Garage Sale

As you may know, in recent months I relocated from a vast palace in Nottingham to a pigeon hutch on a Holloway rooftop. As such I need to jettison some of my life. I figured I'd offer these delights up to y'all on here before putting them on eBay. Email great-men@hotmail.co.uk if you're interested in any.

Marshall B65 Basstate with Celestion speaker. Could use some TLC.

Fender Dual Showman 4x12 cab on wheels with outward angled front

Fender Dual Showman 100w valve head, twin channel with reverb. Beautiful and loud. Battle worn around the country with Swound! and Great Men and will do you proud.

Marshall JCM 1960 2x12 cab, used live once (An Evening With Great Men)

Jackson Performer Dinky Reverse from 1997 with Dimarzio Evolution pickups

Kay through-neck

Jackson Kelly Professional with GFS pickups - coil-tapped bridge humbucker and neck P90.

Tales of a Sweaty Idiot, vol. 1

So in addition to cooking food and drinking beer, Great Men do actually play music from time to time! Last week such an event occurred in Nottingham at a lovely place called the Golden Fleece, organised by a fellow called Will who has broken every bone in his body but still didn't let that be an excuse to miss us. Excuses that other people successfully used were "my friend got spewy" and "it's warm outside".

Before I go further let me mention a guitar that I call the Black Lodge Telecaster. It's called this because I spent ages with a ruler, masking tape, and spray paint to give it some stripes to look a bit like the floor of the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. Lemma 1: I am an idiot.

Back to the Fleece: Supporting us were a band called The Cupid Stunt from Leeds, who I'm pleased to say were a pleasure as gentlemen and a pleasure as a band. Great Men approve of The Cupid Stunt. Hopefully we'll get a trip to Yorkshire to play with them some time. Like us they have guitar, bass, and electronically generated drums: a soundman's dream! They do have vocals, but that's probably because Greg can sing and I can't so fair enough!

Then we came on and played all our hit singles. I could talk about the music all day but there's only 2 things you really need to know:

1) Although the night before I'd been planning on playing my red Les Paul, some weird technical glitches meant I played the Black Lodge Telecaster instead. Incidentally guitar gimps I've recently upgraded to 11s and I'd recommend it.

2) It was a hot day. Ignorant commoners everywhere claimed it was a heat wave and that they might die. I crossed my fingers. I also played guitar under some lights near a kitchen that had just given me some tasty fish and chips. Lemma 2: I am sweaty. I am portly and maroon, I am the sky and the water.

Some of you may be scientists, some of you artists, still more of you just not as stupid as me. Long story short when a sweaty idiot plays guitar quite aggressively and said guitar has dubiously painted lines on it, this happens:

I was actually quite relieved because when I first looked down at my guitar I thought I was bleeding black blood.

At this point perhaps you'd expect a moral to the story, or maybe just to discover that I'd learned my lesson. Well yesterday I stabbed my hand with a fork, and now I'm off back to the garage to put a fresh coat of spray paint on my new Les Paul...

Heifer cow is better than none

Business first: this Thursday, May 20th, Great Men are making our second appearance in Nottingham this year, headlining at the Golden Fleece with another duo called The Cupid Stunt, organised by the wonderful Will of I'm Not From London. You should totally come down for the following 3 reasons:

1) Music
2) Beer
3) It's free, and that includes as many high fives as you can eat

GUITAR GIMP PARAGRAPH 1: Although having previously suggested I might play my Black Lodge Telecaster on Thursday, I busted out my red Les Paul at practice and enjoyed it a lot, so who knows what could happen? And who cares? If you care, please write me a letter, or "electronic-mail" as the kidz say these days.

Yesterday I watched football on the television. Mr Kim made me do it, he promised beer and a dog. He wasn't lying. I'd still rather watch the Marx brothers, which I duly did. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

GUITAR GIMP PARAGRAPH 2: I took receipt of 2 guitars from eBay this week. One is shrouded in security as R-Man and I turn it into the "Great Men Bennecaster" for Mental Benn. The other is a white Les Paul with black binding and I'll share it with y'all as soon as I've cleaned it up and put in some new chrome pickups.

R-Man is in Paris at the moment so in lieu of rock and roll I occupied myself in the only way I know how: driving to Manchester and back. I was kept company by the following albums all of which I recommend:

Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers
Slint - Spiderland
XTC - Drums and Wires
Sisters of Mercy - Floodland
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

Oh by the way if you like films and/or Brian Blessed (you've got 2 eyes and a soul haven't you?) then you should have a look at the award winning short Mr Bojagi, written by an old friend of mine. Here it is!

Staymaker

We just finished writing a new song called Staymaker. The title is inspired by Thomas Paine as we've both just read a book about him by Christopher Hitchens which I'd thoroughly recommend. We've demoed a working version of the song, but we've yet to put the eyebrows on it. That's us up there 'laying some track'.

The real magic is happening next weekend though when we're recording for real down in That London with our good friend Mental Benn, perhaps for a real life record to come out. We're also going to hang out in Parliament and see Pavement. Which is possibly even cooler than hanging out on a sidewalk and seeing Funkadelic. There's a high five going for everyone who stayed on my wavelength through that sentence.

Oh yeah, we're playing a gig in Nottingham on May 20th at the Golden Fleece on Mansfield Road, which promises to be a hoot because they serve nice beer and everything. I might play my sweet looking Black Lodge Telecaster. I'm an idiot who spray paints guitars to look like things from Twin Peaks.

Afternoon drinking, Duck Soup and Soviets in space

Things we've learned this week:

• Beeston has many tolerable pubs, but our recent favourite the Hop Pole does offer cracking beer in a good atmosphere. Particularly when you head out to Sainsbury's to buy lunch on a sunny afternoon, stop off for "one", and end up ordering Chinese takeaway at dinner time about 5 Harvest Pales later.

• The [relatively] new Nottingham Contemporary art gallery is pretty cool, and we enjoyed the Star City exhibition. I also liked the use of space and atmosphere within the exhibit, prompting thoughts of how this could translate to a future Evening With Great Men.

• Marx Brothers films are still as brilliant now as they were 80 years ago. In fact is it wrong that I found Duck Soup slightly topical what with the general election looming? To be honest I think Groucho would clean up on these televised debates.

Speaking of the election, make sure you go and vote! One of the candidates is going to become your MP whether you like it or not, so exercise the right to democracy that our grandfathers fought to protect for us. If you really don't want to vote for any of the candidates, turn up and write my name on the bottom of the slip: attendance without a vote is still better than staying home, as you're standing up and being counted (yes I am a mathematician as well as a rock star...).

And if you won't take my word for it, take Frank's!

We're Great Men and we think like this

One of the few drawbacks of being in an instrumental band is that we can't expose you, our adoring public, to the many things we have to say - not just about ourselves, but about philosophy, science, current events, film and which is the best pub to go to in Beeston on any particular evening.

Hence welcome to our new blog, which hopefully will be a forum for us to engage with you on the hot topics as well as updating you on the continuing adventures of Great Men.

If you've stumbled across this blog and don't know us, we're a 2-man band from Nottingham, and we sound like this.

Don't be a stranger!