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I awoke with a considerable hangover on Saturday, but a bloody great greasy breakfast saw to that. Tattie scones – anyone outside Scotland know them? Magic for mopping up the egg yolk and bacon grease from your plate as you swill the last of your coffee.

I did some husbandly things in the morning, traipsing into St. Andrews with Mrs. Toad to find a memory card for the camera, so we only caught The Pictish Trail in the morning. Johnny played a solo set which was, bar something of a deranged electro wig-out on the last song, a guitar based affair. He’s some set of lungs on him does Mr. Lynch, and has an album coming out very soon, on Fence Records. Given the amount of time he dedicates to the label itself and to playing in King Creosote’s band, it’s nothing short of a miracle he found the time.

The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now

Bar brief excursions for OLO Worms and Player Piano, I spent pretty much the rest of the evening in the Hew Scott Hall at the Tracer Trails evening.

OLO Worms are really not my thing at all – a little bit too much experimentation going on there and not really enough straightforward tune-writing. Not that they don’t have some genuinely lovely bits of course, but there’s a lot of mentalism there that I struggle to quite come to terms with. But that, folks, is the beauty of the Fence Collective: nowhere are you more likely to be exposed to something new and peculiar that they have taken a chance on, and that is there just because someone has found something interesting in the music was enough to spark genuine interest. Fingers & Thumbs is about as straight-up a pop song as you’re likely to hear from them.

OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs

A little bit more traditional is Player Piano, a star of Homegame, erm, three I think. Mrs. Toad and I saw his excellent solo set in the Erskine Hall in 2006, and this was the only gig of all of Homegame that she insisted in coming to this year. Jeremy Radway plays an old-fashioned kind of music, part rock ‘n’ roll, part music hall in a sense, and with a little bit of soul in there as well. For this set he amped it up a bit and made some noise, bringing touches of 70s proto-metal to the evening, which was odd, but good. And if you like the sound of that, listen to this – just gorgeous:

Player Piano – Mercy (A.C. Mix)

As for the Tracer Trails stuff, well regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with most of the bands mentioned – Eagleowl, Rob St. John, Adrian Crowley, Rich Amino and Withered Hand all played – so there’s no need to go into the music too much, apart from pointing out that I pretty much enjoyed the lot. As much as any one act I actually enjoyed the atmosphere and the evening the most. A couple of the band members swapped around, there was a blinding reworking of Rich Amino’s Ribena song, making the subject of necrophilia the focus, and Mrs. Toad got a little mashed and insisted to me that we release virtually fucking everyone on Song, by Toad Records and get the lot round to record sessions.

This is the beauty of a small, friendly scene like this. I mentioned Song, by Toad Records to Johnny Lynch who pretty much runs Fence and he had all sorts of useful tips and advice and help. Hopefully he’ll be on the Toad Sessions pretty soon as well. Fence also invited Manchester’s Red Deer Club Records to take over an evening in one of the halls as well – small enterprises run by genuine enthusiasts and who see one another as potential sources of support and help and fun and not as adversaries.

So we sat there in that hall, people drifting in and out as they went to other things, half the people discussing their little personal projects with one another, chatting to the musicians and chatting to friends they largely know from the Fence forums, or the Beef Board, as it is known, and it was genuinely fucking brilliant. This is one of the things that is oddly contradictory about Web 2.0 and all this technological shite that so isolates us at our desks, using MySpace and email and blogs and discussion boards and Facebook and IM and anything else rather than actually having a conversation with anyone: I have made friends with more real, flesh and blood people by fannying about on the internet than I ever have by any other way.

And would Fence Records or the Edinburgh indie-folk scene or the Red Deer Club and all these disparate-yet-interrelated communities still exist without all this? Of course they would, I’m no deranged technology evangelist, but the slightly contradictory link between all these virtual friends and the easy, friendly, cosy atmosphere of the Hew Scott Hall on the Saturday makes me feel quite optimistic. And it also gave me a stinking fucking hangover. But virtual friendships clearly are actually real, they are not poor second-cousins to meeting people in the flesh, they are every bit as real and as meaningful.

Rob St. John – The Acid Test
Rich Amino – One Hundred & Blue
Adrian Crowley – Bless Our Tiny Hearts
Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day

Sorry a couple of these songs are re-posts, but I just don’t have that much stuff by Rob & Eagleowl in particular that I can share.