Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Vienna (Wien) / Gasometer / Austria
Concert date: 20.03.2006
Attendance: 2500
Ticket price: €30.00
Well, that date finally rolled around. I’d been dying for gigs this year! The former gasworks known as Gasometer, now artfully converted into a “shopping and entertainment” center (with a heap of cafés, restaurants, shops full of assorted knickknacks and movie theaters), has a shiny hall (Ba-Ca Hale) that holds around 5,000 people. On the day of The Darkness, about 3000 of them showed up. And for a change from every other day this year, this one was finally sunny!
Around 8:00 PM the opening act Doomfoxx waddled onto the stage. These guys are something like the Rolling Stones with the volume cranked way up, to 11! Especially the vocals and the melody lines. Like a cross between Jagger and Cocker. And he bellowed like a man possessed, which means the vocals were seriously powerful. The word “doom” in the band’s name isn’t pulled out of thin air either, since they carry both that usual “rockerish” debauchery and a proper “feel” of near-cataclysmic collapse. You could tell right away from the “beat” that they’re British, because they attacked with a solid rhythm laid over deliberately dirty guitar “riffing”, the real rock stuff! Even Keith Richards would’ve been stunned that someone on stage could have a guitar as “wasted” as his. The guys are obviously not The Darkness, but the “glam rock” fever clearly got to them too, and they were dolled up accordingly. The singer reminded me of Metallica’s bassist Trujillo (so he had that Native American “look”), dressed like a jazz trumpeter who’d just escaped from Harlem. In short, I went in with no expectations, none whatsoever, before Doomfoxx hit the stage. And it’s incredible how the crowd heated up and responded wildly, showing a healthy dose of enthusiasm for their set. A great little party and the right choice for a warm-up. A red bra flew out of the rowdy crowd and the singer hung it on his mic. Whether it was a well-rehearsed trick or some teenage girl really did “lose” it, I don’t know, but it nicely spiced up their performance. After 40 minutes they left us to wait around in the hall again.
The euphoria grew by the minute, and a bit after nine a familiar melody rang out. The lads from up north are coming. Arrival, which Mike Oldfield himself once covered for ABBA way back when, drowned out the scattered shouts of the crowd. But the crowd came fully alive at this excellent intro and… the first member of The Darkness was already on stage. Drummer Ed Graham started dictating the rhythm of Knockers. Soon after, bassist Richie Edwards jumped on stage, and people greeted both with a roar. The audience, as expected (and no, I’m not being modest), was made up of young people aged somewhere between 16 and 25. Then guitarist Dan Hawkins leaps up, followed at last by the main figure and locomotive of the band, Dan’s brother Justin. From the very first hit the sound was phenomenal. That slightly twisted “glam hard rock”, you know the one. Long-forgotten tricks, somehow brought back to life. A somewhat more “amateurish” and even naughtier (on purpose) Def Leppard, they were red hot on stage tonight. The crowd jumped up a good notch higher, of course, when the opening “riff” of One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back kicked in. The Darkness clearly sensed the crowd’s devotion right away and really did play on stage with no brakes at all.
I haven’t laughed this much at a gig in ages. Justin was on fire, of course! He kept playing around with guitar picks, chewing them in his mouth, spitting them into the air, catching them back in his mouth, then “kicking” them back into the crowd with a volley like a soccer goalkeeper. Before long The Darkness had flooded the crowd with picks and almost staged a real downpour of picks in the style of some Malmsteen.
