Dancing in the Darkness (11 page)

I
t was April 2004 and we were in LA for five days, manfully attempting to squeeze in the
Jay Leno
and
Jimmy Kimmel
TV shows, two nights performing sell-out concerts at the Henry Fonda Theater, three in-store album-signing sessions at Virgin, K Mart and Best Buy, a heap of radio and magazine interviews, hobnobbing with the likes of Dave Grohl, Steve Coogan and Jack Black, visits to The Roxy (DJ: ‘And you’ll never guess what crazy shit’s going down! Those Darkness guys just walked in!’) and the infamous Viper Room, not to mention various record-company meetings. And all under the beady gaze of a documentary crew from ITV’s
The South Bank Show
, who accompanied us for much of the three-week stateside jaunt.

‘Meet and Greets’, or ‘Grip and Grins’ as we called
them, lurked around every corner, and those wishing to remain successful were expected to partake. It was hard to believe
that
many people could be involved in the planning, packaging, marketing and selling of our so-called product – one measly album. It seems global corporate consumerism only functions properly if everyone agrees to be phoney.

‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ had been the most-played video on American MTV for two consecutive weeks earlier in the month and we were, according to the
Sun
, the fastest-growing UK band in the USA since The Spice Girls. To commemorate this, they’d mocked up a picture of the world-famous girl band with our heads superimposed on to their bodies – but they’d got it all wrong. They had pie-loving Ed as ‘Sporty’, gentle Dan as ‘Scary’, darts-loving Justin as ‘Posh’ and myself – by far the most ‘mature’ band member – as ‘Baby’. Ed reckoned they should have used ‘Old Spice’ for me, making me instinctively sniff my armpits in a moment of BO paranoia.

My brother Chris (a rare combination of the mystic and the man of action) had come over from Venezuela to party, along with his partner Ada and trusty sidekick Brendan. And artist Jonathan Gent was crashing on the sofa in my L-shaped Mondrian
suite. They crammed in as much of LA as they could in a Pontiac convertible Chris had hired to cruise around in and I joined them whenever possible.

We visited a swanky Italian restaurant owned by Robert De Niro after somehow finding ourselves in a lesbian cocktail bar, before heading to the most exclusive nightclub in West Hollywood. In fact, it was so exclusive that if I told you what it was called I’d have to commit suicide, certain in the knowledge that it was only a matter of hours before I was to be assassinated.

We planned to leave the Henry Fonda Theater aftershow party to head to this VIP mecca, but not before I’d committed another ‘Frankie Faux Pas’ – a term coined by my increasingly irked bandmates to signify another instance of my putting my foot in it. I recognised a distinctive and familiar
snow-white
jet of hair and an enigmatic, immobile face: it was the film director Jim Jarmusch. But what was he doing at a Darkness concert? I set about bending his ear, reasoning that a man who leaves so many on-screen mysteries dangling in mid-air, unresolved, might perhaps care to explain what he was thinking of. In the process, I completely ignored the hairy mountain of a man he was with.

My bass tech Stuart then pulled me aside to say,
‘That’s the producer who wants to do your next album; you should talk to him.’

Regarding the long hair, shaggy beard and general bear-like demeanour, I jumped to conclusions and addressed him as Arthur Baker, telling him how much I liked the work he’d done with New Order and Afrika Bambaataa. In fact, it turned out to be none other than Rick Rubin, the metal maestro of all he surveys, who’d produced Justin’s heroes AC/DC and had come to see if we were up to scratch. I got the impression the mix-up had pricked his ego, or more likely he just didn’t warm to me.

Now, as it stands this isn’t a great anecdote, but fast forward almost a year to the London launch party for
Live Aid the DVD
, and I somehow managed to commit that very same faux pas the other way round – this time talking to Arthur Baker thinking that he was Rick Rubin, telling him how much we admired his back catalogue, his rock credentials and how much we’d love to work with him. Being famous for fusing Afro beats and pioneering queer-core disco, Arthur Baker would have been forgiven for thinking The Darkness had gone mad. Which, incidentally, they had, but we’ll come to that in due course.

