HARMONICA & VOCALS:- George Hexman GUITAR Phil Mcdonough BASS Joan Bimson DRUMS Michael Weizman

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 the Las, the Boo Radleys, Elvis Costello, 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. Although always known as a blues band, the Hexmen’s material is not that easy to categorise. 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 that 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. That music, borrowing from Chicago Blues and British Beat was also heavily influenced by the London Mod scene and was essentially dance music. The Hexmen play blues-based, high adrenalin dance music and include in their repertoire unique adaptations of tamla classics and Ska. The bands’ album is an homage to the classic timelessness of sixties’ mod music, played with a vigour and enthusiasm that belies the combined experience of the Hexmen. The album is due for release late September 2008.