Song, by Toad

Friday’s Fraudulent Fripperies

Well, it’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it. There have been some pretty major blow-ups in the blogosphere, posts taken down, people quitting, and some pretty angry tantrums. And fucking fair enough, too, quite frankly.

The weirdest thing about the whole situation is just how disjointed it all is. Ed received a takedown again yesterday for posting a Keane remix which was sent to him by a PR contact and hence, one has to assume, legitimate. That same PR person was baffled and not a little annoyed by the takedown notice, telling me this morning that:

“This is hugely frustrating. All the band/ management/ label wanted to do was to giveaway the CSS remix to a handful of blogs so that fans could get a wee thank you for making the album No.1.”

And as much as I don’t like Keane, this is a pretty decent thing to want to do – definitely how we would all want our favourite bands to be thinking.

What happened with Glasvegas has also baffled and annoyed Columbia UK, who knew nothing about it until the angry reactions were pointed out to them. It turns out it was nothing to do with them: Sony BMG in the States had been the ones wielding the flame thrower.

This pretty much sums up why I hate the major labels. Almost none of the individual people working for them will be stupid, but moving in large groups makes people stupid. None of us, as the saying goes, is as stupid as all of us. Or, from the rather splendid film Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” While people on the internet have been innovating for them, the major labels have presumably not been standing still, and presumably they will have had some amazing ideas, but as soon as you have large meetings and committees and a legal department, A&R, management, publicity and global strategy all involved then innovation is killed stone dead.

Innovation seems to find it almost impossible to survive meetings. I know this because this is exactly what I see every day in Proper Job. Consequently the major labels, by virtue of their sheer size, are proving virtually impossible to move forwards in this respect.

Then the other side of it: the self-righteous bleating about illegal downloading when they themselves do not even have a coherent internal position on it. The right hand wants the remix out there and the left hand abhors mp3 blogs. Until such time as they know what they are thinking collectively and have an actual, consistent position, irrespective of its merits, they have no right threatening people and interfering with what the rest of the world is doing. Get your own fucking house in order before you start invading ours and destroying our work, you disgusting hypocrites.

There’s another side to this: the bands. Reading The Pop Cop I happened across this particular snippet, and Jason is pretty well connected within the music industry, so I think he is a credible source.

“it’s clear that many people don’t think Glasvegas themselves are immune from blame. In fact, we can tell you that the band have been made personally aware of the situation but have chosen not to comment on it.”

Which says one thing to me: fuck Glasvegas, fuck their careers and fuck their music. Let them rot. They were happy enough to enjoy all Ed’s hard work when they wanted him onside, but now things have changed and the minute this happens they snuggle up to the devil’s penis and lick it lovingly like the loyal lapdogs they are. Not an apology, not an explanation, not even a message of goodwill. They could easily have emailed Ed and simply expressed regret for what happened. They wouldn’t have had to condemn their label, which would have been brave, they could simply have grown a teeny tiny little bit of a fucking spine, or had some grace, or even simple manners. But they couldn’t muster even that, so fuck them. If that’s the particular flavour of jism they choose to swallow, may they fucking choke on it.

This week’s five were chosen by Dylan from Blueback Hotrod, official Toad photographer and all round bon vivant. They continue the theme of large corporations, which seems rather fitting, given the week we’ve just had. If you want to choose the five for next week, just pop me an email. As ever, please do take the chance to de-lurk and say hello. And after all the seriousness, wailing and gnashing of teeth, let’s take the chance to have some fun, eh.

1. Last major-label record bought (Not counting boutique subsiduaries – an act signed straight to one of the industry behemoths.)
2. Last item bought from IKEA
3. Average weekly spend in Tesco. (Or largest supermarket chain in your territory if not the UK)
4. Favourite brand of trainers (that’s sneakers, Americans).
5. Usual watering-hole – friendly local run in person by the landlord and host, or soul-less chain venue owned by an international leisure conglomerate?

What a fine and fitting selection of songs we have this week.

