He compares You Win Again’s “swingy groove” to Aerosmith’s Rag Doll, plays it to demonstrate what makes it great (“It’s all about the doodle doodle”) and even sings the “Ohhhh girl” bit in a Robin Gibb falsetto. He explains that becoming Maurice Gibb was “encouraging because it means with the right facial hair arrangement, I could go bald … and as long as you pair that look with a silky shirt and medallion combination … you still look virile”. The video This Is Why the Bee Gees Rock begins with his face superimposed on all three “disco kings”. Hawkins thinks the channel is accessible “because I don’t go too deep into the theory”, but it’s also down to his winning mix of knowledge, warm irreverence and an entertaining screen persona. He even demonstrates how it might have sounded with a “boom-bish”. In the video Is This the Best Oasis Song?! he observes that Wonderwall reflects Oasis’s change of drummer from Tony McCarroll’s “boom-bish” “shed builder” rhythms to Alan White’s skippier patterns, which “broadened the possibilities that Noel Gallagher had”. Hawkins will read a potted, slightly customised biography (“the music band Oasis”), then pick up an acoustic guitar to work out how a song is constructed. The format is fairly similar from episode to episode. Keynote speech … Justin Hawkins Rides Again.

“But now if people stop me at an airport, it’s not to talk about the Darkness. When he first started the channel, he noticed that other musicians mentioned it. Although best known for their No 2 smash hit I Believe in a Thing Called Love 20 years ago, the often tongue-in-cheek bombastic rockers are still filling arenas today. Justin Hawkins Rides Again reaches a constituency well beyond the Darkness fanbase.

Three hundred and thirty-odd videos, 375,000 subscribers and 47m views later, the singer needn’t have worried. “I worried that people might think I seemed desperate,” he explains, video-calling from a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, fresh off a Darkness arena tour. He wasn’t expecting it to become popular.

In the short clip that followed, the rocker explained that he would be uploading several videos each week, in which he would deconstruct classic and new songs or comment on issues in the music industry. ‘I t is I, Justin Hawkins from the Darkness,” began the singer on 23 October 2021, launching his YouTube channel Justin Hawkins Rides Again.

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