Justin Hawkins with Dawn Osborne – Transcribed

When Justin Hawkins spoke with Dawn Osborne in UK Lockdown 2021

Dawn.. I’m here with Justin Hawkins of The Darkness Justin, tell everyone how you’re doing?

Justin.. I’m doing well. I’m happy. Well as expected..

Dawn.. How have you been spending lockdown?

Justin.. Lockdown? Do you mean the second lockdown, first lockdown or just lockdown?

Dawn.. I think when we had no summer festivals it all became one for me really.

Justin.. Okay, well technically I’m not locked down because I live in Switzerland. Here they didn’t take it that seriously because the numbers were pretty good at the beginning compared to now, and so after a while, it just seemed like everything went back to normal pretty quickly like last summer. And then the numbers went disastrously wrong. You know, it’s just been it’s just been weird because I hear a lot of stuff from the UK because obviously all my bandmates and family and friends and all that live in the UK and then you sort of see how things are being handled there, mishandled actually by the authorities, but most people are kind of scared and taking it seriously. And then here it was just people hugging no masks, shops, open restaurants open everything it was just like, like nothing had happened.

Dawn.. But Switzerland’s catching up, so are you staying in the house a lot now?

Justin.. Well, I always do anyway, I still don’t like leaving the house that much. But um, restaurants are closed. shops are open. Depends on the Canton actually. There’s no national guidelines. Each Canton does their own thing.

Dawn.. But what a year 2020 was, I mean, looking back, and now we’ve got 2021. And we’ve already had Jamiroquai in the Capitol building, and we’re only six days in, so who knows what’s gonna happen?

Justin.. Yeah. Um, I mean, for me, the biggest disappointment is not being able to play live. You know, that’s true. Yeah.

Dawn.. Yeah, absolutely.

Justin.. Yeah, we had six weeks in America, we had all the festival stuff that we’re supposed to do, we had some amazing shows planned for wintertime, which we never even got a chance to announce. Because it just became clear that there was no confidence in being able to actually do those concerts. So we just ended up doing absolutely nothing apart from one streaming show just for Christmas, which was brilliant. But, and it was great to see everybody but, you know, even that was was fraught because we were supposed to have an audience. You know? Like, a socially distanced audience. Yeah, sold loadsa tickets. It wasn’t a cheap ticket. It was kind of like a good sort of bonus day for all of us really having had a year of inactivity. And then just at the last minute, Boris said, Oh, yeah, we’re gonna change the tier of London, and which is fair enough, but what really pissed me off if you don’t mind me saying was like, if you know about this new strain, and you know about it for months, don’t let people put concerts on and sell tickets. If they’re not gonna be able to fucking shut pubs, shut the fucking restaurants and get it sorted. You know? Don’t wait until everybody’s dying before you do something. It’s really annoying. And just, I was angry. I still am a little bit angry. I just realised.

Dawn.. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you did your bit for the pandemic, though. Because you did a charity single, didn’t you? The Ramones? ‘I Believe in Miracles” that was for an infectious disease thing.

Justin.. Yeah, I think at the beginning, there was a lot of that kind of, I use inverted commas to say creativity. There’s a lot of projects like that. And I was invited to do that. I did it. Because I quite admire the guy Boris who was putting the whole thing together from Gogol bordello or something?

Dawn.. Oh, right. Yeah.

Justin.. So when he contacted me, because I really liked him, I wanted to do it. Um, but yeah, and apart from that I started doing a Patreon. Okay, actually teach people how to sing and play guitar and do a load of other sort of content, creative content stuff online, an album, a lot of online stuff and a bit of writing.

Dawn.. Well, I’m gonna come back to some of those subjects. I don’t want to skip over them so fast. But before we do, Download didn’t go ahead last year, but you took part in the virtual festival instead, remember? I mean, that’s a bit different. Hopefully, it’s going to go ahead this year. What do you think are the chances of that?

Justin.. Well, I don’t know much about the statistics of it in terms of chances. But I mean, that’s slap bang in the middle of a British summer. I heard that my mum might be getting vaccinated somewhere in the middle of February. So okay if you can reach just one person, it’s not ideal if it’s your mom, because she probably wouldn’t pay for a ticket, you know?

Dawn.. I think I won’t be on the list until towards the end of the year, December, January. But I think I might have had Covid in March. So maybe I would just go anyway, you know, and try and socially distance and stuff.

Justin.. If you’ve had it, and perhaps they’ll come up with some evidence to suggest that having had it means you don’t get it twice you can just start living like it’s ancient Rome. Last Days of ancient Rome, just enjoy it.

Dawn.. People are saying life will be permanently altered. But actually, if you watch documentaries about the Spanish flu, people wore masks then and people got in trouble for not wearing masks, and we just completely forgot about it. We went back to normal life. I do believe we will go back to normal life

Justin.. back to normal then.

