Jack White – Blood and Porridge

March 17, 2026March 18, 2026

The Darkness descends on Singapore

Andy Warhol’s prediction that one day everyone would be famous for 15 minutes seems cruelly appropriate when I think about English glam rock / metal band the Darkness. In 2003 they released their debut album Permission to Land and for the next year they were huge. The album went platinum and the band racked up three awards – Best British Group, Best British Rock Act and Best British Album – at 2004’s BRIT Awards.

But then… Suddenly, they weren’t huge. Their second album One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back (2005) being a flop and their singer and lead guitarist Justin Hawkins quitting the band after struggling with drug and alcohol addiction didn’t help, though overall they gave the impression their popularity would be brief. With the over-the-top theatricality of their music – crowned by Hawkins’ falsetto vocals – and the cartoonish-ness of their videos and general image, the band obviously didn’t take themselves seriously, which was admirable. Alas, there’s a problem with presenting yourself as something of a joke, i.e., even the funniest joke in the world stops being funny when you’ve heard it a number of times.

For the record, I should say I liked One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back, if only for its title track, which contained the immortal lyrics: “The first line hit me like a kick in the face / Thought I better have another one just in case…” I also liked them because they came from Lowestoft, the rather rough-and-ready seaside resort in County Suffolk. I was spending much of my time in Suffolk when, temporarily, they hit the big time. Indeed, at the height of their celebrity, they threatened to buy big, fancy houses in Southwold, the more upmarket, snootier seaside resort a few miles along the coast from Lowestoft – a threat some Southwolders took seriously. I seem to recall a newspaper article where the journalist visited Southwold and interviewed some locals about the prospect of having Justin Hawkins and co. as residents. One old lady expressed her disapproval of them because they ‘had tattoos’.

However, as evidenced by John Travolta – who went from the highs of Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978) to the lows of the Look Who’s Talking movies (1989-93), but then enjoyed a comeback with Pulp Fiction (1994) – or Robert Downey Jr – who, after Air America (1990) and Chaplin (1992), seemingly destroyed his career with cocaine and heroin abuse, but then made a half-billion dollars playing Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – or even Sir Michael Caine – whose route from Zulu (1964) and Alfie (1966) to having roles in eight Christopher Nolan movies and becoming a British national treasure had to go through a mid-career trough containing the likes of The Swarm (1978), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), The Island (1980), The Hand (1981) and Jaws: the Revenge (1987) – just because you were once fashionable, but then went out of fashion, doesn’t mean you won’t ever come back into fashion. So it is with the Darkness. After being off the radar for a long time, they’ve lately acquired some retro-coolness.

Their eighth and most recent album, 2025’s Dreams on Toast, got to Number 2 in the British charts. They’re due to support Iron Maiden at their 50^th anniversary show at Knebworth Park in July this year. And in December 2026 they’ve lined up no fewer than seven UK arenas to perform in for their Band of Brothers tour. They even generated some headline-making controversy when Justin Hawkins, who reunited with the Darkness in 2011, and younger brother Dan, who plays lead guitar in the band too, criticized Yungblud’s performance at the late Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell concert last summer. The elder Hawkins commented: “…if the future of rock comes from musical theatre and Disney, if this is Ozzy’s heir, we’re in trouble.” Finally, it hasn’t done the band’s renewed popularity any harm that, since 2021, Justin Hawkins has had a YouTube channel where he reviews and analyses songs. It currently has 600,000 subscribers.

Last week, the Darkness made their first-ever appearance in Singapore, my current abode, with a gig at the Capitol Theatre. In terms of musicality, it wasn’t the best concert I’ve attended in the city-state. That accolade probably belongs to Jack White, whom I saw at the same venue three-and-a-half years ago. But in terms of showmanship… This gig was pretty awesome.

Yes, the band-members are two decades older than they were in their mid-noughties heyday – bassist Frankie Poullain, who once resembled a moustached villain from a spaghetti western, appears to have transformed into Kurt Vonnegut – but the encroachment of middle age hasn’t slowed, calmed or subdued them. Justin Hawkins, for example, in an impressive display of spriteliness, performed a handstand at one point. Also, admirably un-self-conscious, he stripped off to the waist early in the gig and flaunted a torso slathered in tattoos. No wonder that old lady in Southwold objected to him.

