Rock from dusk til dawn

As Alan Ball, the man behind True Blood, the hit American sex-and-gore drama points out: "Vampires live for ever, and they're not constrained by conformity and traditional moral codes. You can live vicariously through them." Just like rockers, then, especially ones who die young and remain beautiful on posters and T-shirts for eternity.

So we shouldn't be too spooked at the news that vampires are taking over the pop charts.

Earlier this month Brand New Eyes by Paramore, a Tennessee rock band led by the flame-haired Hayley Williams, who have never previously had a major hit in the UK went to no 1. They owe the sudden success of their third album to their connection with Twilight, the vampire novels by the Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer.

Bloodthirsty urges

Meyer sold 29 million books last year and the first film instalment which had Paramore's thrashing Decode as its theme song took $35 million (Dh128.5 million) on its first day of release in November 2008.

Both Meyer's novels and Ball's show (which is based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Series of books) feature teenage girls who take a vampire as a boyfriend and have some success at reigning in their bloodthirsty urges. It's the classic female fantasy of taming the wild man, as played out in rock songs from the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack to Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boi.

These men-monsters are both romantic and dangerous and thus objects of intense desire to their school-age fanbase, especially the porcelain hunk Robert Pattinson, who plays the chaste vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies. His will-they-won't-they-get-it-in-the-neck relationship with the human student, Bella, has even inspired a bizarre gush of girly tribute bands playing songs inspired by the stories, including The Bella Cullen Project and Bella Rocks. The former's chirpy acoustic ditty Sexy Vampire contains the couplet: "Edward's so hot he can set the house on fire/Yeah, he's one sexy vampire."

The second movie in the Twilight series, New Moon, will prove still more lucrative to the stars who appear on the soundtrack, which was released on Atlantic records.

(New Moon opens in the UAE on November 26.).

It features a mighty line-up of brooding rockers including the emo pioneers Death Cab For Cutie, who penned the dramatic theme tune Meet Me on the Equinox, as well as Thom Yorke, Grizzly Bear, Editors and The Killers, all providing new songs.

Though there is an overriding gloom to much of the associated music, there is no one style in common.

There are bands, such as goth rockers AFI and the aptly named Dead By Sunrise, whose new albums are clearly hoping for a taste of the vampire market but the sexy darkness of the mythology is equally well summed up in music by True Blood's theme tune, the countrified swamp rock of Bad Things by Jace Everett.

It's a song to stay up all night to, so menacingly cool that it instantly disproves the True Blood bumper sticker: Vampires Suck!

— Evening Standard