Bill Hicks – Satan Starmaker
Jeffrey Lewis – Don’t Let the Record Label Take You Out to Lunch
Hefner – The Greedy, Ugly People
David Cross – Women, Please Rinse Off Your Vagina And Anus!
The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast
And one more bonus, just because it’s so appropriate. The man was an unmitigated genius.
Bill Hicks – Fuck Only Artists

Oh Right, That’s Why You’re Being Such Pricks

You’ve got to hand it to DC. He may be as mad as a box of frogs, but the boy has just the sort of insane, conspiracy-theorist, cynical paranoia that can make you a visionary these days. In fact, there are times when I get the impression that the world is actively trying to live up to his cynicism. Like this time.

Back on the Don’t Be Evil post, where I ranted somewhat furiously about indiscriminate and groundless wielding of DMCA notices to flush the blogosphere of certain artists’ mp3s, whether or not the mp3s were still there in the first place, DC commented saying this:

Seems to me a witch hunt has started – it must be a sign of something on the cards. Something big & expensive. Someone somewhere has a deal tied up with all concerned & they’re flexing their muscle to show they have zero tolerance in order to sate their benefactor. It simply can’t be a coincidence all these people are getting the toecap in the arse & I don’t think they woke up last Monday & decided “You know what, it’s nearly Christmas & I’m bored: let’s fuck with the bloggers”. Something’s about to launch, you mark my words.

Which, as I said at the time, seemed so paranoid that it was probably very close to the truth. Very close indeed, it turns out.

Because then the lovely Vic from Muruch noticed this press release in her inbox, peddling music website called Shockhound:

“millions of MP3s and merchandise featuring artists from the major record labels Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI Music, as well as independent labels. In addition, artists will be able to upload and sell their music directly to users… Content at launch will include reviews, music news, interviews, original programming and music videos.”

And whilst I cannot definitively link the two, they are very, very oddly coincident. Major label tie-ups… free DRM-free mp3s… you don’t think? Nah, couldn’t be.

So, without more than circumstantial evidence to base this speculation upon, it looks suspiciously like the majors saw the success of blogs, saw the launch of things like RCRDFCKNGLBL and decided they wanted a bit of the action. As Vic notes, all the artists mentioned in these vanishing post complaints are signed up to Shockhound. Mind you, lots and lots of artists are signed up to Shockhound, so that might not mean much.

Personally, I don’t give a shit what they’re trying to do. Any website that is little more than a massive shop, and which has Kaiser Chiefs, Snow Patrol, The Cure and Oasis on the front page is hardly any threat to my line of editorial, so fuck them.

Bob Dylan – Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

Talking of Album Covers…

Mentioning albums I bought just because the cover is brilliant reminded me of this: An Instinct For Detection by Lionrock.  Just look at that cover!  It’s so cool, how could I not buy it.

As it is, I barely like the album.  But at this point I was starting to get into vaguely electronic music – exploring Stereolab, Dubstar and Saint Etienne a little further – so I was quite open to new sounds.  This never quite caught, unfortunately, being just that little bit too dancey and trip-hoppy for my liking.  I was also mercilessly derided by my then-girlfriend for trying to get into dance music.  Imagine that – finding someone more of a narrow-minded indie snob than myself.  No, I can barely imagine it either. Actually, when she strayed away from indie it was in the punk direction, largely, although she liked folky stuff too, but for some reason my electronic-based explorations never met with a shred of favour.

Funnily enough, even though I didn’t take to the album, these two songs have stayed in my head persistently enough that I ended up downloading them from Napster and then again recently from… er, not sure actually.  Maybe it’s because of the mixtapes they ended up on or maybe because I’ve never played them that much since, but they make me really nostalgic for some reason.

Lionrock – The Guide
Lionrock – Straight at Yer Head

Arnold is Rather Old

This album is one I bought years ago.  It was from a time when the Beta Band were making quiet waves in Scotland – although I wasn’t quite cool and hip enough to know anything more about them than that they existed.  Arnold don’t have much in common with The Beta Band, apart from the fact that, looking back, it feels like at this point we were starting to see the breakup of the Britpop juggernaut.  It had, as a movement, peaked.  And now, by 1998, it was well and truly petering out.

