Back in business

After a 7 year recording hiatus during which time I've moved house 3 times, moved country from Luxembourg to Ireland, got married, became a dad... I finally have a home studio set up again!

While I was getting everything set up I found an unfinished project(4 guitar tracks) from my old band that had been hiding on a hard drive since 2005. So, to get me back in the swing of things I decided to finish it off.
Now that that's done there are no more excuses so I'll get started now on some new recordings. In the meantime, here's the song I finished off: Don't Tell Me(written by Eddie Leonard):

"Taxi for Two" used in promo video for Real English®

A big thankyou to the people at Real English for using Taxi for Two in their preview for their New South Beach Videos

New Site

I thought I was being generous and providing links to places where my music could be downloaded for free. I was wrong. Wordpress had disabled links to external sites that weren't partnered with Wordpress and my links were going nowhere... So I put two fingers up to Wordpress and moved to Blogger. It's really just the same site with a wee bit of a facelift(and links that actually work).

New URL

http://sideshowmanny.net I lost the .com one but at least the elephants are happy :-)

iOS friendly music page

Soundcloud have a new HTML5-powered platform which means no more Flash, which in turn means iOS friendly widgets. So you can now stream or download the music on the music page to your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Mac Book :)

url update

Graham Holland from It's A Frog's Life Acoustic Podcast has done some digging around and got in touch to tell me that I'll be able to re-register the domain name after 24th July 2012. So not too long before normal service can be resumed.

A massive massive thankyou to Graham for his investigations. It's well worth checking out his podcast which you can find here: It's A Frog's Life Acoustic Podcast

new elephant friendly url: http://sideshowmanny.wordpress.com

I'm not much of an activist, I don't think it's always a good idea for musicians to get too preachy, it's the thin end of the Bono wedge...
I had the sideshowmanny.com url registered through Go Daddy, however, after reading this article - bob-parsons-godaddy-ceo-elephant-hunt, I decided not to renew it with Go Daddy when the time came.
So I let it expire but Go Daddy still own the url (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to register it through another company at the moment).
Which means for the time being at least, the url for the site is: http://sideshowmanny.wordpress.com

It's more to type but at least no elephants will die in the process.

Holy Mojo Photo's

I got round to taking some snaps of the holy mojo on my new guitar.

Do you?


Cos you gotta have...



In...



Gimme 5000 of those -

Holy mojo!

I treated myself to a new guitar recently. Well, I say new, it's 21 years old but it's new to me! I'm the guitars 3rd owner, the 1st owner was a preacher in the States who had adorned the guitar with some stickers (Shouldn't a preacher know better than to commit sacrilege?!). The second owner removed the stickers but in the 20 years they'd been on there, they'd left a bit of a 'T' shirt tan...
So now on the guitar you can see, in glorious T shirt tan, the words "Jesus", "Believe" and "Faith" plus the outline of a small Christian fish symbol...
So the guitar has some holy mojo, don't know how it'll feel about my songs of drunken one night stands and general debauchery but it's a dream to play and I absolutely love it.
I'm nearly finished recording the first song with it, "Writing a New Score", I just need to do a few finishing touches and I'll have it here for you in the next few days.

Here's a picture of the guitar, for the guitar geeks out there it's a Larrivée LV-03E. The picture is just the eBay picture from the seller, I'll get some better ones done at some point with some close ups of the holy mojo T shirt tans ;)

Press and Photo pages added to the site

I've added press and photo pages to the site -
http://sideshowmanny.wordpress.com/218-2/
http://sideshowmanny.wordpress.com/226-2/

Facebook band page added

I added a band page to facebook for all music related stuff (mostly it'll be updated with what's on this blog but if you prefer to facebook, it's the way to go)- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sideshow-Manny/125304784170981

Music page added

I've added a music page which, at the moment, has a SoundCloud player with all the tracks from "Sideshow" and links to download each track from SoundCloud.

I'm working on some new material at the moment and will upload some of that later this week.

New website

Howdy folks,

I've put together a new website, the MySpace page is still there (if anyone still uses MySpace?) but from here on I'll be posting all my new songs, videos, news etc. on the new wordpress site.
The url is still the same http://sideshowmanny.com or you can also use http://sideshowmanny.wordpress.com

Also any time I post anything on my blog here, it will automatically appear on my Facebook Wall and a link will be tweeted as well. So no need to come here searching for new stuff, just follow me on twitter, add me as a friend on Facebook or if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to the feed.
There are handy buttons for each of these - RSS, Facebook, Twitter underneath the header on the site.

