IT'S NOT OVER YET GUITAR TAB

You've seen the behind the scenes video in my last blog, you've bought the novelty fondu set, you've reorganised your perceptions of time according to when the chorus and then the first verse and then the middle 8 and then etc etc kick in, and now you can play the song, because Me and Krish have tabbed out It's Not Over Yet and it really properly took right well long. Enjoy:

BEHIND THE SCENES OF MIDDLEMAN'S NEXT VIDEO

Bonjour people,

I've been away in India for 3 weeks dancing on the beach for New Year, swimming in waterfalls and chillin with cows. But now I'm back and it's gonna be a good year for Middleman. I know cause I heard a rumour that it said it in someone's horoscope once.

We're playing at South by South West in Texas in March, and our first single from our debut album's going to be out soon after, in late March or early April. Here's some behind the scenes stuff from the video shoot:

AMSTERDAMAGE

I hadn’t been to Amsterdam for 6 years, which is about how old I was when I used to play on my mum’s BBC computer. Bat and ball was wicked, and so were Monsters and Chucky Egg, but it’s Frogger I want to give special mention to in this blog. If you’ve never played it, but you’ve been to Amsterdam, just imagine you’re trying to cross the street there and that you’re a frog, and you’ve pretty much got it. The traffic’s nuts: cars, trams, bikes, buses, lorries, pedestrians using running as a legitimate form of business-man-transport. Legitimate not cause they’re late, just cause they’re Dutch.

My mate Gaz right, when he gets properly on one, there’s no stopping him. He can get knocked down, and he just gets back up again and takes it on the chin and other clichés. He’s like that Chumba Wumba song about Weebles, but less egg-shaped. He spends a while doing what he said was an important dance, a dance that mattered, at strangers in a bar who don’t agree with its significance. Then when the bar closes and he’s not got the audience his dance deserves, he starts telling people he’s Rupert Grint off Harry Potter. He had people taking photos with him all night, and got 3 free tickets into a club, and an apology from the guys on the door for not being able to give him more. By the end of the night he's pushing 13 pence sterling in my hand and saying, "Get me a meat." But than doesn't stop him trying to engage Amsterdam residents in a game of burger tennis using their hedge as a net on the walk home.

During the weekend I wondered something I’ve wondered a few times before. When you’re intoxicated, and things seem amazing or you have a brilliant idea, is it because you’re mind is in a higher, more open state, or is it because your mind is slowed down and so regular things seem incredible. It’s the old, absolute/relative argument. You know the kind of realisation I mean. Like, when music feels 3D with all the layers criss-crossing and you lay back in it like a massive sonic hammock, or when the person on the telly says the same word as you at the same time with the same intonation whilst looking straight at you. Or when you realise for the first time that even though the chicken and the egg are so closely linked, you never eat chicken and egg as a meal. Bacon and Eggs, sausage and eggs, ham and eggs, but never chicken and eggs, or you REALLY appreciate, and are proud of, portmanteau words like Nanslator and Amsterdamage, or your yawns taste like ironic pins and needles, or you decide you’ll make your fortune by selling Disease Monopoly to Hasbro and that the brown ones would be STDS, and the greens and navies would all be terminal illnesses.

Or you hear a song lyric differently to how you’ve heard it before like:

‘The people you’ve been before

that you don’t want around anymore

they push and shove, and won’t bend to you will

I’ll keep them still” (Elliott Smith Between The Bars)

and you realise that the first bit could mean that you don’t want to be like you used to be, or that you suffered mental illness and want to stay sane, and that the second bit could mean I will prevent these ‘people’ from coming back by keeping them still (inanimate/dormant), or that I will keep them, still. I will still keep them. You realise then that within the 4 different combinations of these various halves there are dozens of different nuances that could apply in each case. Is it, ‘I will still keep them, despite you hating them, because they are part of you, or is it, I will still keep them, so that you don’t have to. I’ll keep them for you, as in the Spanish ‘por’ not ‘para’. I’ll keep them instead of you so that you’re free from the burden. In the first part, if you don’t want to be like before, does that mean you don’t want to act like you used to, or act or think like you used to, or not even have memories of what you were like before?

