Let's be honest ‘The bloke who sang Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) becomes a metal influencer’ wasn’t on many people’s bingo cards at the start of the decade. But when Covid hit and The Darkness were forced off the road in 2020, Justin Hawkins got creative when it came to how he would connect with fans.
“I was doing Patreon and had got pretty comfortable on camera,” the singer recalls. “So my producer at the time said, ‘You should probably do stuff on YouTube because it’ll be really successful.’ I was very sceptical about it. I didn’t like the stigma of being a YouTuber, even though I’d had all these experiences [on camera] with Cameo and Patreon. For some reason I thought a more public-facing thing was not really what I signed up for.”
When 2021 rolled around and The Darkness still weren’t able to tour – even though they’d got seventh album Motorheart in the bag – Justin decided to give it a go. The Justin Hawkins Rides Again YouTube channel officially launched in October 2021 with the express intent of getting Justin to react to news and songs from the world of rock and metal. It quickly proved a hit.
“The weirdest thing for me has been going to a festival where The Darkness is on the bill and having people come up and recognise me, not because of the band but because of the YouTube channel,” he admits with a laugh.
It turns out getting one of the last major British rock stars – after all, who else has managed to cross over into pop culture over the past two decades? – to offer expert opinion on music and industry stuff was something of an untapped niche online.
Justin Hawkins Rides Again found itself racking up hundreds of thousands of views as Justin reacted to everything from Sleep Token and President to the beef between Ronnie Radke and Sebastian Bach.
“Doing this, I’ve learned quite a lot about areas of rock that I never would have driven down really,” he admits. “I’m learning about music and teaching myself as I go along. I try to keep it accessible.”
In 2024, Justin took the JHRA format out on the road for the first time for live shows across the UK.
“It was a difficult adjustment to make,” he admits. “The nature of the channel means it’s all very improvised. You can’t really rely on that if you are doing a tour. It’s difficult, if you try to learn a joke and you know what it’s going to be, you can mess it up and get the whole thing wrong. I found myself overthinking it, basically!”
Despite a few hiccups – including a segment where local bands could submit their demos for review, only for a few not to actually turn up to the show (“Life got in the way, maybe,” he offers) – the tour proved a success.
In 2025, he played his biggest Justin Hawkins Rides Again gig yet: at Download Festival. The day before The Darkness played the Opus Stage, Justin walked out to a packed tent of people who’d come to see him talk. So of course, it all went tits up.
“Something like 3,000 people had come to see me,” he recalls in awe. “So of course, my computer wouldn’t communicate with this video wall they’d got in there! In the end, I had to rush out and try to fix it without anyone seeing who I was. And that got a cheer.
"I was like, ‘This thing I was going to do clearly isn’t working. Would you like to see a picture of my dog instead?’ They all started chanting, ‘Dog! Dog! Dog!’ So it was great, because even though everything I’d planned went out the window, it still worked.”
That baptism by fire certainly hasn’t put him off. He’s now plotting a full Justin Hawkins Rides Again tour in January and February 2026, embarking on a 20-date run that will see him play theatres and gig venues across the country. While the format has been streamlined, he expects the shows to still deliver the same blend of insight and humour as the videos on YouTube, and admits there’s still a joy to finding new things entirely through the channel.
“One of the things I’ve found out about myself is that I’m not as closed-minded as I thought I was,” he jokes. “I can listen to something by a band like The 1975 – a band who I’ve completely ignored – and end up crying on camera when I found something really moving. It’s really brilliant.”
Watch Justin Hawkins Rides Again on YouTube. The tour begins at Swindon's Wyvern theatre on January 12, 2026.
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