[Mrs. Toad has very kindly contributed this Friday's Fives, as I am busy being mounted like a five-dollar hooker at Proper Job.  Enjoy.]

I am in the middle of a secondment at Proper Job which basically means that instead of rushing around trying to get new clients or speak to existing ones about what is going on in the world of stocks and shares, I am undertaking company analysis and have time on my hands to contemplate the mysteries of the future.

So at the moment, I am mulling what cars will be like in 2030 and how many of them will be on the roads. This is usually predicted using an S-Curve function which predicts growth of consumption goods accelerating from matching income growth at low levels at twice the rate of income growth for a certain range of income finally slowing again to match income growth at higher levels giving an S shaped graph. According to this, there will be 2 billion cars on the road in 2030 (there are about 800 million now). Scary stuff. However, population density is also rising (only 46% of New Yorkers own a car whereas 92% of Americans do) and car sharing (ZipCar/City Car club) is also on the rise. So how the hell am I supposed to come up with an even half sensible estimate? Even Volkswagen don’t seem to think we will all own our own cars.

Of course, the point is that you can’t get it right, you just have to make a reasonable estimate and assign a probability to it based on current evidence. Despite the shelves and shelves of strategy books in airports worldwide, there is a great deal of serendipity involved in most business successes. The guys at Google for instance, didn’t start out to be in the advertising business but ending up there is why their company is worth $135bn. There is also the occasional trying to be too clever moment. If I said to you that buying a share of 100 dodgy mortgages packaged together and sliced up is as safe as lending to a blue chip company like IBM, you’d laugh in my face but that’s what all the physics graduates and math whizzes at places like Lehman Bros really believed. Business is hard especially, when mistakes mean that you could go down the pan or get taken out. Its easy to err too far on the side of caution and become defensive and oppressive rather than innovative (yeah, that’s you Microsoft).

Which makes it all the more galling that a non profit entity such as the BBC has apparently confused “value for money” with “bums on seats” in its recent strategic review, leading to the closure of 6 Music, the watering down of local content, and the downsizing of their successful website. The questions in the review also point to them considering reducing some of the innovative projects that they have undertaken such as pushing DAB and developing iPlayer. iPlayer is in large part why people like Murdoch(s) have it in for them, Sky and Virgin Media cannot make money if they cannot control content provision. By pushing people online to a familiar and trusted brand, the BBC has hastened their demise.

This has already been linked to but I would urge you all to take some time to respond to the BBC’s strategic review in full because its clear that fear of Tory/Murdoch harpies is pushing them in an all together more stolid direction than we have seen in the last ten years and that would be a great shame.

1. What do you think cars will be like in 20 years time?
2. Best piece of bullshit bingo you have heard?
3. Company/brand or product you most admire?
4. Company/brand or product you detest?
5. Your soothsayer like prediction for the world in 2030?

Ballboy – All the Records on the Radio are Shite

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Depeche Mode – Everything Counts

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Phil Ochs – Automation Song

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The Clash – Complete Control

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Company Town

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I know there’s been a lot of chatter about this already, but I feel really strongly that we need to try and stop the closure of BBC 6Music if we can.  If you want to help, please sign both of the following petitions:

Petition FM
Go Petition

And if you’re a Facebooker, please join this group.

You can also fill in the following consultation form if you can make the time, which would also be a big help.

Equally importantly, please email srconsultation@bbc.co.uk and tell them why they should keep 6Music.

And finally, make sure you listen to the bloody station.  I can’t stress this enough.  It’s not enough to support something by moaning, and it’s not enough just to like the idea of something existing, if you want to support something you have to actually use their product, whatever that might be.  Otherwise we become these people.

So, why, in all honesty, should we do all this?  What’s the big deal, and are we just being snotty about losing 6Music because it generally played ‘our kind of music’ or is there some wider purpose beyond specific taste which the station served which should be preserved?

The answer, from me, is yes on both counts.  Firstly and most obviously, in terms of supporting the actual making of new music, across all genres, 6Music was without parallel.  By giving so much opportunity to small and emerging bands, and by using specialist DJs who could put those bands into a broader historical context, the station fulfilled a unique function in actually supporting the development of music in the UK.

In saying this am I being insulting to the BBC Introducing network, with Vic Galloway, Bethan Elfyn and Huw Stephens?  No, I don’t think so.  As good a job as they do, and as grateful as I am to the consistent support and friendship Vic has shown Song, by Toad, they simply don’t have enough time to represent the entire BBC contribution to new music.  With so little time to play stuff, the volume of submissions to time allowed ratio means that the music cannot all be reasonably listened to or played and the whole thing becomes a crap-shoot, which becomes a real barrier to good things rising to the top.  6Music has enough airtime that good stuff is likely to be picked up – it’s still far from perfect, but it’s alright.

The other point is that in ditching 6Music the Beeb would basically be abdicating any role in cultural and artistic development in the field of popular music.  They may think that fits with their charter, but I do not.  Basically, Radio One is what is already happening, and Radio Two is what was never happening.  These stations are entirely dominated by the finished article, but who is going to finish that article for them?  In the absence of 6Music there will be the shiny, professional mainstream at one end, and tiny DIY enterprises like this one at the other, and absolutely not a single bloody thing inbetween.

