You were rehearsing yesterday, and you’re rehearsing again today… Tat’s right, yeah, trying to get our songs together. It’s funny because we’re just fresh out of the festival season, which is this weird thing because you play once a week, and usually in a different country each time. All your gear is permanently in transit, your guitars and stuff, then you turn up at these venues and have to be great on the spot, having not played for a week.
How disciplined are you all in a rehearsal studio? When you know people so well, is it difficult to keep your mind on the job? Yeah, I guess so. We have different roles in rehearsal and it’s my job to crack the whip – it always has been. It’s my job to keep the thing going, you know; I used to be a real disciplinarian, I’d have us in for eight hours straight, no break. It’s a bit more relaxed now; I’d say it’s about 50% routine, going over certain sections of song again and again and again like a broken record, then 50% pissing about!
It sounds like a good balance there, especially with you, Dan ‘Whip Crack Away’ Hawkins at the helm… Haha, I’m far less like that nowadays though since having kids; I guess the band used to be like my children, but now I’ve got real children I guess wiping their bums is more than enough!
We’re coming into a period of a full-length tour where Te Darkness still has as much relevance as ever, I mean, ‘I Believe in a Ting Called Love’ was on X Factor the other day, did you know? As much as I don’t have a particularly great view of X Factor and despise what it is essentially, it’s good to be played amongst other such great songs. Being murdered by someone like that guy… haha!
Yeah, your songs have become kind of public property now – it must be quite inevitable that you lost control of it a bit when they’re that big… Yeah, another example of that is
the Christmas song, which has taken on a life of its own. Tose songs sort of exist independent of the rest of our career as well, you know. Tat was just a moment in time but you can pretty much guarantee that it’ll probably be played forever I think! I’ll be trying to avoid watching the TV at Christmas and that awful sweater I was wearing for the rest of my life, hahaha!
Yes, you need to pick your jumpers carefully in this industry. Haha, yes. If only I had something else to wear… I mean it was very nice of Phil Collins to lend it to me, haha, but I kind of regret it somewhat.
You guys don’t have to wait for certain musical waves to come in and out of fashion because you tend to buck the trend and stamp your own style on proceedings… I think we’re one of those bands who, and it’s quite strange, became a pop, or popular thing despite being influenced by, or aspiring to be like hard rock acts. So yeah, we stand the other side of fashion as you can probably tell from our stage outfits most of the time!
Te band quickly outgrew Britain and became a global concern – I remember watching Darkness videos in Hard Rock Café in Washington DC – do you think you just ignited the imagination of a worldwide audience? I think so yeah, I think there’s very few rock ‘n’ roll bands around and rock ‘n’ roll is such a wide sound, really but essentially it stands for something a bit rough and ready and doesn’t necessarily conform and I think that’s exactly what we are, you know; we’ve never really… I dunno, like Coldplay for example has always sat categorically in the middle of what they’re trying to play, but we don’t fit nicely into that AC/DC type of rock category, I think we’re just an oddity. I guess the bands that you could compare us to are not around any more, so I think the fans of our type of music only really have one place to go for it, and that’s us.
‘Permission to Land’ went five
times platinum – did that elevate you to a level that was just too difficult to maintain? Yes, actually it went more than that as it goes! I think it was like eight times in the end! Sorry what was the question again? I was just trying to count my platinum discs, hahaha! Oh yes, yeah I think the level of success probably would have been easier to maintain had we not found it so hard to maintain our drink and drugs schedule, you know! I think one thing had to give and unfortunately it was the band and the band’s success really. I think the main thing is that we had a fantastic sort of ride; it was like holding on to a jet engine taking off, but ultimately going at that speed and being up that high, you’re gonna get covered in ice and fall off. Well that’s a weird analogy, but it’s a similar thing, you know. I thought we all dealt with it pretty well, but really we all struggled. It was kind of a crazy time; we talk about it sort of fondly now and it’s almost like we had to lose it all to appreciate it properly, you know. I think ultimately we were just caning it really, really hard and we paid the price for it! None of us regret what we did and I think for everyone, this is just part of life and we’re glad to be back together. Tere’s camaraderie there where we still can’t actually believe we made it through and we’re still making music. We laugh about it; we laugh about the fact that it’s only ever one of us that can seem to remember something that happened in the past at any one time. It’s one of those things; it’s a rock ‘n’ roll band, what are you gonna do?!
We’re a magazine that really did like the Stone Gods so for us, it wasn’t a bad thing; the adversity of the split prompted, I think, your most creative chapter. Creativity often comes from hard times, don’t you think? Definitely, definitely, I think in a similar way the excitement that I had going into that studio with Richie and Ed to do the Stone Gods project reminds me of going into Te Darkness again. I think when we all went off after Te Darkness, it was all about making music for
outlineonline.co.uk / November 2011 / 13
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