The Darkness’ rhythm guitarist Dan Hawkins “sliced his fingers to pieces” all the time nailing his harmonising solos with brother Justin.
The ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ hitmaker would get wounded from regular use of the G-string.
Dan told Total Guitar magazine: “When we’re harmonising off the back of one of my solos, it normally sounds like Thin Lizzy and ABBA. And when I’m trying to harmonise with Justin’s solos, you can literally hear me sweating! Especially on Permission To Land, it was a f****** nightmare. To be honest, the first six years of my career in The Darkness was a nightmare because my G-string was a wound 22. So we’d do one of the solos where I have to join in and harmonise, for instance something like Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End), and it would literally be slicing my fingers to pieces. Forget about moving an inch, that G-string wouldn’t be moving a millimetre.
“Justin loves bending those strings all over the place!”
Dan praised his brother for bringing the “raunchineness” to their harmonising.
After Justin suggested their relationship is like “fire and ice”, he replied: “I’m ice and you’re fire. You’re bring the raunchiness! The only time I’ll take a solo is when I’ve got a melody in my head, something that helps add to the emotion of the thing. If it makes sense to my ears, then I will put my hand up. And then sometimes I will think, ‘Oh no, I can’t really solo in this key!’ But if I hear something, I will stick my hand up and say, ‘Yes, I will take this section of the song!'”
The Darkness reflecting on their early playing comes as they dropped the 20th anniversary reissue ‘Permission To Land… Again’.