Author: wamdines

“It’s one of those things where you find out who your friends are,” Justin Hawkins mused recently to the half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, referencing the fan base-dividing video for recent single I Hate Myself, featuring a heavily made up Hawkins staring down the camera lens for the song’s duration.

The same take-it-or-leave-it spirit pervades Dreams On Toast. But then The Darkness have long been rock’s most Marmite band. Back in the early noughties, when the studied Stateside cool of The Strokes and the White Stripes redefined the indie-rock zeitgeist, The Darkness’s peculiarly English fusion of Queen and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band seemed about as culturally relevant as Nora Batty.

Yet their subsequent success – 2003 debut Permission To Land went quadruple platinum and earned the band three Brit Awards – vindicated their determination to do things their own way, their resolve reflected in a renaissance which has seen them claw their way back up to stadium level since their 2011 reunion.

Put it down to Justin Hawkins’s age, then (he turned 50 this month), but this strain of defiance is as prominent as ever on the band’s eighth studio album. Opener Rock And Roll Party Cowboy feels like a continuation of the breezy hair-metal of 2019’s Motorheart up until the final seconds when the singer bawls: “Fuck off!”, while a swaggering I Hate Myself is actually an ode to self-loathing, and the bad-tempered The Battle For Gadget Land delivers a Chinese burn to the chrome arm of progress, Dan Hawkins’s guitar battery as corrosive as Killer On The Loose-era Thin Lizzy. Equally, unexpected diversions into country honk (Cold Hearted Woman, Hot On My Tail) and cinematic balladry (Weekend In Rome) may also raise eyebrows among diehards.

But when the storm clouds clear, the band’s innate pop sensibilities shine as brightly as ever. The Longest Kiss is a gorgeous synthesis of 70s bubblegum pop that nods to 90s cult icons Jellyfish, while Don’t Need Sunshine is a mid-tempo banger of stadium-sized proportions. Better still is Walking Through Fire. The kind of fist-in-the-air anthem that reminds you why we fell in love with The Darkness in the first place, it even comes with a breakdown where Hawkins – channelling Vivian Stanshall – declares: ‘We never stopped making hit albums, it’s just that no one buys them any more!’

In a world of bread-and-butter rock bands, The Darkness remain the toast of the town.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

More about the darkness dreams on toast

Ginger Wildheart has built an erratic career on brilliantly realised, rousing pop rock and the kind of offstage behaviour that might have given Hunter S Thompson pause for thought. He’s a Wildheart, a solo artist, a former Quireboy, the leader of Silver Ginger 5, SuperShit 666, Hey! Hello!, Clam Abuse, The Sinners and more, an occasional country artist, and even, ever so briefly, a Scorcher, a Bride Of Destruction and a member of Cheap Trick.

Currently, Ginger’s basking in the success of The Wildhearts’ 11th studio album, Satanic Rites of the Wildhearts, described by Classic Rock as “a glorious ode to the litany of wankers we all have to deal with every day and a reminder that life isn’t always the big overarching questions.”

Lemmy

The Wildhearts toured with Motörhead, I was nervous about hanging out with a hero; if your hero turns out to be a dickhead then you’ve got three weeks of him breaking your heart; but Lemmy was everything I wanted him to be. They offered to help us in any way they could and I said, “You’d help me by letting me play Overkill with you. And he said, “Okay, in Sheffield.” And I was like, “I want to do Hammersmith,” and he just walked off and I thought, that’s it, I’ve blown it. A couple of days later he came back and said, “You’re a cheeky bastard, but you’re doing Hammersmith.”

My trial by fire was going out drinking with him. His thing is he gets in the club; there are blondes and this bucket of ice with Smirnoff and another with Jack Daniel’s. I get in this roped off area in this club somewhere and there were no blondes, not anyone, just me and Lemmy talking. And it turns out that his girlfriend in LA was my first girlfriend – whom I’d lost my virginity to! And when I did Overkill at Hammersmith, the room was filled with people who liked and disliked me, and I’m up there playing Overkill – yes, sir!

