By the time he was 18, Justin Hawkins thought he was “too old” to be a rock star.
The 48-year-old musician – best known as the founder, lead singer and lead guitarist of The Darkness – didn’t hit it big with the One Way Ticket rockers until he was 25 and revealed he thought he was too old to do it but worked his way up by studying music and getting a job in a studio.
He told the SixtySeconds column of Metro newspaper: “I remember when I was about 18 and I saw bands like Ash coming up and I thought, ‘Well, that’s over, I’m already too old,’ but I still wanted to be in music, so I went and studied music technology and got a job in a recording studio.
Then I made a kind of easy-listening cassette of songs I’d written for my grandfather as a Christmas present. And it was heard by somebody at a publishing company and they thought, “Oh, this kind of easy listening stuff is ideal to synchronize with movies and TV shows and commercials,” and they
signed me. I did a lot of stuff. I did HSBC, Mars bars, Audi… and then I did the Ikea commercial, which basically paid for our first album and bought me and my brother our first Les Pauls.
During his heyday, the ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ hitmaker infamously performed headstands on stage while clapping his feet, but he has now come to the conclusion that the stunt doesn’t necessarily have to be part of the show these days.
He said: “The first time I did that headstand, foot-clapping thing on stage, I didn’t practice it, I just did it instinctively and it became part of the show. That was 20 years ago and I’ve been doing it ever since. I also went through a long period of climbing up the balconies of theaters and jumping down into the audience. But on three different occasions I’ve broken ribs doing that. The last time was in Australia in August and it was agony. So I came to the realization that maybe it doesn’t have to be part of the show.
