Kurt Vonnegut – 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.

February 28, 2024March 1, 2024

The magnificent Seven Moons

© Sort Of Books

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize. The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020. Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read. One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch. Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original. Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending. But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013. Parts of this 19^th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places. Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986. Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day. No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel. It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages. That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the things I now miss most about the place.

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in. Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost. He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds. The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened. As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered. And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants. In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man. In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed. But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement. It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements. Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour. For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan. Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War. This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.” These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then. It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s. “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents. But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms. We all pray it stays that way.”

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example. Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost. (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie. It came out in 1990.)

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury. I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space. It’s the perfect hiding place. Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.