You Must Be Hank Marvin - Mattessons TV Advert

guitarz.blogspot.com: Most TV adverts are extremely irritating, some even invite shouting at the television, whilst others cause me to reach for the TV control and press mute or else select a different channel. However, this ad is quite clever and jolly good fun, even if it is advertising a meat product (I'm a vegetarian). The music is, of course, "Apache" by The Shadows.

For those who don't get it, "Hank Marvin" is cockney rhyming slang for "starving".

G L Wilson

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John Martyn - "The Man Upstairs"

This is my second post about John Martyn within the space of four days, which is something for which I make no apologies. When I was checking the links on my previous post about John Martyn I clicked through to his website and was very soon found myself placing an order for The Man Upstairs DVD which was advertised there. The DVD arrived in the post the very next day and having watched it I can report back that it is sensational. The footage is taken from a concert from 1978 filmed by German TV for the legendary Rockpalast programme. It's an up-close and personal solo performance from John and includes some fantastic versions of some of his best-loved songs. I was open-mouthed in amazement watching him work his Echoplex magic on "Outside In" and "Big Muff", but there's plenty of more traditional styled acoustic playing on songs such as "Bless The Weather" and "May You Never" (which is NOT an Eric Clapton composition, as is often mistakenly believed).

The show is there - warts and all - including lots of banter with the audience, Martyn re-tuning his guitar between songs (different songs being in different tunings) and breaking a string and performing the fastest string change I've ever seen just before "Solid Air". Also of note is a particularly beautiful version of "Small Hours" on which Martyn's Gibson SG makes an appearance instead of the more familiar Martin acoustic with gaffa-taped pickups.

Guitarists will especially enjoy "Seven Black Roses", a song that Martyn developed for showcase in the guitar clubs where everyone is scrutinising everyone else's guitar playing. It's a very visual piece with Martyn performing a succession of on-they-fly key changes by moving his capo up the neck.

An added bonus is the song "I'd Rather Be The Devil" (with more of that Echoplex!) from the same concert which was not included in the original TV broadcast, but thankfully the footage was discovered when the DVD was being compiled.

Anyway, it's a fantastic DVD. Buy it here.

It's the HARRY WORTH^* double-neck Strat!

Here's another highly comical bad-looking guitar that I scraped up from the bottom of the eBay barrel especially for your delight and amusement at the beginning of this new year.

Who is this supposed to appeal to? Is it for those who can't decide if they want to play left or right-handed but don't want to appear to be a complete tool like that Michael Angelo Batio fellow?

I suspect it was just a cheap and easy way to build a double neck using readily available parts. I doubt it'll be a popular seller though.

Actually, it seems it's a half-arsed effort; if you click through to the eBay selling page you'll notice in another photo that it has two right-handed necks on it, thus spoiling the mirrored illusion.

* For those of you outside of the UK or else of not advanced enough years to remember, Harry Worth was a British comedian who had a TV show back in the 60s, during which title sequence he used to get up to some memorable shenanigans playing about with his reflection in shop windows. Somehow the above guitar brought this to mind!

OK, Band Meeting...

Sadly, tonight in the UK on BBC4 we'll be seeing the final episode in the first series of Flight Of The Conchords - one of the funniest and most inventive comedy shows to be seen in recent years. The premise is simple: Bret and Jemaine are two naïve musicians from New Zealand trying to make it in the music business in New York, aided and abetted by Murray their usually inept manager who has a day job in the New Zealand Consulate. If truth be told, not a lot actually happens of any momentum to our two heroes throughout the series. The joy of this programme is in the ridiculous dialogue, the hopeless tangles they get themselves into, and the fantastic and often quite surreal songs that are woven into the scripts usually in the form of some dream sequence.

I believe that they also have something to do with the recent resurgence in popularity of Casio's DG-20 digital guitar from the 1980s, if recent prices seen on eBay are anything of an indication. (I played one at the London Music Show back in the early 1980s when the instrument was first launched and it was a horrible thing. Basically it had the guts of a cheap home keyboard type instrument and with sensors under the fret positions on a rubber fretboard and with nasty black plastic non-tuned "strings".)

Blimey! Mikey scrubs up nicely, doesn't he?

As a big fan of the TV series American Chopper featuring the custom bike builders of Orange County Choppers, I was excited to hear that the Teutul family and the OCC crew have teamed up with Peavey to produce this curious offspring - the Peavey limited edition Orange County Choppers guitar - of which there will be just 100 built.

OCC in turn have built a Peavey-themed bike, featuring an on-board guitar amp, which will be the subject of two forthcoming episodes of the TV series.

Actually, this will not be the first bike with integrated musical gear that we've seen in American Chopper. I'm thinking of the "joke" moped that Mikey unveiled for Billy Joel who was expecting to see his dream motorcycle. It featured hideous piano-key graphics and had an old Casio keyboard attached to the handlebars, and a mic so he could sing along whilst riding!

McCartney Guitar up for auction live on TV - it's one of his first guitars apparently. I doubt if it's any of his famous instruments such as one of the Hofner violin basses.

I've just watched an interesting TV documentary about 70s glamsters Mott the Hoople. But the question I'd really like answered is what were those bizarre shaped guitars they used to use?

All I can find on the web is this about Ian Hunter's maltese cross guitar.