Last night, I had the chance to go and see The Darkness at the O2 Academy in Leeds, where they were promoting their latest album (which I've reviewed on this blog) and putting on a hell of a show in the process. Before I go into details about the main event, I need to talk about the warm-up act; The River 68's.
It's a fact of life that every modern band has a completely shit warm-up act so I wasn't expecting much from this gig. What we ended up getting were two Scottish boys completely in love with themselves playing the same song over and over again but with different lyrics that you couldn't hear over the venue's terrible vocal acoustics. Since there were only two of them on stage, one of the chaps had to play guitar whilst stamping out a bass drum rhythm and the other got to wail away on vocals as he danced and stroked himself to his mate's basic chord playing.
It was already pretty bad before the one on guitar starting blowing away on the harmonica, the most pointless instrument ever to stain Rock music, but I could forgive all of that if they weren't so fucking boring! It was just the same shit over and over again without any backbone or energy designed to entertain intellectually vacant pissheads, something they could've avoided if they bothered to bring a bloody drummer or decided to play a song that didn't sound like the most basic Southern Rock B-side.
Having listened to a couple of their studio recordings afterwards to compare their work, it seems they know someone capable of playing the drums and injecting a bit of excitement into their music. Unfortunately, their performance left me bored shitless and even though the last song had quite a good melody that would've sounded a lot better had it not come after half an hour of tedium, there was nothing about The River 68's that made me want to give them any of my money for their "art".
But enough about that; let's talk about The Darkness!
After about two minutes of an audibly-painful synth intro, the band appeared on stage and burst into "Barbarian", album opener from Last Of Our Kind. Credit where due, all of their songs sounded nearly identical to the studio versions from the powerful riffing to the falsetto vocals and each member of the band (including the new drummer) was on top form. Justin Hawkins makes a damn fine frontman for the band as his on-stage antics definitely made the night even more entertaining.
In between and often during songs, he would joke with the audience and tell amusing anecdotes. In fact, after the audience started chanting "YORKSHIRE! YORKSHIRE!", the band gradually broke into an impromptu song about areas in Yorkshire which may or may not be turned into a fleshed out track in the near future (if it is, you heard it here first folks!). Along with "The Yorkshire Song", the setlist contained most of the band's greatest hits, some of the best songs off the latest album and pretty much every track off the band's 2003 debut, Permission To Land.
I'll admit, I was disappointed that they didn't play "Last Of Our Kind" or "Open Fire" but on the plus side, I've been introduced to several awesome songs that I'll be purchasing and listening to on repeat for the next couple of weeks. All in all, it was a great evening full of entertainment that I would definitely recommend to fans of a good old fashioned Hard Rock show, although you should be warned that the band do literally pause songs to chat with the audience so if that bothers you, you might want to steer clear.
Unlike Motley Crue, these guys are still touring and (presumably) releasing new material which will be promoted with another tour, so if you get the opportunity to buy tickets for these guys, jump on it! It's just a shame these guys had to release a Deluxe Edition of their latest album that contains a whopping five extra songs too unimpressive to include on the main tracklist, a sin which automatically earns any band a middle finger from me until it fucking stops happening.
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