At least I did one thing right, introducing the
surprisingly shy Tilda Swinton to the even more timid Jarmusch. The upshot of that encounter was that they worked together on the movie
Broken Flowers
– not that you’ll see me mentioned in the credits, but that’s Hollywood for you.

Brother Chris had been going on all day about this exclusive club we just
had
to see, telling us it was like ‘one massive VIP room’, which only started me wondering how much rope and how many bouncers you’d need to cordon off all those egos. When we arrived, it looked like any other popular nightclub: hundreds of desperate fools competing to gain entry. I always felt guilty jumping the queue at moments like this – it was against my Marxist principles. Of course, it didn’t prevent me going into the club, albeit with a guilt chimp on my back. Later, I was glad I’d given my political beliefs the night off, since a certain A-list actress seemingly fell for me at first sight, as I’ll explain if you’ll bear with me…

Our entourage had been shown to a booth, where we promptly ordered several bottles of vodka and necked some Hollywood Ecstasy. To our right, an emaciated 78-year-old Hugh Hefner was spreading his attentions around a harem of eight leggy beauties. Meanwhile, several miles away, the
rest of the band were smoothing things over with Lemmy from Motörhead (Justin had called him ‘a wart-faced cunt’ and banned him from our gig – he’d wanted to do a song with support act The Wildhearts – after he’d said we were a cabaret band who should be performing on Wigan Pier.)

Back in the VIP club, Leigh Francis (a.k.a. Avid Merrion of
Bo’Selecta!
fame) made his introductions and told me there was someone I should meet. She was a blonde girl with high cheekbones, piercing green eyes and a backless dress that served to highlight her only visible blemish – a scrawny back. Still, that was plenty of blemishes less than me. And there was something strangely familiar about her too, a striking resemblance to my girlfriend Katrine, which left me momentarily saddened, as our
three-and
-a-half-year relationship was at that time hitting the rocks.

‘YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!’ She was American, that was a cert.
And
she had great taste in music! As we yelled into each other’s ears, I couldn’t help but notice the attention we were getting, from her friends and mine. Then Jonny Gent sidled up and told me I was talking to the actress Kirsten Dunst.

I remembered watching
The Virgin Suicides
three
years previously and being amazed at how similar this actress was to my then new girlfriend. I was a struggling musician at the time, penniless but in love. Now here I was, three years later, with my girlfriend’s doppelganger Kirsten Dunst.
Somebody
should put an end to gorgeous nymphets raising the hopes of paranoid, ugly guys.

She grabbed my hand and mumbled into my ear. I tried to resist – out of respect for Katrine – but her grip was tight. Finally, her friends left and she went with them. The night had ended with no actual transgressions, thank God – I was still in a relationship and she had a scrawny back anyway – but I somehow sensed, in an Ecstasy-fuelled premonition, that the writing was on the wall regarding my girlfriend and the band.

R
ound about now, certain similarities between my father’s musical career and mine began to become apparent to me – most obviously, the fact that we were both musicians who’d performed in musical quartets at the top level. Granted, his had performed classical music and mine had performed classical rock, but we’re splitting hairs here (specifically, those of a facial variety: he had a beard and I had a moustache).

It’s hard to believe that almost 40 years apart we recorded and performed in the same venues – the Koko building on Camden High Street, formerly known as The Camden Palace, and the BBC recording studios in Maida Vale.

The BBC Concert Orchestra wasn’t enough for my father, though. He wanted to make his mark, so he formed The Edinburgh String Quartet with
his friends. The combo toured in many exotic locations worldwide before he eventually retired to his idyllic Caribbean retreat after the pressures of touring led to him being sacked and splitting up with his French partner, Catherine (pronounced K-A-T-E-R-E-E-N), before leaving his offspring behind.

And what of his offspring? One of his sons had taken up music at a late age and started to gig around Camden, enjoying popularity as a member of the group Empire. Yet another link here – his classical recitals were broadcast around the British ‘Empire’ on the BBC World Service.

