Classic Cool, The Datsuns, kings of the Rock 'n' Roll Marque.
There are bands who spend twenty-five years trying to become more interesting, and there are bands who seem to have understood the assignment from the beginning. The Datsuns have never been particularly interested in making life easy for historians.
They began in Cambridge, Waikato, in the late 1990s, initially as Trinket, and by 2000 the name had become The Datsuns. It was a good decision. Trinket was perfectly serviceable, but despite the throwback to a lost marque, The Datsuns sounded like the sort of band that might arrive at your house in a suspiciously large American car and ask where the amplifier was.
Their timing was equally fortunate.
The early 2000s saw a renewed appetite for loud, direct guitar music, and The Datsuns were unusually well placed to take advantage of it. They were young, visually memorable and plainly enthusiastic about rock music, but they were also good enough to make the enthusiasm contagious. A seven-inch single, ‘Super Gyration!’, appeared in 2000, followed by touring and a growing reputation in New Zealand.
Then came John Peel.
The Datsuns sent him a record, a photograph and a letter. Peel played them on his BBC show, and in 2002 they recorded Peel Sessions. For a young New Zealand band, this was rather more than a nice bit of publicity. Peel had an almost supernatural ability to make a listener in Britain believe that something happening somewhere else was suddenly worth paying attention to.
The Datsuns went to Britain and found themselves at the centre of a remarkable burst of attention. Their self-titled debut album reached number one in New Zealand and number seventeen in the UK. ‘In Love’ and ‘Harmonic Generator’ both reached the UK singles chart. They appeared on Top of the Pops and Later... with Jools Holland, toured extensively and became fixtures in a British music press that was always particularly fond of discovering that a band from somewhere else had somehow been hiding in plain sight.
The whole thing could easily have become ridiculous.
Instead, The Datsuns grounded themselves, kept touring and making records, each arguably better than the last.
That is perhaps the least remarked-upon part of their story. The early mythology is irresistible: four young musicians from Cambridge, a sudden move to London, NME covers, Peel Sessions, major-label attention, Led Zeppelin comparisons and the sort of rock ’n’ roll acceleration that tends to make excellent documentary footage. But the more interesting achievement is what happened after the cameras moved elsewhere.
The Datsuns continued.
They have now been a band for more than twenty-five years. Their career has included changes in labels, countries, drummers, musical fashions and the general cultural temperature surrounding guitar music. They have survived the rise and fall of several supposedly definitive rock revivals, which is quite an achievement in itself. Trends tend to behave badly around bands who refuse to leave.
Their eighth studio album, Moonstruck Man, is due in November 2026. The title track, released in August, is our introduction to it.
And it is a rather good reminder that The Datsuns have never been particularly interested in treating rock music as a museum piece.
The title ‘Moonstruck Man’ has the sort of grandeur that might once have required a cape. There is something knowingly romantic about it, but also slightly unhinged. It belongs to the old vocabulary of rock ’n’ roll: moonlight, obsession, danger, desire, the possibility that somebody has made a questionable decision and is enjoying it enormously.
That feels appropriate for The Datsuns.
Their relationship with rock music has always been less academic than physical. They have never needed to pretend that the history of the form is a burden from which they must escape. The riffs, the volume, the swagger and the absurdity are part of the fun. They can admire the past without behaving as though they are trapped inside it.
There is an important distinction there.
Nostalgia wants to recreate something.
The Datsuns have generally seemed more interested in keeping something alive.
That helps explain their longevity. A band built entirely around being fashionable is inevitably in trouble when fashion changes. A band built around loving music can survive several changes of fashion without having to rewrite its constitution every few years.
The Datsuns have also always occupied an interesting position between different corners of rock. They have been called garage rock, hard rock, heavy metal and garage punk, among other things. Dolf de Borst once described the band's position rather neatly: their music could be too light for heavy metal audiences and too heavy for straight garage audiences, and they deliberately liked it that way.
That refusal to fit neatly remains useful.
The current line-up has Dolf de Borst on vocals and bass, Christian Livingstone and Phil Somervell on guitars, and Adam Lindmark on drums. The personnel may have changed over the decades, but the basic arrangement of the band remains pleasingly uncomplicated: four people, some loud equipment, a catalogue that has accumulated rather than disappeared, and another record on the way.
The recording of Moonstruck Man has also continued the band's international existence. The album was made across several locations in Sweden, with work taking place at Studio Gröndahl, Gold Halo, Kiki's Castle, Livingstone Boudoirs and Riddarborgen. The Datsuns produced the record themselves, with Frans Hägglund engineering and mixing most of the album.
But there is no need to pretend we know more than we do.
Moonstruck Man is not yet out. Only a handful of songs have been made public, including the title track and the later single ‘Run From The Sun’. The rest belongs to November. Any grand theory about the album as a whole would therefore be premature, and The Datsuns have been around long enough that we can probably afford to wait.
‘Moonstruck Man’, though, gives us something useful.
It reminds us that the band are not attempting to reconstruct their younger selves. There is no need for that. The Datsuns have already lived through the period when being young and loud was enough to become a story. They have now reached the rather more interesting stage where the story is simply that they are still here.
That longevity has a peculiar effect on the music.
A new Datsuns song does not arrive in isolation. It carries the accumulated knowledge of everything that came before it: Cambridge rehearsals in the loft of the town hall, early singles pressed onto the lost art of 7inch vinyl, Britain in 2002, John Peel putting their records on the radio, the strange business of becoming famous, the years of touring, the records that received more attention than others, the records that probably deserved more attention than they received, the fierce independence of running their own label, and the simple persistence required to keep a band alive.
There is something almost reassuring about it.
The music industry has changed several times since The Datsuns first started playing together. The way people discover bands has changed. The economics have changed. The fashions have changed. Even the definition of what constitutes a successful rock band has been repeatedly revised. The Datsuns have always managed to keep the industry, in all its forms, at arm's length.
The Datsuns have largely ignored the paperwork.
They have continued making rock music.
And perhaps that is why ‘Moonstruck Man’ feels less like a nostalgic return than a continuation. The title track of an album arriving in the band's fourth decade is not asking permission from the past. It simply takes its place alongside everything else.
There is a certain freedom in that.
You can spend years being told that rock music is dead, resurrected, dead again, retro, ironic, unfashionable, fashionable, or in need of saving. Eventually the sensible response is probably to plug in and get on with it.
The Datsuns seem to have reached that point some time ago.
Moonstruck Man arrives later this year. The album will tell us what the full picture looks like. For now, its title track offers something simpler: proof that the Cambridge band who once sent John Peel a seven-inch, a photograph and a letter are still making their case.
They don't seem particularly interested in making it complicated.
Nor, thankfully, do they appear to have run out of volume.
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