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Review: Justin Hawkins Rides Again, St. George’s
Having notched up a remarkable half-a-million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Justin Darkness has decided to take the show on the road. Would anyone turn up to see something they’ve become used to watching for free on their screens? No worries there: the entire tour has sold out.
Clearly, no expense has been authorised for stage dressing, which comprises a comfy chair, a laptop, a large projection screen, a lamp, a couple of tables, a few guitars and a life-sized cardboard David Hasselhoff cut-out. Having left the catsuits back home in Switzerland, where he now resides, Justin ambles on in a faintly alarming brown suede outfit (there’s a costume change later) and kicks off with an audience participation rendition of the . . . Rides Again theme tune.
A two-hour stage show requires a little more structure than his usual winningly shambolic approach, so some bits are obviously scripted and there are a few well-worn yarns along the way. But otherwise it’s the familiar mix of anecdotage and deconstruction of music videos. Justin explains why Black Oak Arkansas are better than Beyonce and Take That are demolished, while kudos is given to the actual musicians doing the aging boy band’s musical heavy lifting – notably proggers Jem Godfrey and Lee Pomeroy. He also takes apart a beach-set video by obscure rockers Wally World (he doesn’t remark on the National Lampoon reference), which looks like a Poundstretcher version of Ugly Kid Joe’s Everything About You.
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Prompts come in the form of answers to questionnaires distributed to ticket holders asking them to nominate their guilty pleasures, worst gig, and so on. Justin also sets out to re-establish post-covid gig etiquette with a set of rules – though he doesn’t get beyond rule two, which relates to his oft-expressed hatred of being filmed by a sea of mobile phones.
He’s always been a quick-witted and amusing frontman and this translates well to what is effectively a stand-up comedy show. It’s all deliciously unfiltered and one can’t help hoping there are no libel lawyers present. The Darkness’s participation in the recent Monsters of Rock Cruise provides some new material, from the experience of playing a guitar solo in a hot tub (“It’s effectively an unflushed toilet”) to publicly taking the piss out of former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley’s wig, which led to a showdown with Ace’s ‘people’.
On each date of the tour, local bands have been invited to submit music for Justin’s appraisal. Bristol has produced a bumper crop, so he opts to highlight two of them. The best of these is a song entitled I’m Scared by a band called Peach, whose representative is invited on to the stage to hear it pronounced “fucking awesome”. Quite so.
This was only the second Justin Hawkins Rides Again live show so glitches would have been forgivable, but it all goes impressively smoothly. The positive audience response suggests he’d be very welcome to do it all again, albeit in a larger venue.
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: March 2024
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