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Snippets from the Blues World

Blues band the Hexmen were a product of the post-punk creative maelstrom of Liverpool in the early 1980s. George Hexman: singer, session blues-harp player and frontman, founded the band, joining forces with major movers and shakers of the scouse music scene. The Hexmen line-up was a shifting collaboration of local luminaries including members of Afraid of Mice, Psychedelic Furs, Edgar Jones, Tthe Las, the Boo Radleys, Elvis Costello (Rusty), The Stairs, Cast, Dr Phibes amongst others – even guitarist Charlie Whitney from supergroup Family was a sometime Hexman.

The musical side-project can often be the more creative – as demonstrated by contemporary artists the Last Shadow Puppets. But high profile players have commitments and George eventually concentrated on solo session work. 

In the early summer of 2008 at a Merseyside jam night, several ex-Hexman met up with George and once again shared the stage. The magic and menace were still there! The momentum of the band’s return has been remarkable. The jam night generated immediate offers of work and Hexman, realising that the band’s mojo was alive and kicking, decided on making an album. Never one to bow to others’ expectations, Hexman ignored the mutterings of those who said it couldn’t be done, and recorded a full album’s worth of material in only four days at Liverpool’s Motor Museum Studios.  

The band’s backbone is blues based certainly, but one of the defining qualities of The Hexmen has always been energy. The quality of blues played tends to have an aggressive edge which owes a lot to punk – not surprisingly as many of the players involved in the band cut their teeth on punk in the late seventies and early eighties. However, the genre of the music is in many ways a reprise of the amphetamine-fuelled rhythm and blues that came out of London’s pub circuit in the seventies.”

Album available from iTunes or:

www.thehexmen.co.uk

www.myspace.com/thehexmen

email: info@thehexmen.co.uk