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Justin Hawkins is putting his soaring vocals to use in a new band. The former frontman for The Darkness is now preparing for his return to the music scene with a new group called Hot Leg. Hawkins split from The Darkness in 2006. The singer tells Billboard.com he felt the band “overachieved” and says he left because he didn’t love being in the group anymore. Hawkins feels better about Hot Leg, calling his work the best songs he’s ever written. The band will issue “Trojan Guitar” as the lead single overseas next week. Hot Leg’s still-untitled debut disc will follow in January.
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But the frontman of new rock quartet Hot Leg has quite an act to follow. The Darkness’ huge U.K. success saw the band’s 2003 U.K. chart-topping debut album, “Permission to Land” (Atlantic), sell 1.4 million copies domestically, according to the Official Charts Co.; Nielsen SoundScan puts U.S. sales at 710,000.
The band also collected five top 10 U.K. singles, three BRIT Awards and an Ivor Novello songwriting award. However, after second album “One Way Ticket to Hell … and Back” (2005) failed to scale the same heights, the Darkness imploded in 2006.
“We overachieved, really,” Hawkins says. “But I didn’t love it anymore.” After an extended sabbatical that included a stint in rehab, Hawkins returns with Hot Leg’s debut single, “Trojan Guitar,” an Oct. 20 U.K. release through his own Universal-distributed label, Barbeque Rock Records. A January album follows.
“These are the best songs I’ve ever written,” Hawkins says. “Some people are going to dismiss it because of the Darkness thing, but that’s just the way it is.”
Hot Leg headlines U.K. shows Oct. 12-31, followed by supports with Alter Bridge (Nov. 4-13) and Extreme (Nov. 14-24). International dates are not yet scheduled.
Once upon a time, there was a fantastic, ridiclous, awesome band called The Darkness. After just two cds, that band broke up. A bunch of the members formed a brand new band called Stone Gods. Unfortunately, that band lost everything that made the Darkness special, and ended up being just another junk hard rock band.
Fortunately, I have just learned that the lead singer of the Darkness, and one of the ones that didn’t join Stone Gods, started a new band called Hot Leg. Of what I’ve heard so far, this band retains a lot of the awesomeness of the Darkness: the great singer, the awesome guitar, and a distinct style. The style is definitely different from the glam rock style of the Darkness, but it still manages to be awesome.
They have already recorded an album (though it hasn’t been released, or even named) and they are currently touring through England, so if you live over there, make sure to buy some (rather cheap) tickets and enjoy the show!
James Clayton
Justin Hawkins, he of falsetto vocals and ridiculously tight flared catsuits, is back! Ah, the music scene has been miserably low on personality since The Darkness declined and Hawkins subsequently resigned and crashed into rehab. The former frontman of East Anglia’s finest is now fronting a headband-wearing group called Hot Leg who deal out deliciously ebullient rock ‘n’ roll with all the stagecraft and gleeful gusto that made the man famous.
Having been catapulted into the stratosphere on the back of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”, The Darkness were callously discarded by the fickle public who dismissed their real-good-time rock as a fad whose novelty had worn out by album number two. The true believers knew though that this was no joke: this was rock ‘n’ roll, heart and soul. There is no place for pernicious critical snobbery in the realm of real unadulterated guitar geekdom. The Darkness – and concomitantly Hot Leg – may be daft and deliriously ‘ridiculous’ by everyday standards but, damn it, isn’t that the whole point of popular music?
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Hawkins described how Hot Leg play “Man Rock”. Last time I browsed through a record shop, there was no “Man Rock” CD section. This is a genre that Hawkins has come up with himself and decided defines his band’s sound. “Why Man Rock?” he muses rhetorically. “I think anything with ‘man’ at the start sounds impressive. Man-sized tissues. How big are they? They’ve got to be huge haven’t they?”
Once you get beyond scary thoughts of what kind of creature would have such a nose that would necessitate such supersized sheets of Kleenex, you realise that Hawkins may be right. “That’s one rockin’ man-riff!” sounds like a decent enough way of describing a potent power chord. “Shut the hell up or I’ll kick your head in with my man-boots!” certainly sounds impressively threatening and tough. “Man child” maybe doesn’t have the extraordinary element, but there’s a sense of fun in that phrasing for sure. It’s when you get to slightly pathetic lexis like “man-flu” and “man bag” that you realise that Hawkins’s rule isn’t a cast-iron universal truth.
Regardless of the merits of the “man-”suffix, Hawkins is crowd-surfing on a cracking idea here. Why narrowly confine yourself to industry-prescribed generic labels that most often mislead and lump you in a vague categorisation that no doubt carry negative connotations?
There’s more of this article (not HL related) at denofgeek.com
Hot Leg’s MySpace blog Justin’s Twitter Teamhotleg Twitter
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