The rock band Dave Grohl considered too silly: “Do I truly believe it? Well, no”
Rock and roll has always been about an element of fun running throughout a show. No one goes to a venue to spend the entire time staring at their shoes, so it’s better to deliver a spectacle and leave the audience with something to remember when they leave the venue. Dave Grohl has always been a student of making the audience feel like they’re a part of the show, but when he first encountered The Darkness, he wasn’t quite sure of what to make of them.
But in theory, what’s not to love about the British glam rock outfit? The height of their brand of rock and roll was 30 years past their debut, but listening to tracks like ‘I Believe In a Thing Called Love’, it practically has everything that a middle-school music fan would doodle in his notebook when they dream of success.
And looking back on their discography, their debut, Permission to Land, is still one of the better debuts to come out of the 2000s. It’s about as kitschy and cheesy as one might expect, but listening to tracks like ‘Get Your Hands Off My Woman’ and ‘Black Shuck’, they at least know their way around a hook better than most other groups coming out of England in the post-Britpop ever.
There are even pieces of their music that show they weren’t as hardcore as they seemed. ‘Friday Night’ is a glittery piece of power pop, and given how well they adopted their signature threads in the video for the song ‘Love is Only a Feeling’, it’s not like they aren’t aware that their approach wasn’t at least a little bit over-the-top.
For any metalhead, though, someone needs to be doing something very right to be able to pull this kind of thing off. There’s a fine line where most hair metal bands cross into manufactured territory, but The Darkness was still more than worthy to stand on the strength of their songs rather than their theatrics.
That didn’t stop Grohl from giving The Darkness a little bit of a closer look when they first burst onto the scene, saying, “I’ve seen footage of them live, and more power to them. A rock band playing rock music, hell yeah! That’s great! But do I truly, wholeheartedly believe in it? Well, no. That, to me, seems a little silly.”
Grohl may have been a part of the movement that put some of The Darkness’s heroes six feet underground in Nirvana, but they weren’t strictly copying hair metal outfits. They were the kind of artists indebted to acts like Queen and T Rex, and by the time they regrouped with Hawkins out front after going to rehab, they became one of the most reliable hard rock acts of the modern age.
And it’s not like Grohl hasn’t been a fan ever since, even bringing out Hawkins during the tribute show for fallen Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins to sing a few Van Halen tunes. The Darkness was never attuned to the underground scene with their music, but there’s nothing wrong with a group reaching for the stars and actually reaching the top of the world in the process.
