Let's be honest ‘The bloke who sang Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) becomes a metal influencer’ wasn’t on many people’s bingo cards at the start of the decade. But when Covid hit and The Darkness were forced off the road in 2020, Justin Hawkins got creative when it came to how he would connect with fans.
“I was doing Patreon and had got pretty comfortable on camera,” the singer recalls. “So my producer at the time said, ‘You should probably do stuff on YouTube because it’ll be really successful.’ I was very sceptical about it. I didn’t like the stigma of being a YouTuber, even though I’d had all these experiences [on camera] with Cameo and Patreon. For some reason I thought a more public-facing thing was not really what I signed up for.”
