When I Believe In A Thing Called Love appeared out of the blue and turned The Darkness into an overnight sensation, many did not know what to make of them. The song featured piercing falsetto vocals, funny lyrics, flamboyance galore, and a chorus filled with ridiculous mouthfuls of words. To top it off, it had a crazy, larger than life music video.
I Believe In A Thing Called Love was released as the third single from The Darkness’ debut album Permission To Land on 22 September 2003, and it broke the band. It peaked at #2 on the UK Singles Chart, eventually selling enough copies to receive a platinum certification. It charted pretty much worldwide, becoming a Top 10 hit in Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, and on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
The song came out during a time when music had become very serious. The colourful and fun times of the 1980s were long gone. Grunge and gloom had taken hold in the 1990s, and the Britpop bubble had burst. Then The Darkness came along, paying homage to the songs and showmanship they had grown up with. The fact that they brought the party and good vibes made them so different that people almost did not know what to make of them.
The Darkness came across as flamboyant, fun, glam, and even a bit camp, but they were also playing catchy rock’n’roll. You could hear that Queen and bands of that ilk were amongst their inspirations. Many still doubted them. Were they genuine in what they did or were they having a laugh? Even worse, were they taking the piss or sending up the genre? No matter what people chose to believe, they would not be alone in their stance. Opinion varied highly. Many loved them, while others found them ridiculous or did not know what to make of them.
They were clearly having a bit of fun with that particular song, though. It was exactly what was needed at the time. Primarily, they showed us that we don’t really need to take it all that seriously all the time.
Many were confused, but also very amused. How the band was portrayed ended up standing in the way of many embracing their music, and for some time many were wary of liking ‘that joke band.’ Eventually it sunk in that this was indeed a genuine band, intending to be here for the duration and build a lengthy career.
Sometimes the story behind a song can be summed up in one sentence. “I can’t remember who said it,” guitarist Dan Hawkins told The Guardian, “but we were having a conversation along the lines of: ‘Why don’t we just write the stupidest song ever?’”
The lyrics may seem nonsensical, but they connect in their own way. “Some of the most stupid stuff is the ones that people sing at you, and that always makes me smile,” Justin Hawkins said in a Songfacts interview. “Things like, ‘My heart’s in overdrive and you’re behind the steering wheel.’ That’s just daft. But in the right way, it’s not too stupid, and it’s not clever-clever stupid. Just daft. And that’s quite uplifting, I think. Or it makes people feel like they’re part of something innocent and pure. I think that’s quite challenging, because being daft in the right way is very difficult. I’ve only done it well a couple of times. That’s probably one of them.”
Can’t explain all the feelings that you’re making me feel
My heart’s in overdrive and you’re behind the steering wheel
Touching you, touching me
Touching you, God, you’re touching me
I believe in a thing called love
Just listen to the rhythm of my heart
There’s a chance we could make it now
We’ll be rocking ’til the sun goes down
I believe in a thing called love, hoo-ooh
Writing the track was a real collaborative effort. Dan and Frankie [Poullain, bassist] shared a top-floor flat in Primrose Hill in London. “It sounds posh, but trust me, it was a s–thole!” Dan told Classic Rock. “Justin would come over and the three of us would write in this flat, jamming on an acoustic, cos we couldn’t afford to write in a rehearsal room. We had some booze, smoked some ‘Joe’, and tried to write the most ’80s song we could. We started with the riff, which Justin came up with. It sounded really great right away. But when he sang the chorus for the first time, I just said, ‘No, you can’t do that – it sounds ridiculous!’ I really thought people would just laugh at us when they heard it. So for the rest of the song, I tried to make it sound cool, more ‘rock.’ The rest of the song is all in minor key.”
“We were at Dan and Frankie’s flat in Primrose Hill,” Justin Hawkins told Songwriting Magazine in 2017, “and were about to go out to the pub, exasperated after hours and hours of trying to write something good, and I just came out with the riff. I had no idea what I was going to do after that and just followed my fingers around the frets. It was such a preposterous riff that it made everyone in the room laugh. Once we got playing it I just sang along to it and the verse was there.”
“Justin and Frankie were sparring with that ridiculous chorus line very early on,” Dan Hawkins told The Guardian in 2023. “I came up with the bridge and the back end of the chorus and tried to put it into some sort of semblance of a song. We took that arrangement into a dingy rehearsal room a few days later. I expected us all to feel embarrassed playing it. But everyone was singing along to the chorus the second time it came around. We looked at each other and thought: ‘This is it. It’s staying.’ I was like: ‘Oh fuck. It’s staying.’”
Justin Hawkins adds, “We didn’t labour over it. We didn’t toil and look for the ultimate riff. I was just following my fingers, really. I think we were sitting at what we used to call the Table of Truth: it was a round wooden table in the flat where Frankie and Dan lived. Things that are cartoonish and ridiculous – that’s my raison d’être. The ridiculous things that the Darkness do are tempered by Dan’s actual good taste. For me to be turned on, it’s got to have something in it that makes him go: ‘You can’t do that.’”
The song is unashamed in its love for all things classic rock. When it got airplay, you suddenly realized that this was the first time in ages that you’d heard a guitar solo on the radio. That had become an almost uncommon element by 2003, but this song was definitely designed to have guitar breaks in it. It was built towards the solos as much as the chorus.
The guitar solo gets an extra emphasis as Justin Hawkins yells “guitar!” immediately prior to it. In a YouTube interview on the Professor of Rock channel, he said: “I would do a lot of that kind of scatty, shouty, yelp-y, exclamation stuff, and I probably did a lot more than what survived. I was doing it because I wanted to give us options. You can overdo that, overcook it. I think Frankie felt like I’d overcooked it. But it was there because when you’ve got it there, you can subtract, and that was one of those that survived. Also, before the top part in the middle, I was going ‘synthesizer!’ We cut that bit out!”