Have a look around the site and feel free to leave a comment,

Que la force soi avec toi!

Manny

Jamendo Pro

Jamendo Pro has proved to be a great way of getting the music out there, I usually get about 6 or 7 plays each day in "public places".

Places playing the tunes include pubs, shops and hotels. One place in particular that caught my eye was Yves Rocher, the high street cosmetic store - my girlfriend shops there!

Behind the Veil also got used for an online movie but that's all I know. Unfortunately I don't know what the movie was or where to find it! So if you know, then please send me a link!

Likewise if you hear any of my tunes getting played anywhere at all, be sure to let me know!

Gig review

"Manny G, Live at D:cliq shows Luxembourg’s favourite Scottish minstrel take his one-man show from the depths of the Clausen taverns to the heady heights of city centre gig'dom by supporting Lucky Fonz III on a fresh yet ever so slightly crispy October's eve.

Far from troubadouring on and on about sensitivities, personal failings and all manner of emotional damage inflicted by others, our hero of the hour is not letting us out of here till we've surrendered to the tales of his own erections, overweight one night stands, cuckoo clocks and walking in the shoes of an alcoholic wife beater..... Vaudeville and variety!!!

Tonight's show is largely an airing of the album 'Sideshow' stripped bare and shifting the focus on to the lyrics. Manny is often without reserve, occasionally crude but not overly so, it's all the more obvious in tonight's show that the lad knows how to pen an urban tale with just enough brutal honesty and wit to amuse, but not cross the line from entertainment to cabaret.

Trailblazing through a 12 song set to a smallish crowd who had enough nuance to appear Manny hits the comfort zone around the third or fourth track. On the scale between victory and defeat, the too cool for skool brigade will be back for more. Game, set and match."

Review by Eddie Leonard

Luxembourg University DVD Part 2

The launch party was good fun - free food, free bubbly - what more can you ask for! ;-)

Here's an article about the DVD on the University website - http://wwwen.uni.lu/newsletter2/articles/we_proudly_present_uni_lu_on_dvd2/%28language%29/fre-FR

And if you really want, you can order a free copy of the DVD by mailing and asking the good people at Luxembourg university - movie@uni.lu

Lots of photos were taken at the bash but as yet I haven't seen any online. There are promises to upload the movies from the DVD to YouTube and the Uni website but so far that hasn't been done. As always, I'll keep you posted,

G

Music to be used by Luxembourg University

Tic-toc and Stroll on are going to be used as backing tracks on a promotional DVD for Luxembourg University.

The company creating the DVD are Region 2, a German company - http://region2.de/index_engl.html

Watch this space and I'll keep you posted on the developments,

G

Thanks for the donations

I'd like to say a big thankyou to Andrej Novak and Vincent Cornet for their kind donations.

Your appreciation means a lot to me, thanks!

Manny

Gig Review

"Manny G, Live at D:cliq shows Luxembourg’s favourite Scottish minstrel take his one-man show from the depths of the Clausen taverns to the heady heights of city centre gig'dom by supporting Lucky Fonz III on a fresh yet ever so slightly crispy October's eve.

Far from troubadouring on and on about sensitivities, personal failings and all manner of emotional damage inflicted by others, our hero of the hour is not letting us out of here till we've surrendered to the tales of his own erections, overweight one night stands, cuckoo clocks and walking in the shoes of an alcoholic wife beater..... Vaudeville and variety!!!

Tonight's show is largely an airing of the album 'Sideshow' stripped bare and shifting the focus on to the lyrics. Manny is often without reserve, occasionally crude but not overly so, it's all the more obvious in tonight's show that the lad knows how to pen an urban tale with just enough brutal honesty and wit to amuse, but not cross the line from entertainment to cabaret.

Trailblazing through a 12 song set to a smallish crowd who had enough nuance to appear Manny hits the comfort zone around the third or fourth track. On the scale between victory and defeat, the too cool for skool brigade will be back for more. Game, set and match"

Review by Eddie Leonard