Justin Hawkins admits feeling regret over Darkness split

Justin Hawkins has admitted that he still feels regret over the time The Darkness split up before reuniting again in 2021.

Despite the huge success of their debut album in 2004, ‘Permission To Land’, the band split up after their 2005 release, ‘One Way Ticket To Hell…And Back’ while Hawkins, who is the lead singer, guitarist and frontman of the band, was battling addiction.

During the group’s ongoing UK tour to celebrate two decades of their debut, Hawkins told fans at a concert in Manchester on Tuesday (December 12) that he “felt really bad” for his bother Dan in the band following the break up.

He described his brother as the “brains” of the operation before adding: “Silly old Justin took all the drugs and [messed] it up” (via Music News).

He said he “had to live with the consequences of that”, referring to the split.

Hawkins recently said he thought he was “too old” to be a rock star at 18. 

The musician told Metro newspaper that he thought he wouldn’t make it as a musician once he reached 18 and started to study music and work behind the scenes instead.

He said: “I remember when I got to about 18 and I saw bands like Ash coming up and thinking, ‘Well this is over, I’m already too old!’ But I still wanted to be in music, so I went and studied music technology and got a job in a recording studio,” (via Yahoo).

He then went on to reflect on his journey and being signed by a label, aged 25. “Then I made a sort of easy-listening cassette of songs that I’d written for my grandfather for a Christmas present. And it got heard by somebody at a publishing company and they thought, ‘Oh, this kind of easy listening stuff is ideal to synchronise with films and TV shows and adverts’ and they signed me.

“I did a lot of stuff. I did HSBC, Mars Bars, Audi… and then I did the Ikea advert, which basically paid for our first album and bought me and my brother our first Les Pauls.”

The Darkness recently released their upcoming feature-length documentary, Welcome to the Darkness. 

Directed by Simon Emmett, the documentary will tell the story of the band’s formation in the early 2000s, their fast rise to fame as well as their crashing disbandment in 2006,  finally covering their reunion in 2011.

The band also recently paid tribute to Shane MacGowan during a sing-a-long in Dublin.