Dawn.. I think we will.

Justin.. Yeah, but what if we don’t want to or shouldn’t.

Dawn.. I definitely want to get back to my live music. Yeah.

Justin.. Definitely, but I think like just the idea of wearing masks on public transport. I mean, first of all, there’s a lot of facial recognition stuff. I mean, I’m gonna sound like a swivel eyed loon, but I just think  there’s a lot more anonymity that has been completely absent for a decade, for example.

Dawn.. Yeah. And if one of your teeth falls out, you can wear a mask until you get time to go to the dentist.

Justin.. Happens to me all the time.

Dawn.. Now, I love Easter is cancelled. I absolutely love it. I mean, you know, it was just such a great album. But I’m a bit scared about what you might actually call the next album. Please don’t call it ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.

Justin.. It’s called ‘Justin Hawkins from The Darkness wins the lottery’.

Dawn.. That’s a really good one. Um, you said that there’s a new album on the way. So anything that you can tell us about it now?

Justin.. I think when we first started working on it, we were sort of looking at maybe releasing it in spring or something. But that was when we thought that, you know, we’d be touring in the summer, or at the beginning of the summer, we did. We don’t know now what the timelines look like, really. And there’s absolutely no point in us releasing something unless we can back it up. You know, we’re not, we’re not The Darkness 2003 we’re The Darkness 21. And we need a fan base to come out and see us play for us to, you know, do albums, you do that to sort of make the set more interesting.

Dawn.. Is it in the can already? Is it done?

Justin.. No, it’s not done. I mean, we could have done one quick, I wrote an album at the beginning of it all. But when I do stuff like that, it’s not suitable for The Darkness, you know, and we need to collaborate on it. We could have put something out. But we didn’t. And I think this for the best, really, we spend time on it and it’s always better.

Dawn.. I saw you on ‘Icon’the rock photography documentary, actually quite a small segment. Really, I would have liked to seen a bit more of you, but it was nice that you got on there.

Justin.. How much segment did you say?

Dawn.. I mean, there were, I think five or six programmes, I watched them all. I think you were in one of them. And I mean, is rock photography important to you? It is to me, because I actually take photographs myself how do you feel about it?

Justin.. I think that there’s a real knack to live music photography. Even trained photographers don’t necessarily have it, they don’t have the sort of ability to capture those moments. My favourite live music photographer that’s ever taken pictures of us is a woman called Sue Thompson, who’s actually a fan of the band, always in the front row, always rocking. And then you see her posh camera pop up for a couple of seconds at a time. And she always comes out with the best pictures of the night. And she’s got talent, you know, and I think studio photography, you know, the really iconic sort of almost like fashion photography that you need to do to pad out your CD booklets and, and your posters and all that sort of stuff, I think that’s totally different skill. Yeah. And my favourite one is Simon Emmett, who’s who’s also happens to be the man who’s making the documentary about The Darkness. And who is staggering and sees us in a way that nobody else sees us and he’s really got a special eye. I actually studied photography when I was at Lowestoft college and old school, you know, like properly develop photographs and not digital, pre digital cameras because I am very old.

Dawn.. What’s happening with the documentary?

Justin.. Well, I sort of covered it a while ago, and it was quite upsetting to me, it’s very, very naked. And for me, it was just a bit too close to the bone. And there’s a lot of stories you can tell when you follow a band around for five years, you could say anything like really. And so I’m looking forward to seeing what it comes up with next. I mean, he’s got so much footage, and he’s actually managed to get access to a lot of the stuff from when we were ‘huge’. And it’s weird watching though, because over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve gone through so many different appearances, at one point I was super skinny. One point I was super fat. One point I was super fit. I’ve had short, long, middle hair. I’ve had moustaches beards, all sorts .. a lot of time I don’t even recognise myself and I certainly don’t recognise myself when I’m drunk.

Dawn.. Have you thought about doin your autobiography while you’ve got more time on your hands at home?

Justin.. No, because I’m too busy doing stuff to write about doing stuff.

Dawn.. All right. Okay.

Justin.. There’s probably a writer or two that I would probably enjoy collaborating with on that stuff. But I’m somewhat of a compulsive liar. I don’t know how much sort of truth would be in it. It’d be entertaining, but it’d just be a load of old horseshit. You need to have a bit of truth, I think.

Dawn.. I myself thought you would make a great literary writer as well as a songwriter. You know, because you just seem when you’re doing your ad libbing and stuff like that, there just seems to be so much going on in there. You know?

Justin.. When I’m just talking you mean?

Dawn.. Yeah. Yes. So that you would be a good person to express yourself in an original way?