The song would become an incredibly important song for The Darkness, but when they wrote it they really weren’t sure about it. ”The chorus is so stupidly catchy,” Dan Hawkins told Classic Rock, ”I thought people were just gonna take it as a complete joke! Right from the start, this song stuck out like a sore thumb. It’s at the Def Leppard/Queen end of what we did, whereas 90% of our stuff was inspired by 1970s AC/DC. And Aerosmith. And Thin Lizzy. Oh, I could go on! I was so unsure that we debated about playing the song live. But as soon as we did, people loved it. It’s party music, and it just gets people going.”
Justin Hawkins remembers people around them responding well to the song from the get-go. He told The Guardian: “I remember when we rehearsed the song, our manager came down and just said: ‘That’s a hit, that is.’ This was news to us. We recorded it in 2001 – the lead vocal was recorded on 11 September, the day of the 9/11 attacks. We played it with Robbie Williams at Knebworth a few summers later. It really was like: ‘Shit! Now we’re famous.’”
The lyrics work on many levels. They are funny, they are positive, they are memorable, and they manage to say something profound without being deep. They say the best ones come completely naturally rather than being toiled over, which this song also makes a good case for.
“The very first thing that I said when I opened my mouth was all that steering wheel stuff” Justin told Songwriting Magazine. “I was thinking about an old car that my dad had restored which had an overdrive button that made it go a little bit faster or put more fuel into it. It wasn’t supposed to be about guitar distortion, it was more a button on the dashboard of love. It was one for the petrol heads. Then I really enjoyed pairing ‘feelings’ with ‘feel,’ I just thought that was a really fun way of saying it.”
Justin Hawkins is convinced that the song’s positive message is a key reason for its longevity. “I was almost on a pathological quest to put ‘love’ in every single song. Bands were afraid to actually talk about love. But the huge songs, the ones that really get you in the heart, they’re actually talking about it and they’re using the word ‘love’. I’m always in love, that’s the reality. It’s one of the first and most abiding addictions of my life.”
The story behind the music video is a tale onto itself. Director Alex Smith originally shot a low-budget music video with the band at his house and around a supermarket. “When we first did it, we were just kind of running around with a camera,” Justin Hawkins told Songfacts. ”We were trying stuff out with a video director called Alex Smith, a friend of our stylist, who is someone we grew up with. So, it was just a way of him introducing himself to us and showing us how creative and cool he is. And we were trying to impress him. It went really well. He stole a lot of the effects from Big Trouble In Little China. It was really cool. The original video was mostly shot in a market down the way from his. At one point, I was singing into a sausage.”
When it was decided that they wanted the video to break the band in the US, a bigger budget was provided for a second attempt. This led to a second, space-themed video where the band are now located on a spaceship. Justin Hawkins is getting ready for a nightly rendez-vous, band members go in and out of doors that open and close, and there are performances as they also battle aliens and monsters, with lightning shooting out of their guitars and several other special effects. One of many highlights show Dan Hawkins performing in front of a wall of Marshall amps before the band’s spaceship gets attacked by a giant squid.
“Then we remade it, but with the full realization of what we were trying to put across,” Justin told The Guardian. “With genuine props and interiors that were built by carpenters, and monsters and the spaceship and everything. But the one thing that remained – the one prop that we kept from both shoots – was the sausage. The garlic sausage. Which probably by the third time we reshot it was really quite fizzy, I’d imagine.”
“The crab in the music video was a reference to when you’ve taken lots of cocaine and your eyes are on stalks,” Dan continues. “We’ve always had an affinity with sea creatures – we’re from Lowestoft! But also, do you remember the old Doctor Who, with everything about Daleks and K9? Well, the guy who created K9 and a lot of the Doctor Who props and characters and puppets, his name is John Friedlander. But the guy who made the pterodactyl and the spaceship for us was Jim Friedlander, and that’s his son. He was the son of the guy who created the Daleks, and he came and did our spaceship and beasts that you see in there. It was all real things – we didn’t do any CGI stuff. We did old-fashioned, British science-fiction stuff.”
The song has long since transcended the band. It’s one of those that has developed a life of its own. It is part of the soundtrack of a certain generation and known by countless more. It keeps popping up on radio and TV, in movies, in setlists as cover versions, and obviously The Darkness themselves will never be able to escape it.
“To record it, I probably played it 200 times,” Dan told The Guardian. “And since then, I’d say the total is pushing 4,000. Every tour we did, we’d soundcheck with it as well. Three times a day, five times a week. What’s surprising is how big it is internationally. We played that song to 400,000 people at a free festival in Poland and every single one of them was going crazy and singing it back to us. We played to a full stadium supporting Lady Gaga in 2011 in São Paolo and it was the same. It’s like that wherever we go. Everything about the song pushes positivity. It just feels great to play.”
Justin adds: “My goal has always been to get every pair of hands in the air. And often that was the case. We’ve seen a lot of hands in a lot of different airspace. Every time we play it, the place kicks off and I feel relief because I can play it on autopilot. Even now, people sing it at me in the street. I’ll never have anything but abiding affection for that song.”
The British magazine Classic Rock ranked the song on top of their list when they ranked the Greatest Rock Song of the ’00s. Justin Hawkins commented: “All The Darkness ever tried to do was bring a little joy into the glorious realm of rock, but I Believe In A Thing Called Love crossed over big time and changed our lives forever. To have been awarded Song Of The Decade is overwhelming and I’m very grateful to Classic Rock for everything.”
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