What a Beautiful Ass!

“Thanks for the donkey!” says Darkness lead singer Justin Hawkins with a grin, gulping on his Budweiser in the Blender office. “And it’s not often you get to say that!”

No indeed. Nor is it every day that Blender’s twenty-second-floor headquarters plays host to a large, furry quadruped. This is one of those days, however, thanks to the British falsetto-metallers — who, when asked how they would like to spend $848 of our cash, sent word that they wanted to crash one of New York Fashion Week’s catwalk shows . . . with a donkey!

The news had initially caused much head-scratching, donkeys being none too easy to locate in Manhattan. But then we contacted Animals for Advertising, a firm that specializes in just such odd requests (they provided a lucky snake to Britney Spears for the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards). So it comes to pass that, just after 6 this particular afternoon, work on the Ultimate Music Magazine grinds to a halt with the appearance of a seven-month-old Sicilian miniature donkey named Georgia and her owner, Tucker Hartshorne. Not just absurdly cute, Georgia is also something of a music fan, Hartshorne assures us.

“I play bluegrass on my banjo, and she likes that,” he drawls. “Cows are known to make more milk if you play them country music. It relaxes them.”

By the time the Darkness turn up an hour later, Georgia appears completely relaxed, perhaps even bored. She is certainly unworried by the band’s appearance despite their copious bandannas, tattoos and facial hair.

“Ah, she’s lovely,” coos Hawkins, 28, stroking Georgia’s flanks.

“Yeah, what a beautiful ass,” deadpans Hawkins’s younger brother, 26-year-old guitarist Dan.

“Originally we were talking about doing midget jousting with donkeys,” Justin recalls. “But then we thought, ‘Hey, it’s Fashion Week — let’s take a really unglamorous creature to that’ and demonstrate that even a donkey can be the new black, as it were.”

“We were expecting a big nag, though,” adds bassist Frankie Poullain, 32. “She’s very cute.”

“We’re a bit like a donkey, aren’t we?” Dan conjectures. “We never fail to amuse — and we’re quite hairy.”

Actually, the story of the Darkness more calls to mind a mule. A throwback to the days when playing guitar solos atop a roadie’s shoulders was not so much expected as demanded by law, the band toiled away in unfashionable obscurity for three years before finally hitting paydirt with their debut, Permission to Land. It’s an album that as we speak is celebrating its third week in pole position atop the British charts.

“Is America ready for the Darkness?” Dan muses. “Everywhere else is, you know. It ain’t rocket science, what we do. Now, where exactly are we going to plant the tree?”

Ah, yes, the tree. The Darkness’s one non-donkey-related request was to plant a tree in our office. Sadly, although it was easy to get a nice-looking 10-foot-tall ficus, there aren’t many places in the crowded Blender workspace suitable for reforestation.

“What about that office over there?” Justin asks.

Ah, well, that belongs to our publisher. Our has-the-power-to-fire-everyone’s-ass-if-we-fuck-with-his-office publisher.

“Nah, he won’t mind,” Justin asserts. “We’re the motherfucking Darkness!”

It has to be said that the motherfucking Darkness do a very nice job of repotting the tree, even if most of the work is left to 26-year-old drummer Ed Graham while the rest of us compete for the title of World’s Worst Pun Merchant: “It’s tree-mendous!” “Leaf it alone.” “Your humor’s really branching out.”

Enough! We have bigger fish to fry, or, rather, donkeys to lead through New York. And so the Darkness escort our four-legged friend out the front door and hoof it one block north to the Bryant Park Fashion Week Pavilion, where at this very moment designer Anna Sui is showing off her new spring collection.

According to one newspaper the next day, Sui “gave the surf-chic craze a funky, glitzy twist.” Unfortunately, neither Darkness nor donkey get the opportunity to make up their own minds about the designer’s work, as our path into the pavilion is blocked by a part-man, part-mountain bouncer. After complimenting Dan on his Thin Lizzy T-shirt, the human blockade announces that there’s no way we’ll be allowed to upstage Sui’s Hawaiian-print minidresses. Even Blender’s assertion that Georgia is both on the guest list and a close personal friend of designer Karl Lagerfeld falls on deaf ears.

But the truth is that band and donkey have become the center of attention anyway, as a multitude of photographers shun their usual fashionista prey to snap our odd fivesome instead. The Darkness’s point made (Justin: “See? Donkeys are the new black”), we regretfully bid adieu to Georgia and retire to a nearby watering hole for debriefing.

“I’m not disappointed in any way,” Justin says, making swift work of his frozen margarita. “I’m really glad we did this. Hopefully, it will change people’s perception of the donkey from an unglamorous horse to an absolutely fabulous creature in its own right.”

Dan, meanwhile, is already thinking about the next time the Darkness will have the opportunity to spend $848. Or, if he has his way, $8,480.

“We’ll get a big horse, then an elephant, a giraffe and so on,” he explains. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll take a blue whale down Broadway in a huge tank. That would be cool.”

Gentlemen, we await your instructions. . . .