How the hell are you supposed to progress, to step up, to actually make that massive leap without the developmental step of 6Music, where you can start out with a couple of airplays on one show, maybe get a session on another, and hope to eventually make the step up to a Maida Vale Session and perhaps eventually some Radio1 airplay.  Take away 6Music and you have to go from the Song, by Toad podcast to Radio1 in a single leap, which is not only a ludicrous expectation, but also makes the process increasingly arbitrary, because bands develop at different rates.  Not everyone can teach themselves all the stuff required to do this without intermediary steps, and even fewer have the stamina to keep going all that way without the encouragement they provide.

So from a label or band’s perspective, this is basically a disaster.  This was the closest we had to a reasonably understandable route to establishing ourselves, and in its absence this is going to become extremely challenging.  If I wanted to be a cynical bugger about it I would look at the Toad Sessions and look at the podcasts and watch the BBC and everyone else (XFM, anyone?) abandoning this middle ground for the higher echleons of pimping finished products and I would be rubbing my hands with glee at just how much audience they are surrendering and how much artistic ground they have abandoned, ground which we can now make a concerted effort to occupy.

Ultimately, though, that just isn’t how I feel.  Getting the likes of Gideon Coe, Marc Riley and Stuart Maconie off the air is a massive loss to anyone who cares about music and, more specific to the BBC, to anyone who cares about supporting cultural development in the UK.  The BBC are paid a lot in the form of tax, and they have a public service responsibility, and as far as I am concerned cutting 6Music will represent a very significant failure to fulfil that role.

Some people release videos to promote their music, but Ok Go seem to release music to help them promote their film-making talent.  This is their second video for This Too Shall Pass and it speaks for itself really: mental genius.

Apparently this took them four months to build, and honestly, I don’t even care if they cheated a bit (how did they do that going through the hole bit about 3/4 of the way through?) or if it really is as clever as it looks, it’s so visually engaging I am going to love it anway.

Terms like ‘viral marketing’ really were invented for people like this, and of course it sums up the fundamental misconception a lot of people have about viral marketing.  I get emails from fuckwits all the time saying ‘have you seen the latest ‘viral’ by suchandsuchatalentlessfuckwit?’  And of course, that’s just not how it works.  You can’t designate something viral status, and lo and behold – poof! – it is then a viral video.  Viral is a description of how something spreads, and if it’s shit and doesn’t go anywhere then it isn’t viral, no matter how cool your haircut is or how hard you try.

It’s like respect – the description of something as viral is not something you can demand, it’s something which must be earned.

This is a free download (from here) of a demo recording by a band about whom I know next to nothing: Waskerley Way.

The EP is basically just shoegaze, but as far as I am concerned pretty much most stuff is ‘basically just’ something, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s done well.

In this case, the guitar riffs are engaging, the pace changes subtly but effectively throughout the record, and those buried, scuzzy melodies get me humming.  To be absolutely frank, I am not sure what else you should ever really have to say about anything.

I like this kind of stuff: a fuzzy, fairly monotonous din, with the good bits nice and buried, so that it’s not so much about the riff or the hook particularly as the slow emerging and submerging of loveliness from within a sea of noise and mess.

This makes it sound like this is actually a difficult record to get into, but actually that isn’t true.  In the case of Waskerley Way the melodies are actually pretty up-front, so for all I have taken a long time to review this, I knew I liked it pretty much from the first listen.  It never gets boring either, not that it should over five songs.  But the mood shifts back and forth from insistent to brooding to slightly manic and back, making sure it continues to nudge your ears back to where they belong every once in a while.

It’s straightforward enough, this, but it’s well-executed and I like it.  A very promising debut.

Waskerley Way – Yonder

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Waskerley Way – Little Victories, Little Defeats

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Scott from Frightened Rabbit is a lovely guy and has been a real friend to Song, by Toad Records, so it makes me feel totally ungrateful and really fucking mean to say this, but I think this album is awful.

Hutchison still shows flashes of his songwriting gift – something which I would never deny – on sad, simple songs like Fun Stuff, but pretty much everything else on the record is so soft around the edges and so smothered in by-the-numbers radio indie arrangement that I really can’t listen to it.

The moment I realised that no matter how much I wanted to like this album, and no matter how much I tried I would always have an allergic reaction to it, comes just over two minutes into the slow build of Skip the Youth, when the chorus of backing vocals comes in for the first time.  Honestly, it’s so horrible I want to set it on fire.

This kind of grand, choral leaning has always been there or thereabouts in Frightened Rabbit’s stuff, but when it was just their voices producing it, it had a note of keenness, of desperation, and it let the emotion really grip you.  Now it just sounds bombastic and over-cooked and throws down a pretty impermeable barrier to me making any emotional connection with this album.

