Duality

Let's cut to the chase: Great Men are going to be playing 2 shows in London this month and you and all your friends should come for the following reasons:

1. These will be our last shows for quite some time.
2. We're going to play a completely different set list at each show, covering our entire back catalogue between them.
3. You can submit requests for which songs you'd like to hear at each show.
4. At the gigs we'll be selling the last of our Springsteen VS Stallone t-shirts at the bargain basement, holiday season friendly price of £5 each!

Here's the lowdown:

On Thursday November 24th we've been invited by the excellent Motherhood to play at their EP launch at the George Orwell on Essex Road (near Islington and Dalston).

On Wednesday November 30th we're playing at Camden Rock in, err, Camden.

On Thursday December 1st we burrow into our warrens and commence hibernation.

Submit setlist requests on the Facebook events linked above, or on Twitter @Great_Men.

See you soon: bring friends, buy a t-shirt!

Take That Took This

You may recall that earlier this year we released our Great Men: Springsteen VS Stallone t-shirt (stock left in all sizes!):


Take That may have returned to their original lineup, but unfortunately Robbie Walliams hasn't also brought some original merchandising ideas along with him; imagine R-Man's surprise whilst browsing in Tesco today when he spotted the new garment from Gary Barlow's boys:

Rumours that Take That's 2011 tour will be entirely instrumental have yet to be denied.

Springsteen vs Stallone: The T-Shirt

Remember that time when we talked about the American dream as exemplified and mirrored in the careers of Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone? Well we realised that the next logical step for any successful essay is to merchandise it. Also you may recall that we're a band, and bands have t-shirts. Also we're not much to look at. All these facts combined into one obvious course of events: press-gang people we know who can do Photoshop and that sort of thing into designing us a sweet Great Men: Springsteen vs Stallone t-shirt.

Then, on a roll with the exploitation of our friends, we remembered that one of them was handy with a camera and that another one, instead of being a beardy ogre like us, was in fact a pretty girl, so we decided to take some photos of said t-shirts in action. This has the double bonus that maybe a promoter will see one of these photos and think we're a band with a pretty girl that sings, hence book us on the kind of sweet gig from which instrumental beardy ogres are usually precluded, not finding out the truth until it's too late...

As you can imagine we get a lot of fan mail here at GMHQ, so I thought I'd share some completely at random...

Well Little Jeffy, thanks for your continued support over the years, and thanks for asking about the t-shirts. You can buy them now for only £8 over at greatmen.bigcartel.com and I'll tell you what, because it is very nearly the season to be jolly, if you order before the end of 2010 we'll do you a free personalized CD of Great Men demos and stuff to enjoy when the radio isn't playing The Pogues or Phil Spector. If any of our extensive international readership are interested in a t-shirt, do drop us a line and I'm sure we can figure something out - we've already sent one to New Zealand (hi Enthusiastic Tom!).

Finally on a sad but celebratory note, RIP Leslie Nielsen and Irvin Kirshner. True facts: I did my English A-Level coursework based on the linguistic humour exemplified by Nielsen in Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker projects such as Airplane and Police Squad. And I wrote said coursework whilst nestling in the intestines of a Tauntaun.

One of those facts was not true.

American Dream: Springsteen VS Stallone

Great Men are great fans of America. I took a less than cannonball run speed coast to coast road trip a few years ago and C-Bomb spent some of his formative years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Presumably he was baptised and learned to swim in the warm brown waters of the Mississippi, the Old Miss, the Old Man…

The American Dream is a simple one – that anyone no matter their background can through their own ingenuity, hard work and strength of will – become somebody. This creates a dichotomy of equality and aspiration, all men might be born equal but that don’t necessarily mean that they die equal. This contradiction seems to me to inform the lurches and crises of confidence that have typified post civil rights America. 2 men also seem to illustrate the choices and dilemmas that have faced the recent generations of Americans who were the first not guaranteed to enjoy a better standard of living than their parents. 2 men whose work have scratched at the neuroses of an entire nation and illustrate that nation and its people at their best and worst. A nation that schizophrenically holds both Charlton Heston and Woody Guthrie as heroes.