“It’s one of those things where you find out who your friends are,” Justin Hawkins mused recently to the half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, referencing the fan base-dividing video for recent single I Hate Myself, featuring a heavily made up Hawkins staring down the camera lens for the song’s duration.
The same take-it-or-leave-it spirit pervades Dreams On Toast. But then The Darkness have long been rock’s most Marmite band. Back in the early noughties, when the studied Stateside cool of The Strokes and the White Stripes redefined the indie-rock zeitgeist, The Darkness’s peculiarly English fusion of Queen and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band seemed about as culturally relevant as Nora Batty.
