Still crazy after all these years

The Darkness

How could you resist an album that opens with a full-bodied rocker such as Welcome Tae Glasgae? “The women are gorgeous and the food is okay,” singer Justin Hawkins assures us, dubbing Glasgow “the envy of the Sassenach [the English]”.

The track even comes with bagpipes and sirens.

The Darkness have been brightening up our lives since their monster 2003 smash I Believe In A Thing Called Love.

The Lowestoft band’s exuberant brand of camp heavy metal – with sequinned catsuits, maximum falsetto and shed-loads of refreshing daftness – caught on all over the world.

The quartet mix their obvious influences – AC/DC, Queen, Def

Leppard – with earthy humour. Sid James would love it. It’s Love, Jim tells of a sensual encounter with an otherworldly being with “a kiss like a tractor beam… I could not resist the suction”.

Justin’s lover is more mechanical on the headbanging title track: “You need a Phillips screwdriver to get her undressed,” he reveals. But “she isn’t programmed to deceive me and I kept the receipt…”

The song is a glorious mix of hefty riffs, strong hooks and old-school tempo changes.

These 12 tracks range from the radio-friendly single Jussy’s Girl to Sticky Situations, reminiscent of Queen.

Meanwhile The Power And The Glory Of Love is classic hard rock and Thin Lizzy-esque Eastbound is about a pub crawl.

It’s a grin-driven din, as subtle as a Glasgow kiss, but hard not to love.

The Darkness’s kind of stadium rock was written off by snooty critics decades ago, yet their debut album, Permission To Land, went quadruple platinum in the UK, selling 1.3million copies.

True, their string of hits dried up in 2006, but their studio albums always chart high.

This, their seventh, finds their feel-good recipe gloriously unchanged.