Song, by Toad

Archive for the Rambling category

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I’ve Become a Much Better Person Recently

 I think that the readers of this website will be more aware than most of the direct correlation between the obscurity of the music they listen to and the overall quality of a person’s character.  In fact, never mind correlation, I think it’s fair to say that there is almost certainly a direct causal link.

No one can argue, surely, that ceasing to listen to chart music will improve your soul – in much the same way that no longer reading the NME will liberate your brain and give you a wonderful feeling of clarity and, more importantly, self-respect.

So given that your fundamental worth as a human being can be directly measured by the obscurity of your music collection I was horrified to plug my last.fm profile into the Obscurometer and discover that my hipster score was a measly 81.2%.  81.2% for fuck’s sake?  That means that 18.8% of last.fm users are BETTER THAN ME!  Nooooooo, this cannot possibly be true!

Now, last.fm can be a truly treacherous bastard, telling the world all sorts of dirty little secrets about your secret Alison Moyet evenings, and extensive collection of K.T. Tunstall b-sides.  Or, even worse, having written the review this afternoon, last.fm now knows I have actually listened to that fucking Lana Del Rey album, and Christ on a fucking bike, who knows who it might tell!

Anyhow, the Obscurometer can give you a hipster self-respect score for all the the listening intervals last.fm records.  Now, I’m getting better and better at this shit, so I figured that even if I had let myself down in the past, the last twelve months should represent a pretty decent improvement in my right to a sense of social superiority.

Tragically, even though I thought I would have known better since well before 2011, my score was still that devastatingly unimpressive 83.6%.  An improvement, but not very impressive, as I’m sure you’ll admit.  Despite cleverly listening to bands like Benjamin Shaw and Death Songs, with artistic validity ratings of 93.3% and 94.9% respectively, I undermined my best efforts by foolishly playing music by the crushingly well-known likes of Wilco (37.2%) and The Mountain Goats (49.4%).

Anyway, I may not have been able to acknowledge it to myself, but clearly my instincts told me something had to change, and it seems that thankfully some inner sense of self-preservation has restrained my urge to listen to whatever that damn hell I want, in favour of stuff other people will never have heard of and which therefore reassures me that I am better than them.

By six months ago, a mere year after giving up my tragically unhip grownup job, I seemed to be getting the hang of this thing, improving my score from the frankly embarrassing initial 81.2%, through the improved but nevertheless not particularly impressive 83.6% percent of a year ago, to the increasingly swagger-worthy 85.4%.

Anyhow, whilst you can’t deny that those are some pretty impressive numbers, they are nothing compared to where I am now.  Now, whilst 85.4% would probably and rightly intimidate most people, by the time we look at my score for the last three months, I am at the frankly knicker-elastic-snapping 90.5% personal validity score.  I can look down down my nose with confidence at all but the most determinedly obscure of last.fm’s users.

Looking at those listening habits, you can see a couple of key influences, thrusting me to the forefront of cultural value ratings.  Firstly, listening only to Song, by Toad Records bands.  Being a woefully unsuccessful record label is of course incredibly cool, seeing as if lots of people like your music, then you are almost certainly a populist sellout who most self-respecting hipsters stopped liking after their first couple of singles three years ago.

However, that is still only good enough for a 90.5% personal worth score.  By the last week, however, I am clearly becoming seriously awesome.  How awesome, I hear you ask?  I’ll tell you: ninety-fucking-six point two fucking percent.  Yep, 96.2.  That’s seriously fucking awesome.  That’s like a black fucking belt in hipsterism, that is.  Motherfucker, if you thought I was pretty damn worthwhile before, I am now undeniably fucking amazing – better than 96.2% of last.fm users, who are already mostly hipsters to begin with.

The key (if you look at what has been scrobbled for the last week – listening to the new Jesus H. Foxx album, the new album by The Leg and the mixes for our as yet unreleased split 12″) is very clearly to listen to music so fucking cool that it hasn’t even been released yet.  In fact, you should probably listen to unreleased music by bands who don’t actually exist yet, which is what I will be endeavouring to do as I push on for that magic 100% score. Finding their recordings might prove a challenge though, because if I thought Googling Girls’ debut album (called Girls) was a challenge, imagine how hard finding a band who don’t actually have a name yet would be.

