This Town Needs Guns

It’s like well Goffic ‘n tha…

Some of you may well be aware that bass player extraordinaire Jamie Cooper is also guitarist in Oxford post-math-rock-whatevs-it’s-just-bloody-good band Hreda. They’ve got a new 7″ (with CD) out that contains two songs “Dead Horses/Minnows”. To listen to the songs on the record go here. To buy the record, email the band at hreda@hotmail.co.uk

I think it’s £3/£4, and is a total bargain at either price. Jamie is also responsible for the rather lovely artwork as well. What a multi-talented young man he is!

It is with a heavy heart and eyes swollen to bursting with tears that I announce our departure from Big Scary Monsters. The past few years with BSM have been the most amazing, emotional blah blah blah blah blah…no one has died, and this is not an obituary…we just think that we’ve gone as far as we can with BSM and believe that now is the time for a bit of a change.

In all seriousness though, we are sad to be leaving BSM. Kev has been good to us over the years and was the first person to really give the band a chance and show some faith in us. We certainly wouldn’t still be here today without him. Now that touring ‘Animals’ is coming to an end and we have begun writing for our next record we think it’s time to look for pastures new. We’ll continue to do whatever we can to help promote BSM (and their excellent roster) in the future and hopefully you’ll see the occasional TTNG track feature on a BSM compilation or something. We’ll see.

Speaking of ‘Animals’, we’re going to be playing some farewell UK shows in October before we hibernate and start work in earnest on the next record. Expect a nice mix of new and old songs, some of which may not survive the Winter and could be your last chance to hear them. Here are those dates:

*= co headline w/ Tubelord

Full details of all the gigs can be found in the “Upcoming gigs” section.

We should be announcing some new UK tour dates for later this year, in the next few days…along with some other exciting news

A few months back Tim and Jamie took part in Big Scary Monsters’ second annual 5-a-side tournament. I think it was supposed to be a TTNG/Dartz combo, but everyone in Dartz had to pull out due to injury. Fortunately, Russ from Hreda and a few of Tim’s football friends were happy to stand in. Here’s some footage of your favourite BSM bands trying to be athletic (look out for Tim’s smooth moves and Jamie’s charging attack/shocking penalty):

Massive thanks to everyone who came to see us at Y-Not Festival on Saturday. Two weeks in a row now, we’ve played to packed out marquees to hundreds of people. Nice

Saturday was pretty mental. It took us 4 hours to do a 2 and a half hour journey thanks to the savage rain on the M1. We got on site about an hour before our stage time, but it took forever to get to the stage thanks to the rather adverse conditions on the site (see picture below). By the time we’d parked up and discovered that we had to carry all our equipment about 200/300 metres through rivers of mud, it was all a bit too late. A big thank you to the Y-Not staff who were incredible and helped us lug our equipment over to the stage. I was going to have to do the whole lot on my own (being the only member of the band with the forsight to bring wellies), but the kind ‘kilted’ stage manager was an absolute legend and helped me out massively.

We had hoped to setup early and play for a lot longer than our alloted 25 minutes, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. That being said I think we played pretty well and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Unfortunately though, we had to leave almost immediately after we played because our van was blocking the entrance/exit to the backstage area (as there was nowhere else we could park it without sinking into the mud), so I apologise to anyone who went looking for merch that wasn’t there. Records and other stuff are available to order online.

Anyway, thanks again to all the people who came to see us and the awesome staff at Y-Not, who were absolute troopers dealing with pretty terrible conditions.

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