One Way Ticket

This song is about addiction, specifically cocaine. Most songs about cocaine cloak it in euphemisms (see: "Snowblind" by Black Sabbath), but lead singer Justin Hawkins mentions the drug by name in this one: Holy coke, repeating myself, except I'm getting slightly louder Hawkins was indeed hooked; he later admitted that when the band became successful in 2003, he developed a cocaine habit that cost him about £1,000 per week and made him rather difficult to deal with. He didn't kick the habit until 2006 when he quit the band and went into rehab. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2010, Hawkins explained that the band lived the life they portrayed: "It may have seemed like we were posturing," said the singer. "But we sold millions of records and did loads of drugs."

The video makes many not-so-veiled references to cocaine. It's set on a snowy mountain, and at one point the band runs from an avalanche. There' is a also a demon of some kind presiding over the underworld, having frozen the Earth. A white powder is clearly visible on his nose.

In 2003, their debut album Permission to Land made The Darkness the hottest new band in the UK, but they made some bad choices in the aftermath. For their follow-up album, One Way Ticket To Hell And Back they paid barrels of money to get producer Roy Thomas Baker on board because he was the man at the controls for Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Justin Hawkins later said that cocaine is terrible for creativity, and the band was not up to form. Baker layered the tracks with guitar and vocals, but they didn't have the magic The Darkness conjured up on their debut. "One Way Ticket" was released as the first single; it debuted at #8 in the UK but fell fast. The group was kaput a year later, not heard from again until their 2012 album Hot Cakes.