Midway through their thoroughly entertaining show at Wembley Arena, the Darkness played a song from a decade ago called ‘Barbarian’, about Ivar the Boneless and the Viking conquest of Britain. ‘Barbarian’ exists in a long tradition of men with long hair, tight trousers and loud guitars singing about our Danish friends.
Led Zeppelin did it on ‘The Immigrant Song’: ‘The hammer of the gods/ Will drive our ships to new lands/ …Valhalla, I am coming!’ Iron Maiden did it on ‘Invaders’: ‘The smell of death and burning flesh, the battle-weary fight to the end/ The Saxons have been overpowered, victims of the mighty Norsemen.’ Scores of others you are less likely to be familiar with have, too. The Viking anthem is a rite of passage in hard rock.
‘Barbarian’ sounded pretty much exactly as you would expect, with a churning, properly metallic riff, and a characteristically snappy top-line melody from singer Justin Hawkins. ‘One by one, the kingdoms fall,’ Hawkins trilled. ‘They looked upon this isle, and took it all/ Harbingers of pain/ Edmund the Martyr, cut down by a Dane!’ It’s either a microscopically well-observed spoof of metal lyric-writing – so on the nose as to no longer be funny – or it’s just bad writing. That it was performed by the Darkness rather than, say, Manowar was the only thing that stopped it being just another metal song about Vikings.
When they became famous in 2003, the conversation about the Darkness was all about whether they meant it. But of course they meant it. You don’t display such complete mastery of the idiom unless you really love it: the Darkness sounded like a real hard-rock band in a way Spinal Tap never did.
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