How The Darkness battled fatigue and unfair demands to create their iconic Christmas single

The Darkness’ 2003 hit Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End) is a holiday classic, but recording the song – and its accompanying music video – proved a difficult challenge, guitarist Dan Hawkins and bassist Frankie Poullain tell Yahoo UK.

The band, which also featured Justin Hawkins and at the time included former drummer Ed Graham, were at the height of their powers and had to deal with fatigue and unfair demands to bring their outlandish song idea to fruition.

“So to make the song, we had a very, very tight deadline to do it,” Hawkins explains.

“So we hired a guy named Bob Ezrin, a legendary producer (and) we put together a rough live demo of the song and sent it to him.”

The band only had “two or three days off their schedule” to get everything together, Hawkins adds. They struggled to find time “between the chaos of touring and awards shows” because things had “really kicked off by then.”

“We booked into Abbey Road Studios, we had him for three days, but we only recorded the Christmas song on the first day, then we went to an awards ceremony on the second day, and on the second day he brought the choir into the recording booth,” Hawkins adds.

“So we met Bob in the morning at the studio, we talked about how we wanted it to go and about six hours later we were back home.”

“The funny thing is, it’s something that surfaced in the rehearsal room about three or four years before that,” Hawkins says.

Poullain jokes that it’s “not really rocket science” to come up with a song, saying of the writing process for Don’t Let The Bells End: “I just felt like it was a good sounding song and someone should do something like that, so why shouldn’t it be us?”

The bassist adds that the song was “quite emotional” because of the melody and the lyrics they had written.

“Dan brought a little bit of melancholy and soul to the verse, there’s a little bit of Merry Christmas, War is Over — the (John) Lennon song — a little bit of that… and it really gives it depth, I think.”

But the challenges didn’t end there, as the next step was to record the music video, an extravagant, colourful and fun celebration of the song.

The reality was quite different.

Poullain continues: “That’s the problem with these record companies, when you’re busy, they always take those little moments when you should be resting.

“It’s always after something and you have to do a video shoot and then you look horrible and you have no energy and you’re drained of all the energy you could have had.”

“It actually works better,” Hawkins jokes. “Because if you watch this video, everyone’s eyes are completely glassy, ​​because they had to use so many drops to make our eyes look like someone who had only slept one hour in five weeks.”

Poullain responds by saying, “That’s what you want rock stars to look like,” adding, “You want them to look a little dazed and confused.”

The band’s Christmas hit battled for the top spot in the UK charts, something Hawkins admits they didn’t really care about at the time.

“The only thing that pissed us off was that we said we’d had a ridiculously exhausting year, we’d come back from tour and it was Christmas, and we said ‘we’re not going to advertise this, we’re just going to let him do his thing’.

“And the label said, ‘Look guys, I’m really sorry, but it looks like it’s going to be number one, but it looks like it’s going to be knocked off the top if you don’t spend this week, the week before Christmas, promoting it.

“We thought, ‘Oh my God,’ and then we went into promotion mode, five days of promotion and it still didn’t reach number one and we didn’t care at all at first.”

The song was beaten to first place by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Mad World, with Poullain stating that “it was a 1% difference in sales” and that there were only 500 sales between them and the winner.

“It was cool, we didn’t care,” adds the guitarist. “Actually, a lot of these number ones are the ones that fall into oblivion, and that’s exactly what happened. The best guy won in the end.”

Hawkins continues: “It’s unusual to have a song that sticks around after all these years, it keeps climbing the charts after people finally realize that (some songs) are bullshit.

“It was funny because some Christmas songs are fun for about a decade and then they disappear from the charts when people realize the whole sound sucked.

“But ours is starting to gain momentum and I don’t think it’s really going to go away, it’s become a British classic.”

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