Anyhow, I think from studying the results of the Obscurometer, we can divine a clear way forward for both myself and Song, by Toad Records in future: never actually release any of our albums, thus instantly making us the coolest record label in the world, and meaning that I will simultaneously win the Gold Medal Super Hipster Prize for listening to more of the most obscure music than anyone anywhere ever!

And then I will turn off the internet and we can all go and read a book for a bit instead.

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HMV Really is Fucked Isn’t It

Apart from the number of my friends who work there, it’s difficult to feel any real sympathy for the lumbering dinosaur that is HMV.  Nevertheless, I do find the company’s struggles quite fascinating, and they really do seem to be on death’s door at the moment.

Generally when I end up discussing this with anyone it tends to be solely within the context of music retail.  What will the slow death of HMV do for smaller independent shops?  What will it do for music sales when the only remaining large high street retailer finally vanishes?

These are valid and interesting questions of course, but they tend to lead to quite narrow discussions about what little remains of their business model.  HMV is struggling not just because music retail is fucked, but because the whole retail sector is in turmoil.  In the wake of the disruption caused by the internet, out of town aircraft hanger superstores seem to be fine and high-end boutique retailers seem to be fine, but HMV is neither of these things, so it is facing difficulties both by virtue of its place within the retail environment, as well as the more sector-specific issues caused by the fact that the selling of mp3s quite simply makes shops redundant in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

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What the Cock and Balls is this Fucking Abomination?

 Jesus ear-fucking Christ this fucking hurts to listen to.

The Willow Garden is a song I first came across as a b-side to Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I didn’t know it was a traditional song at that point, but I didn’t care where it came from.  I didn’t even know who Warren Ellis was, but the fiddle playing on the song was some of the best I had (and still have) ever heard.

It’s amazing – managing to sound mournful, morbid and creepy all together.  Like a lot of Warren Ellis’ stuff it is really quite horrible and utterly beautiful at the same time

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Willow Garden

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Anyhow, at some point I twigged that it was actually a traditional tune, probably when I was browsing through eMusic’s amazing collection of stuff from Smithsonian Folkways.  This kind of horribly macabre tune suits that style perfectly.  Nothing quite seems to deliver the gleeful brutality of old folk and fairy tales quite like the screech of those pre-war folk voices, and the harsh, sawed violin which tends to accompany them. It fits well with Ellis’s approach to the violin as well actually, and to The Bad Seeds’ approach to folk songs and murder ballads: they revel in the discord, the casual malice, the horror, the almost cartoonish evil of it all.

Hobart Smith & Texas Gladden – Down in the Willow Garden

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One thing a lot of this old music doesn’t fit too well with, however, is soft pop.  Sam Amidon, for example, is hardly hard on the ears, but his voice has character, and where Cave and the like bring cheerful brutality, Amidon brings a lovely sense of empathetic sadness.  The intensity of the emotion is still there of course, and it is always a rather grim emotion to embrace.

I have heard these songs sung with a degree of beauty however, and sometimes it works.  Kind of.  Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes snuck a couple of covers onto MySpace a few years back under the name White Antelope.  They were simple recordings, and although they were pretty unembellished I really quite liked them.  I find his songwriting rather boring, I have to say, but he has a lovely voice and I really enjoyed hearing his versions of songs like Silver Dagger, Wild Mountain Thyme and things like that.

White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme

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And then this fucking happened.  Jesus donkey-fucking Christ, what an awful, awful thing to have heard.  I should have known better, frankly.  It was fucking stupid of me to click on the link anyway, to be honest, but like a Presbyterian surfing child porn on the internet all day, I knew just what I was going to get and a large part of me was just dying feel the outrage.

Bon Iver’s first album For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t too bad.  It had a couple of nice tunes, and the minimal arrangements suited his vocal delivery, making it seem ghostly rather than just weak.  The new album was a fucking awful soft-pop horrorshow though.  The lush, utterly objectionable arrangements were abysmal enough in themselves, but they made his voice turn from lip-wobbling emotion to a sort of pathetic, needy bleat.  And now he’s taken to giving The Willow Garden the mother of all public shamings with this dreadful, wan, weak, lifeless version.