Bands like Arnold and The Beta Band seem, in retrospect, like the first inklings of what indie was going to become after Britpop: introspective, slightly more atmospheric than pop, and generally quite a bit less brash.  They weren’t entirely indie though, given that this album was released on Creation Records.  Well, let’s rephrase that, Creation were still indie at that point, but they were surfing the Oasis wave and were within a year of selling out to Sony BMG, so they were pretty influential and well-established for an independent record label.

Personally, I have to confess that there is really only one reason I bought this: that cover.  I love the proportions, that shade of blue, and the drawing style.  The album itself I only found myself half liking, but there are some great songs on it.  It reminds me of a time when I still actually went into HMV from time to time, although I was largely shopping at Fopp (before they were HMV), Echo and Lost in Music at this point.  I wasn’t reading zines, but I had started to take note of which record labels and which producers were involved with bands.  I bought loads of CD singles – an unfairly maligned format.  I found music by browsing in record shops, not from the big magazines, not from the telly and not from either radio or the web, which barely existed at this point.

Looking back, the era of the CD single seems like a sort of lost time, in between the indie era of home-packaged vinyl releases and fanzines, and the internet era and subsequent territorial battle between the industry and its consumers.  Britpop was waning, and there was yet to to emerge an obvious successor to dominate our landscape, so it was like a little lull in the world of music.  Not that the music was all crap by any means, just that there seemed to be no coherent ‘movement’ to define the time.  A bit like the 90s as a whole, really.

Arnold – Goodbye Grey
Arnold – Windsor Park
Arnold – Fleas Don’t Fly

You can still buy their stuff on Amazon incidentally – look at the second hand prices though.

Suzanne & Hope

Remember the giddy days when this blog used to be about music, rather than futile attempts to influence political machinations incomprehensibly bigger than ourselves? It was only a week ago, but it feels like fucking ages.

I don’t have a lot of new music to post at the moment, so I thought I’d mention this interesting little snippet. Last night on my Fresh Air show I played a couple of (relatively) obscure songs, along with the popular songs which they had inspired. Which, In fact, they Inspired so very much that writing credits were given to the writers of the first song, so heavily was it borrowed from.

The first one was pretty obvious: Creep by Radiohead borrows so heavily from The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies that they were credited on the album cover to Pablo Honey, and apparently everyone but me knew this until quite recently.

The second one, however, was a little more obscure. I bought R.E.M.’s Up back when it was released, in about 1998. I loved it then, and I still do; in fact I think it might be just about their most under-rated album. They had lost drummer Bill Berry and instead of trying to paper over the cracks, they seem to have decided to turn a potential failing into a virtue. The album is shot through with synths and drum machines, successfullly embracing the fact that it is largely drumless instead of just fudging through and hoping no-one would notice Bill was gone.

About halfway through this record is a song called Hope, which I think is brilliant, but when the sharp-eared (not in a Star Trek sense) young lady I was seeing at the time made some throwaway comment about it being pretty much a Leonard Cohen cover, I was completely baffled. I just couldn’t hear any Leonard Cohen in there, so we went back through his album and eventually tracked down Suzanne. It’s such a classic I am more than a little surprised I couldn’t hear the similarities to begin with, but you know what, I still can’t. If I hear them one after another then it’s pretty obvious, but if I try and just listen to hope in isolation I genuinely can’t make the leap in my head, even though I know it’s there.

R.E.M. actually credited Cohen for his influence on the song in their inlay card. I love both, frankly, and the French version of Suzanne by Francoise Hardy is also gorgeous. Enjoy.

Leonard Cohen – Suzanne
R.E.M. – Hope
Francoise Hardy – Suzanne

Toad on Fresh Air Again

In about a hour or so I will be back on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station for the first of another semester of Song, by Toad shows – every Tuesday from 7pm-8pm UK time.