When you list the bands that had an influence on the Darkness, the one topping the list is surely Queen. Accordingly, there were moments tonight when I felt I was listening to the rockier end of Queen’s musical repertoire – without the detours into opera, funk, disco, music hall, electronica and so on that the older band were so fond of – with Justin Hawkins providing plenty of Freddie Mercury-style flamboyance. But I mean that in a good way. Those Queen-esque moments smacked of loving homage rather than slavish imitation. And on the subject of Queen, I should mention that since 2015 the Darkness’s drummer has been Rufus Tiger Taylor, whose dad is none other than the legendary Queen tub-thumper Roger Taylor. Justin Hawkins cracked a joke about this at one point, quipping that Rufus’s father used to ‘play the drums in Status Quo’. I laughed, though nobody else in the crowd seemed to. Maybe because I was the only audience-member old enough to know who Status Quo were.

The setlist balanced half-a-dozen songs from their first and still most famous album Permission to Land, including such crowd-pleasing items as I Believe in a Thing Called Love and Get Your Hands Off My Woman Motherf*cker, with half-a-dozen from their recent comeback Dreams on Toast. Of the latter songs, Rock and Roll Party Cowboy, which served as the opening number and set the tone for what was to follow, was a particularly glorious slab of glam-metal genius / stupidity (“Leather jacket, no sleeves / Harley-Davidson? Yes, please!“). Some of their in-between albums were represented by a song each and they also did a cover, a guitar-heavy rendition of Jennifer Rush’s The Power of Love (1984), which Hawkins’ voice was highly suited to. The cover was fun, though one ironic take on a power ballad was enough. They thankfully didn’t follow it up with versions of, say, Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart (1983) or Celine Dion’s It’s All Coming Back to Me Now (1996).

The band played epically with instruments cranked up to 11 at all times, Justin Hawkins antics’ as frontman achieved the right alchemy of melodrama and hilarity, and consequently the evening was high in entertainment value and the crowd had an excellent time. What helped, I felt, was that the Darkness came across as being a bunch of genuinely decent lads. For instance, Justin Hawkins showed his appreciation of the guitar-tech guy who sporadically had to run on and off-stage. The band also made sure their touring member, the keyboardist and guitarist Ian Norfolk – who, with his bald head, trimmed beard and sensible clothes looked as unlike the other performers as was possible – got a minute in the limelight. By the way, I appreciate a guy called Norfolk playing with a band from Suffolk.

Moreover, the one moment that could have soured things – the band stopped a half-minute into I Believe in a Thing Called Love to ask certain members of the audience at the front of the stalls to stop filming on their phones – was well-handled by Hawkins. Speaking like the nice, popular teacher at school who, once in a blue moon, has to discipline an unreasonably rowdy class, he pointed out in an I’m-not-angry-just-a-bit-disappointed voice, “Imagine if I sang the song while filming you on my phone… It’d be really boring!” He was more restrained than Brett Anderson of Suede, who in a 2023 gig at Singapore’s Star Theatre reacted to phone-filming spectators by tussling with them and knocking the infernal devices out of their hands.

Incidentally, when I arrived before the show, I noticed that one of the counters selling drinks at the back of the stalls belonged to the Flying V, Singapore’s premiere – well, probably only – heavy-metal bar. And when I approached that counter to buy a beverage, I discovered they were selling Aspall Cyder. The cidery producing this particular brew is located in the Suffolk village of Aspall, about 30 miles southwest of Lowestoft. Wow, I thought, is this on sale because the Darkness are performing tonight? Are they supporting the Suffolk economy whilst playing in Asia? Momentarily, I had a vision of the Darkness’s tour-jet being accompanied by a cargo plane loaded with bottles of East Anglian scrumpy. However, I visited the Flying V after the gig and learnt that they sell Aspall Cyder there all the time. So it was just a coincidence.

November 24, 2022November 24, 2022

Jack the lad

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

After I’d been deprived of live music for nearly two years, courtesy of Covid-19, my luck certainly enjoyed an upswing this mid-November. On November 12^th, I got the chance to see Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium. Two days later, Jack White rolled into town on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which kicked off in White’s home city of Detroit on April 8^th and concluded three days ago in Christchurch, New Zealand, with five continents visited along the way.

The Singaporean leg of the gig was held in the Capitol Theatre in the Capitol Building, the picturesque 1929 neoclassical building on Stamford Road, whose refurbished interior also contains an atrium of ‘modern and classical dining establishments’, a retail mall and the luxury Kempinski Hotel. My partner and I had tickets for the upper circle, getting to which was a little weird. The theatre’s entrance is in the middle of the atrium, among the eateries. For the circle seats, we were directed through a door out of the foyer and into the atrium again, up a couple of modern escalators that climbed the atrium’s side, and through another door that brought us back inside the theatre.