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AC/DC

The Wildhearts were on tour with AC/DC in Europe on their Ballbreaker tour, then we went to the US and it turned from majesty to comedy to tragedy all in one month. We got there and took full advantage of the welcome that America affords a young band, which is as much drugs and alcohol as we could get our hands on, and then, inevitably, we started fighting with each other. And then we decided that we couldn’t work together anymore and so we went home.

It’s possibly the worst thing that ever happened to me; I was partly responsible for blowing a tour of America with AC/DC. And our crew and our manager were all as fucked up as we were and they all agreed; there wasn’t one person who said, “You can’t go home.”

As a collective troupe, the Wildhearts were all idiots. I love AC/DC. They turn up, do their job and go; you tour for years and years and you don’t do that by hanging out and partying all the time. I mean, look at us: we managed five dates. Yes, why did AC/DC make it and the Wildhearts didn’t? It’s not all sonic.

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Guns N’ Roses

The night The Quireboys supported them at Hammersmith, I only got to meet Steven Adler and Slash, but I met Axl when the Wildhearts attended the Freddie Mercury concert at Wembley. Axl was playing with Elton John that day.

Anyway, we’re sitting at this table, free drinks are coming, Liza Minnelli comes and sits down, Tony Iommi, then Roger Taylor pops over, and then these light bulbs come on over our heads that we’re at the wrong table, it’s Queen’s table! And I’m next to Axl and he was so nice and subdued and cool, and I wasn’t expecting it at all.

I didn’t know if we’d get on and I told him how much I loved Elton John and he just started on about how much he loved Elton John too and how much of an influence he’d had on him musically when he was growing up. I just warmed to him; this figure that I’m sure can be very hard work, but right then he was this lovely guy reminiscing about music.

I know a few of the guys in the band now, but Axl’s never around if I go and say hello. I met Tommy Stinson when he was playing with them and I was so nervous that nothing came out when I went to say hello. All I could think was, “When are you getting back with The Replacements?” And part of my brain’s going: “Don’t say it, don’t say it!”

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Manic Street Preachers

We did the Generation Terrorists tour, and saw them every day for at least a month. Richey Edwards was lovely: he was quiet, studious. He was learning to play the guitar and he had a Beatles songbook. He’d sit in the corner of the dressing room going, “That’s a D, that’s a G,” and then he’d go out and this fevered, kind of crazy Clash vibe came off him when he played.

The juxtaposition used to fuck with my head: the guy’s learning to play guitar, but when he gets on stage he looks like Mick Jones. We were sharing dressing rooms for the most part, that’s the bits I remember, talking about our love of the Stones and the Pistols and Guns N’ Roses, kindred spirits all the way.

I wanted to go onstage all guns blazing, but if we hadn’t gone on tour with the Manics we might never have stepped our game up and done anything. There are not many tours you do that start off with 50 punters in the audience and end up with queues of people outside who can’t get in.

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Cheap Trick

We were playing with The Darkness in Nashville and Rick Nielsen just walks in our dressing room and we’re like, “But for you, we wouldn’t be here!” Then he goes, “I’ve got a friend who wants to meet you,” so he drags us out and taps the shoulder of some guy and he turns around and it’s Steven Tyler and I’m talking to Tyler and Nielsen and going, “Will someone for fuck’s sake take a picture?!”

Steven Tyler gave me the best cigar I ever smoked. It was this ridiculously two-coloured cigar, dark and light tobacco; very rare, so expensive and just like you’re smoking air. Then I met Rick again when I was in the Bravado store in New York, and this guy comes over I know and says, “Do you play bass? Cheap Trick are coming to play and they haven’t got a bass player. Do you want to do it? It’s in about 20 minutes time?!”

They asked what I wanted to do first and it was He’s A Whore – had to be. Then Voices, Surrender and Clock Strikes Ten. It was only a few songs, but it came together so quickly and it sounded great and I was in Cheap Trick, if briefly.

