So, here commences a busy weekend of giggery, with Oxjam’s Edinburgh Takeover kicking off tonight (beware Toads bearing flyers!) and then Rob St. John’s album launch at Pilrig St. Paul’s tomorrow, with Meursault, eagleowl and Viking Moses.

In the meantime, for me at least, there is an increasingly chilly office to sit in, although thankfully today seems pretty mild.  It’s a bit like when you’re sitting at your desk in increasing need of a piss – I have just been sitting here getting colder and colder and wondering just how uncomfortable I will have to get before I give up and get the fuck out of my chair and turn the bloody heating on.

I also – this is turning in to a truly fucking fascinating post, really it is! – have an operating system upgrade to install on the computer, but I am kind of holding off doing it in case anything goes wrong, because I really can’t be fucked spending hours trying to put computer things right.  Mrs. Toad is quite good at this shit, because she gets the bit between her teeth and refuses to give up, whereas I tend to just think ‘oh fuck it, the fucking thing’s fucked’ and smash it to pieces with a hammer.

So de-lurk, come out of the woodwork, sally forth, do whatever it is you have to do to chip in your five and generally waste an afternoon when you should really be off doing something more productive.

1. Inanimate object upon which you wish you could wreak revenge.
2. Your most pointless temper tantrum.
3. What always pierces your outer shell of zen-like calm?
4. Which famous person would you like to see really lose it?
5. Pick a celebrity deathmatch.

And here are some covers, for shits and giggles.

ARMS – While the Flies (The Joy Formidable)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ellie Goulding – Heartbeats (The Knife)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Howth – I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Robin Pecknold – Where is My Wild Rose? (Chris Thompson)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Still Corners – Eyes (Rogue Wave)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

 Hmm, not sure exactly what’s going on here, but I like it.  Yoofs sent me an email a while back, when they changed their name from… er, whatever it was before.

I don’t know much about them, apart from a handful of rough songs on their Soundcloud page, but I most certainly like what I’ve heard so far.

It’s a little tricky to pin them down though, because through the half a dozen songs or so already out and about on the internet, the core of the band’s sound seems to be quite uncertain.

New single John Actor is Monkfish is basically just fairly rough and rowdy, garagey guitar pop.  The guitar line which leads the song is fucking fantastic, in fact, and the chorus is simple and hummable, backed by an escalation of racket from the band.

It’s a brilliant track, but it has only just been released, and is not the song which originally turned me onto this band.  That job was done by the awesome Sidewalk, also embedded below, which has a fantastically catchy guitar coda in it.  In fact, that melody sounds for all the world like it could be being played on a keyboard*, and this pushes the perception of the band slightly away from the lo-fi garage rock blanket which seems to be enveloping everything I’m listening to at the moment, and into rather more pop territory.

Listening further on their Soundcloud page, Good Guyz Make Bad Friendz and the subsequent Hazy Dayz sound like they could easily be the fuzzed up demos of a band who might have been pottering about the fringes of Britpop.  It’s far too growly for that of course, but it doesn’t sound a million miles away from the kind of basic melodic structure of songs I remember listening to a fair bit in the mid to late nineties, as Britpop’s bubble burst, and it spilled out a load of styles all clearly indebted to the guitar pop of the preceding few years.  They all oozed off in their own directions as bands and listeners started to move on (the latter could almost be The Bees, for example, although they came a little later), but there was something still there which tied them to what had gone before..

So it’s all a little uncertain where this band are going at the moment, as it usually is with bands at this embryonic stage, but they’ve got a couple of absolute corkers here already, and I’m looking forward to what I think is their first proper release, We Used 2 Be Fun (listen here).

JOHN ACTOR IS MONKFISH by yoofs

SIDEWALK by yoofs

*And it still could be a keyboard I suppose, my ear is hardly a well-educated one when it comes to this kind of thing!

 I only ask the question because it came up in conversation in the pub recently.  I was chatting to a relatively young friend of mine who was saying that he was drifting away from new music a little because when the newer musical fads – chillwave and lo-fi, for example – have emerged, instead of really getting into them, he’s been exploring backwards to the stuff which inspired them in the first place.