Justin.. Yeah. I used to.  I have written a couple of stories, but started to write something long form, a novel, issue was it ended up sounding a bit like Douglas Adams or something like that. It gets a bit surreal.

Dawn.. I love Douglas Adams.

Justin.. But there’s already Douglas Adams. We don’t need another guy doing Douglas Adams.

Dawn.. I mean, his his books were great. And there were only a few of them. Really, you know, you would bring your own thing to it, I am sure. And maybe with a rock and roll twist as well.

Justin.. Maybe I’ll write a musical.

Dawn.. Yeah, well, you could think about that. But, you know I prefer the rock music myself. Maybe you could combine the two, Alice Cooper was in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ recently on the television, maybe combine the two something like that.

Justin.. Which character did he play?

Dawn.. He was Herod.

Justin.. Typecasting!

Dawn.. And when you have ideas, such as ‘The Curse of the Tollund Man’ and things like that, d’you get them from books? Or do you get them from TV? Or do you get them from a chance remark that someone says to you? Where do you pick things up from and think ‘I’m gonna make a song out of that’?

Justin.. ‘The Curse of the Tollund Man’ it’s regional for me. Because when you grow up in East Anglia, you you are sort of exposed to a lot of Saxon mythology. And they found a body buried in peat. And when they were looking at it, it was garotted. And so they didn’t know whether it was some kind of religious sacrifice or whether it was a punishment for some crime that had been done, but the curse was just something. It’s just an interesting sort of archaeological find, but then I just made it into a song about a curse of the find. So I really love that story about when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, and then apart from Carter himself, like everybody died right? Yeah, everybody that was on the excavation died in weird circumstances. And he was the only one that died of natural causes like when he was in his 60s or something. And I always think that’s really interesting. And I tried to make a sort of Howard Carter to you know, Curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb about the body that was found in peat in East Anglia.

Dawn.. Well, that’s what I mean about having such an imagination and combining things and stuff like that, you know, like Shakespeare type of thing. He took stories, embellished them and you know made them absolute classics. Not that I want to lose you to the music, because I don’t.

Dawn.. You’ve been doing some music for children’s television as well and ‘Grace’s Amazing Adventures’ or something. I haven’t seen it myself. I like to think it’s not my age group. Tell us a little bit about that.

Justin.. You might not be the target audience for it. But Grace Webb is a competitive motorcyclist. And she’s really good at driving cars and all that. And so she shows kids amazing machines. And it’s all just fast cars, robots, aeroplanes. You know, just anything. It’s just for the petrolheads the kids.

Dawn.. Well, I love Muttley and the magnificent men in their flying machines remember that

Justin.. really do Dastardly and Muttley?

Dawn.. Yeah, excellent.

Justin.. I was quite pleased because I went to see the new Scooby Doo movie with my daughter in the cinema. And I was like, I couldn’t believe that they’re just throwing away those characters as kind of antagonists. Like Dastardly and <uttley deserve their own Hollywood reimagining?

Dawn.. Absolutely. I think so too. I love Penelope Pitstop too.

Justin.. Course. Of course, of course.

Dawn.. So when do you think we’re gonna see this new Darkness album, Justin? I know that you’re still touring to support ‘Easter is cancelled’. And I know that the Australian tour was cancelled, the American tour was cancelled. And you’re gonna have to go back and do those because people are not going to let you get away with that.

Justin.. We were in Australia when all went down, disaster.

Dawn.. So I really want to see a new album, because I love the last one so much. And so I’d hate for you to let this slip into a sort of two year. three year gap.

Justin.. Yeah, the idea of the next record for me, is I’m only writing stuff that I’m really, really gonna have fun singing and playing. So I just want it to be a really uplifting album, I don’t want it to sort of be like one of these lockdown albums where it’s all about the situation. I mean, it’s the Darkness’ job to provide some kind of relief from the world, understand me? So you know, something uplifting, and that doesn’t, doesn’t even refer to the misery and the uncertainty and the suffering and all that, that we’ve had to endure, as music should be aspirational. And it should talk about a world, the world that I actually live in, you know, where nothing like really affects me.

Dawn.. A lot of the time anyway, because you can’t go out.

Justin.. And the only thing I miss is touring. But then, you know, once this is all finished, we’ll be back out there, and I’ll be fine.

Dawn.. Absolutely. But you were gonna tell me something a little bit more about the new album, is there anything more you can tell us, any little teaser about what you’ve got in mind for it?