The theatre – whose auditorium retains its 1929-vintage appearance – quickly filled up. It would have been nice to report that the crowd was immensely varied and contained everyone, to quote White’s most famous song, “from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”, but it largely consisted of Western expats. These included both suited, sombre ones who’d just arrived from work and casually dressed, hanging-out, shooting-the-breeze ‘dude bro’ ones. Unfortunately, the yaketty guys sitting directly in front of us belonged to the second faction. There were a few Singaporean-looking folk in attendance, though, such as a guy admirably clad in a death-metal T-shirt and ragged denim shorts, with long hair and an impressive amount of tattoos; or a bloke in a white T-shirt I could see below in the stalls, pressed against the front of stage, who reacted to the music with such berserk jigging and gyrating that several times I thought he was going to start a fight with people he crashed into on either side of him. He must have been Jack White’s biggest fan in Singapore.

White and his three band-members – bassist Dominic John Davis, keyboardist Quincy McCrary and drummer Daru Jones – came on stage to the strains of the MC5s’ Kick Out the Jams (1969), a famously hectic song whose hecticness, it’s fair to say, they matched during their two-hour, 23-song set. They delivered a gloriously intense and relentless barrage of rock ‘n’ roll noise. Commendably, they also achieved a balance between performing with utter musical virtuosity and, from the look of things, having an extremely good time. McCrary’s keyboards were agreeably high in the mix, giving the band’s sound, to my ears at least, a faintly Doors-ian or Stranglers-esque tinge. Meanwhile, kudos to the instrument tech team, who had their work cut out scurrying constantly about the stage and making sure all the instruments and equipment, including White’s fleet of guitars, were functioning correctly and bearing up to the strain.

Dressed in a dark suit, white boots and a patterned, chest-revealing shirt and sporting a slicked-back shock of hair whose colour can only be described as ‘metallic blue’, White resembled a character Nicolas Cage might have played in a sweaty, disreputable thriller directed in the early 1990s by Brian De Palma. Some of his more histrionic stage-moves evoked the mighty Nicolas Cage too, come to think of it.

The set gave a neat overview of White’s musical career. The songs played ranged from Cannon, off the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album in 1999, to two items from White’s last solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, released in July this year. In fact, about half the songs came from White’s solo work, Blunderbuss (2012), Lazaretto (2014), Boarding House Reach (2018), Fear of the Dawn (April 2022) and the afore-mentioned Entering Heaven Alive. Of these I’m familiar only with Blunderbuss. That’s not because I stopped liking or lost interest in White after 2012. It’s just that during the last decade I’ve lived in places where it’s been difficult to keep up with contemporary Western music. However, the solo stuff fitted in seamlessly alongside the older stuff performed, which mostly came from his celebrated noughties band the White Stripes.

The bulk of that White Stripes material was found on their third and fourth albums, 2001’s White Blood Cells (Dirty Leaves and Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl and We’re Going to be Friends) and 2003’s Elephant (Ball and Biscuit, The Hardest Button to Button and the inevitable Seven Nation Army). Nothing appeared from their last two albums, Get Behind Me Satan (2005) and Icky Thump (2007), which at least meant we were spared their rather fearful version of Corky Robbins’ Conquest (1952), the one with the bullfighting-themed video, which I’ve always thought was a rare White Stripes misfire. Bravely, Seven Nation Army was played not as a crowd-pleasing finale but as the opening number. It did resurface late on, though, after the band had ended their main set and left the stage and before they returned for their encore – because the crowd started chanting its memorable riff: “DAAAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAAAH-DAAAH!” At this point, I tried to get a chorus of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” going, but nobody played ball.

Also aired were songs by the bands White played in during the noughties that weren’t the White Stripes – the Raconteurs’ jaunty Steady as She Goes (2006), and the Dead Weather’s ominously organ-heavy I Cut Like a Buffalo (2009). The one song of the evening not to belong in any way to the Jack White canon was a cover of 1992’s 7 by Prince and the New Power Generation. It didn’t surprise me that he included something by the diminutive Minneapolitan musician-singer-songwriter. Prince, with his tireless prolificity and penchant for new projects, self-invention and basically never standing still, strikes me as an obvious role-model for White.