Just click the big Listen Live button thingy on their homepage and you will be treated to the (frankly creepy) spectacle of me talking for an hour without swearing once. Hopefully.

It’s a good playlist to start back with, and as a taster here’s a song from right at the end of it that I almost certainly won’t get time to play because I’ll probably talk too much.

Andre Herman Dune & David Tatersall – Jim Flynn’s Next Book

Email to Columbia (& Sony BMG)

This is an email to a gentleman introduced to myself as the ‘MD of Columbia’ by the person who suggested I write him an email about the whole 17 Seconds Glasvegas fiasco. Here is what I wrote. Comments, anyone?

Dear XXXX,

I was given your email by XXXX who, having read the following post on my site, thought it would be a good thing if I got in touch with you personally regarding Glasvegas and DMCA notices issued in their name.
http://songbytoad.com/2008/10/23/dont-be-evil/

I don’t know how much you know about this, but DMCA notices are being wielded against bloggers completely indiscriminately at the moment, and as you can tell from that post people are both angry and afraid. Now, to be absolutely clear, I do not intend this to be an antagonistic email, nor am I getting in touch simply in order to shake my fist and point fingers. I genuinely would rather find an amicable solution to this situation, and I genuinely believe that the vast majority of music blog writers feel the same way. At the time I was angry, and wrong on some basic facts, but there are nevertheless a lot of things which I think need addressing and I appreciate you taking the time to read this email.

Basically, many people are having pages of their music blogs indiscriminately removed by people wielding false DMCA notices in the direction of Google and Wordpress, who host most of the blogs. In the case described in my post, a fellow Edinburgh blogger had his interview with Glasvegas from January this year erased because of old and expired links to recordings given to him freely by the band at the time. Writing a huge long interview with an unsigned band and posting their demo recordings with permission is absolutely not the behaviour of a copyright pirate, and the fact that Columbia has chosen to pursue Ed is frankly disgraceful, in my opinion. more »

Live in Edinburgh This Week – 26th October 2008

Well there’s virtually nothing going on in the city this week, nothing at all. Almost. There is the Fence Collective Halloween bash in Fife (no, I know, Fife is not Edinburgh) this weekend and then, on Saturday…

*drum roll please*

…Broken Records launch their new single, Lies, at the Bongo Club with support from Sparrow & the Workshop and Eagleowl. Broken Records are on the verge of sorting out the release of their debut album, but it’s all Very Top Secret at the moment. I haven’t seen Broken Records for a while actually, and I’m really looking forward to it. And personally, I think it’s very good news that there’s not all that much on, because I have a busy week ahead of me.

Wednesday is an excellent little gig I am helping to arrange, on Thursday we send out all the promo material for Meursault, Eagleowl, Nightjar and a new Rob St. John EP, which will be a long, tedious evening no doubt. Well, apart from the beer that is.

Then my little brother and his missus turn up on Monday, and we all get to watch the US elections and get plastered. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I am likely to be useless at work on the day after.

Broken Records – Kathy
Broken Records – The All Fell Into the Sea (Toad Session)

Shit almost forgot – Bart’ll kill me.  On Friday at the Wee Red Bar there is the latest (and final, really honestly this time) Gentle Invasion gig.  So for those not going to Fence Halloween, here’s an alternative.  If You Lived Here… sound particularly good, if you ask me.

Our Ladies of Sorrow, If You Lived Here You’d be Home By Now & Russ Abatoir at the Wee Red Bar.

If You Lived Here You’d be Home By Now – Dead Boyfriend

Toadcast #43 – The Fightcast

The Fightcast?  Yes, the fucking Fightcast.  Why?  Well because mp3 bloggers have been taking it in the arse with some force over the last week.  Posts are being deleted left right and centre, so presumably the major labels have decided to declare all-out war on blogs.  This is because they are scabby old unwashed cheesy penises.  This is not slander, I can prove it with charts and graphs.

