On November 19th, UK-based Glam Rock band The Darkness release their new dose of high-energy Rock, titled Motorheart via Cooking Vinyl, and while it’s not exactly a concept album, it does have some notable prevailing ideas and imagery. In the forefront is an alien sex robot who inspired the album title track and title. But alongside some of the sci-fi elements that pop up, there is a more all-encompassing trajectory. This album is essentially a love album in its own way, though, that’s paired with an energy that expresses just how much the band have all missed live performance. Along with the new album release, The Darkness will be hitting the road with great verve, touring in both the UK and EU.
I spoke with bassist Frankie Poullain about the making of the album as well as the making of their recent rather idiosyncratic videos. We also discussed the ways in which The Darkness typically approach composition and why this album may be pretty extra when it comes to fantasizing about playing it all live.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I imagine that you should be resting up because you are about to go live with plenty of dates in November in the UK and onwards in the EU. I’ve even heard that there might be a 2022 US tour coming up.
Frankie Poullain: There are rumors about the States tour, yes. It looks like it’s pretty close to being signed off on. I’m really excited about that. I don’t think I’ve gone four years without being to the States since the beginning of the band. I’ve always been to the States regularly. When I wasn’t in the band, in 2005, I had an American girlfriend for awhile and I stayed in New York, in Harlem.
HMS: It’s so beautiful there. The architecture and history are so fantastic.
FP: I stayed in a brownstone building and met great people. There were funeral parlors and beauty parlors next door to each other. That’s what I remember most about Harlem.
HMS: Those are both hangouts, too, which you wouldn’t expect to be true. Those are both community centers.
FP: It should be! We should be more in touch with death. It shouldn’t be this unknown thing to be scared of. It’s not healthy the way that we sweep it under the carpet. You just have to walk around a graveyard to see the number of graves that haven’t been visited.
HMS: That’s a solid observation. I think America is particularly out of touch in that way. Thinking about the album, I don’t know that I noticed much about death on the album, but I noticed a lot about love. I was surprised when I looked back at the album as a whole. Is that typical of The Darkness, or is this album more slanted that way?
FP: That’s probably because Justin [Hawkins] did his breakup album, which was the previous one, Easter is Cancelled, which unfortunately we didn’t get to tour in the States when the pandemic happened. But with this album, now he’s single again, so he’s looking for love, and finding it in certain places as well. So I’m led to believe.
HMS: How do you feel about the whole Motorheart love robot concept? I wouldn’t say that it’s a concept album, but these elements weave through.
FP: There are a couple of songs which are about robots or sex robots, like “Motorheart”. But with “It’s Love, Jim”, it’s more like an alien, like his sexual encounter with an alien. There are a couple there and they can be construed as him tarting up a run of the mill encounter with a member of the opposite sex, or it could be him being metaphorical, talking about AI and where that’s leading us. Justin doesn’t really like to explain his lyrics too much. But it’s true, it does talk about love a lot. I try to sabotage that by writing the first Goth track for The Darkness, the last track on the album, called “Speed Of The Nite Time”. That was myself at home, feeling a bit cut off from the other guys.
Dan [Hawkins] and Ru[fus Taylor] were coming up with things like “Motorheart” and “Eastbound” that were really rocking. I was at home with my partner, Diane Birch, who is an American singer/songwriter. We don’t usually collaborate on music at all, but one day we were talking about how much we loved 80s Goth stuff, like Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. She started playing finger drums and I came up with a bassline. Then we created a Goth backing track which I sent to the guys. Justin said that he loved it so I took it to Dan and he added some guitars. I worked through some lyrics and melodies with Justin and then he generously sang it in a lower register doing a Goth thing in the verses. That’s very different from normal Justin.
HMS: Now I want a music video for that one! Didn’t you write the video for “It’s Love, Jim”?
FP: I wrote and co-produced it with my Italian director friend. I live in an English village in the countryside and across the road is a studio where we shot “It’s Love, Jim” and we shot “Jussy’s Girl” around the village. It’s a very typical English, Somerset, country village with thatched cottages. I actually live in a thatched cottage. When we were talking about making videos, I mentioned to the guys that I knew an Italian director who was a real character and shoots on 16 mill. He’s really old world and eccentric.
We talked to him on Zoom and he won them over. He’s got a lot of charm. He ended up shooting three videos with us. It was going to just be two, but on the day that we shot, “It’s Love, Jim”, our manager said that we needed a lyric video for “Nobody Can See Me Cry”. We shot that in one take, still with the makeup on from the previous video, and with a bunch of dry ice. This was the most low-budget video, really. We shot those three videos in three days.
HMS: I did not know that they were shot with 16 millimeter film! That’s awesome. There’s something in common between the videos for “It’s Love, Jim” and “Jussy’s Girl”, and that’s the use of black and white for some of it. Where did that idea come from?
FP: It was just time and place. The town next to me is called Frome, and a lot of creative people live there. It’s become a bit of a creative center and an escape from London. There are various artists there and I met Alberto [Arepo] there. We had a lot in common in terms of our taste in film and sensibilities. I almost said that I was touched that the guys trusted me on working with Arepo, but I think it was just that it was too late to do anything else! We just grasped the opportunity. It was stressful, though, because we had no idea if it was going to work. I knew that if it didn’t, the buck would stop with me, and I would never be able to forget about it! But I think they came out great.
