Given that, for all my ranting, no-one really cares what I think about anything, I may have been a little careless in Brighton when I was talking at The Great Escape.  I was on a panel about new broadcasting models, which discussed internet radio, podcasting and stuff like that, as well as, belatedly, streaming, algorithm-based services like last.fm and Pandora.

When asked about these services I said “As far as I am concerned, last.fm and Pandora are fucking pointless.” It’s needlessly provocatively-phrased, I suppose, but not far from the truth when it comes to my own personal opinion.  But of course, that’s the pull-quote everyone seems to have taken from the panel, and it appeared in Wired as well as last.fm’s own blog, where they have a few digs back at me.

Now, to be absolutely fair, if last.fm had called labels, music blogs or podcasts ‘fucking pointless’ then I imagine I’d be bristling with indignation myself, so I can understand them being a bit irritated, but there are a couple of misconceptions as to what I was actually trying to say that I reckon I should try and clear up.

Firstly, I was not trying to express a general truth, more a personal opinion.  I am well aware that this kind of service is doing very, very well, and that plenty of people find a lot in last.fm and Pandora to love.  I also agree with some of the points made by last.fm about the market share that they are capturing, although funnily enough the last time I worked in an office we tried using last.fm as a radio station for a while and it didn’t prove very popular.  Nevertheless, I can easily see how it would suit office environments perfectly.

Also, if you aren’t relentlessly wading through a tidal wave of new music as I am, I can also easily see how saying ‘I like The National and Smog’ and then being recommended, say, Kurt Vile, would be a very welcome introduction.  As they point out as well, last.fm introduces people to a significant amount of music from ‘the long tail’, so they are also helping people discover relatively unknown bands, who they might not necessarily happen across otherwise.  This is all good.  I applaud this, and I genuinely think the service they provide makes a lot of sense, and I think it is a/ a very good thing, and b/ something a lot of people would be into (as they clearly are). Read the rest of this entry »

The Canadians win at music. We went to three things at the Canadian showcase: Hooded Fang (above), Slow Down Molasses, and Hot Panda, and all three were fucking great.  I know it’s a cliché to say that Canadians seem to be disproportionately good at music, but on this weekend’s evidence, they just are.  Born Gold to follow later tonight!

Brighton is an odd place. Seemingly designed around the car, with weird, three-lane roads running right through the middle of town and along the waterfront, and with the place centred on a series of huge roundabouts.  Inbetween all these incongruously large roads (particularly for a relatively small town), however, are rabbit warrens of tiny streets.  So you get used to ambling lazily around, and then IMMINENT DEATH, IMMINENT DEATH!

People are really, really nice.  I keep expecting to meet these music industry twats you hear so much about, and I still haven’t found them.  I know at our level of things you aren’t likely to meet a lot of industry twats, because they’re all chasing the money farther up the ladder, but this is a really big festival and everyone has been incredible.

Doing a seminar after three or four pints is a bad idea. I was on a panel about running independent labels, and I’d had a few pints.  So needless to say I talked way, way too much, swore like an angry sailor and contradicted everyone.  The one the next day about podcasts and alternative broadcasting was done stone-cold sober (well, it was at 11:30 in the morning) and was far more lucid and less annoying.

Buzz is an unpredictable beast. Fear of Men are pretty fucking buzzy band, to the best of my knowledge, but their set at the Amazing Radio thing was woefully under-attended. They were really good too, as were PINS, who played after them.  PINS are pretty damn buzzy themselves for such a new band (12,000 Soundcloud plays on one song), and while it was marginally busier for them, I was still surprised at the relatively modest turnout.  Mind you, I suppose the Amazing Radio showcase, whilst it had pretty much the best lineup of the whole festival, wasn’t listed in the official brochure, so maybe folk just didn’t know.

Jellied Eels are a fucking abomination. They just are.  Never eat them.  Ever.

I can be a right tedious cunt when drunk. I met loads of people at the end of the day yesterday, after a whole day of drinking.  Bad idea. Apologies are almost certainly due to Dani from Amazing Radio, Jake from Basement Fever, Matthew from the Pigeon Post, the drummer from PINS, most of Fear of Men, and that random guy who I thought was trying to start a fight with me, until he pointed out that it was actually me who had started it.

