Samuel Stokes, Pete Rinaldi, Justin Hawkins, and Darby Todd, photographed for SPIN in Austin, Texas, March 19, 2009

TEEL PANTHER STRIDE onstage around 1 A.M. at La Zona Rosa on the second night of Austin, Texas’ annual South by Southwest music festival. The mock-metal band’s joke isn’t subtle: four guys with poodle hair and spandex pants performing foul-mouthed

odes to fat girls, Asian hookers, and the primacy of heavy metal. Justin Hawkins first encountered Steel Panther last year when he was in Los Angeles mastering Red Light Fever, the debut album by his new band, Hot Leg. That Steel Panther would appeal to him is both obvious and a little surprising. His previous group, the Darkness, also toyed with rock clichés, though never so blatantly. The Darkness’ 2003 debut, Permission to Land, matched big riffs with Hawkins’ outlandish falsetto on songs about genital warts and ping-pong. Live, Hawkins dressed in flashy catsuits and played guitar while riding a stuffed white tiger. Back then, the band’s insistence that

 

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rock was meant to be, you know, fun felt like welcome counterprogramming amid a landscape populated with self-serious mooks like Linkin Park and Staind. The album eventually sold nearly 3. 5 million copies. The 2005 follow-up, One Way Ticket to Hell…and Back, hewed closely to the Behind the Music–ready script by being bloated, drug-addled, and unreasonably expensive to make. It also fueled a backlash that seemed to center on a meta-textual conundrum: Was the Darkness’ indulgence in rock’s musical, visual, and chemical excesses indicative of their sincere enthusiasm for said excesses or an ironic comment on them? More simply: Was Justin Hawkins just fucking with us all along?

Steel Panther present no such conundrum. As they launch into their first song, Hawkins weaves through the crowd until he’s right up front, hanging his tattooed arms over the barrier at the foot of the stage. With his frizzy bleached-blond mop, faded Aerosmith tee, skintight tiger-print pants, and purple scarf, Hawkins looks

like somebodyyououghttorecognize, though it’s not clear many in the half-empty club do—at least until Steel Panther’s frontman pulls him up to sing the Darkness’ biggest hit, “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” Hawkins does so with gusto, wrapping the mic cord around his hand and shredding on an imaginary guitar. Since leaving the Darkness after a rehab stint in 2006, Hawkins’ only U.S. performances have been guesting with Steel Panther. But here at SXSW, his prancing around with a hair-metal comedy troupe could be considered a strange way to build momentum for his new band, Hot Leg. “I don’t care,” he says afterward. “The whole thing about being taken seriously has never mattered to me. Those Steel Panther guys are fucking awesome. I see someone doing that and I just want to join in.”

After the show, Hawkins is besieged by fans. He greets every curiosity seeker like an old friend, and every camera phone with an outstretched tongue and devil horns. When a bearded guy invites him to “do a whole bunch of blow