Dancing in the Darkness (4 page)

I
spent ages searching for like-minded musicians around London; the trouble is, if you don’t know what your own mind is like, how are you supposed to search for like-minded collaborators? I did learn something about musicians, though: they all seem to be convinced that no one feels things quite as deeply as them.

In 1995, a guy called Dan Hawkins replied to an ad I’d placed in
Melody Maker
. He was a shy 18-
year-old
bass player with floppy hair and a strikingly serious demeanour for his age. Shy but determined, and obviously quite talented. After my bass-playing adventure in Swing, I had developed into a
cack-handed
27-year-old guitar player. We hired and fired our way through two short-lived bands before finding a suitable singer and drummer. Upon christening the outfit Empire, I switched instruments
with dextrous Dan and set about recruiting his older brother Justin to play keyboards and second guitar.

Justin had a delightful childlike way about him and refused to take anything seriously, but Dan took things very seriously indeed and had fired him from both of the school bands they’d been in together. Dan was
credible
, whereas the older but infinitely more irresponsible Justin was, in his own words,
incredible
. I suppose I acted as a foil, corny as that sounds. Sweetcorn in tin foil on the barbecue of electric dreams. I made it a personal crusade to convince them to play together again, for the simple reason that bands containing talented siblings always seemed to go places.

The fact is, they were both musically gifted and appeared to be grounded individuals with a sense of honour and decency instilled into them by the archetypal loveable cockney parents (who’d raised them in East Anglia’s Lowestoft). They had character, strength of will, genuine humility and good humour. It was as though I’d been endlessly tossing a coin, always getting the inevitable heads or tails, and finally it had landed on its side – perfectly and precariously balanced. I decided that, no matter what happened with Empire, I’d like to continue working with the Hawkins brothers.

M
usic magazines like to publish supposedly embarrassing photos of bands in their previous incarnations. The Stone Roses were once an embarrassing Goth band and Jimi Hendrix dutifully wore a suit and tie serving as a back-up session guitarist for sixties soul singers. Even Pete Doherty played in a dodgy school band once – apparently they were called Baby Shameless and legend has it they still turn up for the odd gig from time to time. (If you’re reading this online, you may have to adjust the joke filter on Outlook Express so this one gets through.)

However, just like Wet Wet Wet – who reportedly started life playing Joy Division covers (presumably as Dry Dry Dry) before Marti Pellow’s perma-grin lent them a white-soul direction – The Darkness band members found themselves becoming progressively more embarrassing in order to make it. There were key differences, of course: our ace in the pack was Justin Hawkins and his poison was the gack,
*
whereas grinning Marti (being a Glaswegian), at one time in his life, admitted to preferring the smack. What is it with guys who smile all the time?

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, our former guise was a band that was kind of spontaneously planned. Justin Hawkins was on keys and second guitar, with Dan Hawkins on lead guitar and yours truly on bass duties. Two South London likely lads filled in on drums (Steve Sergeant) and vocals (Paul O’Keefe). An accountant at Savage And Best, Music Management and PR, heard our cassette and liked what she heard. Her name was Sue Whitehouse, and she decided to get out from behind her desk and look after us.

If I told you that the best soundbite our PR guy could muster up was the hugely underwhelming ‘Like Rick Astley fronting the Pixies’, then that
should give you a rough idea of why, like almost all other bands will tell you, ‘We nearly made it.’ That, of course, translates as: ‘We failed.’

The fact is, we were much of a much-ness. Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. But the point I’m really trying to make is that our previous incarnation, Empire, was a million miles away from what became The Darkness. You could say we didn’t make it because we weren’t embarrassing enough. Or that, when it comes to music taste, one man’s cheese is another man’s meat.

Truth be told, sometimes you just have to make a fool of yourself in order to entertain other people. And, if you try to be cool, you just end up like everyone else. Therefore, it’s plainly obvious that ‘embarrassing’ is the real cool.

I
f you always do what you're good at, you always go for the safe option – which means you miss out on adventures. If you really want to do something, then it doesn't matter what skills you have. Stubbornness and determination are part of the story. But there's something else that propels people like me through a world of pain, confusion and cock-ups. You could say we're determined to excel in what we're
not
good at. There are lots of us like that. Sometimes it's hard to separate courage and stupidity, so why bother? I happen to think the two go great together, like gammon and pineapple.

