The Playlist

Justin Hawkins of The Darkness on being guitar-shamed in front of Nuno Bettencourt, and the genius of Mark Knopfler

The riff that made me want to play... Walk This Way – Run-DMC feat Aerosmith In 1986, when I was 11, my grandmother bought me a Phillips ghetto blaster and some money to spend on tapes, so I bought Run DMC’s Raising Hell and a Huey Lewis & The News album. Raising Hell is a really rocking album, but of course the real highlight guitar-wise is Walk This Way, which got me into Aerosmith and got me into rap as well. And when I was 14, and Aerosmith’s Pump came out, that changed everything for me. Oh my God, I listened to Pump all the time...

The riff I want to be remembered for... I Believe In A Thing Called Love – The Darkness

Most of the riffs in The Darkness come from Dan (Hawkins, Justin’s brother). But the intro to I Believe In A Thing Called Love is one of the few riffs I’ve come up with that I ended up playing on the record. It sounds like I’m in the bath, and in the video I’m actually in a bath. Brilliant! And in my capacity as a writer for other people, I did come up with a really good rifffor a Meat Loaf song, Love Is Not Real. That’s got me playing in one channel and in the other it’s Tim Pierce, a session guitar legend, who played for Bon Jovi before Richie Sambora.