Darlia: Blackpool's Short, Bright Rock 'n' Roll Story
Photo: JoeJoeJoe93 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darlia_Rock_am_Ring_2014_(1).JPG
In late 2013, BBC Newsbeat met a Blackpool trio that people in the music industry were calling "the most exciting new guitar band in the UK." Frontman Nathan Day took the hype calmly. "Wierdly [sic] not so much," he told the BBC. "Because when something happens so quick you don't have time to think about it." Darlia's song "Pandemonium" now sits on U-Rock®'s WURN-dB Underground playlist.
A school band that got serious
Their story goes back to school. Newsbeat reported that Day and drummer Jack Bentham played guitar and drums together as kids. When they got older, Day decided he wanted to take music seriously and form a proper band, because "no-one takes you seriously when you are a kid." His recruitment method was direct: "I was frantically running around, going up to people on the street, 'Someone start a band with me'."
Wikipedia gives the formation year as 2013, in Blackpool, with Day and Bentham joined by bassist Dave Williams. Asked about their sudden attention, Day was modest: "We were the only ones who had heard of ourselves so the fact that someone is listening is decent enough."
A name from a flower
The name has a story too. Day told Newsbeat that after a show a girl handed him one of a bunch of plastic flowers, and he kept it in his jacket pocket. "After we settled on Darlia, I still had that flower and it turned out to be a dahlia flower and we were like, 'OK that's cool'." He admitted the explanation might sound "really pretentious," but insisted it wasn't meant to be: "I'm honestly fascinated with flowers."
He also hinted at a past full of odd jobs, especially cleaning. "The cleaning aspect goes a lot deeper," he said, "and we could probably make a film out of it one day with the amount of material from cleaning alone." The BBC compared that to the plot of Good Will Hunting.
Records and stages
According to Wikipedia, Darlia signed with B-Unique Recordings and put out three EPs between 2013 and 2015. Petals, an eight-track mini-album, followed in 2015 and reached No. 79 in the UK. Wikipedia lists singles including "Queen of Hearts" (2013), "Stars Are Aligned," "Candyman" and "Dear Diary" (2014), and "I've Never Been to Ohio" (2015).
The live run was impressive for a young band. Wikipedia says they toured in support of Gerard Way, Nothing But Thieves and The Wombats, played Glastonbury and Reading, and joined the NME Awards Tour in 2015. A first full-length LP was expected in 2016.
Change and an end
That album didn't arrive as planned. Wikipedia notes that in 2017 Day wrote a satirical NME article suggesting the band had been on a break. The line-up changed: Bentham left in 2017, and guitarist Micko Larkin and drummer Greg "Greggles" Bishop joined. New singles followed, "Ballad of Black & White" and "Beat Me Up" in 2017, and "Pandemonium" in 2019.
Wikipedia's member list places the band's end in 2019, the year Day began a solo career. "Being in a band taught me what I wanted to do," he said, as quoted by Wikipedia. "It made me realize I had to do this for myself, because I just wanted to get as much music out as possible." He has since released the EPs We Come in Pieces (2021) and Fall Forever (2022), according to Wikipedia.
Why it matters on U-Rock®
Darlia were a band that arrived fast and burned bright: a kid stopping strangers in the street to start a band, a name from a plastic flower, and a run of festival stages in their first couple of years. "Pandemonium" was one of their last singles, and it's on the WURN-dB Underground playlist now.
U-Rock® play data: no plays logged in the BROADCAST or CORE histories (2026-07-02 to 2026-10-12). The band appears on the WURN-dB Underground Spotify playlist.
Sources 1. BBC Newsbeat, interview with Darlia (2013) — https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-24734724 2. Wikipedia, "Darlia" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlia_(band) 3. Spotify, "WURN-dB Underground" playlist (embed) — https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/0bZ0fCQCL7IkKfqcQycsMI