Is it fair to call the Chieftans the Elton fucking John of folk music, given the sheer number of people they’ve collaborated with?  I know that collaboration and cover versions are a central part of the folk tradition, but honest to God I wish there was some way I could unhear this fucking song.  And to make matters worse, I keep playing it again and again, just to remind myself that I am not exaggerating the scale of the horror.  And if you’ve got the Bad Seeds’ version, and that gorgeous old version by Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden in your head already, it sounds even more utterly abominable by comparison.  Sing with some fucking spirit man.  Sing as if something, anything, depended on it for the love of fucking God!

Justin fucking Vernon & the Chieftans – The Willow Garden

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I Know a Lot of You Aren’t American But SOPA Needs to be Stopped

I don’t know how to turn this site off like I am supposed to, but many internet-based companies, including the likes of Wikipedia, are staging a blackout today in protest against a bill being proposed in the States which effectively allows people to have entire websites shut down on the mere accusation of copyright infringement.  The mere accusation – not a hint of due process of law to be found.

Now, I run a record label, and we are constant victims of copyright infringement when people make our releases available for free download without our permission, and so I do think that laws need to be made to fight this, but SOPA/PIPA are most definitely not the ones to do it.

We have already seen with the DMCA the kind of incompetence and casual malice shown by the large entertainment companies who will, by dint of having teams of lawyers on the job, end up policing the internet.  They served nonsense DMCA notices against dead mp3 links, against links posted with full permission and then refused to recant once they were, after a very arduous process, shown to be in the wrong.  Now it’s not just individual pages which will be removed, but entire websites which can be eradicated from existence, again, with no right to due process of law.

More seriously than attacking mp3 blogs, people already use copyright infringement to silence political debate, with dubious political statements made on air effectively eradicated from existence by the channels which originally aired them.  And even direct quotation of someone’s statements has been attacked as copyright infringement in the past, making important political discourse potentially subject to censorship as well.

Anyhow, I know a lot of you reading this site aren’t American, so I won’t go on anymore, but this will affect you too.  However if you are American and can do something about it I urge you to do so by going either here or here to read a little more about it and then getting in touch with your state representative, which you can do here.

You do not fix a legal problem by handing over policing of the internet to Warner Brothers and fucking Sony to do as they please.

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Why Remixes Make Me Hate Music

 See that image on the right, there?  That’s the egg of what is known as a cowbird, a bird which, a little like a cuckoo, tricks other birds into raising its young and therefore is able to avoid doing any fucking work itself.

I hope you can see how I would think this a suitable image to illustrate a rant about fucking remixers.

I was actually intending to use a picture of a parasite to illustrate this particular post but, honestly, I couldn’t stomach the Google image search.  It would have more accurately illustrated how I feel though. I also did a search for ‘attention whore’, but the results were almost as unpalatable.  Perez/Paris Hilton or a fucking tapeworm, which would you rather gaze at a picture of?  You see why I went for the eggs.

To make matters even worse, as much as I have been driven to despise the epidemic of cack-handed, attention-whoring remixes which infest the fucking internet like a nasty dose of the crabs, remixes are not something I think are inherently bad.  In fact, there may not be many, but there are at least some remixes which I think are brilliant.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Recording Our New Split 12″

Man man man man man this was fun.  And it sounds fucking brilliant!

Yesterday afternoon was spent at Toad Hall recording half of the songs for the Split 12″ we’ll be releasing in roughly April or May this year.  I described this on the Song, by Toad Records 2012 podcast we posted on the weekend, and included songs by all but one of the bands (for the fourth, see this podcast).

The plan, simply enough, is to record four songs by four bands we happen to think are brilliant, and then release them on a 12″.  We’re recording most of the tracks live, a lot like the Toad Sessions, and will be releasing videos of songs which we shoot live as we record, again a lot like the Toad Sessions.  I suppose you could describe this release as being like a release of a Toad Session recording, albeit a little more polished and without the interview bits and stuff like that.

