The Number 1!
Some songs are so unique that they occupy their own space, outside of time and place. The Darkness’s I Believe In A Thing Called Love is one of them.
Some songs seem to be so unique that they occupy their own space, outside of time and place. The song that you voted the best of the century (so far) is one of them.
“I don’t think I Believe In A Thing Called Love has ever really sat well with what’s contemporary. It’s just its own thing.”
Justin Hawkins
I BELIEVE IN A THING CALLED LOVE
The Darkness From: Permission To Land, 2003
From the first spin of I Believe In A Thing Called Love, it was clear that here was a song to go the distance. Back in September 2003, The Darkness’s signature tune was instant, heroic, effervescent and just the right side of ludicrous. All factors amplified by the dour mewlings of nu metal’s fag-end. Seventeen years down the line, with I Believe In A Thing Called Love prancing atop our poll of the 21st century’s greatest rock songs thus far, its giddy power remains undimmed. “Playing that song is like slipping into a comfortable bath with a loved one,” frontman Justin Hawkins tells Classic Rock.
At the time, of course, not everyone was quite so enamoured. Rewind to 2001, and The Darkness were a band out of time. Vintage rock disciples adrift in the wrong century, their misfit status was embodied by the aforementioned Justin Hawkins: a former jingle writer, with a glass-shattering falsetto and a taste for man-made fabrics. Flanking him were younger brother Dan (a sometime session guitarist), drummer Ed Graham (a friend from the Hawkins’ native Lowestoft) and Scottish bassist named Frankie Poullain (who dressed like a pirate).
“We were desperately poor,” Justin remembers. “No hope whatsoever of achieving anything at all. But as long as we stayed alive – and I mean that literally – we were happy. We had nothing to lose, and so the reasons for doing music were pure and simple enjoyment. I think that’s why we felt so free to record something as different as I Believe In A Thing Called Love. I was in love with the experience of being in a band, and I’d known the others for years, so I felt super-comfortable and cradled. I suppose that song says a lot about the experience of being in The Darkness, in three or four minutes.”
The band’s home base was the top-floor flat (a “shit-hole”) shared by Dan Hawkins and Poullain in London’s Primrose Hill. Here, the four members would drink plonk late into the night, smoke heavily and arrange themselves in a circle to spit out song ideas. “There’d be a huge ashtray in the middle, absolutely full to the top,” recalls Justin. “Red wine everywhere, although not the expensive stuff, unfortunately. But it wasn’t like a chimps’ tea party. It was a very focused affair. It allowed us all to contribute honesty to the songwriting. There was no hiding. We still try and do that today.”
On the fateful day when a chunky chord sequence rolled off Justin’s acoustic guitar, ears pricked up. “It just popped out, that ridiculous opening riff,” he recalls. “It just sort of naturally emerged from the ether. Dan had the chords for the pre-chorus. With the ‘touching you’ bits, that just seemed like a natural thing to do. You need to sort of put the brakes on a bit after all that information about steering wheels.”
When Justin belted out the octave-straddling chorus, his younger brother worried that it was overly frivolous. “When I hear something that sounds too serious,” Justin says, “I tend to worry that it sounds like we’ve climbed up our own arse, whereas I think Dan has the opposite concern. There are moments when we pull each other in opposite directions, and times when we meet in the middle. If we’d gone any further, that song would have become a parody. The question was: ‘Can we get away with this?’ And the answer was clearly, ‘Yes’.
“But it wasn’t until we fired it up in rehearsals that we realised how good it felt to play loud,” he continues. “It felt real and fun and silly, at the same time. It never sounded of its time. I don’t even think it sounded like the eighties rock thing that people compared it to, apart from the middle section when the synthesiser comes in. I don’t think I Believe In A Thing Called Love has ever really sat well with what’s contemporary. It’s just its own thing.”
The final recorded version of I Believe was a tapestry of overdubs, and there’s a good reason why Justin recalls the exact date when he tracked his lead vocal at 2khz Studios in North London: “The vocal that we ended up using on the recording was from September 11, 2001. I remember coming into the studio as it was all unfolding. There were people watching it on the TV. I just thought there’d been an accident of some sort. Somebody said there were two planes and a building, and in my head I arranged that to mean two planes had crashed into each other, then landed on a building. I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t realise the implications until afterwards. I just got on with my work.”