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UFO

The Quireboys used to hang out with UFO all the time when Phil Mogg managed us. We used to go and stay at Pete Way’s house. It was where I discovered Tracii Lords, we’d be in our sleeping bags, passing a spliff around and he’d put a porn movie on and we’d be like, “Oh no, wrong! We’re all young guys and we’re in your living room. Why are you giving us a hard-on? What’s the thing? What happens next, you give everyone a hard-on and then go around the room with a bat like Al Capone?!”

UFO was the first dressing room I ever went in when I was a kid too; I was at City Hall, No Place To Run tour. And everyone was leaving, and I just walked to this door. I wasn’t planning anything, I didn’t even know where the backstage was. I walk in this door, no one stops me, straight past security like I’m invisible and along this corridor and I walked straight in their dressing room and they just gave me a drink. They sat me down, gave me some drumsticks, plectrums… I’m in heaven.

Seeing Pete Way on stage earlier and wanting to be like him and then being back there and them being so nice to a kid they didn’t even know, I still find that incredible.

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Mick Ronson

He was going to produce the first Wildhearts album. He came down to the rehearsal place to see us and he was just a lovely man, unassuming, humble, talented as fuck. He didn’t end up producing because the label thought he was so sick he might not get to finish the project. We didn’t get it at the time, we hated the label; we were so reactionary.

We had the song My Baby Is A Headfuck and it wasn’t that great, but we thought if we can get Ronson to play a solo on it then it’ll work. I got in touch with him and said, “We’re not going to record this song unless you come down and play on it,” and he went, “I’d be honoured.” And Ronson wasn’t around for very long, but I take solace in that it was the last of his recordings you got to hear, because he died during the making of his album.

We got him to do one more take of the song because we didn’t want him to stop playing; he nailed it the first time. We just wanted to listen to him. He had one of our cheap Les Pauls and he was using a bottleneck and it was just like, “How the fucking hell is he doing that with that?!” And he’s doing all these gorgeous bends and really clever stuff and me and CJ [Wildheart] are like school kids – ‘Look how much we don’t know’. It was a real lesson.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 155 (March 2011)

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion. 

Last month Heart resumed the Royal Flush Tour they had to postpone last year due to singer Ann Wilson‘s treatment for cancer. But her appearances on stage in a wheelchair have caught fans off guard – hence the explanation the band are making before each of their shows.

“She broke her elbow before we started,” sister and guitarist Nancy Wilson tells Classic Rock. “It was confusing at first; it was not the result of the cancer. She kicked that cancer’s ass. Then she broke her arm and is now in a wheelchair, so we had to make sure there was a little disclaimer at the beginning of each show – ‘Don’t worry, it’s not the worst. It’s not what you think.’

“It’s lovely to be back at the rock job, though, at the loud office as I like to call it, and seeing Ann killing it every night, even though she has to be in the chair right now.”

The younger Wilson says the injury occurred during tour rehearsals in Nashville, where Ann and most of the members of Heart’s touring band Tripsitter reside. “She was just leaving rehearsal to get into her car and go back to her house. I wasn’t there but she slipped on the ice. It maybe could have been worse, but we’re still being careful that there’s no further injury to make us postpone more shows, you know?”

On her After Dinner Thinks With Ann Wilson podcast the singer noted that, “It’s not about cancer, it’s about me being a klutz.” She broke her elbow “in three places” and required screws to put it back together. “The pain level is still way too much to take it out of a sling,” she explained, “so I chose to sit because then I can just concentrate on singing and not keeping my balance and having somebody out there catching me when I reel to the side… I’ll be up and out of it after a while.”

Heart’s Royal Flush Tour – the group’s first in five years – began last April and was to have included a European leg and stadium dates with Def Leppard and Journey during the summer. Ann Wilson performed seated during portions of those concerts as well.

The tour was halted after the initial North American run due to Ann’s need for a “time-sensitive but routine medical procedure”; that was revealed in July as a cancerous growth that had to be removed and treated with chemotherapy.

“The operation was successful and I’m feeling great, but my doctors are now advising me to undergo a course of preventive chemotherapy and I’ve decided to do it,” Wilson said in a statement, adding that the doctors were recommending she take the rest of the year off from the stage.

