When the Night Comes win big
Hot: The fans have raised him up. Josh Groban hit No. 1 for the first time ever on the Official Albums Chart with his Broadway cover LP Stages. Congrats, Josh! UAE-based band won the Hard Rock Rising competition on a local level last Monday Not: English
Last week, the UAE-based rock group When the Night Comes won their fifth competition in two months without ever recording a finished song. But before moving to Dubai from England two years ago, lead singer and SAE Institute student Richard Hagan shunned the idea of a battle of the bands such as Hard Rock Rising, which they won last Monday.
“I’ve never done a competition in my life, and I wouldn’t normally enter a competition … Because generally, in my experience of what I’ve seen of competitions, they’re quite badly organised, they’re generally pretty much fixed before you start,” he said.
But as the winning act of the local level of Hard Rock Rising, Hagan’s band will now compete regionally — judges include Little Steven of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band — and on an international level in Spain on July 23. The grand prize is a festival spot with Kings of Leon, Lenny Kravitz, Robbie Williams and Avicii on July 24 and 25 in Barcelona in front of 60,000 people.
Hagan says he and his four band members — Charlie Al Mammeri from Lebanon (guitarist), Giovanni Bertuol from Brazil (bassist), James Dulis from the US (keyboardist) and Ramzi Sassi from Tunisia (drummer) — are a reflection of Dubai as a melting pot of cultures, and stand out because of their “character”. Here, he tells us more about When the Night Comes. On being an original band… “To be honest, most people, if they’ve grown up [covering songs] and they’re doing that for a living, it means they’re happy with that. I’ve done original material all my life … I would rather dig holes in the road than play somebody else’s songs that mean nothing to me. It’s a soulless affair. It’s very difficult to find people [here] who have that soul or that desire to do that.” On what sets them apart… “Most of the bands here don’t have what I call the X-factor, because of a combination of things. If they’ve grown up here, they definitely won’t have it, because to me, this is a bubble. This is like Mars, and I feel everybody else is on Earth. If you’ve grown up here, you haven’t really got a concept of what the real world is like… There’s no poverty here, for instance. Poverty creates talent, because it creates that desire to want something better, and that struggle and strife. When I go and see the bands here, I look them in the eye and I can’t see that. I can’t see that struggle and strife and blood, sweat and tears that I’ve been surrounded by all my life in England.” On their influences… “The Doors onwards, really. David Bowie, Black Sabbath. A mixture of all those things. It’s quite theatrical. I like to take an audience on a journey. I like a show. If I go and see a band, I want to be entertained. I’m not interested how good the guitar player is. As long as the music’s great and it moves me, and visually, it moves me, I’m happy.” On prior experience… “I’ve probably been in about five bands all my life. I’ve played 30,000 seaters before... and I’ve played in the smallest place you can imagine. I’ve played lots of toilets, is what we call them. There’s a circuit in England called the toilet circuit, it’s the worst places you could possibly imagine. But to be honest, I’ve had some the best nights of my life in those toilets.”
On the next stage of the competition…
“I think it’ll be down to personal taste then — you’ll either float the boat of the judge, as in like, you’ll hit his buttons, or not.”