This is a way of looking at it that I find really interesting, not least because I do the exact opposite.  When it was all alt-folk and stuff like that a few years ago, I didn’t particularly go back to the likes of The Pogues and The Waterboys and other bands at the centre of the last alt-folk movement in the late eighties, although of course I do still listen to those bands. Even though I could see the direct parallels between this generation’s embracing of Balkan themes and the predominantly Irish flavours of the last time around, I got right into the fad and immersed myself in the new stuff as far and wide as I could.

Similarly, now that lo-fi is in and so many of those bands are ripping off American indie rock from the late eighties and early nineties, apart from buying a couple of Pavement records I had no excuse for not owning, I haven’t really looked too far back at the musicians they are borrowing from.

I actually find it kind of ironic, too that the guy in his early twenties was lecturing the guy in his mid thirties about all this stuff not really being new, and that he should try listening to some obscure stuff from twenty years ago if he wanted to know where it all came from.

Anyhow, this comes up because US label Captured Tracks are apparently launching a new project called The Shoegaze Archives.  Correct me if I am being thick, but there seems to be pretty much nothing out there about it, bar a bunch of regurgitated press releases (somewhat like this one) on relatively high profile online publications (perhaps slightly less like this one).

Nevertheless, it looks like a really interesting project.  The lo-fi fad has brought a lot of shoegaze with it, but beyond frequent references to My Bloody Valentine and the like, I had never really explored backwards to the origins of the genre.  That’s partly to do with the fact that a lot of my recent purchases of old stuff has been in secondhand record shops, and an awful lot of shoegaze was released in the early nineties, when vinyl was at its most in danger of vanishing altogether.  A lot of this was simply never pressed to vinyl in the first place, and that is part of the aim of The Shoegaze Archives.

I feel somewhat chastened by this kind of project.  I was always into older stuff – as you probably know by now, I was raised on it, and never really got into the music my contemporaries were into until my very late teens, but ever since then I haven’t found myself looking back that much.  It’s something I want to do, mind, I just never seem to really make time to actually do it.

So this looks like a nice idea, and I am looking forward to it.  It’s nice that people are exploring old music, that underrated bands like the Stone Roses and the Cranberries are getting back toge… no wait, I’ve gone way, way too far there, sorry.  I’ll get me coat.

Here are a couple of songs from the first things they’ll be releasing, just for shits and giggles:

deardarkhead // Just For You by TheArtOf…

SHOULD // Faded by TheArtOf…

The John Knox Sex Club do more or less everything music isn’t really supposed to be doing at the moment, and they do it absolutely brilliantly.

Firstly, it’s strongly folk influenced, an attribute which was flushed clean out of the zeitgeist by the success of Mumford and Sons.  There may still be money to be made in it, but the hipsters are staying well clear.

Secondly, it’s bombastic as fuck, not a hint of irony, not a hint of clever retroism, cool detachment, nothing.  They absolutely go for it, with not a care for the sort of cool kid who might sneer at them for genuinely and honestly giving themselves over to what they do and letting it run riot.

I first heard of this band when the awesome Sparrow & the Workshop kept insisting to me every time we met that they were the best live band in Scotland, but for some reason I never really made the time to listen to them.  Then their amazing version of Katie Cruel appeared on the Sways Records mixtape, Sparrow & the Workshop came back in to record a podcast with us and mentioned the band again, and a couple of weeks later they themselves got in touch to ask if I would like to hear their new album.

I did, it was fucking ace, and I immediately invited the band to play an Ides of Toad night a couple of weeks back, where they were absolutely incredible.  The intensity is quite evident on record, which is an impressive enough achievement in itself, but live they really were something else.

In fact, seeing them live made some sense of the record for me, as well.  Songs like Above Us the Waves and Katie Cruel grabbed me instantly, but tracks like the epic thirteen minute opener Kiss the Dirt struck me initially as just a bit too much of a prog-folk pomp-a-thon for me to really love it.  I mean, the rest of the music kind of flirts with that anyway, but a couple felt a little over the top when all I had heard was the album.