In September, she updated that, “I’m doing absolutely fine now, but it’s been, to put it mildly, a lot. Chemo is no joke… The worst is over and I’m thankful for the efficacy of this poison – but it’s more than welcome to get the fuck out of my body now.” Wilson also revealed that he would be doing “some maintenance (treatments) going forward.”

Heart hit the road once again on February 28 in Las Vegas and have North American dates booked into August. A new European run has not yet been announced. Full dates below.

Nancy Wilson, meanwhile, is optimistic about making some new Heart music in the near term, too, to follow up 2016’s Beautiful Broken.

“I’ve been trying to push for a new Heart album, like an acoustic Heart album for a while,” she notes. “Ann’s written a few new songs with her guys, Tripsitter. I’ve been writing some things with Sue Ennis, our Heart collaborator of many years. But when you’re on the road that’s about all you can get done. That’s a big enough job without trying to put anything [else] on to it. So let’s get done with this [tour] and then we can start to talk about new Heart music.”

Heart: Royal Flush Tour 2025

Mar 28: Knoxville Food City Center, TN
Mar 29: Charleston Coliseum, WV
Mar 31: Buffalo KeyBank Center, NY
Apr 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Apr 04: Ottawa Canadian Tire Centre, ON
Apr 05: Quebec Videotron Centre, ON
Apr 10: Toronto Coca-Cola Coliseum, ON
Apr 12: Mashantucket Foxwoods Resort Casino, CT
Apr 13: Boston Agganis Arena, MA
Apr 16: New York Radio City Music Hall, NY
May 31: Atlantic City Hard Rock – Mark G Etess Arena, NJ
Jun 01: Vienna Wolf Trap, VA
Jun 03: Lexington Rupp Arena, KY
Jun 04: Detroit Fox Theatre, MI
Jun 06: Highland Park Ravinia Festival, IL
Jun 07: Hinckley Grand Casino Hinckley Amphitheater, MN
Jun 10: Evansville Ford Center, IN
Jun 12: St Louis The Fabulous Fox, MO
Jun 14: Grand Prairie Texas Trust CU Theatre, TX
Jun 15: Cedar Park H-E-B Center at Cedar Park, TX
Jun 17: Sugar Land Smart Financial Centre, TX
Jun 18: Baton Rouge Raising Cane’s River Center, LA
Jun 20: Birmingham Legacy Arena at the BJCC, AL
Jun 22: North Charleston Coliseum, SC
Jun 24: Jacksonville VuStar Veterans Memorial Arena, FL
Jun 25: Estero Hertz Arena, FL
Jun 27: Orlando Kia Center, FL
Jun 28: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Aug 27: Allentown The Great Allentown Fair, PA

Tickets are on sale now.

Gary Graff is an award-winning veteran music journalist based in metro Detroit, writing regularly for Billboard, Ultimate Classic Rock, Media News Group, Music Connection, United Stations Radio Networks and others. Graff’s work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Classic Rock, Revolver, the San Francisco Chronicle, AARP magazine, the Detroit Jewish News, The Forward and others. Graff has co-written and edited books about Bob Seger, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. A professional voter for the Grammy Awards and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Graff co-founded the Detroit Music Awards in 1989 and continues as the organisation’s chief producer.

Before HIM cornered the market in Finnish goth metal, Helsinki’s The 69 Eyes had the elegantly wasted after-midnight look and sound nailed down. In 2009, as they geared up to release their ninth album Back In Blood, mainman Jyrki 69 sat down with Metal Hammer to talk sex, vampires and rock’n’roll.

Jyrki 69 is a stone cold rock’n’roller. He sits almost horizontal in the foyer of his Camden hotel sipping at a drink, cloaked in jet black denim and leather, all tousled raven hair and silver jewellery. If he wasn’t drinking it would be hard to tell he was actually alive. He is indeed one handsome, cadaverous motherfucker. He says that he enjoyed the party he was at the night before but adds: “When it was the 16th round of Jäger I knew it was time to call it a day. It was still as crazy as hell when we left, people bouncing off walls, girls standing on tables screaming.”