HMS: They did. I love that both videos have little threads in them that are not neatly tied up. They all have details that leave you wondering or thinking about them. I really like old silent films and to me they kind of felt like that because there’s a lot of stuff in those old films that’s not explained or worked out.
FP: Exactly. I guess that comes from Alberto’s Italian sensibilities and I have that too because I’m half French. Some Americans have come on board with that, too, the idea that some things don’t need to be resolved. Like with David Lynch, which is almost the opposite of something being resolved, but reveling in something being unresolved. Then the Coen Brothers started doing it as well. I’ve always enjoyed that because I don’t think, in life, that many things are ever really resolved. For me, it’s all about the characters and I’m not really on board with moralistic storytelling where everything has to add up and make sense. I enjoy more character-led things that revel in the idiosyncratic nature of humans.
HMS: I actually just realized that the video for “It’s Love, Jim”, does have a little bit of deathliness to it. There’s the spiritualism and séance that’s like the fascination at the turn of the century with those things. I know Conan Doyle and Houdini were really into those things.
FP: Of course, I’ve read that about Houdini. It’s definitely a reference to all that kind of stuff and having fun with it, but not being too reverential with it, since it’s a music video. I was stressing with Alberto that we didn’t want to be literal. What’s really nice is to combine some of that highbrow stuff, like referencing Bunuel, but then being silly with it. Everyone’s seen enough of pretentious reverential stuff.
HMS: I should have asked you this sooner, but there’s actually a bigger sweep of humor that runs through the whole identity and history of the band, isn’t there? So I can see why there’s humor here, too. You don’t want to strike that pose or be taken too seriously, do you? You seem to undercut the Glam stuff even as you include it.
FP: I think so. When people are being really serious, it’s almost like they are protesting too much. I think it really brought it home to me when I watched a documentary about the band Bros. They became really well known in this country, two brothers who were huge in the 80s. Then they tried to do a comeback and there was a documentary about them. It was very funny because it was unintentionally like watching The Office. The two guys had zero self-awareness. It was basically Spinal Tap. After that I watched The Beatles documentary, Eight Days a Week.
I was amazed how in the Bros documentary, they took themselves so seriously, as if they were misunderstood geniuses, but the music was just abysmal. But then in The Beatles documentary, they were taking the piss out of each other, being playful, making jokes the whole time, but they actually were geniuses. This isn’t me saying that we’re geniuses, but me saying that I think playfulness is so important, and accessing the inner child is key to Rock ‘n Roll music and many other things as well.
HMS: There are so many levels on which that is true. There’s the level on which the audience can get involved and respond to that. Then there’s the fact that The Darkness has passed some significant anniversaries as a band and how would you be able to stay creative over time if you didn’t? That way it doesn’t get routine.
FP: Yes, maybe it’s been a good thing to have this break in a way. When we go back to the States, it’ll have been four years and usually it’s every two years, so all I can say is that we’re more refreshed than you can possibly imagine. I think everyone is chomping at the bit, or most people who have a lust for life, anyway. Even if we have to be in a bubble and aren’t able to hang out in a bar after a gig, which will be tough, it will still be incredible to be on stage again. That’s going to be the be-all and end-all. The thing about humans is that they are adaptable. The comfort we have in our lives now is such that we’ve never had in our lives in history. It could be a lot worse.
HMS: It seems like live performance has always been a big part of the band’s momentum and I understand why these tours will be so important. When you write and create music, does the idea of live performance shape that, or do you create more for composition and think about how it’s going to present live afterwards?
FP: We probably should think more about how the songs will be presented live, but generally I would say that composition becomes the most important thing. Certainly, for Easter is Cancelled, it was more about composition. For this one, maybe there were a couple songs, like “Nobody Can See Me Cry” where Dan was thinking about the live aspect on the backing tracks. Because it’s really heavy, and you can tell that live it’s going to sound huge.
Occasionally, we do think about that. There have been other times when we’ve thought, “We need our We Will Rock You”. That’s famously a song that was written specifically for the stage, like a theatre piece. That’s the most famous example of what you’re talking about, and Brian May is on camera talking about it on Youtube. It’s all about dynamics.
We do tend to think about composition-first, though, which might be because we won the Ivor Novello Award for being the “Songwriter of the Year” in the UK with our first album. That’s quite prestigious so it probably went to our heads a bit, in the sense that we do think of crafting songs all the time. We don’t always get it right. Not every song you’re going to write is going to be a good one, certainly not a great one, but the craft of it is always there in our minds.
HMS: Are there songs that you are really looking forward to playing live from Motorheart?
FP: I think “Nobody Can See Me Cry” is going to sound really good. Also “It’s Love, Jim” is great because we needed a song to carry the torch for “Get Your Hands Off My Woman”. We’ve had that as something that never disappoints live, and we’ve wished we had more songs like that, a mosh pit song. I think we’ve done a great follow up to that track with “It’s Love, Jim”. I’d be interested to see if, with “Jussy’s Girl”, we can really pull off that 80s stadium Rock, with a dancing in the aisles, Def Leppard vibe.
HMS: This album really has so much energy to it, I kind of thought you’d say that it was written to be played live.
FP: I should stress that this album is probably the most like what you’re referring to of our albums. Because we were all stuck at home, and Dan was probably fantasizing about being back on stage and rocking out again. Rufus, too, with his big stadium Rock drums on this album, you can almost hear him imagining being back on stage again. I guess you could call this album “wish fulfillment”.
Photo credit: Credit Simon Emmett
