The release of a new boxset edition of The Darkness' Permission To Land, to mark their debut album's twentieth anniversary, was all the prompt that Patrick Clarke needed to revisit a record that he loved as a nine year old (and only partly because it fulfilled the role that Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction did for me: introducing pre-teen ears to the f-bomb).
Two decades on, he reports for the Quietus, little has changed: "I still struggle to find much to The Darkness beyond that surface-level barrage of falsetto and overdrive, and yet it's a barrage that satisfies completely. I desire nothing more and nothing less." Very true. Permission To Land is a high-camp hoot, a record that revels in the inherent ridiculousness of rock 'n' roll through parodying the likes of AC/DC and Queen, but it does so armed with a host of deceptively well-crafted (if lyrically questionable) songs. The suggestion that the album still evokes "childish joy" would no doubt make perfect sense to Running Punks founder Jimmy Watkins, who was reduced to a grinning, gibbering mess when he listened to it for the first time recently.
Clarke also makes the very valid point that The Darkness' modus operandi, which involved maximum flamboyance and giving the footballer's 110 per cent even when only performing to a handful of people in the back room of a pub, meant that they were stadium-ready when Permission To Land took off. I still recall them opening up at Glastonbury 2003, relative unknowns totally unfazed by the occasion who strode on, commanded the Pyramid Stage and by the end of the set had secured themselves a significantly larger fanbase.
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