New music festivals are way, way better than music festivals. If The Great Escape ever gets big enough that they feel obliged to import shit headline bands to draw in the masses, then it will be a real shame.  Alright, they did have Gaz Coombes, Maximo Park, Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists on the bill, which was pretty fucking mystifying, but for the most part, these are all new and under the radar bands, and that made the whole thing far more fun.  Have you seen the lineup for Reading and Leeds this year?  Exactly.

Some of the venues are great, but some are atrocious. The Canadian stuff was help in the Blind Tiger, which was a great place.  Amazing Radio, on the other hand, had to make do with downstairs at the Queen’s Hotel, which was just weird, having all these bands play on conference centre carpet.  All we needed was a plate of little triangular sandwiches and a variety of biscuits and the oddness would have been complete.

I want to live somewhere with a beach.  And pubs. Pubs on the beach. The sun came out on Friday, and we had beer and grilled sardines on the beach. It. Was. Awesome.

People have sort of heard of Song, by Toad. Which is nice.  We met loads of ‘industry people’ who it seemed had actually heard of us, were aware of what we are doing, and seemed to like it.  This was a bit of a surprise, to be honest.

Be careful when crossing the road.  I think the people of Brighton actively try and run folk over.

Three days is about the limit. At SXSW this year, I hit it so hard during Interactive that I couldn’t really face seeing much during the music festival.  This is a colossal waste of time and money, so I am glad I managed to get out to see so much this time.  Credit must go to Ian as well, who rather bafflingly chose to get up incredibly early every day, and phoned to hassle me before noon and force me to come out to see things.

I was serious about the jellied eels.  Honestly, just don’t.  Horrendous things.

I struggle enough to put on gigs in a venue with a PA, a professional sound engineer and a bartender, so I am nothing short of in awe of the kind of madness it would take to put on a whole festival.  That’s just what my pal Baz has done though.  Most of the time he puts on gigs in Wigan (and I complain about Edinburgh being a tough sell!) but last Summer he started The Imploding Inevitable Festival up in the Lake District.

The Lake District is one of the most beautiful parts of the UK, in my opinion, and I used to go up there quite a lot when I was living in Manchester.  I didn’t go last year, but I will be there in June this time around because I am DJing at the festival this year.  Don’t worry though, Toad heroes Jonnie Common, The Pictish Trail and Rob St. John will all be playing too, so you won’t just be stuck up a mountain with just me, my record collection and no way to escape.

The Imploding Inevitable also chimes nicely with my new policy of boycotting the tedious identikit festivals you tend to find once the attendance goes much into the thousands.  I just prefer these smaller ones, frankly.  And you can buy tickets here if you so choose, and so choose you bloody well should.

 I know it tends to happen a couple of times a year, when you suddenly stop and think ‘Christ, is it May already’ but umm… well, fuck, May?  Already?  How the hell did that happen?

It’s been an amazingly busy year so far, and recently I have had so much stuff going on even on the weekends – be it gigs, recording, trips to various events and so on, that even sticking to the podcast schedule has been an enormous challenge.

It’s odd to think that a lot of the things I am doing for the blog seem to get in the way of me actually writing it, but that is the case at the moment. Going down to The Great Escape this week, for example, is mostly blog-related in that I’m on a panel about new broadcasting models and podcasts, and another about running DIY record labels, but it is likely to play havoc with the posting on the site.

Also, blogging is itself changing as well.  A lot of the music chatter I find myself engaged in is finding an outlet on my Tumblr site and through Twitter as well, so suddenly my insistence that the entire internet agree with me about music is being spread across those two forms of social media, as well as Facebook, this site, the record label and the now-regular gigs we host.  And I don’t even make Spotify playlists yet, or use This is My Jam.  It means Song, by Toad is certainly changing, but I am buggered if I know what it is turning into.

I suppose it will always be little more than a slightly different incarnation of the same thing: me going on and on and on about music I like, so no real change, if you look at it sensibly.  But the new formats and new channels are kind of fascinating, in that very twenty-first century way: it’s obvious that things are changing, but not particularly obvious how.