Seeing them play it live, though, was incredible.  The plaintive, pained beginning was even more emotive, and the song didn’t so much build to a crescendo as twist itself into a whirlwind which ended up pretty much tearing it apart entirely.  It was an immense and visceral experience.  Sparrow were right.

One song, The Neighbours, still doesn’t quite click with me I have to confess, but everything else on here is brilliant. For a band that were reluctant to record in the first place, they’ve done a fucking great job of it – for this is one of the best jobs of capturing raw energy and creepy, disturbing loveliness on the same recording that I’ve heard in a long time.

And if you buy the CD you will be sent a hand-crafted package made by the band themselves, as if to reassure you that they haven’t abandoned their principles entirely by actually recording their music!

John Knox Sex Club – Above Us the Waves

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bandcamp (buy the album here too) | More mp3s

So I am fed up with the fucking Stone Roses, I think I’ve made that clear.  And as for Lana Del fucking Rey, Christ she’s been getting on my tits recently as well.

Funnily enough, you know, I actually like Video Games; I genuinely think it’s a pretty good pop song, and if it was just that song by itself then I would presumably really like it.

But there are two things which started out just mildly annoying me, but with their sheer ubiquity have turned an indifferent snort into utter loathing.

The ubiquity itself is fucking annoying enough, just to start with. This is of course a little related to envy, but I have been checking the 6Music playlists a lot recently, for any sign of them playing our recent releases, and whilst they’ve cropped up here and there, that fucking Video Games tune has been on every fucking show at least once, every day for fucking weeks.

And the song, as much as I like it, just isn’t that good.  I don’t know how fucking incredible a song would have to be before I wouldn’t be just slightly irritated seeing it all over the place like that, but I would imagine sampled birdsong from rare starlings whose wings are tipped with silver would have to be involved in some way.

It just fucking annoys me that all these unsigned bands and tiny labels are slaving away for fucking ages trying to get the slightest glimmer of attention, and some major label marketing department dresses up an established attention whore in something slinky and glamorous, butchers her fucking face, throws her at the media in a shower of pouting and cash and lo and be-fucking-hold, all the rest of us trying our best to score a moment here or there are instantly buried in an avalanche of sex-pouts.

That brings me onto the fucking second thing: her fucking image. Now, have a look at that video at the bottom of the page, back when Lana was just plain old Lizzy Grant. You can see the same hyper-sexualised pouting antics going on there, although admittedly that was before she decided to butcher her face, but it’s now quite clearly been turned up to eleven.

Just for the record, plastic surgery for vanity rather than medical reasons is something I find fucking abhorrent. If your self-esteem is so utterly defeated that you are willing to cut open your own face and turn yourself into some sort of freakish science project in order to desperately try and shore up your self-image I seriously pity you. So that ‘freshly punching in the face’ mouth of hers just gives me the heebie-jeebies to begin with.

But it’s the overtly sexual nature of it. I am not for a second pretending that a mumbling indie boy in a beard and a cardie isn’t triggering pre-conceived notions of style in his potential audience the very second he chooses his clothes and his haircut, but the image you choose shows how you view yourself as well, and Lana Del Rey’s, like her Leslie Ash trout pout, gives me the creeps.

Watching her mince her way through her fucking videos, as well as through shite like her Jools Holland performance tells me just one thing: that she judges herself pretty much entirely on her appearance and her sexuality, not her music. It’s not that men and women in pop should pretend not to be sexual beings, but every single thing she does is dominated by a pout, then doe eyes, then a coy smirk, then another pout, then a breathy gasp, then a moistening of the lips and finally some more pouting.

Basically, it feels like she and her label and her management are trying to sell their songs to my penis, rather than my ears. And that makes me feel insulted. It also seems like they have no faith in her music either, because the sex doll image so utterly overwhelms it, which is just insulting to her, frankly. It is, after all, a pretty good song without all that pish.

You know those identikit indie bands, with their attitude and their leather jackets and their ‘let’s ‘ave it’ machismo? Well they look like a bunch of cunts, don’t they.  This is one of the female equivalents.  The ‘I have nothing to say, so I am going to look pretty’ tactic which fucking bedevils women in music wherever they go. Katy Perry for indie kids.