Take the world of skiing: the ones on the move always suffer less than those who are static. If you're proactive, it works better for you. It's all about forgetting yourself. If you try to avoid getting hurt, you'll get hurt. That's a given. The way I see it, if you really want to forget yourself, it pays to be both courageous
and
stupid…

After being so near and yet so far with Empire, followed by a fruitless two-year search for someone to front the backing tracks myself and Dan Hawkins had put down (Justin, Dan and myself planned to stick together as a unit if we could find a convincing front person), I needed to forget
myself
. Any courageous and stupid adventure would do just fine. Staying in London too long without achieving your goals is a slow, painful torture. And the more I feared that torture, the more I feared failure – to the point where I feared failure was not even an option. How could it be while Gestapo voices berated me nightly for the crimes of a wasted life? So when my little brother Chris turned up unexpectedly, and invited me over to Venezuela, I didn't need much persuading.

It was 15 April 1995, so that meant it was my 28th birthday – and an Easter weekend, a great excuse for my mum to visit. She was staying with my older brother Tim up in Finchley Central and they had a present for me to collect. I jumped the tube as I always did, to safeguard precious dole money, and arrived there to find my mum even more excitable than usual. There was a huge
cardboard box for me to open. I was wondering how the hell I would manage to squeeze a washing machine into my minuscule Kentish Town bed-sit and resignedly began peeling back the masking tape, when all of a sudden my little brother Chris, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in five years, burst out of the box. With his sunburned nose, kids' TV presenter dungarees and eighties mullet hairstyle, he looked like a pantomime lion about to perform a Nik Kershaw medley. It was the best birthday present I ever had.

Venezuela was the land that fashion forgot because the little culture it had was stuck in the eighties and Chris, to his credit, had never really cared what was fashionable anyway. It was refreshing and surreal to hang out with him in the Big Smoke's artifice of try-hards and fashion victims. Occasionally, taxi drivers and acquaintances of mine would mock his unfashionable appearance, but he'd simply keep the drinks coming with his big heart and deep, generous pockets. He was twice the man they'd ever be, and deep down they knew it. Now I needed to know what had happened since we'd shifted our cargo some five years earlier. And why his nose was so red.

He and Austin had invested their drug-run fund
into a bar venture called The Dolphin Inn on the Caribbean island of St Vincent. Unfortunately, as these things invariably do, it all went sour. Family, drugs, money and business is a highly volatile cocktail, even if handled with care, and unfortunately my mad father and brother weren't the kind of people who handled things all that carefully.

Austin's ‘wake and bake' routine (getting stoned before breakfast) had resulted in a cosmic mindset. He'd discovered that practising yoga and landscape painting could quell his demons and pacify the pirate within. Unfortunately, he possessed a blind spot of the ‘world revolves around me' variety, which led him to believe he'd tapped into a higher new-age collective consciousness that could serve as a template for running not just your personal life but also your business affairs. That meant staff helping themselves to wages and flexi-time Caribbean style. Having run bars in New York and Cape Cod, Chris knew that this would end in tears, for the simple reason that people take the piss. He also suspected that Austin's insistence on being the only place on the island to serve duck instead of chicken was fundamentally flawed – for the simple reason that there
were
no ducks in the
Caribbean. There were, however, enough chickens to feed the whole of China.

The venture turned into a disaster, with yardies openly dealing drugs there, blood on the dance floor and all manner of racketeering. Their choice of female partners didn't make things any easier. Ironically, Chris had married precisely for that reason – to help with the registration of the bar – but Jezel, by all accounts, turned out to be somewhat temperamental. Finally, at his wits' end, he went to her father for advice and was told in no uncertain terms: ‘YAH MUS' BEAT THA BEETCH!' Mercifully, Chris chose to interpret the affectionate marriage guidance promptings of his father-in-law as jest.

Austin fared little better. At one stage, after complaining of severe headaches and stomach cramps, he became convinced that one of his casual lady friends, who happened to be an ex-prostitute of local renown, was gradually poisoning him with arsenic. Chris watched on helplessly as she pilfered the nightclub's earnings – brazenly taunting him at the till, licking her lips and stuffing the takings into her bra.

Yes, it seemed that my family had lost the plot again and, after Chris clobbered Austin one night
in a drunken contretemps, it was left to their respective lawyers to finish the job. Eventually, using his superior network of contacts, my father drove his penniless son from the island. I was furious when, a year later, he tried to excuse himself to me over the phone. As far as I was concerned, it was the last straw. I hung up and vowed never to talk to him again.

Meanwhile, Chris had escaped by crewing on a yacht to Venezuela where he swiftly set about organising day trips up a volcano and around waterfalls. Just as I always seem to be on the verge of expiring, he's always been a survivor. Four years later, he was running a vast adventure tour enterprise, Jakera Tours, whose motto (‘Viva la Vida') was supposed to be about
living
– live life. It was only a matter of time then before I got involved and ended up almost
dying
…