Ultimately this is about corporate control of culture.  I don’t want to sound like a ranting conspiracy theorist, but put simply, this is how it works:  people pay for things they feel passionate about.  People feel passionate about art, the creation thereof and the participation therein.  Consequently any company vaguely engaged in cultural endeavours desperately wants to own the loyalty and devotion of as many people as possible, and anyone participating in this arena is a threat.  Grassroots art has more emotional resonance with people, people are more loyal to and more devoted to it and it is more personal.  Due to social networks of all sorts – blogs, networking sites, even something as simple as email -  it is an ever bigger and less controllable threat.

They want blogs to exist inasmuch as we provide free market research and free A&R, but if we think we have any influence, any rights, or indeed any genuine loyalty, they wish us dead.  Fuck them, fuck their little games and fuck the horse they rode in on.  If they don’t want to play with normal people then let them withdraw.  Let them take REM and U2 and fuck off.  I would rather form a massive great list of small independent record labels that do want to play nicely and only ever cover them and unsigned bands, and let the big boys compete with the X-Factor, if they think they can.  Fuck them, let them drown in their own greed.

Toadcast #43 – The Fightcast

01. The Love Language – Lalita (02.20)
02. Honey Claws – Shout Out (07.14)
03. Findo Gask – One Eight Zero (10.56)
04. The Avett Brothers – Murder in the City (23.25)
05. Yusuf Azak – Ursa Major (28.02)
06. Miracle Fortress – Have You Seen in Your Dreams (30.53)
07. How To Swim – From Here to Dundee/Eternity (33.55)
08. Jib Kidder – Flip Flap (45.09)
09. Situationists – Onwards & Upwards (46.17)
10. Yusuf Azak – 19.19 (53.45)
11. The Avett Brothers – The Greatest Sum (Acoustic) (62.02)

Five Friday Favourites

I am still so boiling with a combination of rage and digust after yesterday that I can barely think of anything fun at the moment. You know when you’re in the kind of mood where you get really irritated because your bus was on time and you might have missed it because the bastard thing has been so late so consistently for the last two months that you never for a second thought it would actually appear when it was actuall timetabled to appear. Fucking bastard bus.

I am out of money, too. The reason? Banking crisis? Credit crunch? Unusually expensive month? No, I’ve been out on the sauce too much and I’ve spent it all. And now I am angry at the world because of it.

On the plus side, Sam Amidon will be playing Edinburgh on the 10th November, which is amazingly exciting. I am trying to talk a couple of mates of mine into supporting him, but we will see. There’s also a secret show at a party next week, taking place in a gorgeous old Edinburgh venue that is being brought back to life by a couple of lovely girls. One of them, Ruth, comments on this site from time to time. The official launch party is going to be in early November, but this will be an amazing warm-up, and the chance to have a look around the place as a work in progress. So any curious Edinburgh types should email me (address on the contact page) and we should be able to get you in, provided there aren’t loads and loads of you.

Now for the fun bit: de-lurk and say hello, people! This is the time of the week where no wit, no specialist knowledge and no old in-jokes matter: everyone is encouraged to chip in. Respond to the question with five words or five paragrahs, it’s up to you, but please do feel free to respond and end the week with something trivial, silly and enjoyable. Oh, and anyone who wants to suggest next Friday’s five should email me at the usual address – it’s harder than you’d think.

1. What single item would you like to shove up the collective arse of Columbia Records?
2. Cover Columbia Records in jam and throw them to the…
3. Suggest something relaxing to help me get over my Columbia Rage.
4. How many units of alcohol tonight, and which sort?
5. Name something banal you’re going to do this weekend.

Deer Tick – Ashamed
Lincoln – Great Wall of China
Just for Tart, we have three rough old bastards:
Riff-Raff – I Wanna Be a Cosmonaut Billy Bragg before he was Billy Bragg.
The Nipple Erectors – So Pissed Off Shane MacGowan before he was in the Pogues.[
The Radiators – Television Screen Phil Chevron before he became the Pogues’ rhythm guitarist.