And I actually think video games is a pretty good song. But I am fucking sick of the fucking lot of them at the moment, and I am going to go and fucking hide in my room until they fucking go away.

 I wonder, sometimes, how many of you reading this blog have been here for, say, the last four years or so.  It was November 2007 when I first moved my old music site over to Blogger, and I am sure one or two people have been around since then, but I am never all that sure.

I only mention this because Death Songs hark back to the earlyish days of the blog, and very much to the early days of the Song, by Toad podcasts.

Back in those days – mid 2007, I think it was – I was obsessed by The Shaky Hands’ amazing self-titled debut album.  Mrs. Toad and I went over to the States that Summer, to go to my little brother’s wedding, and we spent some time driving around Massachusetts, Maine and Nova Scotia while we were there, with a very limited collection of CDs, including The Shaky Hands. Consequently, I have really fond memories and very pleasant associations with Nick Delffs’ voice, and the easy going, but nevertheless purposeful rhythm of his songs.

Hearing his new project, Death Songs, for the first time brought that all flooding back, and it was a very, very nice surprise indeed.  This project sounds a little more bare-bones than The Shaky Hands, but nevertheless a lot of the old charm is still very much present. I like the bareness though, it makes it sound like it could all have been recorded live in a single take, which is nice for reasons I can’t really explain.

This is most easily described as an album of acoustic pop, with the mood elevated by a framework of handclaps and a crisply strummed guitar. Despite the name, this is far from morose music, having more in common with early Dodos stuff than the kind of dingy laments you can get when a nice young man picks up an acoustic guitar.  In fact it isn’t until the gorgeous second half of rather schizophrenic closer Remain in Love Straight to the End that things get a bit more downbeat, but by that time you’re ready for it.

I think that what I’ve always enjoyed about both the Shaky Hands and now this music probably comes from the combination of the way Delffs sings and the way he plays the guitar: I am never really all that sure if the predominant feeling it conjures is wistful or upbeat.  Sometimes the pace of the music and the vocal delivery contradict one another a little, creating a pleasantly shifting palette of emotions.

It’s not the most insistent or attention grabbing release, this, but I am really enjoying it.  And I am really glad that Delffs is back, too.

Death Songs – Water in the Eyes of Man

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Shaky Hands – Whales Sing

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Shaky Hands – Summer’s Life

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Death Songs on Reverb Nation | More mp3s | Buy from Post-Consumer Records

Why are the Stone Roses famous?  One album is why.  One fucking album. Alright, it was one pretty bloody amazing album, and in many ways it paved the way for indie to morph into Britpop, which was a pretty significant event, irrespective of what you think of Britpop itself.

For everyone else who fucking works, they must dream of having a couple of good years at the office and then deciding fuck it, it’s time to hang up my paperclips and just send my employer royalty demands for the next twenty years, because I was just so very awesome for the twelve months or so in 1987 when I actually bothered my arse.

But nevertheless, a couple of years’ work and suddenly you can dine out on that for fucking years. And not only that, but when it turns out that forever living off the fruits of a very brief period of labour isn’t quite enough anymore, they can suddenly decide to whip the decaying carcase of their barely enduring reputations out of mothballs and make it dance for the public’s fucking edification again, all the while smearing themselves obscenely in baby oil and dollar fucking bills.

You’d be better off going to see a fucking Stone Roses tribute act at this stage, and in all honesty, this is all you are going to get, even if you do pay a bazillion pounds and the indentured servitude of your youngest child (or whatever it is they’re charging) to see these superannuated muppets in the flesh.  Whether it’s a tribute act with professional, well-rehearsed musicians or one with the original members slapping one another on the back all night, it is going to be no more than a tribute act nonetheless.

And god help you if they try and write any new songs.

Also, Alex Petridis described Brown’s live vocals thus: “A muffled, gloomy honk, like a despondent goose wearing a balaclava”.  What a fucking awesome turn of phrase.  And lads, fuck off, haven’t you got enough money?  And what about your fucking dignity?  Do you really want to be a ‘heritage act’?