© Third Man / J / XL

Neither did it surprise me that Another Way to Die, the song he did with Alicia Keys as the theme for the unloved Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008), was left off the setlist tonight. While it’s better than the anodyne, play-it-safe themes the Bond producers have used on the most recent films, Another Way isn’t great. But it would have been fun for me to hear a second Bond theme played live in 48 hours, after Guns N’ Roses performed Live and Let Die (1974) on November 12^th.

Talking of which, the audience was told in plain terms before the gig not to use phones to film or take pictures. This meant, mercifully, we were spared the experiences of the Guns N’ Roses concert, where often it seemed I was peering at the stage through a galaxy of phone-lights – or indeed, through a galaxy of Samsung Galaxy phone-lights. Audience members were encouraged instead to obtain official photos from White’s website, which is what I’ve done for the pictures at the top and bottom of this entry.

Actually, looking through the site’s gallery of photos from the Singapore gig, I see that the tour photographer, David James Swanson, managed to snap one of the guy in the white T-shirt who was moshing crazily in the stalls. I bet he’s happy about that.

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

June 23, 2022August 2, 2022

Rock star insults

From youtube.com

This blog entry starts with Kate Bush… but isn’t about Kate Bush.

The other day I read a news report about how Kate Bush’s 1985 song Running Up That Hill had just gone to number one in the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium and Sweden and reached number five in the United States. The renewed popularity of the song was due to it being featured in season four of the American sci-fi / horror TV series Stranger Things. My curiosity was sufficiently piqued for me to go to YouTube and type ‘running up that hill’ into its search-bar, wondering if it would provide the clip from the TV show where the song was used. That didn’t happen, however. Instead, YouTube – presumably its algorithms had taken note of my past musical preferences at the site – sent me to a cover version of Running Up That Hill performed by the late 1990s / early 2000s band Placebo. I have to say the cover version didn’t sound bad at all. And incidentally, the comments below were full of Americans saying things like, “I’d always assumed this was an original Placebo song. I hadn’t known some English chick had sung it first, back in the 1980s!”

Meanwhile, my reaction at that time was: Placebo? Wow, I haven’t heard of them for years…

And then I thought: Hold on! They were responsible for the greatest rock ‘n’ roll insult I’ve ever heard live!

Let me explain. In 1999, I attended T in the Park, then the biggest annual music festival held in Scotland. Placebo was one of the bands performing on the main stage and I was near the front of the crowd at the start of their set. Also appearing that day was the rock band Gay Dad, who’d recently scored hit singles with the songs To Earth with Love and Joy, although sceptics grumbled that the hype surrounding the band was nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the fact that its singer Cliff Jones had previously been a music journalist – his former colleagues in the media were promoting his outfit as a favour. Placebo’s singer Brian Molko was obviously one of the sceptics. Before they began playing, Molko apologised for the band being slightly late in coming onstage.

This, he said, was because: “I was getting a blowjob backstage from the singer of Gay Dad.” He paused, then added with timing worthy of a master comedian: “Believe me, it’s not just their music that sucks!”

Anyway, that memory got me thinking about the following question. What are the best rock star insults of all time?

There are a few famous ones that come immediately to mind. I recall Robert Smith of the Cure saying of the self-consciously fey and militantly vegetarian frontman of the Smiths, “If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I eat meat. That’s how much I hate Morrissey.” Also memorable was Nick Cave’s comment on a well-known Californian funk-rock band: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the f*ck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Van Halen singer Dave Lee Roth was pretty brutal about a certain post-punk troubadour of the late 1970s and early 1980s: “Music journalists like Elvis Costello because music journalists look like Elvis Costello.” Though for brutality, you can’t beat the Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards talking about Slowdive, one of the key bands of the shoegaze movement of the late 1980s: “We hate Slowdive more than we hate Hitler.”

George Melly, though strictly speaking not a rock star – he was a jazz / blues singer – deserves inclusion here for his response to Mick Jagger. Melly had drawn attention to the deep grooves on the Rolling Stone’s face and Jagger had tried to dismiss them as ‘laughter-lines’. “Nothing,” pronounced Melly, “is that funny.” Meanwhile, I was never a fan of Boy George but I’ve always chuckled at his verdict on Elton John: “All that money and he’s still got hair like a f*cking dinner lady.” And just to prove that the art of the rock-star insult remains alive and well in 2022, there was recently a spat between Joan Jett and gun-humping, Trump-worshipping rock-neanderthal Ted Nugent, which produced this Jett-gem: “Ted Nugent has to live with being Ted Nugent. He has to be in that body, so that’s punishment enough.”