Anyhow, Manchester bands Sex Hands and Waiters came through yesterday to record their bits, Dolfinz are recording on Friday and Saturday, and then Paws, who have business in London, will be doing their songs after they play Vic Galloway’s next Electric Circus night at the end of the month.

I remember when the Cold Seeds album was finished, and when Rob, Neil and Tom Western emerged from the living room after finishing the recording for Weald – everyone was high as a kite and absolutely wired.  I’ve been the same today – absolutely unable to do anything except work on preliminary mixes of yesterday’s recording to send down to the bands for feedback.

I know the industry is full of cynicism and all sorts of shit, but making music is just plain fucking exciting!

Here are a couple of videos to let you know who I’m talking about here:

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A Little More of This, Please, and a Little Less of That

I am not doing predictions, mostly because I can’t.  I have no idea what is going to be big this year and what isn’t, and even if I think a band is going to release something amazing that probably doesn’t matter, because bands I love rarely ever get all that famous anyway.  But in any case, and in no particular order, here are some things I liked about last year, and some things I didn’t.   Some stuff I’d like to see more of and some things I am looking forward to, and some things I am not.

“Something wicked this way comes”

(And by wicked, I mean good, I hear that’s how the kids are using the term these days)

Tape labels - I know they’re a little contrived, and that tape is in many ways a shit format to release on but… I don’t know, there’s a playful, youthful energy to this stuff which I can’t help but love.

You’re shit, and you know you are - Okay, so we may have swallowed an awful lot of guff this year, but it did make me laugh how most people’s reaction to pompous, self-important garbage like (Viva) Brother was to point and laugh.

The X-Factor - you know how you all complain about that shitey bar full of guys in Ralph Lauren shirts or stupidly tight t-shirts, or girls with ironed hair in tight jeans who seem to forget that Footballers’ Wives was over fucking years ago? Well the X-Factor is a bit like this.  Yes, it’s fucking woeful, but it’s destroying the major labels, clearing the ground for the interesting indies and acting as a very helpful retard-sink for people who might otherwise be bothering us with their opinions about real music.  And for this I salute it.

Recognition for our fucking bands! – King Post Kitsch proved that even if you never play a single gig, and even if you release your album really early in the year you can still get great press and end up on loads of End of Year lists.  Lach got in every glossy music mag in the country – yes, that’s right, all of them.  The Japanese War Effort proved that even if you get almost no press, if people like your stuff enough then social networks can be just as effective, if not more so. And Rob St. John showed rather decisively that even if your PR lady craps out on you mid-campaign, if your shit is good, when it hits the fan it will go absolutely fucking everywhere.

“I’ve only got three bullets and there’s four of Motley Crue”

(If I were the grim reaper of the music world, these would be the first for the chop)

Soft pop – Right, I know we’re all trying to be awfully grown up, but describing the sort of lifeless, limp, soulless, anaesthetic musical tapioca quicksand released by the likes of Destroyer, Iron & Wine and Bon Iver this year as ‘mature’ is pretty much saying that you don’t have the courage to admit to yourself or anyone else that it’s basically just boring shit.  Just because we wanted these albums to be good doesn’t mean they were.  They are the sort of detestable eighties soft pop people you hate in eighties movies use to lure away the our hero’s beloved.  And they, not the time you drove your Chevy to the fucking levee, were the day the music died.

Lana Del Rey’s insufferable pouting - I’m not sure which gender her over-sexualised pouting or arch, faux-ingenue caricature insulted the most – it was like a small-child-with-explosive-diarrhoea-and-no-shorts-on-playing-on-a-roundabout scattergun of sexist cliches. Although I do find myself developing some pity when I see her dead behind the eyes, middle-distance stare which seems to be begging someone put her out of her ‘there’s not enough Vicodin in the world to take away the pain of what I have become’ misery.