The same bloggers who once had journalists cursing at the general public’s lack of appetite for thoughtful, intelligent writing, are now making the very same complaints themselves, as short-form, quickfire media like Tumblr and Twitter become more prominent.  I am not sure how much I agree with them, though. I mean, we all have our natural formats in which we are the most comfortable communicating, but a good writer should be a good writer, be it over ten paragraphs or 140 characters. I certainly find a lot of merit in all these new formats, but I am not always entirely certain what content I think belongs on the Tumblr site, say, instead of this one.

The reason I am going on about this at such length is partly because there is bugger all happening in Edinburgh this week, as far as I can see, in terms of live music, so I started a post and then found I had nothing to put in it.  And also, as I mentioned, I am about to start redesigning the site, to make sure the gigs are better represented, to make sure the label is more prominent, and to better integrate Twitter and Tumblr.

It’s a bit of a tricky task this time around.  The last time we redesigned the site was about three years ago or so, and back then it was simple: blog + label.  Now there is so much more going on, and frankly I am not sure where I should best be placing the emphasis.  It’s interesting though.  So yes, just warning you.  You might see some more changes around here soon.  I’ve absolutely no fucking idea what kind of changes, but definitely changes!

[Before anyone reads this and thinks I am a total dick, I promise to write the same email from the other perspective next week, because whilst I do get inundated with incoming PR for the blog, I also have to send out lots of PR material myself, for the label, so I do know how frustrating it is for both sides, and promise to make this an even-handed whinge.]

PR is, I think it’s fair to say, just about the closest you get at this level of the music industry to the grasping of nettles.

It’s something you have to do, you have to do it well, and it is almost impossible to get right.  I have the misfortune of having to, erm, grasp this nettle at both ends as well, because not only am I subject to a flood of PR emails and press releases from people wanting coverage on the blog, but of course I also have to write all the stuff we send out for Song, by Toad Records as well.

I don’t really know where to start on this one, because it was receiving all the promo emails for the blog which pretty much provided the grounding for me to write my own for Song, by Toad Records when the time came, and yet I am meaner about PR people than pretty much anyone else in the music industry.

There’s a simple reason for this of course, and that is that a worryingly large percentage of them seem to be complete fucking idiots.

For example, when I first started getting promo emails from Sony they were so threatening about what I could and couldn’t do with the music they were sending me that I was actually too scared to even download it in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a continuation of this thread from Wednesday at Wide Days, to update with a little information about the A&R seminar, which I couldn’t very well write about at the time, because I was on it, talking shite in my usual way.

Modern A&R – How is talent developed and nurtured?

Alex Knight – Fatcat, Ellie Giles – Jigsaw Management, Pip Newby – Friends vs Records/PIAS, Stewart Henderson – Chemikal Underground Records, Matthew Young – Song, by Toad Records.

I will be writing about this a little differently from the ‘one thing after another’ way I rattled off the previous sessions on Wednesday, for obvious enough reasons, but there are still some good points which I think might be interesting to pass on.

Roughly speaking, I think it’s fair to say that A&R has probably not changed all that much at indie level.  Both Stewart and Alex confirmed that they are given a healthy cushion by their back-catalogues, and that allows them to sign who they want to sign, with little concern for the commercial potential or nous of the band.

Alex said that the main driver for Fatcat was to find something which sounded either different from anything anyone else was doing, or was just tremendous fun, and Stewart said that Chemikal, although they had chased hits around the turn of the millennium, had pretty much given up on that altogether now.

From my own perspective I found their chat interesting because we are a little different.  We actually are not insulated by a healthy back catalogue, and for a while we operated on the level that a lot of small indies do: they are run by amateurs and have no profit-making prerogative and therefore can basically release what-the-fuck-ever they want.  For us that’s changed a little now, in the sense that some releases have gone well and others not so well, but from now on we will pretty much use three rules to determine if we want to work with a band or not:

1. Do we love the music?  This is still the best commercial strategy I can think of.  If I start second-guessing myself on the basis of which band will and will not sell a lot of records, then I will start making stupid decisions and could well end up releasing music I am not that keen on, with no real sense that I would be very good at ‘picking hits’ in the first place.  So we’ll stick with having to love it ourselves, and assume that our taste is mainstream enough that in general we will find enough people to agree with us.

