‘It is I, Justin Hawkins from the Darkness,” began the singer on 23 October 2021, launching his YouTube channel Justin Hawkins Rides Again. In the short clip that followed, the rocker explained that he would be uploading several videos each week, in which he would deconstruct classic and new songs or comment on issues in the music industry. He wasn’t expecting it to become popular. “I worried that people might think I seemed desperate,” he explains, video-calling from a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, fresh off a Darkness arena tour. “Or that I’d lost my mind.”
Three hundred and thirty-odd videos, 375,000 subscribers and 47m views later, the singer needn’t have worried. Justin Hawkins Rides Again reaches a constituency well beyond the Darkness fanbase. Although best known for their No 2 smash hit I Believe in a Thing Called Love 20 years ago, the often tongue-in-cheek bombastic rockers are still filling arenas today. When he first started the channel, he noticed that other musicians mentioned it. “But now if people stop me at an airport, it’s not to talk about the Darkness. They’ll go: ‘I love your YouTube.’”
The idea for the channel came about after lockdown. After he’d spent the enforced layoff doing fitness videos and guitar tutorials, his longtime creative producer, Jenny May Finn, noticed that he was becoming “comfy on camera. Which I’d never been.” So Justin Hawkins Rides Again was born. He was intrigued by the prospect of what he calls “an amazing window to the world” – where he has total control, without any of the filters or compromises demanded by the music industry. “I can sit here and say anything I want.”
The format is fairly similar from episode to episode. Hawkins will read a potted, slightly customised biography (“the music band Oasis”), then pick up an acoustic guitar to work out how a song is constructed. In the video Is This the Best Oasis Song?! he observes that Wonderwall reflects Oasis’s change of drummer from Tony McCarroll’s “boom-bish” “shed builder” rhythms to Alan White’s skippier patterns, which “broadened the possibilities that [songwriter] Noel Gallagher had”. He even demonstrates how it might have sounded with a “boom-bish”. Hawkins thinks the channel is accessible “because I don’t go too deep into the theory”, but it’s also down to his winning mix of knowledge, warm irreverence and an entertaining screen persona.
The video This Is Why the Bee Gees Rock begins with his face superimposed on all three “disco kings”. He explains that becoming Maurice Gibb was “encouraging because it means with the right facial hair arrangement, I could go bald … and as long as you pair that look with a silky shirt and medallion combination … you still look virile”. He compares You Win Again’s “swingy groove” to Aerosmith’s Rag Doll, plays it to demonstrate what makes it great (“It’s all about the doodle doodle”) and even sings the “Ohhhh girl” bit in a Robin Gibb falsetto.
“Lyrically, he seems to be talking about coercing somebody to be your partner,” Hawkins tells the camera, with an impeccably raised eyebrow. “If that was written now they’d probably hesitate with some of this stuff … but they’re serious songwriters and men with actual desires.”
Incredibly, there is no script. Apart from a couple of early clips that required a second pass, everything is filmed in one take. “My producer [Finn] sends me my assignment. I press record and go for it,” he says, which means the camera captures the spontaneous insights when he first peeks under a song’s bonnet. “My favourites are when something occurs to me and I’m like: ‘Oh yeah.’”
Filming takes place wherever he is, which might be the cottage, his home studio, freshly out of the shower or on the road (one video is interrupted by room service). The tech is pretty basic. “For the last few I’ve been relying on a webcam,” he says. “I might upgrade a few things but it’s all got to fit in a bag. I don’t want to be walking round with a whole production.”
Subjects range from Is Lana Del Rey Overrated?! to How the Rich Are Destroying the Music Industry. Having been himself on the sharp end of music criticism, Hawkins strives to find the positive and prefers a gentle lampoon to outright criticism. He managed to upset Foo Fighters fans by admitting – shock, horror – he doesn’t listen to them at home, but after a video asking C’mon, Are the Foo Fighters Really That Great?! he concluded that they are. He tells me that in an era when most bands are using performance software on stage, Dave Grohl’s outfit are “a proper rock’n’roll band”.
Most disdain is reserved for artists who “water down their music in order to develop their standing”. He singles out Coldplay and Maroon 5. Even then, he praises the former’s early hit, Yellow, while scolding them for their later BTS collaboration. “It can’t be about anything other than the numbers,” he sighs, “and it meant I felt better about hating them.” Coldplay’s defenestration is all the more effective because Hawkins delivers it in a shiny silver anorak “which makes me look like an oven-ready turkey”.
after newsletter promotion
After Hawkins noted that Maroon 5’s Adam Levine didn’t move like Jagger but “like Maud Jagger, Mick’s great-auntie”, their “people” accused him of infringing copyright by covering their song. “Which I wasn’t,” he insists. “But they challenged it and YouTube will always go with the copyright holder.” So now every time someone watches Hawkins’ video, titled I’m Sorry. It’s Just Sh*t, the advertising income goes to Maroon 5. “I’m slagging them off and they’re getting paid for the privilege.”
The channel is a nice little earner for Hawkins, but he suggests it’s a “sideline” rather than a windfall. Mainly it allows him to dig into stuff he is passionate about. Videos such as The Truth About Being an Addict (prompted by an interview Metallica’s James Hetfield gave about addiction to fame) touch on Hawkins’ experiences of the “music trades, at the top, the bottom and in the middle”.
Several, like his recent Jeff Beck obituary, are serious or emotional. Hawkins finds the raw, confessional song Hi Ren by singer Ren – AKA Ren Gill, who has Lyme disease and was confined to his bed for several years – “the right side of challenging” and was thrilled to see comments “from nurses and people in mental health saying how helpful it is to get that perspective in a song”. He found the 1975’s brutally honest, self-analytical Part of the Band – featuring lines such as “So many cringes in the heroin binges / I was coming off the hinges, living on the fringes” – so moving he “cried on camera. But I just love it when something hits me like that.”
He doesn’t ever want Justin Hawkins Rides Again to become “an obligation” or lessen his creativity in the day job. “But the amazing thing has been that after listening to all this stuff, I really want to make some music.”
Justin Hawkins Rides Again is at YouTube.com/@JustinHawkins RidesAgain