Justin.. I love being sort of emotionally honest, at the, you know, the risk of shooting myself in the foot. And I like really exposing the character defects and personality disorders that I have can’t wait to explore and celebrate those really. And sometimes some people think that music is like, cathartic. And that you sort of describe all the darkness that’s inside you and then you feel better and your audience feels better because they feel less alienated because they sort of, they realise that they’re not the only people that feel like that. And there’s a bit of that about us. But at the same time we’ve got to celebrate, like the parts of our personalities that are dysfunctional. I totally understand and appreciate the need for like a greater emphasis on men’s mental health and all that sort of stuff. But for me, without the madness, you can’t create anything. Mm hmm. I think that’s right. Songwriter’s shouldn’t be sitting doing therapy. They should be writing songs.

Dawn.. I I do think that’s right. And I think that when artists are honest, and they write songs, honestly, I mean, take, for example, David Coverdale of Whitesnake, or someone like that, some of his great songs like ‘Crying in the Rain’ and things like that they’re songs about breakup, rejection, feeling sad, feeling depressed, that sort of thing. And his fans absolutely love him because of that naked honesty and he’s not afraid, you know, he had a double hernia in his groin recently and he told everybody about it. I’m not saying everyone should necessarily let everyone in to that extent. But it does mean that you get close to people when you’re willing to be that honest about things that happen in your life, even if they’re not particularly flattering or you know, they don’t reflect well necessarily on you, such as depression. It brings your audience a lot closer, even if they don’t suffer from the same things because they feel as though they are allowed into your world a little bit more.

Justin.. I think. The other thing to remember is that when you write a song, you write it quickly, you’re capturing a moment in time, and then like studying the way you feel, is expressed in the song itself. But then as soon as you finish writing the song, you might not feel like that anymore. And you don’t necessarily need to feel that way to be able to sing it later. As long as it’s a great song, it doesn’t matter. And so for me, like when people say, ‘Oh, are you happy? Are you sad?’ I always reject that question. Because I think that the human experience is a whole spectrum of emotion. And it’s not determined by like events in your life, because you can feel great about the coffee that you’re drinking, but terrible about the loss that you’ve just suffered. Or you know, your dog licks you in the morning, and then shits on the carpet later on, you’re gonna have anger, and contentment, companionship and all these things that make you feel good. And also, you can have to deal with some actual shit. And that’s just an example of, so you have a spectrum of emotions that you experience a whole gamut of it. And so it’s all about when you write a song, make sure you’re honest about how you feel when you write it, not what you want to say with a song, you see what I mean, otherwise, it is less effective as a way of expressing something.

Dawn.. I totally do. But what happens if you get up one day? And you actually, I can’t imagine it with you, but you actually didn’t feel like going on stage? I mean, how do you deal with that? Say something awful happened to you? But you’ve got a big concert that night?

Justin.. Would have to be pretty awful to stop me from doing it, I think.

Dawn.. Right? Right. Right. I suppose the live experience for many artists is how, you know, they sometimes suspend their lives, and it’s what they live for to be onstage, you know, which is away from whatever issues they may have going on.

Justin.. I think it’s like playing sports, you know, I think it’s when you play football, and the balls bouncing along, you haven’t got time to look at your phone, or think about the bills you’ve got to pay, you just have to go and get the ball and try and do something effective with it. I think playing music is like that, too. If you kind of step on stage, and then you surrender to the experience of it for two hours. The only thing that matters is the performing of the songs. And it’s really exhilarating, and it’s escapism, it’s just what you need sometimes. And for me, like if I’m in a relationship that’s going sour, and it’s affecting my performance, because I’m thinking about stuff, and I’m forgetting the words, because stuff’s happening in my life, then that relationship is at that point over. And then, you know, if it’s interfering with the only part of the day that actually matters it cannot go on. So I have actually ended relationships because of that situation. Yeah,

Dawn.. I understand. I mean, it is the most important thing to you. And it must feel nice when what you do the records, the live music and stuff like that, is able to do things for other people. So you will often hear people say, you know, well, they’re having a terrible time, but they go to a live concert. And that’s what makes life living for them. You know, so you get it both ways, because you actually reflect into other people’s lives. And they tell you what it is that you’ve done for them when you’ve you’ve done the live concert.

Justin.. I get it both ways. Fnar.

Dawn.. And on that double entendre I do believe that we’ve come to the end of our allotted time. Justin, thank you so much for making some time to talk to us. I can’t wait to to hear the new album, just hurry up and write it. And then you can give birth to it. And we can all enjoy it. And I know that you’ve done the European part of the tour. But I would like to see you live again. So I hope Download goes ahead. And I hope you do get to do some live shows for us all very, very soon.

Justin.. So happy to be on the Download bill. I just hope it is able to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, it’ll happen someday. And hopefully when it’s  done we’ll be involved because we love it. And we love you. Thanks.

Dawn.. And I hope very much to be at the next gig. Maybe taking some photographs, doing some reviewing. I’d love to be there. Right. All right. Thank you very much.

Justin.. You’ll be welcome in the pit anytime Dawn.

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