The rest of his bandmates have gone back to their home city of Helsinki, in Finland, but the frontman of the glam goth metal group, The 69 Eyes, has stayed on for an extra day to hang out with Hammer and hit numerous metal shows and clubs over the weekend. 2009 marks exactly 20 years since this cool rocker and his black-clad comrades first took to the stage with the mission to distil everything that they thought was righteous about music into one band. They contained the grave gothic melodrama of The Sisters Of Mercy, the glam rock of Hanoi Rocks and the thundersome ramalama of Motörhead.

But surely, by rights a band of this vintage still trying to hit the big time, still dressing like something the cat dragged in (from Sunset Strip), should be an embarrassment, right? Like a Scandinavian version of Crème Brulee, the Eurovision wannabes from The League Of Gentlemen. Well, perhaps if they’d tried to change with the times the answer would be yes. They certainly didn’t add a fat man in a backwards baseball cap to their line-up in the late 90s. It’s hard to imagine ever seeing a photo of this band in massive shorts or luminous rubber ‘cyber’ gear. Instead they have remained 100 per cent dedicated to the cause of being louche, outlaw rockers.

When you spend time with them it genuinely feels like they don’t have a choice in the matter though. It is The 69 Eyes or nothing. They are certainly not rock chameleons. Jyrki sips at the Guinness which matches his colour scheme perfectly, as he sits insect-like behind aviator shades. When his countrymen Turisas and Finntroll are mentioned he shows his hand, albeit politely: “I’m not a role-playing games guy. I’m not about drinking beer and singing folk songs. I’m all about sex, blood and rock’n’roll. All of these role-playing game bands and folk metal bands with their drinking songs… well that’s interesting and they are from Finland but I don’t have time to get involved with them.”

He says that there are two strands that go through all Finnish music linking them to other bands: namely politeness and melancholy. He expands: “HIM, Nightwish, Amorphis, Hanoi Rocks they all have this tuneful melancholia… this is why we had to go to America to record our new album, so we could get fucking hard, full of attitude and in your face. There is a massive difference between the Norwegians and us. They’re Vikings aren’t they? We were afraid, hiding from them in the woods while they burnt and pillaged.”

When asked to choose which ingredient out of sex, blood and rock’n’roll is the most important to the group he is adamant: “Sex. For me, sex has always been very important in rock music. The number one reason to be in a band. The Beatles were a very anti-sexual band but the Rolling Stones were pure sex, so you can guess which one is my favourite. The same thing with Guns N’ Roses versus Faith No More, or The Stooges vs Pink Floyd. When rock’n’roll started it was all about sex. Nothing else. The rhythms wake up that lust. It’s all about the mystery and the sex and the stuff that happens after dark.”

So when he is asked if he doesn’t dress up as a caveman because it would interfere with his chances of bedding a hot gothic girl, there is the merest hint of a smile and nod by way of an answer.

It would be wrong to suggest that the group have remained exactly constant, of course. Their new album, Back In Blood (their ninth), is certainly a much ballsier affair than the preceding efforts, Angels and Devils.

“To make a new record we needed a change,” he says. “For the last 10 years we had made records with Johnny Lee Michaels but this time we wanted to work with someone else. Matt Hyde wanted to work with us and he really liked my voice. As an outsider he could see the band differently from a guy who had been working with us for 10 years. And he kicked our arses. He told us, ‘I know what kind of record your fans want.’ His roots are in classic rock – Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, that kind of stuff. He said we were not dangerous- sounding anymore. There were too many keyboards and it was too well-produced.”

He stops and slams his drink down: “Before, if you hadn’t seen us live, you might not know that we have a really great rock drummer. Now you can really tell!”