2. Do we like and trust the band personally.  This one is down to the fact that most of our bands end up crashing at our house at some point, or coming round for dinner or getting pished in the back garden when the sun’s out and, frankly, I don’t want to do this kind of stuff with people I don’t like.  And also, this industry means a lot of work for very little reward, and frankly I am happy to do that if I like the person I am doing it for and want to do my best for them, but it becomes very hard indeed if they are cocky wankers or ungrateful cunts.

3. Are they going to match the work we put in with effort and care of their own? I have been out of profitable work for nearly two years now, and it is getting to the stage now where I have to justify that decision, at least a bit.  We don’t need to make much money, per se, but a couple more projects which are in the black, even if only marginally, would be good.  And, if a band aren’t selling any records, which is absolutely fine by us, then they need to at least match the level of intensity and effort I will put in, otherwise I will slowly but surely begin to feel like a bit of a schmuck.  Which isn’t nice.

Anyhow, Toad Manifesto aside, Pip and Ellie approached matters from more of a major label standpoint.  Apparently major labels are backing off a little from plucking unknown bands out of nowhere, and I suppose the two most eminently mockable examples of that in Scotland recently are the likes of Make Model and Kassidy who ended up with massive advances thrown at them before they really even had an audience – and look where that got everyone involved.

I know it’s easy to point and laugh in these situations, but really the labels themselves should have know better: why were they signing bands without a fanbase to speak of or even any real songs?  More recently we seem to be seeing situations where bands are allowed to prove themselves at the indie  level (even if those indies are wholly or partly owned by, or in some cases funded by, the majors. Then, once they’ve demonstrated that they can sell records and fill venues, they get snapped up by a major who can throw some financial heft behind them and help them make a bigger breakthrough.

Where the majors do still have confidence, however, is with pop acts.  I know all of this is basically pop music, but you know what I mean: a great vocalist with some good lines or a couple of lads who make good hooks but can’t really sing tend to be picked up by managers or major label A&Rs (and apparently the majors now deal with managers far more than bands these days) who put them together with the right producer, maybe a good vocalist or whatever it is they happen to be missing and then get them to ‘write a hit’.

This happens a lot, even with the bands that get to that stage, and it’s fair enough, I think.  The kind of sums being invested at that level really do mean that you have a commercial obligation, and I think it would be ridiculous to claim that it should be ‘all about the art’ when this much money is involved.  If you want it to be all about the art, then you have to accept that such sums can’t really be justifiably risked.

Finally, I think there were a few general points to be made which apply across the board. In general everyone on the panel said that the most important thing was to find someone you trust.  Again, there are no guarantees in this business, and you really need to make sure that rather than just being flattered that any old label or manager or A&R has taken an interest.

I added this little caveat as well: make sure you have a really good idea of what kind of a band you are, and who it would and wouldn’t be appropriate for you to be working with. A major label kiddie-pop hit factory is not going to be much use to anyone reading this blog, but still if Sony got in touch, most bands would bite their hand off, and that can be suicidal.  Alternatively, there are bands with bigger ambitions who would be totally unsuitable for smaller labels who simply don’t have the resources to get them where they want or need to be.

So be careful, and make sure you know who you are as a band, you’re working with someone appropriate, and that you genuinely, sincerely trust them.

And that, I think, was just about that.  Then we all got very, very drunk.

Afternoon troops, seeing as I am at the Wide Days conference (come along if you’re in Edinburgh, it’s worth it, I promise) it is going to be pretty much impossible to write about music today, so I thought I would talk about some of the sessions going on and you can… umm… well, do as you please with it.  This is the internets after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Caring about music is nice, but it’s pretty easy.  We like stuff, we don’t like stuff, we grievously insult people with different opinions from ourselves… the usual tedious carping.

However, once a year we get the chance to do something a little bit more, and to actually make a bit of a contribution to the world: Mrs Toad organises the Stockbridge collection for the RNLI – the lifeboats for you acronymophobes – and on Saturday 28th April we will be asking you for a little help.

Every year we collect for the RNLI between 10am and 4pm here in Stockbridge and every year our friends and various music allies turn out to help us.  We are very grateful for the help, and once again this year we will be asking for it.  Usually the incentives we offer involve roast lamb and plenty of wine, but this year we can add another gentle inducement:

On the evening of the 28th April Edinburgh’s sonic alchemists The Leg will be launching their new album An Eagle to Saturn at a mystery venue in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and if you choose to be so nice as to help us collect for the lifeboats beforehand then Mrs. Toad and I will pay for your ticket to the album launch show.  As well as plying you with roast meat and wine.