The world of rock contains certain individuals who can be relied upon to denigrate their contemporaries practically every time they open their mouths. Two who spring to mind are siblings Liam and Noel Gallagher, late of Britpop mega-band Oasis. Among those suffering the wrath of Liam Gallagher have been Keith Richards and George Harrison (“jealous and senile and not getting enough f*cking meat pies”), Bob Dylan (“a bit of a miserable c*nt”), Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day (“I don’t like his head”), Bono (“he looks like a fanny”) and Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine (“sounds like someone’s stood on her f*cking foot”). For my money, though, his best insult was heard at a Q Magazine Awards ceremony, where he yelled at Coldplay’s Chris Martin, “You’re a plant pot!”

As the older and supposedly more cerebral Gallagher, Noel’s insults have been more elaborate, if a tad less savage. Of the musical output of Justin Bieber, he once opined, “My cat sounds more rock ‘n’ roll than that.” He likened the appearance of the White Stripes’ Jack White to “Zorro on doughnuts” and mused about skatey Canadian punk rockers Sum 41: “After I heard Sum 41, I thought, I’m actually alive to hear the shittiest band of all time.” Needless to say, Oasis’s Britpop arch-enemies Blur came in for some stick too: “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.” And inevitably he’s had some choice words for his wayward younger brother since they acrimoniously parted company in 2009. That same year he famously described Liam to “a man with a fork in a world of soup.” (For his part, the younger Gallagher has repeatedly referred to Noel as a ‘potato’ and called his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds ‘the High Flying Smurfs’.)

The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards has also had a famously barbed tongue, powered by his apparent disdain for any form of music that isn’t structured around a 12-bar blues progression. He’s dissed Prince as “an overrated midget”, REM as “a whiny college rock band” and P Diddy as “bereft of imagination. What a piece of crap.” He dumped on the Grateful Dead for “Just poodling about for hours and hours. Jerry Garcia, boring shit, man. ” Of Metallica he speculated, “I don’t know where Metallica’s inspiration comes from, but if it’s from me, I f*cked up.” Hilariously, he said of Elton John after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and after John had reworked his 1973 ode to Marilyn Monroe, Candle in the Wind, as a tribute to the deceased princess: “His writing is limited to songs about dead blondes.” (To which Elton John retorted that the venerable Stones guitarist resembled “a monkey with arthritis.”)

But surely the man who’s suffered the most ignominious put-down from Keith Richards is his long-term singer, writing partner and fellow Rolling Stone Mick Jagger. Jagger’s image as a tireless lothario took a dent when Richards wrote about his manhood in his 2010 autobiography Life: “Marianne Faithful had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.”

From vassifer.blogs.com

However, when it comes to rock-star insults, one man is – or alas, was – the undisputed champion. Mark E. Smith, for four decades until his death in 2018 the driving force behind the fascinatingly off-the-wall post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, was never more entertaining in interviews than when he directed his guns at his peers and rivals in the music world. Among those getting it in the neck from Smith over the years were Badly Drawn Boy (“fat git”), Echo and the Bunnymen (“old crocks”), Garbage (“like watching paint dry”), Bob Geldof (“a dickhead”), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (“should have his rock licence revoked”), Mumford and Sons (“We were playing a festival in Dublin… There was this other group, like, warming up… and they were terrible. I said, ‘Shut them c*nts up!’ And they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them… I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers”), Pavement (“They haven’t got an original thought in their heads”), Ed Sheeran (like “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops”) and Suede (“Never heard of them,” said Smith cruelly, just after off coming off a tour where Suede were the support band).

And in fact, not even a songstress as lauded as Kate Bush escaped Smith’s vitriol. In 2014, when Bush’s Before the Dawn concerts – her first live performances since 1979 – triggered massive interest in her and her music again, Smith told the Manchester Evening News: “Who decided it was time to start liking her again? I never even liked her the first time round. It’s like all these radio DJs have been raiding their mam and dad’s record collections and decided that Kate Bush is cool again. But I’m not having it!”

It’s a shame the wonderfully curmudgeonly Smith isn’t around today to witness Kate Bush’s latest return to prominence with Running Up That Hill. I’m sure he’d have some entertaining pronouncements to make on the matter.