On the third, he broke his toe while trashing a chair in a moment of dressing-room rage, and tonight needs a painkilling injection to perform at all. Suddenly, things are starting to happen: there are at least two deals on the table from very big record companies, there’s a Single Of The Week in Kerrang!, there’s an imminent assault on America, and right now, they’re touring with a bona fide stadium metal monster, Def Leppard.Glory will be theirs, if only singer Justin Hawkins can stay out of hospital. In that time, they’ve gone from pretending they’re a stadium metal monster in low-ceilinged pubs, to the brink of actually becoming such a beast for real. It’s time for another progress report on the high camp heavy rockers I discovered two years ago in a club in Kentish Town. Someone else put it more succinctly than he, perhaps, ever could: end concealing, try revealing, open your heart.
As regular readers will be aware, I mention The Darkness roughly as often as my colleague over on the radio column mentions The Archers. The scruffily handsome man with a surname like a type of tennis-playing surface uses the dramatic juxtaposition of light and shade (witness the couplet “Birds will sing for us/ We all die in the end”) to convey the ultimate triumph of hope over despair, like a one-man Polyphonic Spree or Flaming Lips Ed Harcourt’s message is a simple one. But somehow, his soaring, soul-stirring melodies overcome my prejudices.

Ed Harcourt ought to be everything I hate: a meek, ordinary bloke writing traditional songs under his own meek, ordinary name. Ed Harcourt

Up there on the stage, there are cellos and clarinets, the trappings of maturity. For more information visit . For ticket information, call 020-7344 4444. Whatever happens I’ll still sing and play guitar – if only for myself.Tracy Chapman begins her latest UK tour on 7 March. I’m not always deciding what I’ll write about, or composing to a schedule, but I assume that there are more songs to come. The way that the process works, I never know when I’ll write another song.

Do you feel you’ve still got a lot of songs left to write?I don’t know. I live in California, and you can’t smoke anywhere – it’s great You can’t even have a cigarette in most bars now I love it.You’ve been performing for nearly 20 years now. It’s really hard on the voice if you’re trying to play some place where people smoke. I wouldn’t say that I hated smoking, but it’s irritating to me physically. What have you got against smokers?I never actually said that, but we do often post signs around the venues asking people not to smoke – especially in the front two rows.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been writing a lot about death recently, but I just feel really lucky to be alive.At one of your gigs you apparently asked people to put their cigarettes out. Music, of course, and although it’s a cop-out answer, life in general. That first time I made about $60 – plenty to go out and buy some Chinese food.What are you passionate about?Lots of things. People would give me jewellery, cheques, and often five-dollar bills, which was a big deal then. From that point on, I started playing at weekends when the stores closed, and made pretty good money.