Yahoo News How The Darkness fought fatigue and unfair demands to create their iconic Christmas single
Dan Hawkins and Frankie Poullain speak to Yahoo UK about the making of Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)
The Darkness' 2003 hit Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End) is a classic of the festive season but recording the song — and its accompanying music video — proved a difficult challenge, guitarist Dan Hawkins and bass guitarist Frankie Poullain tell Yahoo UK.
The band — which also comprises of Justin Hawkins and included ex-drummer Ed Graham at the time — were at the height of their fame, and were faced with fatigue and unfair demands to make their harebrained idea for a song a reality.
“It all came together at the last minute, as things generally do in The Darkness world. And it was the case that we told the label we had a Christmas song but we didn't, we just had the chords."Dan Hawkins
“So in order to make the song we had a very, very tight deadline to do it in," Hawkins reflects.
"So we hired a guy called Bob Ezrin, a legendary producer [and] we got a rough live demo of the song together and sent it to him.”
The band only had a “two or three day break in [their] schedule” to put it together, Hawkins adds they struggled to find time “between the chaos of touring and award ceremonies” as things had “really kicked off by then”.
“We booked into Abbey Road Studios, we had it for three days but we actually only recorded the Christmas song on day one, and then went off to an award ceremony on day two, and then on day two he got the choir in the recording booth,” Hawkins adds.
“So we met Bob in the morning at the studio, went through how we wanted it to go and then about six hours later we were back at home.”
“The funny thing is it's something that surfaced in the rehearsal room about three or four years before that even,” Hawkins says.
“I think we were thinking about doing a song like that at some point, but we might have been discussing it for a laugh.”Dan Hawkins
Poullain jokes that it’s “not exactly rocket science” to come up with a song, saying of the writing process for Don’t Let The Bells End: “It just felt like [a song] that sounds big and it feels like somebody should do something like that, so why shouldn't be us?”
The bass guitarist adds that the song felt “quite soulful” because of the melody and lyrics they had written.
“Dan brought a bit of melancholy and soul into the verse, it has a little flavour of Merry Christmas, War is Over — the [John] Lennon song — a little flavour of that... and that really gives depth, I think.”
But the difficulties didn’t stop there because then came the recording of the music video, an outlandish, brightly coloured and fun celebration of the song.
The reality was something quite different.
“We'd just got off a flight either from LA or Australia, we were absolutely exhausted. Straight off the plane, straight to the studio and we were so f***ing busy at the time.”Dan Hawkins
Poullain goes on: “That's the thing [with] these record companies, when you're busy they'll always take these little moments when you should be resting.
“It’s always after something and you have to do a video shoot, then you just look awful, you have no energy and you're drained of all the energy you might have.”
“It actually works out better,” Hawkins jokes. “Because if you look in that video at everyone's eyes they're completely glazed over, because they've had to use so many eye drops to get our eyes looking like we'd had one hour sleep in five weeks.
“We all look a bit stoned, it's got this kind of 70s vibe. It wasn't because we were stoned, it was because of the eye drops.”Dan Hawkins
Poullain responds by saying “that's how you want rock stars to look”, adding: “You want them to look a bit dazed and confused.”
The group’s Christmas hit went on to fight for the top spot on the UK charts, something that Hawkins admits they “didn’t really care” about at the time.
“The only thing that p***ed us off was that we said we'd had a ridiculously exhausting year, we'd got back from tour and it was Christmas, and we said ‘we're not going to plug this, we're just going to let it do its thing’.
“We didn't really expect it to get to number one at all anyway.Dan Hawkins
“And the label said 'look guys really sorry, but it's looking like it's gonna be #1 but it looks like it's going to be knocked off the top if you don't spend this week, the week before Christmas, promoting it.'
“We thought ‘oh god’, and then we went into promotion mode, five days promoting it and it still didn't get to number one and we didn't give a s*** in the first place.”
The song was beat to the number one spot by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews' cover of Mad World, with Poullain saying “it was 1% difference in sales” and it was just 500 sales between them and the winner.
“It was cool, we didn't care,” the guitarist adds. “Actually, a lot of those actual number ones are the ones that fall away and are forgotten, and lo and behold that's exactly what happened. The best one won in the end.”
Hawkins goes on: “lt's an unusual thing to have a song that's stuck after all these years, it's still creeping up the charts after people finally realise that [some songs] are dogs***.
“It was funny because some Christmas songs are fun for about a decade and then they fall off the charts when people realise that the whole sound was s***.
“But ours starts creeping up and I don't think it's going anywhere really, it's become a British classic.”
Read more:
The Darkness were at their 'lowest ebb' while filming documentary: 'It was really tough for us'
Welcome to the Darkness review – neo glam rockers light up the comeback trail (The Guardian, 2-min read)