So in other words, if you don’t turn up and help out, you must be a pretty dismal sort of fucker; shame on you. Tickets for The Leg album launch can be bought in person from me, from the band, or from Avalanche Records in the Grassmarket.

 In nine days the results of hours of corrupt dealing, favouritism and blinkered cultural ignorance will be announced in the form of the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) award longlist.

Needless to say, whatever ends up being on it, the longlist will be Wrong and will provide clear evidence of the biases towards something or other inherent in Scottish music, and the fact that my favourite album is not on it just goes to show how utterly corrupt these awards ceremonies are.

I mean, there will inevitably be lots of willfully obscure rubbish on there just to prove how eclectic and intellectual the judges tastes are, when the stuff I like most has sold way more records and achieved far more than those pretentious, hipster wank-bands ever have.

And having sold way more records will be the perfect demonstration of the self-evident superiority of my own suggestions, except in cases when I am talking about records which have sold more than my own choices.  Then the record sales argument automatically reverses and the inferior sales of my preferences becomes instantly indicative of the fact that I care way more about music than them and am not just a populist ignoramus.

And of course, this being Scotland, there will be the inevitable Central Belt/Glasgow/Byres Road bias fun to be had, primarily because not enough of my fucking friends will be nominated.  And really, the only possible excuse for that has to be bias, because there’s no way at all that my friends’ albums will be overlooked because everyone else thinks they’re shit, it will be because the idiots who make these decisions never stray away from the ABC and King Tut’s Hoo-Hah Hut. And inevitably that attitude will result in the fantastic Loanhead Ethiopian-dub-garage scene being overlooked*, which just goes to show how meaningless these awards really are.

Which brings me on to another grotesque unfairness that this will inevitably embody: the fucking in-crowds.  Everyone knows that the only people who get ahead in music are those with the most pals.  Now, you might suggest that because people only tend to go to music which they actually enjoy, then the bands they inevitably get to know the best are the ones they like the most, but that would make you a naive rube, because it’s obviously down to some shadowy clique of which I am not a member because I obviously have way too much integrity for that sort of thing. Besides, I like to tell it how it is, and these people just can’t handle that.

And of course if you don’t have all the right friends then of course you can always use money to rig it.  Even though this award doesn’t actually cost anything at all to enter we all know how this stuff works, of course.  Some shadowy and utterly ill-defined interrelation of mutually supportive commercial interests means that the empty-pocketed people – the ones with the real artistic integrity, the ones who are just doing it for the love of music, unlike those other shallow, careerist douchebags – can’t ever compete with the people who basically own this award and were always going to make sure they won anyway.

And now that we know the list is hopelessly biased, corrupt and shows exceptionally poor judgement, I think it’s time to sit back and see who actually gets nominated. And that’s in about nine days’ time, folks.  See you then.

*Warning, I may have stolen this joke from someone on Facebook.  I’m denying it, myself, but there have been allegations.  Strenuous allegations.

As you might know, I have spent the last three days or so down in London, partly to see Meursault play at the Old Blue Last on Tuesday, partly to meet some music industry people for various reasons and partly to catch up with a couple of old friends.

I used to live down there, as you probably also know, but only for about three or four years, and I moved up to Scotland about seven years ago now.  Nevertheless it’s amazing how much affection I still retain for London, and it was really nice to be back, even if just for a little while.

There’s an odd sort of anti-London sentiment in a lot of people in Edinburgh, particularly amongst white collar workers, which I always found a little pathetic when I first started coming up here to visit Mrs. Toad.  I guess a lot of people go down South, either don’t like it very much or don’t achieve what they wanted to achieve, and end up coming back feeling a little as if they have failed and end up resenting London for it.

Personally, I love Edinburgh, and I could well see why anyone would choose to live here over London, but the two places are so different I always found the competitive comparisons a little pointless. I definitely think you need a certain mentality to enjoy a place as crowded, as busy and as relentless as London, but I always found it pretty easy to ignore the hurly-burly and find my own peace and quiet even in such a crowded city.