Here’s a government Ven diagram showing the crossover:

LEICESTER MEN TOP FIT POLL

A friend of mine told me the other day that she read in a magazine that men from Leicester are the fittest in the UK, but she didn't know in which sense it meant. Well obviously, it's both. Leggy men like myself are all capable of being both champion athletes and underwear models.

Take David Attenborough. People know he travels all over the world to look at animals that he could just as easily see on telly without having to wait around for ages. What people don't realise is that he travels exclusively by sprinting non-stop for weeks and weeks over mountains and through deserts. Course he walks or stands still when the camera's on him, otherwise he'd just be a blur of muscle. Sometimes he crouches. Now, gorillas are about 10-15 times stronger than your average man, but just look at this one cower as the man-mountain Attenborough threatens to punch it right in its simian face if it doesn't shut up about his coat looking like a flasher jacket:



Also, I've done a survey and 9 out of 10 girls said they'd get theoretically naked for David back in the imaginary day. That's just how it is for Leggy men. In another survey, 9.5 out of 10 girls said they'd get naked if Gok Wan asked them and he don't even like girls. In case you're wondering, the 0.5 isn't cause I've averaged it out, I asked 20 girls and 2 said they'd get half naked. One said left half, the other said back half.

Having said all that, Daniel Lambert, the fattest man in Britain in the early 1800s (50 stone) was from Leicester, and so was Joseph Carey Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man. Now Danny ain't winning no Tour de France, and Joey's not signing no Hugo Boss contract. And I'm not employing no double negatives.

STICKS AND STONES IS BACK

For those of you who don't know, I do poetry. Me and my mate Adam started a night called Sticks and Stones about 4 years ago at Strawberry Fields Bar on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds. We have one of the UKs top spoken words artists as a guest, and open mic too. Strawbs burnt down early this year so we've been away for 6 months but now we're back! With a Belter! Boom! Bang! Whoosh! Kapowee! DUBIOUS ONOMATOPOEIA!

Below is the e-flyer for the first one of the season. John Berkavitch is the guest. He is a vision of the near future set in 1989. He was the 2007 Glastonbury Slam Champion, the 2007 UK Slam Champion, has performed on radio 1, radio 4, done two national tours, can breathe under water, and hold himself out from a lamppost (or similar), parallel to the ground, thanks to his freakishly overdeveloped latissimus dorsi. Check it out:

SOLVING MYSTERIES, SETTING TRENDS

The mystery of who's been smashing my car up has been solved by deduction. Whilst Ewan was in Hong Kong, my rear windscreen wiper got pulled off, so it must have been Slurpy. We only had two votes on the matter, both saying Slurpy did it, so it's official, you can judge a book by it's vandalizing, sneering, disgusting, bearded cover. Of course, there is the possibility it was someone other than Slurpy or Ewan, somebody else with a massive vendetta against me, like the feminist I held the door open for at the co-op, or that vegetarian guy I offered a block of horse liver to before I knew he was vegetarian, or that racist guy who I was telling that race was not a biological reality, only a social construct, but I'm reaping my revenge on Slurpy regardless. I made him a cup of tea with no sugar in, as I promised two blogs ago, and I've also realised he probably won't look at his passport again until he next travels, so I've done this (I had to photoshop his details out for security reasons, obviously):



Me, Slurps, Ewan and Gaz are going Amsterdam next month but I reckon after Slurps flashes his passport it might just be me, Ewan and Gaz.

We've finished shooting the video for our next single now. Here's a couple of pictures from while we were shooting:



Now I'm not normally a trendsetter but I reckon face scars are gonna be big this season. It's a strong look:

SPINNING PLATES TAB

Me and Krish have been busy this weekend sorting out this guitar tab for Spinning Plates. We're gonna tab out other Middleman songs over the coming months and I'll make them available on here. If you like, you can request a Middleman song and we'll tab it out so you can play it. Enjoy: