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Every musician has a moment in their young life when they connect with music in such a powerful way that they know this is what they were born to do. For Dan Hawkins, guitarist in The Darkness, it happened at the age of seven when he heard a Queen album for the very first time.
Hawkins recalls to MusicRadar: “My dad had gone to buy an MG sports car and I went with him. The car was a wreck but it had this amazing top-of-the-range Blaupunkt stereo – and on the journey back home, my dad played a cassette of A Night At The Opera and it blew my mind.”
He adds: “At that point, even at that early age, I decided pursue a career and a life rocking!”
More than four decades later, Hawkins is still living that dream. In addition, since 2015 he’s had Rufus Tiger Taylor, son of Queen legend Roger Taylor, alongside him as the drummer in The Darkness.
And the Queen connections don’t end there. The Darkness’s second album, 2005’s One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back, was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who worked with Queen on A Night At The Opera and four other albums – Queen, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack and Jazz.
Hawkins says of A Night At The Opera: “It’s the best album ever made! It’s so diverse, it transcends any sort of rock boundaries – even within the first two songs, from Death On Two Legs, an awesome rocking romp, to Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, which is like a 1930s ode to boating! You’re thrown straight into the unknown.”
Hawkins picks two songs written by guitarist Brian May as highlights from this album.
“The Prophet’s Song is amazing,” he says. “Knowing a fair bit about production and having been friends with Roy Thomas Baker, I realise that the work that was put into that one song was more than most bands put into their whole albums.
“Obviously Bohemian Rhapsody is on there too, and it’s nice when a band’s biggest hit is on their best album, but I don’t think of A Night At The Opera as the album with Bohemian Rhapsody on it, I think of it as the album with 39 on it, which is my favourite Queen song.
“39 is one of those songs that grabs me emotionally, although for years I didn’t realise it was about travelling through time in deep space – quite obviously a song written by Brian May!
“When The Darkness were planning to play at Hyde Park with Queen and Paul Rodgers, just before the 7/7 London bombings [in 2005], I was going to play 39 with Brian. That would have been a dream, because that song, and the whole album, means so much to me.”
However, Hawkins did eventually get to jam with his hero. In 2011 May joined The Darkness on stage at London’s Hammersmith Apollo to perform a three-song encore of two Darkness songs, Bareback and I Believe In A Thing Called Love, plus Queen’s Tie Your Mother Down.
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