By coincidence, one of the friends I was supposed to meet yesterday couldn’t make it, so I had four or five hours to myself, just wandering around on a gloriously sunny day and exploring some of my old haunts.

I used to get quite a lot of time to myself when I lived down there as well, because when Mrs. Toad and I were courting she lived up in Edinburgh, so we only saw one another every other weekend.  That meant that every second weekend I didn’t really have that much to do, and I would often walk along the South Bank, dodge the hordes around the wheel and the galleries, and just enjoy watching the river.

I lived on the Thames at the time, on a canal boat moored at Nine Elms Pier, so the river was a huge part of my relationship with the city.  Yesterday, with nothing much on, I wandered back down to the pier to see what had changed and watch the new residents pottering about on their boats the way we did when we lived there.

It was odd looking at the boat I used to own, and the rather drastic modifications which have been made since, as well as the Charles William, another boat I lived on for a bit, but with new owners eyeing me rather distrustfully as I stood up on the riverside walkway and just absorbed the sights of the pier and the river for a while.  Mrs. Toad and I built our relationship while I was living on that boat, and we already knew we were in it for keeps even at that early stage, so it was both strange and nice to see it again.

The pace of development around there was a bit shocking though, with both the New Covent Garden Market and the industrial estate the pier backed onto both being razed to the ground to make way for massive, ugly glass behemoths full of over-priced flats.

So after that I decided to wander along the river towards the Southbank Centre where I was meeting another pal later.  Along the way I stopped for an hour at one of the tapas places under the railway arches at Vauxhall – a place I love because of their bloody brilliant octopus in white wine, with paprika and rock salt.  Vauxhall is a funny place actually, with huge Portuguese and gay populations, as well as the MI5 building just by the bridge, which makes for an odd mix of people at the various cafes under the arches.

After that I completed my wander along the river at a leisurely pace.  A very leisurely pace. Particularly when I have time on my hands I must have just about the slowest amble of pretty much anyone I know, and that’s even more obvious on the South bank of the Thames around rush hour, with commuters barging along, tourists scuttling about, an infestation of joggers desperately trying to quash their self-loathing for a couple of hours, and cyclists all over the bloody place.

It can be fun to be the only person not in any kind of a hurry in the midst of busy people though; a sort of smug serenity can descend over you, which I kind of like.  Particularly when I am sat at my desk, I am so bombarded with emails and obligations that any amount of time wasted sitting out in the garden in the sun comes laced with guilt, but on this occasion I genuinely had no need to make excuses – I had hours to kill and no way to make them productive, so I was able to truly enjoy purposelessness for the first time in ages.

And that brings me onto the one thing I always enjoyed the most about London: it’s just so fucking big.  I have always lived in cities, so for all I enjoy the countryside a great deal, I am not someone who yearns to get away from the masses. In fact just the opposite: I tend to feel most comfortable with big, sprawling, messy city life.

The reason for this is related to how peaceful my day was yesterday: in cities that big no-one knows who you are, and no-one cares at all.  There’s an odd kind of privacy in that.  If anything makes me feel overwhelmed by modern life it is not all the shit happening everywhere, it’s the constant awareness of the needs and requirements of other people, and that constantly present sense of obligation in the back of your mind.

In London, however, where the antithesis of the Cheers theme song is true and nobody knows your name, I tend to find it easy enough to find isolation and peace, even amongst millions of people. And it is a wonderful treat, to be able to sit somewhere on a bench for an hour, watch the river go by and do not one single thing.  Nothing.  No phone shit because my battery was dying and I needed it to meet up with friends later, no checking emails, not even any sense of skiving because I couldn’t have done any work if I’d wanted to.  Just a few hours of peace, watching the sun go down over the Thames, and total and utter anonymity.

With that kind of peace and quiet your mind wanders, and I found myself remembering all the wonderful times Mrs. Toad and I had spent in the city, walking back along the river from Borough Market to cook food together, and perhaps even more lovely was this: I was reminded of the inbetween weekends, when we didn’t see each other, and I would often just walk along the banks of the river by myself and sit quietly, enjoying that incredible feeling you get when even a few dates into a relationship you know with absolute certainty that you have found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Mrs. Toad was actually in American on business while I was down in London, and we may have been apart again, but it was actually quite a romantic couple of days.  In a slightly strange way.