There’s still an energy to a lot of the guitar playing that I can imagine when this material gets off the stereo and into a sweaty venue it really could be great to witness.  A lot of the verses are actually delivered in a style I really enjoy, but so often there is just so much superfluous fluff and air-punching going on by the time the chorus comes around that I just find myself wincing.

You get the picture by now, I am sure, so there’s no point going on about it.  Basically, The Winter of Mixed Drinks and what I personally enjoy listening to are just too far apart to ever really meet in the middle, and I really do feel like an ungracious dick saying so as well.

Frightened Rabbit – Fun Stuff

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Frightened Rabbit – Skip the Youth

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I’ll confess that Christmas kind of caused me to stumble in my Fresh Air Session stuff; I was so knackered by the time the holiday finally arrived that I pretty much abandoned editing and posting the last session of last term, and I’ve been a bit slack about getting going again.

Still, Ruth and I had The Last Battle in last night, and when I got home I decided to stay up until 3am editing the Meursault videos from December, and then chopping and sorting the Last Battle ones from last night.  This means that while I may look like something from the cover of an early Eels album today, you will at least get a nicely edited session to peruse next Monday.  It probably also means that I am an idiot, but the less said about that the better.

So, finally some more sessions happening – this week we have Edinburgh’s most tippediest new band The Last Battle popping in.  There are something like seven of them, I think, so I hope they’ve either limited their numbers for this evening or I suddenly develop into a technical genius, because recording seven musicians with two microphones might prove to be somewhat tricky.

Ruth and I are still trying to think up a suitably hybrid name for the show.  Song, by Toad is basically my thing, and calling the show that rather underplays her role in it, so we thought we’d try and find another name if we could.

Last week’s suggestions included the Princess and the Toad and the current favourite: Toad on a Hot Tin Ruth.  Any further suggestions will be most welcome – please just pop ‘em in the comments below.

Live on Air 8pm-9.30pm – Listen live here.

I’ll fill in the playlist live below from 8pm onwards, so please come and say hello, shout mindless abuse or whatever else it is you internet people spend your time doing.

1. Clem Snide – Moment In The Sun
2. Amanaz – Sunday Morning
3. The Last Battle – Nature’s Glorious Rage (Live in Session)
4. Joni Mitchell – Carey
5. Slow Club – Lets Fall Back In Love
6. The Last Battle- Black Waterfall (Live in Session)
7. Dr. Dog – Shadow People
8. The Last Battle – Cutlass (Live in Session)
9. Hailey Beavis – In Any Case
10. Yo La Tengo – Yellow Sarong
11. The Beatles – Sexy Sadie
12. The Last Battle – Oh Best Beloved (Live in Session)
13. The Akron Family – River
14. The Last Battle – Soul of The Sea (Live in Session)
15. Lambchop – Every Time I Bring it Up it Seems to Bring You Down

Thanks people, see you next week for the Mammoeth session.

It’s fairly quiet in Edinburgh this week, which is good for me, because I am so damn busy there’s almost no chance of me getting out of the house at all – I will be up to my neck in prints and album covers for Cold Seeds and for Trips and Falls, and stuffing promotional copies of albums into envelopes for Meursault and Loch Lomond.  My brain feels liked an over-stuffed Filofax at the moment, and I keep writing down endless lists which look just like the list I wrote a day previously, just in case at any point my head bursts and everything spills out all over the floor.

I know the Filofax was presumably named after a bit of a bastardisation of the term file, and maybe even the words facts or even telefax, but I like to think the filo part came from the pastry, because that’s frequently what they ended up looking like.

My promise to myself, however, is that whatever happens I will be at the Japanese War Effort album launch party on Friday, but as that’s a small gig indeed I am not sure how public a gig this is, you’re best getting in touch with Jamie via the band’s MySpace if you want to go along.

You’ll also be thrilled to find out that Newton Faulkner are playing the Picture House this week – Newton Faulkner the band of whom regular commenter Bart once so memorably said: “To be fair, I wasn’t judging Newton Faulkner entirely on his Wikipedia entry.  I was also taking into account his fucking ridiculous haircut.” which is one of my all-time favourite comments on this site ever in history, so much so that it has been immortalised in t-shirt form.

Friday 5th March 2010: Copy Haho, eagleowl & Debutant play This Is Music at Sneaky Pete’s.

This is Music have recently gone weekly, which is good news.  This weekend sees Aberdeen alumni Copy Haho and Debutant take the stage, with eagleowl in the middle.  The lineup is a bit all over the place in a sense, but I am pretty sure all the bands really like one another’s music, so maybe it makes sense in a different way!

Debutant – Thirst

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Saturday 6th March 2010: Richmond Fontaine & Alana Levandoski at Cabaret Voltaire.

Richmond Fontaine might be one of the most under-rated bands around.  They play Americana, but it is at once so epic in its storytelling sweep, and so small and personal in its details, that you’re left with the impression of really grand vistas made believable by the tiny details in the foreground.  It’s a gorgeous combination, and if you are vaguely interested in this kind of music I strongly recommend you get down to Cabaret Voltaire on Saturday.

Richmond Fontaine – The Boyfriends

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