks to general burnout and the wearing out of the band’s driving engine, the miraculous Justin Hawkins, the band vanished for five years, only to come back in 2012 with the comeback album »Hot Cakes«. With the return and two excellent albums since, that is »Last Of Our Kind« (2015) and the current »Pinewood Smile« (2017) – you could render that jokey coinage as “pine-wood smile” – they proved that The Darkness are no one-hit wonders, but an immensely talented band. They don’t just have giant stage charisma and convincing delivery when they break off the chains and create dynamic theater packed with first-rate pranks; they are also superb songwriters who brilliantly combine riff-driven sharpness, the party theater of constant piss-taking and, as mentioned, keep feeding the show with an element of parody throughout. A new album, »The Easter Is Cancelled«, is already announced for this fall, and so is a new European tour for next year, where The Darkness will stop on 10.02.2020 at Simm City in Vienna, too.
Let’s get back to summer 2019 and sweltering Majano, where things were seriously boiling long, long before the show. The giant green field where a stage goes up every year and treats us to concerts from Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Toto, to Anthrax and so on… is complemented by the surrounding park, which during the festival is literally dotted with stands selling fast food and drinks (you can even order a light Wiehenstephanner wheat beer poured into the original glass – a half-liter one, of course, sinfully good). Italians are pleasure-seekers and will do anything for a good party, and a lot of the time you get the feeling that the whole thing works as if the concert were really just the dot on the “i” of the entire ceremony, which they always go to great lengths to put together.
The evening was opened at nine o’clock by Rock Hysteria, led by the renowned and respected Italian singer Cindy Cattaruzza. It’s a new project from an experienced and very well-known singer and the crowd made a hell of a racket during the forty-minute show, since they know Cindy and her crew all too well. Alongside Cindy, the seasoned lineup includes drummer Carlo Bonazza, who has played with Eros Ramazzotti and Peter Maffay and also helped out the legends Le Orme, bassist Mauro Tolot, whom we’ve seen at Bluesana with Ian Siegal and who has also backed Mike Sponza, and guitarists Fabrizio De Ros and Mattia Toso. Anything You Want, Cut That Crap and the other original numbers that rang out courtesy of the band this evening don’t bring anything we haven’t heard before, but they’re played with real impulsiveness and confidence, which only proves the musicians’ experience, topped off of course by the distinctive and infectious Cindy, who naturally commanded all the attention with her theatrics. Excellent vocals, and the crowd literally ate out of their hometown band’s hand. After an energetic and superb set, the band came to the barrier to pose for photos and chat with fans, hand out autographs and sell a few T-shirts. There was no official merch stand this time, so there were no The Darkness shirts to be had (which left us hunting for guitar picks).
At exactly ten in the evening everything was ready for the main stars of the night. The Darkness! After a spot-on intro – you couldn’t have found a better pick than the instrumental Arrival (orig. Abba) – the quartet charged onto the stage, and the main spotlights hunted down, with full intensity, the biggest hellraiser of the night, who was tearing back and forth across the stage: Justin Hawkins, of course.
The incredible turnout and response fired the crew up, and tonight the band really delivered an outstanding live performance. Justin got a serious workout and, in the breaks, also handed out a few singing lessons (it’s unbelievable how quickly a crowd becomes steerable), which seemingly ate up the otherwise precious minutes of the set, but on the other hand, with this kind of self-ironic debauchery, kept the party at an absolute peak. For a good hour and three quarters. “The pills weren’t wearing off!” Justin Hawkins shed clothes minute by minute. He swaggered onto the stage in white, and then the rags gradually flew off him. For the last third of the show he was down to zebra-print underpants, and in his by now customary routine during Stuck In A Rut he had the “gorillas” from the security team hoist him onto their shoulders and carry him through the crowd while the libertine shredded a guitar solo without mercy. In the last song of the regular set, I Believe In A Thing Called Love, he also did a theatrical headstand (next to Taylor’s drums – on an extra stage riser), and a particularly fun moment came when a few hotheads in the front rows held up a photo of David Hasselhoff, about whom Justin said he was his first idol, a source of huge inspiration and the man who…. “The Man who definitely made America great again!” (these lines aren’t worth translating, because they land with half the intensity). And that’s not all. Justin then stuffed an A4 sheet with a Hasselhoff picture down his underpants, then came up with the idea of collecting as many Hasselhoff pictures from the crowd as possible and sticking them on his body, saying they’d just stick to his sweaty skin. In the closing part, The Darkness didn’t forget to send a sack of balloons into the crowd, which the wild heads kicked around.
In short, describing a The Darkness concert is really like describing stand-up comedy, only the way a rock’n’roll band goes about it (a report on a Steel Panther gig or on Novi Sad’s Perro Deformero would develop similarly). That said, performance-wise The Darkness are unstoppable, which justifies the element of parody. Justin is an excellent singer. He’s stayed that way and in fact keeps getting better. He still hits the fifth octave with the vocals with feather-light ease and it’s so piercing that your hair stands on end. He uses this talent quite deliberately to fire up the theater itself and add even more parody to the performance of the songs. At the same time Justin is also an excellent lead guitarist, and his brother Dan often plays the part of mere rhythm guitarist on stage. Rufus Tiger Taylor is the right address for the spot of permanent drummer in the band, and with him The Darkness have found exactly what they were looking for. He’s wild, he’s precise, he has no trouble handling backing harmonies on vocals too (The Darkness are, among other things, masters of harmonizing vocal lines with additional singing) and you know what? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, in looks too, since his facial features resemble his famous father Roger (the one from Queen, not Duran Duran J). Then there’s the thundering Frankie Poullain on his beloved Gibson Thunderbird bass, who after all these years still can’t throw picks into the crowd and who, of course, on the explicit orders of boss Justin, opened the intro of the song One Way Ticket with the famous cow bell!
The band played a slightly shorter set than last year at Faaker See in Austria, dropping the new Solid Gold from the setlist, which was a bit of a surprise, and bringing back The Roaring Waters from the album »Last Of Our Kind« (from that album The Barabarian still burns with brilliantly venomous fire), while the bulk of the setlist focused on the debut »Permission To Land«, from which The Darkness once again played as many as nine songs. You can’t miss the parody, whether in Friday Night (the chorus deliberately sung in a tone close to Robert Smith – The Cure), or in the famous opening »The Cult She Sells Sanctuary trick« in Open Fire, and in all the other maneuvering with first-rate teasing and sparkling goading that abounds throughout the show.
The Darkness remain a top-class stage attraction, if not an outright live sensation. This time Justin didn’t dish out his sense of first-rate British black humor quite as generously as last year in Austria among the Harley Davidson crowd, but he did give himself a serious workout over the course of the show and shouted himself hoarse. All over the place. This is a band that simply wins you over in an instant. Because they know and understand the first and golden rule of rock’n’roll. Namely, that you have to dose it with a first-class helping of cheeky tomfoolery that has to entertain the crowd. And that’s how it was this evening in Majano. An event with no shortage of broad cheerfulness, plenty of positive vibes, bubbling-over wildness and lust for life, in which, thanks to the brilliant chemistry between the huge crowd and a quartet fired up to the bone, this get-together with The Darkness also passed far too quickly.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Black Shuck
2. Growing on Me
3. Open Fire
4. Love Is Only a Feeling
5. One Way Ticket
6. Barbarian
7. Southern Trains
8. Friday Night
9. Roaring Waters
10. Givin’ Up
11. Japanese Prisoner of Love
12. Stuck in a Rut
13. I Believe in a Thing Called Love
—encore—
14. Get Your Hands Off My Woman
15. Love on the Rocks With No Ice
