Song, by Toad

Mumford & Sons – Live, The Captain’s Rest Glasgow, Tuesday 8th July 2008

When I lived in Glasgow, back between 1994 and 1999, the Captain’s Rest was a shitty-looking Rangers pub with the sort of forbidding exterior and clientele that meant I never stepped inside once in the four years I lived virtually next door to the place. It’s all been spruced up now, although the exterior still isn’t exactly what I’d call welcoming, and is in the process of reinventing itself as a rather snappy little venue with a consistent knack for good underground lineups.

Going to a gig in what is basically the basement of a pub the first thing that struck me was the price: £7.50 are you fucking joking? For a small band with barely a single four-song release to their name? Well it turns out it was something of a bargain.

We missed a good deal of Davie Fiddle, the openers, because we were upstairs guzzling beer, but the three or four songs that we did hear were excellent. It’s quite a staple of the indie scene at the moment: four posh boys playing folky music with an old-time English fiddle sound, but these guys were excellent. Listening to their MySpace page, the charm of the music doesn’t seem to quite come across in the recorded version, but believe me that they are worth seeing live. Dylan and I thought Phil was playing a viola at first, the sound of it was so deep, but apparently it’s just a normal fiddle. Did they say there was a string missing, to make that distinctive sound? They may have, but I was drunk and I don’t remember that clearly.
Davie Fiddle – Chasing Reason

Next came a brief interlude from Derek Meins, ostensibly there simply as a compere, he stood up with the Mumford lads as his backing band and played a brief but brilliant set of country, folky, bluesy, gospelly crazy music. His contorted, evangelical delivery was superb, and I can hardly believe I’ve not heard anything about this guy before. His album, for sale at the gig, has been licensed to Sony BMG thought, so clearly someone has. Again, I find myself not loving the album as much as the live show just yet, but give me time. And if you get the chance to see this lad, defintely, definitely do it.
Derek Meins – The Gin Song (Yes, the Gin Song – I should make this the official Song, by Toad anthem!)

And finally, on to the main attraction. I’d pretty much have been happy with the value for my £7.50 already at this point, but to add cherries to the top of the sundae, Marcus Mumford and his Minions were absolutely superb as well. The performance itself was tight as hell – absolutely perfectly executed, and with easily enough Big Pop grandeur mixed into the indie-folk to suggest that these guys really do have the capacity to become very, very big indeed. I make no claim to knowing how these sorts of chains of events are set off of course, nor how much luck is involved, but I am getting to the stage now where I am confident enough to say so when I think I hear the potential for a band to make an impact outside the confines of the narrow little genre in which I tend to interest myself. The music is euphoric, emotive, arresting and all the other good things you would imagine and if they can keep this up there should be plenty of excitement on the horizon. Their new (and fucking brilliant) EP is only to be found at rawrip.com at the moment, but vinyl copies should be available soon.
Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page

Scientology Fascinates Me

Apart from serving as an extremely efficient Idiot Badge, and providing endless hilarity in the form of Tom Cruise’s infantile Messiah Complex, I think the bit I find most fascinating about Scientology is just how easy it shows it to be to get people to believe patently ridiculous things.

I assume many of them are quite sincere in their beliefs that we are inhabited by exiled alien souls and all that stuff, and although there’s no qualitative difference between that any any other religious mythology, the big difference for me is the lack of mystery. Believing in the myths of Scientology is on the face of it no different from believing crazy stories about evil being caused by a magical being who took the form of a snake and persuaded some lass with her knockers out to eat bad fruit – they’re both just slightly bizarre fairytales and would be treated as equally daft, had they not the stamp of religious belief on one and cultish lunacy on the other.

With most religions, however, they at least have the Argument from Antiquity on their side, and the advantages of massive numbers, popular acceptance and the opportunity to brainwash from an early age, no matter how silly the magic that they are preaching. The Abrahamic religions have been telling their weird and wonderful tales for a couple of thousand years now, which gives them a slightly false sheen of respectability, and given how many people believe in them it seems less silly to do so, no matter how nonsensical a great many of the teachings would seem if evaluated on their own merits. And when you’re rasied with something from childhood it can be near-impossible to shake it off. How many sports fans just can’t allow themselves to say that they think that their team will win, even if they do? It’s just bad luck, and even sensible folk often will not do it, even if they tell themselves that they know better.

With Scientology, grown adults are persuaded to accept as true a series of stories that are not only obvious nonsense but are well know to have been invented by a second-rate science fiction writer about fifty or sixty years ago. How can we, as a species, be so desperate to believe in woo that we are capable of convincing our supposedly rational brains that this kind of slightly childish fantasy is even close to reality? What do you have to do to your brain to persaude it that the concept of Xenu is anything other than a little bit silly?

I suppose general angst, insecurity, tribalism, herding instincts and fear of the unknown all play a part, and maybe an actual psychologist would just laugh off the question as trivial, but I find it quite fascinating. Volcanoes and aliens? Really, seriously? I suppose it ties into the secular West’s increasing fanaticism about idiotic forms of alternative medicine and anti-vaccination lunacy and things like that – we just seem to have an inner need to believe in some sort of magical agency and are collectively prepared to project it onto almost any variety of foolishness you can imagine.

Robbie Robertson – Somewhere Down the Crazy River