Why I Suck... Series 5, Episode 10 - The Darkness!

 Sometimes a band just comes straight out of nowhere and before you know where you are, they're everywhere - radio, TV, festivals, guitar magazines.

So it was in 2003 when the Darkness appeared seemingly out of the ether (in fact, rather more prosaically, Norfolk) - and the music world was alight with spangly catsuits, ear melting falsettos, Gibson Les Pauls and (crucially) PROPER BIG GUITAR SOLOS!

Suddenly, we had a brand new 21st century guitar hero in the shape of a gangly skinny young chap by the name of Justin Hawkins, gleefully embracing all the over the top silliness and flamboyance that makes rock & roll FUN again. 

Not just that, but they could PLAY. PROPERLY play. 

"Permission To Land" was on more or less permanent rotation in my car for a good few months back then and pretty much every band I've been in since has done - or at least attempted - a version of their breakthrough smash hit "I Believe In A Thing Called Love", so to lighten the transition into the winter months, I figured it would be fun to take a dive into the guitar styles of the Hawkins boys and transcribe the whole thing - and this time, I managed it! 

First, as is customary, a little potted history - The Darkness formed in Lowestoft in 2000, but both Hawkins brothers Justin born 1975, Dan in 1976 - began learning guitar at a very young age. Justin also began developing his signature vocal pyrotechnics and flashier guitar skills - heavily influenced by Queen's Freddie Mercury and Brian May respectively - but it wa Dan who actually found success first as a session guitarist (including for 90s pop queen Natalie Imbruglia) after moving to Camden before the Darkness formed.

The pair recall frequently moving through the local music scene as a pair, often with Justin adapting to vocals and keyboards as well as lead guitar while Dan would frequently turn his hand to bass and drums as well as rhythm guitar. It was only really with The Darkness that the pair would attempt the twin guitar attack which they would describe as influenced by Guns & Roses, AC/DC and Thin Lizzy, with harmonised lines and call/response phrases between the different guitars.

Sadly, after "Permission To Land" the band couldn't quite recapture their previous success with follow up album "One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back"  and the former members went their separate ways, Justin struggling with substance abuse and rehab issues - however, they reformed in 2013 and have continued with consistently successful tours and releases ever since.

So, with the history lesson complete, rev up the fingers and the Les Pauls and let's take a look at some licks!

We'll start with a Dan Hawkins solo - the lead break in "Get Your Hands Off My Woman". This track is in D minor but modulates to G minor for the solo:

We kick off with a rhythmically displaced group of pull-offs to the open G and D strings - 4 then two groups of 6. Interestingly, this begins by spelling out a Gm7 arpeggio - G, Gb, D, F - and then Dan moves up to the B note on the 4th fret G to spell out a G7 - G B D F. He follows this with a spot of Chuck Berry style double stop and string bending using G minor pentatonic, before ending with a climactic series of unison bends finishing with the D note on the 10th fret E and 13th fret B as the song modulates back to it's original key of D minor.

Dan Hawkins is undeniably a fine guitar player, but it's his elder brother Justin who does most of the flash stuff - interestingly, open strings form a big part of his style, blended with the repicked bends, major scale legato and singing vibrato clearly influenced by Brian May. This next lick is the climactic (using that word alot in this post...) open string run from the end solo in "I Believe In A Thing Called Love", using the E major scale pulled off against the open E (with the exception of the final D note bent up to E.. but I think we can forgive that as a Les Paul only has 22 frets!).

The third example comes from the end solo in "Love Is Only A Feeling" in D major and here Justin is using a long slippery legato line down the D string before finishing off with a very tasty bit of rhythmically displaced tapping. He tops it all off with a climactic (there's that word again) bend on the 22nd fret B string, bending the A (5th) into the B (6th) - which we can also view as the root note of the relative minor (B minor). Don't worry unduly about following the tab exactly as it's much more about getting the rhythmic idea with the fretting hand and then adding a melody with the right.

The final example shows Justin taking on a very Brian May trick of basing a solo around the vocal melody - this is from the intro solo to "Holding My Own" again in D major, using the D major scale and starting with the D major/ B minor pentatonic scale shape, finishing with a sliding sequence down the D major scale and (dare I use the word again? Yes, I dare... it's The Darkness, after all!) climaxing with a repicked bend milked with vibrato from the E on the 9th fret G into the F#, the 3rd of the home key.

So that wraps up a thoroughly enjoyable look at one of the few classic rock icons that the 21st century has yet produced - strange to think that 2003 is now equidistant between 2024 and 1982! Just goes to show how age plays with your perception of time... but I'll be quite happy if they blast this out in whatever old folk's home I wind up in ;-)  

Why I Suck.. Series 5, Episode 9 - Jeff Healey!