While a horrified world watched, glued to their TVs, as the New York terror attacks unfolded, the oblivious band bottled I Believe In A Thing Called Love in anarchic fashion.
“You wouldn’t have liked what you saw in the studio,” Justin recalls. “I was naked in the vocal booth. At first I did it as an experiment to see if it would help, because I was still quite self-conscious about my singing voice and I was struggling with the vocal. I had a tendency to over-sing or to push it too hard. Then I just started singing naked because it made Ed a bit uncomfortable. Then it became a tradition. Perhaps I was just showing off. But that is part of my job, I suppose.”
Similarly, there was an element of exhibitionism in the track’s three guitar breaks (the flashy first and third solos are played by Justin, the more restrained second one by Dan). “Everyone gets a moment in the sun,” says the frontman. “There’s a bit where the guitar isn’t playing that much and you can hear Frankie going for it, and my brother and I both get solos. Even rock bands omitted solos back then, because they felt it would hamper their chances of getting on the airwaves. But far be it from us to join with that nonsense. So it was important to redress the balance slightly by putting three on there. That song was arranged as you would hope a party would be.”
Another memorable moment was Justin’s shriek of “guitar!” before his brother’s lead break.
“I always had the idea that I would shout something along those lines,” he says. “There were probably lots of different options from that session. But my favourite thing is the ‘Huh!’ before the first solo. That was actually Ed’s idea, and one of his best contributions, really. It’s a melody-free exhalation. I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off, but I was really pleased with how it sounded.”
With the track completed, all they needed now was a suitably outlandish music video. Such as the four band members pitted against a cast of latex space monsters.
“I remember being hungover,” Justin says of the shoot, “and being surprised at how I managed to get through the day. Even though the ideas in that video are quite preposterous and it looks like there’s been some trickery done, it was all real sets and carpentry, as opposed to computers. Even the monsters were real, with the exception of the crab – they did use computers to enhance its stature. It was really a shot-for-shot reimagining of an earlier video we’d made with the director, Alex Smith, in his apartment. The only part that was revived between the two incarnations of the video was the sausage that I sing ‘Guitar!’ into. It was the actual same meat product that we’d used, months and months earlier. I hope it had been frozen in that interim period.”
I Believe In A Thing Called Love wasn’t an instant smash. Originally released in August 2002 on a threetrack EP, the song sank (“I really enjoyed the fact it went in at Number 180,” Justin shrugs. “I’m a big darts fan, so I saw that as a sign”). But when the track was re-released in September 2003, the third single from parent album Permission To Land, it reached No.2 in the UK – and the circus began.
“And were it not for those pesky Black Eyed Peas having a record-breaking run at Number One,” Justin grumbles, “we’d have had a NumberOne song. We spent four weeks or something at number two, which has got to be some sort of record. We’d come from nowhere to slightly less than nowhere. It helped us get some arses on seats in the concerts – and to get us really good support slots with The Wildhearts and Def Leppard. So I think some important people became slightly more aware of us.”
It has never been more difficult to write an all-time rock classic than it is now. With a dwindling stock of unclaimed riffs, and an ever-diminishing well of untapped melodies, today’s songwriter is a fearful creature, tiptoeing through a minefield of plagiarism cases. But with I Believe In A Thing Called Love The Darkness made striking gold seem effortless. A decade after Classic Rock crowned it the greatest song of the noughties – and despite the great tracks in the rundown you’ve just read – nothing has really come along to dethrone it.
“I think some of these chancers in the charts nowadays would kill for a song like that,” Justin says, smiling. “If I Believe In A Thing Called Love came out now, it’d be a hit. If it came out in the eighties, it would be a hit. And I’m not saying that because I’m showing off. I’m telling the truth. I realise that song is bigger than us, and that’s fine. If there’s a band that doesn’t like their biggest hit, then I feel sorry for them, really.
“I still have the same affection for I Believe In A Thing Called Love,” he concludes. “It’s a moment in any set. People love it. It will always save the day. It has the ability to raise your spirits. If we didn’t have that song, God knows where we’d be now. I wouldn’t have had as much sports car experience. I wouldn’t be wearing such fancy clothes. To this day, it’s still very much something that I’m grateful for.”
“I Believe In A Thing Called Love is a moment in any set. People love it. It will always save the day.”
Justin Hawkins