Exit Stage Left by Nick Duerden

Author:Nick Duerden [Duerden, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472277794
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2022-04-28T05:00:00+00:00

17

‘I love the upheaval; I love emotional disasters; I love mismanaging every relationship I’ve ever had’

Despite those few exceptions that prove the rule, there cannot be too many long-term prospects for the kind of rock star who finds their niche wearing the sort of spandex most people would flinch from on the grounds of taste, decency and functional eyesight. And so, if there ever was a genre for which the advice ‘enjoy it while it lasts’ was designed, it’s hair metal. Hair metal has a long, complicated, and often hilarious, past, and was mostly left dead and buried by two things, both of which occurred within the space of a week in late September 1991: the implosion of Guns N’ Roses into the world’s most bloatedly humourless rock band with the release of Use Your Illusion I; and the main stage arrival of Nirvana with their second album, Nevermind. The latter’s pared-down economy was so throat-grippingly effective it compelled all remaining hair metal outfits to please make their way to the door marked EXIT in a disorderly fashion.

It seemed that the genre was never going to attempt a return until, somehow, in the early 2000s, it did. Its resurrection came from an unlikely location: Lowestoft, an English coastal town 110 miles from London. The band were called the Darkness, and were proponents of the genre with the kind of tongue-in-cheek cheek that many would suggest could only ever have been the product of sardonic Brits. It’s entirely possible that a band never took itself less seriously than the Darkness, but as is always the way with comedy, the band’s collective efforts to raise a smile, and to entertain, served to mask just how adept they were at what they did – skilled, even.

Regardless, they’d have been wise to enjoy it while it lasted, too.

The Darkness converged at the purely imaginary point at which Queen’s Freddie Mercury careened into Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins outside the portaloos at a Monsters of Rock festival, each looking the other up and down and wondering who was taking the piss more. In the video for their 2003 signature tune ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, they knowingly plundered every caricature of every bad hair metal and rock act there’d ever been: Lycra jumpsuits opened to the navel, long hair, tattoos and handlebar moustaches. But where so much of this sort of thing invariably involved more style than content, ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ was determinedly joyful, the most fun pop song in an age.

‘That takes a certain amount of charisma, you know,’ says singer Justin Hawkins on playing the role of a frontman who stands on stage with legs akimbo and one arm held high, convinced he’s in full command of his audience. Fortunately for him, Hawkins was possessed with that charisma. He’d grown up wanting to be Freddie Mercury all along, and as an avid teenage gig-goer would note with interest just how few frontmen could manage what Queen’s singer so effortlessly could.

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