 It's a theme I've noticed over the years running this series that all too often, incredible talent is fused with heartbreaking tragedy. The untimely deaths of Hendrix and SRV are well known, but regular readers will have read the same fate with Freddie King, Gary Moore, Rory Gallagher and Shawn Lane..  amazing musicians gone long before their time. And this, sadly was also the fate  of Canadian blues virtuoso Jeff Healey.

To be fair, Jeff's entire life story reads as if it were written by the blues itself. Born March 25th, 1966 in Ontario, Canada, Jeff was adopted (so, for whatever reason, abandoned by birth parents) - and then before he was even one year old, he contracted retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer leading to his eyes having to be surgically removed.. you couldn't make this up. 

Despite this start in life, the young Jeff began playing guitar aged 3, developing his characteristic approach of laying the instrument flat on his lap and reaching over it with his fret hand. During his primary school years he attended a boarding school for blind children and by aged 9 made his first TV appearance on the TVOntario children's programme "Cucumber". By 1979, at 13, he was performing in local rock bands and by 1984, aged 18 and attending Etobicoke Collegiate, he was playing with the Canadian Stage Band All Stars. 

Influenced by Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy and Albert Collins - as well as jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong - Jeff was fast building himself a reputation as a blues prodigy and in 1985 was invited to join Albert Collins and Stevie Ray Vaughan on stage at Toronto Albert's Hall. That same year he would form the Jeff Healey band and release "See The Light" which was subsequently used in the Patrick Swayze '80s classic action movie, "Roadhouse". This was Jeff's breakthrough moment, culminating with the major hit "Angel Eyes" which made No. 5 in the Billboard Top 100. 

The Jeff Healey Band had a consistently successful run through the 90s, and in 2000 Healey began to focus more on jazz, forming the Jazz Wizards, but ultimately cancer would come back to haunt him in 2007 and in 2008, aged just 41 he was dead of sarcoma. 

So a cruel start, and a cruel end, but he certainly accomplished an incredible amount with the short time he had. Stories like that serve to kick things very much into perspective - and also to serve as inspiration. So it seems a fitting way to memorialise an incredible talent and will by analysing Jeff's playing and stealing whatever we can!

The first two examples are from the breakout hit "See The Light", a funky 12 bar blues in D minor, and Jeff is absolutely on fire in the solos here. This first example is drawn from position 4 of D minor pentatonic (which you can visualise as being based around an A minor shape Dm chord) up at the 17th fret, kicking off with a powerful whole tone bend from C (b7) to root (D) on the high E string, followed by a blistering run through the scale positions' top three strings in a demonstration of tension and resolution. The really interesting part is Jeff's deft control of string bending in the second bar - bending from the G (4th) on the 20th fret B string up to first the Ab (b5 from the blues scale) before resolving to the A (5th). This control of the intricacies of string bending brings to mind Albert King as a powerful influence on his playing.

In this second example we can see Healey using a fairly stock "3 Magic Notes" based format but adding the root notes on the 10th fret E and 12th fret D - notice his use of rhythmic displacement, playing the same phrase in different parts of the bar to ensure that different notes fall on the beat - often creating the illusion of there being more going on there than there actually is! - a trick we've seen before on the blog called a hemiola. The stars of the show here though are the chromatic passing notes, Healey navigating his way through the scale using the intervening notes for flavour - because they're not held long enough to grab the attention, they're only really sensed in passing by the listener, adding "grease" to the core D minor pentatonic notes.

This third example is taken from the ballad "Angel Eyes" in C and Jeff is milking the C major / A minor pentatonic scale in position 4 around the 12th fret. This ideas really hangs on bending the 2nd (D, 15th fret B string) into the major 3rd (E) before resolving down to the 5th (G, 12th fret G string) with some singing vibrato, before making his way down through position 3 of the scale  in the second half of the lick and finally coming to rest on the root C (10th fret D string). This creates the effect of a question and answer/ call and response phrase, the 5th  leaving the listener hanging (similar to how Albert King would use it) before finally coming to rest on the root. This is an interesting concept and on the demonstration video I'll show you a couple of ways you can bring this into your playing.

The fourth example is really two separate call and response ideas taken from Jeff's cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" played around the vocal line in the second chorus (where the song modulates from A minor to A major). In the first lick, we're focusing on a D-shaped A arpeggio with the addition of the 4th for a sus4-major resolution and an unusual bend from 5th (E, 9th fret G) up to 6th (F#)  before ending on the 3rd (C#, 11th fret D). The second lick revolves around position 2 of F#m/ A major pentatonic, focusing on the repetition with variation of the F#-G# C# E idea, varying articulation and timing (I'll be able to demonstrate this better n the video), before concluding with a dramatic slide up to the A note (root) on the 10th fret B. 

Although I've focused on Jeff's blues based playing, he also was an exceptional jazz player, and I think we'll be returning to take a look at that facet of his playing before long... meanwhile, dust off the catsuit and the Les Paul Custom, warm up that falsetto... as we shine a light on The Darkness!