timesonline article

How do the Darkness do it? After their overnight success in Britain, the rock group are now storming America, playing a sell-out, cross-country tour, which started last week in Milwaukee and ends on April 17 in Los Angeles.
Success in America is the holy grail for most British acts, the place where serious money can be made. Where once British groups regularly triumphed — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who, Elton John — success has lately been harder to come by. George Michael, Depeche Mode, Bush and Dido have won through (arguably also Radiohead and Coldplay). But neither the Prodigy nor the Spice Girls were able to turn No 1 albums into long-term popularity.



More recently Oasis and Robbie Williams have had a crack at the US; while Oasis appear to have given up, Williams still spends much of his time in LA, forlornly waiting for his big break.

It’s not difficult to pinpoint the reasons for both Williams’s and Oasis’s failure. The former Take That singer’s cheeky-chappie image simply does not connect with transatlantic consumers. He is, believe it or not, too subtle for the US.

According to Dave Boyd, the managing director of Hut records and a man who has seen at least two of his bands, the Verve and Placebo, come close to breaking America, Oasis failed to storm the States for a very simple reason — contrariness. “Noel and Liam Gallagher went so far but then headed back to the UK, and they went with a ‘f*** you’. Americans hate that attitude. In America when you’re a musician you’re in the entertainment business — you ’re not a musician. When you’re a musician in the UK and you want to retain a certain amount of credibility, there’s no real pressure to do all the mainstream promotional stuff . . . In America you’ll be told to go on the David Letterman show, turn up at the Grammy Awards, basically do anything you’re asked. They don’t see a difference between Lucille Ball and Liam Gallagher.” So bands must do everything: go round the college radio stations, turn up to the weenie roasts, do the record company meet-and-greets at the end of the show. Most British bands do not possess that stamina or, it must be said, the time.

As Boyd says: “For a British band the UK promo treadmill is two singles and then an album. This cycle, involving talking to print media and TV and radio interviews, can take up five or six months and then, inevitably, it will either be Christmas or the European festival season. Then suddenly the year’s gone, and it’s, ‘Oh s***, there’s that other place across the water, 3,000 miles away. Better go.’ So, off they troop to CMJ (a music business showcase in New York). After playing to thousands of adoring fans in venues such as the Astoria, suddenly they’re playing to 200 music industry people who couldn’t give a toss.”

Although the Darkness are already known thanks to their huge success in Britain and the peddling of the kind of “poodle rock” still favoured by US music fans not located on the rap and R&B-dominated seaboards, they may well still fail in America. What makes Justin Hawkins and Co so popular in Britain — their puckishness, Spinal Tap-like proclamations (after their appearance at Glastonbury last year, Hawkins claimed, “We were contractually obliged to rock ”) and wit — could alienate American audiences who like their rock basic, honest and earnest.

Depeche Mode, derided in Britain for years as a plinky-plonky synth band, reinvented themselves in the mid-Eighties in the US as an angst-ridden Goth group. It was entirely deliberate as the lead singer, David Gahan, explains: “We’d been written off in the UK so, for me at least, there was definitely an element of ‘Let’s turn it upside down. Let’s be just what you wouldn’t expect of Depeche Mode.’ We became almost cartoonish. We played something like 180 shows in one year, to 25,000 people a night. It was kind of insane but that ridiculous work rate paid off and we became huge.”

That total dedication to live work is the key as Led Zeppelin and the Irish U2 discovered. In the latter’s case, their label, Island, was apparently about to drop them on the eve of the release of their second album, October, in 1981. But Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, went to see Island’s management and said: “Give me a million quid and we’ll break America. The band are going to go and live in America and tour the s*** out of it, they’re going to become an American band and tour constantly. The perception will be they’re an American band.” And it worked. U2 have sold more than 40 million albums in America so far.

It’s really that simple. Play long and hard, don’t be sarcastic, shake hands until you’re numb and if you have halfdecent songs you’re made in America (something must account for the success of Hootie and the Blowfish).

I think the Darkness will crack America. Many pundits do not. The most recent issue of the US rock magazine Spin suggested that their tongue-in-cheek approach will prove to be their Achilles’ heel and that American audiences will not appreciate the joke. However, the naysayers forget that the Darkness’s target demographic is not in the least sophisticated. Hard rock fans will savour Hawkins’s Prince-like costumes and lap up the band’s ostentatious live shows. The group have hungered for success so long that the arduous touring and promotional duties will seem like a holiday. And the singer’s puckish asides will be taken seriously and the Darkness will conquer America.

Take that, Robbie.