It is even more impressive to note how stable The 69 Eyes have remained when you think about how much in the world of rock and metal has changed. They formed round Jyrki on vocals, Jussi on drums, Bazie and Timo-Timo on guitars and Archzie on bass in 1989 when the power of Jack Daniel’s- and-hairspray-fuelled rock was strong. The Cult were still a force to be reckoned with; the Sisters Of Mercy had just discovered Meatloaf’s producer Jim Steinman; while hip youngish gunslingers Danzig and Guns N’ Roses were in full bloom.

The 60 Eyes began life as a glam metal act, influenced by their neighbours and forebears Hanoi Rocks and international acts such as Pretty Boy Floyd. But it was when they started to incorporate gothic and classic rock elements that they began to forge their own hybrid sound. Their breakthrough album came nearly 10 years later in 1990 with Blessed Be, a record which is still seen by many as their major statement.

But now, it is Jyrki who feels like his time in the sun has arrived: “Matt Hyde’s production style is very hard. He was very tough and he squeezed all of the blood and the tears out of us. When we actually went to LA it wasn’t like rock’n’roll fantasy camp it was more like a concentration camp! But that’s how he got a 20-year-old band to finally bloom. We’re now in full bloom!

“I’m proud of it,” he continues. “We’ve been playing for 20 years this September and we could have put out some kind of lukewarm compilation like anyone else would do, but instead we came up with this impressive, exciting new album. We’ve always been about the image to a certain extent, the gothic look but now more than ever it’s just about the music. Well, that and the vampires.”

Ah yes, the vampires. No chat with our Finnish friends would be complete without a discussion about our fanged fiends. Jyrki raves about a giant bag of vampire films he has bought from HMV and mentions seeing recent oddities such as pre-teen, Swedish vamp romance Let The Right One In and cult French movie Lips Of Blood. He says that one particular song off the new album, Hunger, was based on the erotic early 80s horror of the same name featuring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve but, despite trawling video stores and DVD rental shops while they were recording, they couldn’t find it anywhere. Eventually Matt Hyde rang him in desperation: “He said, ‘You need to do the vocals again man. They suck.’ I had to go back to LA but by this time he’d found the film and we just left it running on a big screen while I was singing. And this time we nailed it.”

Back in the real world, there are no such things as immortal beings who have long incisors though: there are just bands who are long in the tooth. The 69 Eyes are not immortal beings, staying forever young, feasting on the blood of their victims. And even though the rock lifestyle is the best way of abdicating the boredom of adult life – just look at Lemmy – they’re obviously all dudes of ‘a certain age’. Why should some young guy who wasn’t even born until after their first ever gig take them seriously?

Jyrki seems unfazed. “This is our mission,” he states, simply. “This is why we are still hungry and why we still want to push the band – exactly because of this 20-year-old. Because they haven’t heard us yet! There are people out there who have space in their hearts for The 69 Eyes and we won’t stop ’til we’ve found them!”

The singer’s youthful enthusiasm for his role as a rocker is infectious and he describes his life in the same way a suburban 14-year-old dreaming of the lifestyle on the road would. “You know, just recently I was at Download,” he says, “and I opened up the door to our portakabin and just outside our door was David Coverdale, Joe Elliott and Brian May telling each other jokes and then Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top passed by! It was like watching TV. What else do you need? This is what it is all about.”

Undeniably it helps that around the globe the band have their devotees; the most notable of whom is Bam Margera, who befriended Jyrki a decade ago while the pair were in Paris. As well as being mates, the Jackass has directed two videos for them, including the recent Dead Girls Are Easy.

“We’re in his latest movie, Where The Fuck Is Santa?, which is filmed in Helsinki. We’re party friends but I really like what he’s doing. It was great getting to do another video with him – it was so much fun. I can’t think of anything more fun than going to Bam’s castle for a few days to film a rock video with hot chicks. Playboy.com was the first place to show the video for Dead Girls Are Easy. I was psyched. I was sending messages to all of my friends saying check this out playboy.com/69. How cool is that? Everything is all about living rock’n’roll dreams and living the life.”

And with that, he finishes his drink and dissolves into the rainy London night, continuing the eternal search for rock’n’roll mayhem.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 196, August 2009