The Darkness have admitted their festive anthem Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) was written on the fly after a drunken night out.
Guitarist Dan Hawkins recalled how the band’s label pushed for a seasonal single following their breakthrough success in the UK.
He told NME: “I was in the Met Bar getting horrendously drunk with Max Lousada, our A+R guy at the time.
“He said, ‘We’ve got to think about a Christmas single, haven’t we? What do you reckon: Love Is Only A Feeling?’ I told him, ‘Well, it’s not a Christmas single, is it?’ He asked if we had one and I said ‘Yeah’… but we didn’t.”
The next day, en route to support Metallica at Dublin’s RDS Arena, the band threw themselves into the challenge. Hawkins bought fairy lights and Christmas jumpers for the bus, and the 2003 hit was quickly pieced together.
He added: “Justin had that chorus as a piss‑around thing from years ago.
“We worked out how to turn it into a proper song and it was finished in a couple of hours in the back of the bus. We just blagged it, really.”
Despite its spontaneous origins, Hawkins said the band were determined to make a genuine Christmas single rather than simply adding sleigh bells to an existing track.
He continued: “At the time, I wanted to compete — I wanted to be part of the race for Christmas. You can spot it a mile off when they just add some bells and the word ‘Christmas’ to an average song. We wanted to do it properly.”
The track went on to become one of the band’s most recognisable hits, cementing The Darkness in the pantheon of modern Christmas rock classics.
The song narrowly missed out on the number one spot after being beaten by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears For Fears’ Mad World.