But the Camden indie scene wasn’t enough for
me
; I wanted to make
my
mark so I formed The Darkness with
my
friends. The quartet toured in many exotic locations worldwide before I eventually retired to an idyllic French chateau after the pressures of touring led to me being sacked and splitting up with
my
Danish partner, ‘Katrine’ (pronounced the same in Danish as it is in French: K-A-T-E-R-E-E-N – spooky), before leaving
my
offspring (The Darkness fans) behind.

If you still haven’t clocked it, I suggest you read back over the preceding four paragraphs – it really is uncanny. Imagine if we’d been the same age,
both playing in The Edinburgh String Quartet, and arguing over lead violin duties. Or The Darkness might have ended up with two bass players, albeit one with a moustache and the other with a beard – but both, nonetheless, with unmistakable pirate headbands.

Heavy drinking, headstrong and hard-boiled – just three tendencies beginning with the letter ‘h’ that characterise the behaviour of myself and my father during our respective musical careers. To which you might add another three: ‘humdrum’, ‘half-baked’ and ‘halitosis’. All are seemingly random and unconnected, but taken collectively they go a long way to explaining what went wrong.

A
fter a gruelling worldwide first-album campaign, we set about writing and recording that difficult second album. I seem to recall desperately wanting it to be called ‘Bushy Hair, Bald Twat’, and I’ll admit it became a real bone of contention for me. Then I remember arguing for the title ‘Frottage’, a French expression referring to passengers on crowded tubes, trains or buses who gratuitously rub themselves up against desirable ladies. In my head, the artwork would have been the interior of a crowded rush-hour London tube train with the assorted passengers all dowdy in black and white except for the four band members highlighted in colour, in the act of committing ‘frottage’ on hapless victims. Sadly, these politically incorrect aspirations were to be dashed as things got correctly political.

During the recording of the album, it became apparent that Justin couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me. What’s more, I hadn’t had any meaningful dialogue with his partner, our manager Sue Whitehouse, in over a year. Then our front man decided he wouldn’t put vocals on my calypso reggae composition, which was a shame, as I was convinced it would make a great comeback single.

We spent months over-deliberating, holed up in the countryside and prey to monumental
self-delusion
regarding the prospects of our second album. I like to think I was slightly less deluded than the others, but that’s easy to say now. No matter how often our friends warned us that the public had tired of the joke, we all felt that with a mammoth budget and a top producer the sky was the limit.

Unfortunately, the sky’s a big place and once you get up there you realise there are no limits. Only the temptation to rest your head on those lovely clouds. Not for nothing do the Polish say: ‘An empty head is drawn to the sky like a balloon.’ And having all that choice means there’s only more chance of choosing wrongly. We had picked a producer called Roy Thomas Baker who had the humungous claim to fame of producing ‘Bohemian
Rhapsody’, but he hadn’t had a hit now for 20 years and his ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ philosophy was diametrically opposed to what had worked for us on that first album.

Meanwhile, our guitarist Dan had turned into Beethoven. Unfortunately for us, the comparison went only as far as the ‘deaf’ bit, as he doggedly toiled away at his imaginary masterpiece in a world of his own. Then he developed a sudden interest in antiques, running up a 30-grand tab renting a highly sought-after 1950s vintage Les Paul. Alas, the longed-for gold dust was in short supply: only a six-month layer of the house variety on an unopened case. It was apt that the album’s finishing touches involved Elton John’s string arranger turd polishing till even he could turd polish no more.

Often, the trouble with life is, there’s only variety and nothing else. If you’re given a choice of two or three things to choose from, your brain can evaluate and make the choice, fast and efficiently – perhaps even instinctively. If there are a hundred things to choose from, however, a whole lot of time is wasted and indecision creeps in. Afterwards, you can never be sure whether you made the right choice, and a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction invariably creeps in. Less choice is better for
creative people, because it forces human spirit and ingenuity to overcome obstacles – and that’s the starting point for invention.

But the budget kept on ballooning and the egos kept on clashing until I decided to test the theory that ‘paranoia is just seeing things the way they really are’. I hired my own accountant – just to check if Sue Whitehouse had made any miscalculations in the band’s finances.

When I rushed to announce the great news that my accountant had uncovered no such miscalculations and that my paranoia was unjustified, Justin announced, ‘It’s me or him.’

Everybody apart from me chose him.