Apparently not. Atlantic ultimately signed the band, and the self-funded ''Permission,''released in the U.K. July 7, held Britain's No. 1 slot for four weeks -- two more than it took to record the album. But the Darkness proved polarizing. Brit music mag NME wished them death, while Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister blasted them as a novelty act. (''When was the last time he sold a million records?'' sniffs Justin.) When the band opened for rap-rockers Disturbed last year in London, they were pelted with boos, coins, and mobile phones.
While the Darkness know their showmanship makes them an easy target -- ''we don't do ourselves any favors,'' says Poullain with a chuckle -- they draw the line at the j-word. ''If you accuse us of being a 'joke band,' it's tantamount to saying to a builder that your work is shoddy,'' says Justin. ''One thing they can't say about us is that we can't play our guitars, that we don't write successful pop songs and sing and dance and wear great clothes.''
Ah, the clothes. Dan has a dozen or so Thin Lizzy shirts, while Justin owns about 30 catsuits (''a triumph in design,'' he says) ranging from zebra stripes to the $16,000 getup he donned at the MTV Europe Music Awards (and for EW's photo shoot). ''A week later, Cher wore something similar,'' Justin says. ''She didn't look as good.''
Justin's fashion sense is just the tip of his package: He's a classic rock star brimming with Rothian sound bites. On Coldplay: ''I like the songs, but they have an inadequate guitar player. He wouldn't cut the mustard in Whitesnake, would he?'' On the Strokes: ''I don't think the man in the street would claim to enjoy their music.'' On the state of rock: ''Booked into a health spa, should be 100 percent in about a year.''
Meanwhile, these blokes are enjoying their Next Big Thing status. (''I believe the Darkness will be the most important band of 2004,'' says Atlantic copresident Craig Kallman.) The first single, ''I Believe in a Thing Called Love,'' is already a most-requested song on New York's K-Rock.
Yet Justin and Co. see past the hype. They'd like to record Justin's musical about the collapse of the fishing industry in the brothers' English seaside hometown, Lowestoft, but ''with very global themes.'' They're building a 40-foot, inflatable, one-eyed dog -- a nod to ''Black Shuck,'' a song about a canine who sends a priest to a fiery death. And let's not forget this project: ''Too many people do the wire thing where they fly over the audience,'' Justin says, ''so why not have the entire audience on wires and just us standing there?''
Quotes like these make it a little hard to swallow their ''we're not joking'' claims. But who gives a flying scissors kick? The Darkness rock. And, like it or not, they're hell-bent on universal domination. ''Think of the world as a forest,'' says Justin. ''There's redwoods, shrubs, and the U.K. is perhaps a conifer. And we've pissed on that stump and left our scent, so now we've got to battle a lot of other dogs and much bigger trees. It's one tree at a time, really. We're not bionic -- we've only got one set of genitalia each -- so it's going to take a while.'' Laughter. ''That is kind of a good analogy, isn't it?'' On a scale of 1 to 10, we give it an 11.
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