The Darkness are one of those contradictory bands that a lot of people don’t quite get. Many are quick to write them off as plain bluffing makeup-wearing posers who offer nothing in their own songs besides a bit of Queen, a bit of Def Leppard, a bit of Status Quo, and on top of that make fun of their own music. Besides, even their name is contradictory. You’d expect some morbid goths or doom metallers on stage. Wrong, kid! The Darkness are a bunch of cheerful guys, total party animals and, on top of being born stage performers, excellent musicians. That last fact makes their deliberately goofy stance, with a whiff of hedonism and machismo, completely legit. They came to serve up some rock’n’roll sauce and pulled it off without breaking a sweat. People swayed to the tight rhythms, had a blast at Justin’s clowning around on stage, and, speeded up and relaxed, gave themselves over to pure fun. The “feeling” in the hall was fantastic, positive. Everyone was going wild and hands were in the air the whole time, from the first row to the very last (by the exit doors). And the Highway To Hell cover just confirmed that wherever you stand in the hall when a track like that echoes live, it makes no difference. You’re not escaping a helping of spilled beer. And so my hair got sticky again, even though I was far, far away from the front row. According to people who watched from the fourth row, they almost turned into pancakes when The Darkness started playing the AC/DC classic.
Justin sang convincingly and dragged the melody through insanely high lines, the kind you’d only think possible when someone’s squeezing you good by the balls. Sure, Freddie Mercury was probably spinning wildly in his grave, but Justin showed convincingly on stage that he’s completely professional about it. The man has charisma and is packed with energy. The stage was never big enough for him. He “riffed”, soloed through most of the solos, played keyboards, and sang with a full run-up. To all this he added a tasty dose of “clowning”, which left the crowd unable to hold back the waves of laughter. The Darkness, whose first two albums are known for both running barely an hour combined, cleverly stretched the songs out with sketches. They worked real extra stage numbers into the instrumental middle sections. For example, in the instrumental part of a song marked by a proper rock thrash, Justin dropped in the main melody of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, with a keyboard sound that would belong straight in some “Looney Tunes” cartoon, and he pulled the same stunt with the main motif of Toccata & Fugue by J.S. Bach. The others weren’t far behind him in this kind of mockery either, and Dan, for instance, started playing Wine And Flowers in the middle of Highway to Hell. The show went by way too fast. Dan and Justin swapped a heap of Gibson and Fender guitars on stage, and among all the guitars in Justin’s hands there was also an Ibanez Steve Vai model, in a hideously ugly color combination that fit the “poser image” perfectly. Yuck, I still can’t get its nasty pickups in screaming, fluorescent orange out of my head.
Around 10:40 the band came back for an encore and set the place on fire, especially with the closing song Bald. For this song in particular Justin appeared on stage to show everyone that he’d diligently put on some nice layers of excess muscle through the hard winter. Shirtless, that is! And in the middle of the song he suddenly vanished from the stage. A few moments later a beam from the spotlights shone right into the middle of the crowd, and Justin appeared among the people on the shoulders of two security guards, who carried him from the right to the left side of the hall (as seen from the stage). Meanwhile the guy soloed through the solo of the song. With the whole hall roaring with laughter, of course. You could especially tell when they put him back on his feet. At that point you could hear nothing but the riffing of Dan’s guitar on stage. On the way back to the stage Justin of course kept soloing and, stumbling up the steps, dropped a bunch of notes. I was “dying” of laughter. The show hit the standard benchmarks for length. I clocked it at a good 100 minutes. Encore included, of course.
The Darkness are an incredibly “fired-up” and energetic young band that has simply made it. What sets them apart is their incredible approachability to the crowd, without a trace of loftiness, which you might otherwise expect from a band whose videos get played on MTV. Relaxed and with balls full of gas, on top of their otherwise professional approach, they gave the audience a truly unforgettable little rock’n’roll party.
Setlist
1.Knockers
2.One Way Ticket
3.Is It Just Me?
4.Growing On Me
5.Dinner Lady Arms
6.Givin’ Up
7.Black Shuck
8.Love On The Rocks
9.Love Is Only A Feeling
10.Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time
11.Blind Man
12.Hazel Eyes
13.Get Your Hands
14.Friday Night
15.Girlfriend
16.Highway To Hell
—encore—
17.I Believe In A Thing Called Love
18.English Country Garden
19.Bald
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