Rufus Taylor of the Darkness here. Motorheart [Cooking Vinyl] is our hard-hitting new album, and we’re very proud of her. I used my old-faithful DW Collectors Series kit in maple-lacquer, specialty-pearlescent black with black chrome hardware. It has a 22×24 VLX kick—the “cannon”—an 18″ VLX floor tom, two VLT rack toms (changing between 12″, 13″, and 14″), and a 6×14 VLT snare. Due to COVID lockdown restrictions, we had to approach the recording of Motorheart a bit different from previous albums. Justin [Hawkins, vocals and lead guitar] was in Switzerland and unable to travel to the U.K., so Dan [Hawkins, rhythm guitar], Frank [Poullain, bass], and I had a brief writing trip to get some ideas down. Later on, Dan and I worked out the arrangements, and we’d send the tracks to Justin for lyrics, vocals, and ridiculous solos. We wanted this to be a celebratory, world-is-getting-back-to-normal, up tempo, no-pissing-about, […]

January 2022 Issue