What on earth is 41st night?

An excellent question. For want of a better term 41st night is a band, or more precisely the latest incarnation of a long linage of music collectives.

The first appearance of a group of individuals with the audacity to claim the moniker of 41st night dates back to the turn of this century and a moderately well respected east London university. At its inception 41st night mk I consisted of the current Mr Bass (though at the time he played that fiddly six stringed instrument) and Mr Drum (who as our story opens doesn't play anything more advanced than a CD player, and even that only with great difficulty). So, Mr Bass and his two newly-found muso friends, Mr Short'n'hairy and Mr Fopp, decide that they would do a little better with the ladies if they could claim to be in a band. Possible looks, album titles, stage setups, and video concepts were discussed. Then, eventually, talk turned to who would play what instrument. Mr Short'n'hairy and Mr Bass, both having some form in the area, claimed six string duties, with Mr SnH also winning a nail-biting cock-muff-bum hole to take vocal duties. Mr Fopp, a worldly fellow, was quick to claim the long-necked four string as his own, and a band was 75% formed.

Now, Gloria Estefan famously warned us that the rhythm is gunna get ya (sic) but if you're a start up band hoping to impress it's fairer to say that you gotta get some rhythm. And so Mr Drum enters our tale. At this time he was but a simple fire warden living at the end of the hall, but the the fledgling nighters saw something in him that they liked and, as was only fitting, subjected him to a grueling entrance interview:

41st night - [Mr Drum] you don't play drums by any chance?
Mr Drum - Nope
41st night - Do you, err, fancy learning?
Mr Drum - Well, I'll give it a go.

And so the first faltering steps of 41st night were taken. This would soon lead to poorly attended gigs, annoyed neighbours, self-financed demos, and several years later, not so much a split as a falling apart.

Belt forward to the middle of what we of a certain age loving call the naughties and Mr Drum, now a fully fledged human beat machine, discovers that his hither-to annoying-as-a-paper-cut younger sibling has actually picked up some game when it comes to six-string shredidge. Several home recorded demos result and promise is very much shown. However, music is much like sex: the more willing participants the better, and so feelers are put out for potential collaborators. Mr Bass, still naively insisting on wielding a gee-tar, is quickly co-opted, as is Mr God, a seventeen stone, barrel-chested bruiser with a vocal styling like a tracker trying to reverse out of a minefield. Somewhat controversially the 41st night tag was not retained through this period. Far more surprisingly, despite the utter mish mash of this particular setup it is, to date, the most successful period of our protagonists in terms of both gigs and recordings.

However, like an improvised explosive device, such arrangements are unstable and often do more damage to their creators than the intended target. Once again things fell apart and our plucky heroes went their separate ways. Darkness fell and threatened to remain.

And then

And then there was new years eve 2009. A party, a lot of drinks, and a rather fruity beer whose providence may well be the feature of it's own post. Suffice to say that, back in a room together, Messrs Guitar, Bass, and Drum, realised how they fat, their true respective roles, and what they had to offer. A union older and more stable than some break away ex-soviet republics was born and to this day remains in intensive care with little or no hope of ever developing higher brain function. Not to mention the need of a regular singer.

And what of the name 41st night?

We actually do play instruments

You might not think that a band would need to spend much time defending the fact that they do, actually, play instruments. They may spend a great deal of time defending the idea that they play them in time, or in tune, or in a way that other people would want to listen to, but usually the basic fact that they own, wear, and make noise with musical tools is usually taken as read. However, in the case of 41st night and one sound engineer at Rooz studios in Shoreditch things are not quite so simple.

This past Saturday our newly acquired singer was not able to to make an appearance so the rest of us thought that we could most productively make use of the time doing a little recording. Now, the trials and tribulations we went through in simply getting our recording software (Cubase) to work could and may be the subject of an entire post (nearly three of the four hours that we were there were taken up. And to anyone involved in the production of Cubase we mean no criticism of your product. It was very much the workmen and not the tool that were at fault) but it's not what I want to address at the moment.

Now, once we had finally sorted out our technical difficulties and appropriately miked up the drum kit we hit the big, red <RECORD> button and set off the drummer like some meat-based metronome. However, playing solo is not the natural habitat of your common-or-garden drummer and they are far more used to have actual musicians playing along with them. As a result our one-man-beat-machine fluffed the first few takes by jumping from verses to choruses to bridges seemingly at random. The preferred solution to this oft occurring problem is to attach headphones to the drummer's upper-most extremity and pump a guitar line that they can follow directly into their head. Sadly, we're not the most organised group of gents and hadn't remembered to bring any usable headphones so this was not an option. In what I'm sure drummers would refer to as wisdom (or possibly 'Big Think', verbal communication not really being one of their strengths) he suggested that the guitarist and bassist could mime, in an air guitar fashion, as it helped him remember the melodic lines. With the tired resignation and desire for an easy life that usually accompanies the humoring of a particularly slow child this was agreed to.

So, jump forward fifteen or so minutes and we are laying down our second track (oh, get me and my industry lingo). Mr Drum is hitting things like a drunk at a whack-a-rat machine and Messrs Guitar and Bass were air guitaring it up like two dads at a wedding disco. With no warning the lights in the room flash on and off. All three nighters momentarily look to one another before tuning to look at the light switch, which is positioned next to the door. Framed in the doorway is the studio engineer on shift for that session. He stares back at a drummer, seemingly playing solo, and two skinny white boys dancing around in some bizarre imitation of a Van Halen gig. Whether he thought is was avant-guarde theater, two musicians so poor that they been forced to sell their instruments but too committed to give up the dream, or simply applied himself to getting away from these questionable characters in short order is not known. What is known is that Mr Bass, overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation and a little worse for wear from the evening before, collapsed to his knees and laughed for a solid couple of minutes. To his credit, Mr Drum, whilst laughing like a chimp on nitrous oxide, kept the beat alive and put down a usable take. Sinor Guitar, to his enormous credit, turned, fixed the newcomer with a 'what are you looking at' stare, and then calmly returned to air jamming away. All the while keeping a completely straight face. For his part, the engineer took in all that he needed to know, collected his jaw from the floor, and slowly backed out of the room. Suffice to say the conversation when we were returning the mikes on the way out was stilted and short.

So, if you are the hard working, curly-haired engineer who was doing to 11-3 shift this Saturday we would just like to say: we actually can and do play instruments. Despite what you saw we are a fully functional bad with tunes and everything. We are not a live action advert for Guitar Hero. As we probably will be seeing each other again we just wanted to get that clear. And keep up the good work.

41st night