But to reiterate the original point, I actually like the Stone Roses… well, that one album at least. But honestly, lads, give it a fucking rest.

I think I started to figure out what I wanted to write about this album when I read the following paragraph, which Euan wrote to introduce his own review on The Steinberg Principle:

“With ‘Sky Blue Sky’ and ‘Wilco (The Album)’, Wilco probably lost a lot of people who liked what they had done on ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ and ‘A Ghost Is Born’.  I guess the same is true of those albums though, in that they lost a lot of people who loved ‘AM’, ‘Being There’ and ‘Summerteeth’ – or at least confused a lot.”

I think Euan found my tepid relationship with recent Wilco output a little frustrating, when we talked about it, because the first time we ever discussed Wilco was after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, and my love of those albums was equal to his, give or take.  Then, when things changed on Sky Blue Sky, I just couldn’t love it anymore, however much I tried.

Mind you, the same thing happened when I discovered Summerteeth (which I bought because of the fantastic Billy Bragg collaborations, Mermaid Avenue Vol.1 and 2 which came out in the late 90s).  I tried to explore backwards, and it just didn’t work.  Try as I might, I just couldn’t get into A.M. or Being There, which was something I remember finding rather frustrating.

Looking back at Euan’s opening paragraph, I guess I was just one of those Wilco fans who remained stranded on the YHF/AGIB island, and that was just one of those things. It was kind of hard to accept though, given how much I loved those albums and, to a slightly lesser extent, Summerteeth. In a way I ended up with an elusive feeling of irritation, as if the band had failed me in some way, or as if I had failed them.

So with all that in mind, you’ll excuse me if I didn’t exactly leap to put this on the stereo when it plopped onto my doormat a couple of months ago.  Partly, I think I was trying to avoid the anticipated guilt of not really liking it, but I’ve done my best to grow some balls, and I’m glad I did.

Not that this is an amazing album, inevitably.  There are still some highly unwelcome hangovers from the classic/soft rock sludge of the previous two records, a sound I will never grow to love. Dawned on Me, for example, is just soft and squishy, and completely fails to excite. And it’s not alone.

I was inevitably a little put off the album by those familiar failings, however there were just enough moments to keep me around, little glimmers here and there of something a little different going on: the utterly gorgeous strings of Black Moon, for example, and the urgent machinery of epic opener Art of Almost.

An odd sense of persistence took hold as the good bits started to sink in.  I still wasn’t enraptured with the album, but there was something which kept me going back.  And for all I am still not enraptured with the album, I am really glad I have spent the time getting to know it better.  Some of this is absolutely brilliant. The aforementioned Black Moon, for example, as well as the absolutely beautiful, piano-led, twelve-minute closer One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend), which might be one of the best songs they’ve ever written.

In between there are moments where the band recapture their old sprightliness, with songs which seem to be an odd mish-mash of YHF/AGIB era prog experimentalism and the more recent classic rock stodge, and yet sound oddly like they could almost be on Summerteeth.  And while they are good, and there are just enough of them to make this album a good listen, it is those two sad songs I just mentioned which make me glad I made the time to listen to this album as much as I did.  They are worth the price of admission alone.

Wilco – Black Moon

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wilco – Born Alone

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

The above photo is of the Palm House in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens, and was taken and passed on to me by Dylan, of Blueback Hotrod legend.  And given that the weather outside is all kinds of shit I thought there would be a sort of bitter irony in using it today.  See – that’s how nice Edinburgh can be, so what the fuck is this pissing rain all about?

Anyhow, traditional British whingeing aside, it’s going to be a pretty bloody mental week this week. Thursday is going to be a particular swine, what with the awesome David Dondero going up against the Fruit Tree Foundation night in Leith, as well as the Travelling Band/Jonnie Common show at the Electric Circus.  Then it’s Oxjam takeover time on Friday.  Then Rob St. John’s album launch on Saturday.  Fucking hell, I’m going to have a liver like a cricket ball  by Sunday.

Wednesday 19th October 2011: This is Music presents Denis Jones & Adam Stafford at Sneaky Pete’s.

