Justin Hawkins is known to all as a man of rock, but, perhaps surprisingly, he is also a lifelong reggae fan. In fact, he credits one reggae legend in particular with expanding his chord knowledge.
“My childhood, the sort of music that I was exposed to from my parents, was always rock, namely dad rock, and a lot of reggae as well,” he tells BBC Radio 2’s Tracks of My Years. “My mum was massively into reggae.”
“The artist that I liked the most from that lot was Johnny Nash,” adds The Darkness frontman. “Johnny Nash was a soul singer that used things like diminished chords. He bridges the gap between soul and reggae.”
Nash is best known for his 1972 hit, I Can See Clearly Now. Nash signed Bob Marley and the Wailers to a publishing deal in 1965 and had co-written with Marley.
Breaking down music theory accessibly has become a Hawkins trademark, in part courtesy of his ongoing Justin Hawkins Rides Again YouTube series. He explains what appealed to him about Nash’s unorthodox writing by comparing it to the approach of country music of the time.
“In the hit factories in Nashville, they’d make two or three albums a day. It’d be the same musicians on all of them. You’d go in and you’d give them the chord charts to play.
“If anything was a minor chord or a minor seventh chord, or had anything fancy in it, like a nine or something, they would look at you like, ‘This is unnecessarily sophisticated, who does this person think he is?’
“There’s standardized progressions that you hear on nearly everything,” Hawkins contends. “If you’re in C, for example, you’ll go to the relative minor, A minor, then I’ll go to an F, and you’ll go to a G. A hell of a lot of music is like that.
“I think Johnny Nash ignored all that stuff and made really unique records that involved diminished chords. That was probably the first time I’d ever sort of listened to one and gone, ‘What is that? I want to learn how to do that.’
Hawkins nominates There Are More Questions Than Answers as his favourite Nash track.
“For me, Johnny Nash is one of the all time greats,” he declares. “I just love that particular song, because he’s doing diminished chords nearly all the way through.”
Despite his interest in harmony, Justin says his only formal learning was from a blues guitarist who taught him the minor pentatonic scale. “That’s the only scale my brother knows, because I taught him that. If you have that scale, you can play along to just about anything.
“That was all I knew. And I was able to play along with things like Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses and the Eagles and all that stuff. That is enough for most guitar players, you know. But what I love about music is the more time you spend kind of immersed in it, the more that stuff goes in, and the more you understand the vocabulary of it.”
Hawkins recently unleashed his Atkins signature guitar in some eyeball-melting finishes. He also argued that bands like Sleep Token and Polyphia have given mass appeal to what used to be called “showing off”.
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