Night By Night
Hard Rock Hell 1 December 2012
Ben: Hi, I am Ben from Night By Night.
MG: Great to meet you!
MG: How much of an honour was it to be here, playing at Hard Rock Hell?
Ben: First time here, really enjoyed it and obviously it’s a very famous and renowned festival and to be part of it really adds quality and accolades to what Night By Night are doing...
MG: Could you give us a brief history of the band?
Ben: We are based in London and we are all from different places in the UK. Personally I am from Bristol, but we have a base in London. Me and our bassist met via a noticeboard and we noticed we both liked a lot of obscure bands from the Eighties, so we built up a great relationship. You know it wasn’t just an add saying band looking for Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue, it was more like Danger Danger, Fire, Harem Scarem, and he was clearly a guy who had researched the depths of Melodic Rock, so we immediately bonded on our musical tastes.
So it was like, let’s have a vision, let’s make a band that draws on all these Eighties bands that we like. Really with the song sensibilities, three part vocal harmony, four part, let’s do it live, no backing tracks and let's mix it up with newer band influences like Shinedown, Alterbridge. You know, big riffs and hopefully get this combination of big melodies and the awesome riffs.
We had this vision, but unfortunately over the two years we didn’t have the resources in the band we wanted. I was originally the singer and the guitarist. I mean I am ok on vocals, I can do the job but I am nothing special and we realised we needed someone very special to complete our vision. We knew we needed a very versatile vocalist with a good range and a great stage presence, which as a singer I really didn’t have. I didn’t enjoy talking to audiences, some people find they have that persona and switch on, while my stage patter was like ... “you alright” ... and stuff like ... “funny thing happened on the way here, we passed a Post Office and the Post Office was closed!!” ... then ... “this is a song” ... I just really struggled with it.
So in 2011 we started a search for a new vocalist, which in this day and age, to find someone from this generation who likes the older music and bands that we are into, is not an easy task and being able to fully commit.
MG: Yes it’s not easy is it, many bands split and are splitting up because of work commitments etc. these days.
Ben: Yeah absolutely, it is not an easy time in the industry.
MG: What are you plans for the rest of the year and going into next year?
Ben: Well we got a new singer in and became a five piece and that completely expanded what we can do. We recorded our debut album ten tracks of Classic Rock. Ten of the best, rather than tacking the other songs on and it sounded great. We did it with a very modern producer, who has worked with Bullet For My Valentine and Funeral For a Friend and helped massively with the harmonies, with a nod to the older stuff. We are really pleased with it and went on tour with JettBlack.
We haven’t released the album yet, we are waiting for the right way to do it and Frontier Records have talked to us about releasing it, so we are in talks and just trying to find a compromise in the clauses and everything.
MG: How has the tour with JettBlack been?
Ben: It was great. We really enjoyed the dates at Wolverhampton, Nottingham and London were really, really strong gigs and a great rock following in those places.
MG: What band's that influenced you growing up, I know you have said Danger Danger already, which was a surprise as you look quite young.
Ben: Well we find out about all of this stuff from older relatives and parents. In fact when I first started to get into this music, it was hideously out of step, everyone was listening to Reef and Korn and that’s been all there was and I could not dig it at all… I mean friends at school would be like ... “Have you heard the new Fear Factory / Machine Head album” ... and I would be ... “No, but I am really loving Def Leppard's 'Hysteria' ..." ha ha! So yeah, we took our influences from bands that weren’t really there any more, they had split etc., and I mean Harem Scarem were a major influence, a great melodic Canadian Rock band.
So we are at a point where we recently did the Jettblack tour and they are a great bunch of guys, very supportive and helpful. When we played Birkenhead, my amp stopped working, so Tom from JettBlack jumped on the stage and helped me switch it over with their guitar amp. They were like ... “Yeah just use our stuff” ... they really cared about saving the day and making sure it was a good show, which was really good.
MG: So being in the industry at the moment is not easy as we acknowledged earlier, how are you finding the crowds responses to your bands work, and what motivates you to keep on plugging away and working in such a difficult time in the whole music industry?
Ben: I find what motivates me personally, are the pockets of feedback we get from the crowd and for instance there’s a girl in Finland, who most of spent hours making these personalised postcards and bracelets with the band logo on and sent them all over. And Ted Poley from Danger Danger was actually wearing a Night By Night T-Shirt as he really likes us and it's bit and pieces like that where we are like ... “fucking hell” ... we must be doing something right to keep us going and the fact that our music is being recognised and reaching the world is fantastic.
MG: So is there a single released?
Ben: Yes, we have released a single and the video is on YouTube. But what has happened, our lead singer has actually quit after the JettBlack tour, basically because of the reasons we were talking about earlier. He was struggling financially and so we parted ways and I guess he just didn’t not have the same motivation as the rest of the band, or ability to keep touring. So we searched for a new singer and we had an amazing response, with people sharing the status that we were looking for a new singer, and people just generally being totally supportive. We just got totally inundated with responses and everyone liked the video.
In fact one of the first e-mail responses we got was from a guy who had a lot experience and absolutely loved our work, and in fact, he had played in a band who had toured with Extreme, Iron Maiden and is a great vocalist, great guy. We thought well this guy is kind of perfect, do we need to keep doing auditions? We thought he was awesome and some of your readers / listeners might know the band he was in before.
He was in a fairly successful band but I don’t want to give too much away at the moment. We have a gig in London on the 12th of December and that is going to be his first gig with Night By Night.
MG: How would you describe Night By Night's sound?
Ben: Ok, if you mix up Def Leppard, Journey, Alterbridge and Shinedown, big riffs and big choruses!
MG: Three words to that describe your band?
Ben: Melodic, Hard , Rock.
MG: Finally, anything you would like to say to our readers and your fans?
Ben: For those of you who know us thank you for all of your support and those who don’t, check us out!
Interview by: Seb Di Gatto