My pal Howard, who runs Humble Soul Records down in Manchester, absolutely raves about Denis Jones, as does Jonnie Common, and I can’t imagine two people whose recommendations I would take more seriously.  Apparently Mr. Jones does a lot of looped vocal stuff, but everyone who has told me about it has qualified that with ‘yeah, but it’s nothing like you’d expect’.  Intriguing.

Denis Jones – Elvis

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thursday 20th October 2011: David Dondero at the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

David Dondero is kind of under the radar, I suppose, but from the relatively little I know about him, he can be fucking spectacular.  Rothko Chapel was one of my songs of the year a couple of years ago, and his sparse, acoustic Americana is really gorgeous.

David Dondero – Rothko Chapel

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thursday 20th October 2011: The Fruit Tree Foundation presents James Yorkston, Rod Jones & Withered Hand at Nobles, Leith.

The Fruit Tree Foundation was set up by former Idlewild gentleman Rod Jones and former Delgado Emma Pollock to raise awareness for the Mental Health Foundation. My personal knowledge is a little sketchy, but I think musicians have volunteered to act as mentors for young songwriters, and together to create new music, and I think it is this which will be performed in Nobles on Thursday. Given the calibre of the musicians involved, it should be really good.

Thursday 20th October 2011: The Travelling Band & Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.

Jonnie Common actually worked on a track by Adam Gorman of the Travelling Band for his recent Deskjob project, so this pairing makes plenty of sense from that perspective.  As to how the rousing Americana of the band and Jonnie’s idiosyncratic electropop will go together musically, erm… well, remains to be seen.

Adam P. Gorman – Hitchhiker (from Jonnie Common’s Deskjob)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Friday 21st October 2011: Oxjam Edinburgh Takeover (Facebook link).

This is a beast of an event, with gigs happening at the Electric Circus, Cabaret Voltaire, Sneaky Pete’s, The Banshee Labyrinth and the (recently resurrected) Left Banke.  The full list of bands thus far confirmed as playing is as follows: As In Bear, Black International, Broken Records (solo), Citizens, Dead Boy Robotics, Endor, Esperi, FOUND, French Wives, i build collapsible mountains, The Last Battle, Letters, Loch Awe, The Machine Room, Meursault, PAWS, Sebastian Dangerfield, The Spook School, Trapped in Kansas, Trapped Mice, Vasquez and Verse Metrics.  It’s going to be a beast of a night, I suspect, but you’re own your own with this one, I am not digging out links for all those bands, nor attempting to describe them.  Just go.

Saturday 22nd October 2011: Rob St. John album launch with Meursault, eagleowl & Viking Moses at Pilrig St. Paul’s.

Personally, I think this is damned close to being the lineup of the year.  I’d like to see anyone else top it, in any case.  This is also, the header implies, the launch show for Rob St. John’s gorgeous debut album Weald, out on 12″ gatefold vinyl at the end of November. We have partnered with John Truckasaurus to add Viking Moses to a bill already bursting with goodness. Tickets are available at Avalanche Records and online, here.

Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb by Song, by Toad

Saturday 22nd October 2011: Patrick Wolf at the Liquid Room.

Alright, alright, a few of you might well raise an eyebrow at this one, but I remember when Patrick Wolf first broke through.  His brand of flamboyant, baroque pop was a bit over the top perhaps, but it certainly had a certain element of fascination.  So I may of course be personally endorsing Rob St. John’s album launch, but this one still kinda caught my eye.

Johnny Lynch very kindly suggested that I put together the bill for an all day hangover-buster/refueller the day after the Fence Collective’s Hott Loggz! Festival (see, Hott Toadzz – get it? get it?).

So, I have compiled a collection of the very finest Song, by Toad Records bands, as well as a couple of Toad Pals, and Johnny has arranged for us to use the Hew Scott hall from 2pm to 10pm, to allow those who have to be at work on the Monday to get back to their various homes.

There will be a bar in the room, and bangers and mash available upstairs at the AIA Hall, and a better way to spend a Sunday wasting time and talking pish I cannot imagine.

Tickets will be a fiver, and will be available on the door.