The awesome pulling power of dismal ‘heritage bands’ - The Stone Roses whored for the most headlines in 2011, but they are far from the only example of what I can only describe as WHO FUCKING CARES music.  Watching a bunch of ageing has-beens cover their own songs is a pretty limp excuse for an evening’s entertainment if you ask me – wouldn’t you be better off just sitting at home and playing the fucking CD?  People who go to this shit don’t care at all about music, they just wish they weren’t as old as they have inevitably become.  Tough shit Grandpa, accept it and fuck off to Switzerland while you still have a sliver of dignity left intact.

Ed Sheeran - I want his severed head in a box on my desk by Monday, please.

The BBC’s apparent determination to undermine new music - when they couldn’t get rid of 6Music, they turned their sights on Introducing.  I thought the BBC was there to support grass roots cultural development, not pull the fucking rug out from underneath it.  And if you want to encroach less on the commercial sector (and get beyond the age of fifty without succumbing to the inevitable and wholly justified urge to remove all your clothes and walk off into the Arctic wilderness alone, with nothing to keep you warm but a half-empty bottle of Famous Grouse, as a sort of mea culpa for the scorched Earth combination of cultural rape and mass lobotomy you have parasitically inflicted upon the nation) the just save the money by setting the set to Strictly Come Dancing on fire during the filming of the next series.

“Don’t Let the Record Label Take You Out to Lunch”

We all know record labels are evil.  But these aren’t.

Night People - incredible hand screen printed vinyl and tape releases.  A lot of it is experimental, and so sometimes a little bit too ‘challenging’ for my nice, safe pop ears, but that just makes it more fun really.

Sways Records - lovely people, and working with bands like Weird Era, Ghost Outfit and The Louche FC.  And they sent a little cuddly ghost plush toy, hand made no less, with the Ghost Outfit single.  A cuddly ghost.  Case closed.

Empty Cellar - Discovery of the year, for me, this lot. They had something like four albums in my Best of 2011 list, and pretty much everything they release is on gorgeously-designed vinyl.

Art is Hard Records - okay, so they’re very, very new, but they’re also very promising.  As well as The Black Tambourines, they’ll also be working with Yoofs and Joanna Gruesome in 2012, which is a fantastic roster.

Scottish labels - yeah, they aren’t getting mentioned here.  Everyone knows I love Fence, Chemikal, Gerry Loves, etc etc so there’s no need to harp on about it again.

“Baby, You Could be Famous if You Could Just Get Out of This Town”

I don’t and won’t ‘tip bands for the top’, because bands I like rarely ever get at all famous, but I can tell you about bands whose new stuff I am very much looking forward to.

Easter - It’s hard to say what they’ll actually achieve. As they’ll be releasing their debut album on a tiny indie I doubt it will make massive waves, but it definitely deserves to.  Their gig with the John Knox Sex Club and Fuzzystar was one of the highlights of last year’s Ides of Toad shows.

PAWS - After getting Scottish music audiences all excited in 2011 it feels very much like it’s time to see what PAWS really have in the locker.  They’re recording an album, doing it with a very decent label indeed, and now we’ll see if they can turn a series of brilliant pop songs into a proper record, and what the rest of the country makes of their amazing live shows.

Jonnie Common - A little like Rob St. John with Song, by Toad, when someone like Jonnie does as well as he did on a small (but brilliant) record label like Red Deer Club I can’t help but wonder what he might have done had he been on someone bigger and with a little more resource.  It’s all idle speculation of course, and I have absolutely no intention of insulting Red Deer Club, but Master of None did have that ‘could be massive‘ feel to it.

The Black Tambourines - With three EPs and a single to their name already, The Black Tambourines are probably at the same level as PAWS, in that it’s probably time to record and album and see what they can do. They were absolutely fucking great when they played here in December though, and more people really do need to see them.

“Maybe it’s Scotland That I Hate”

The Scottish Music Scene (TM) has been pretty thin of late, if you ask me, but there have been some promising glimmers here and there.

Evil Hand/Bottle of Evil - I am lumping these two together because they have a personnel overlap of (I think) 50%.  It’s not always gripping, and because they tend to release things for free I will confess I am not sure the quality control is always what it might be, but when either of these bands actually nails it they produce some absolutely great stuff.

Spook School - It’s very retro, but not in the Surf+Stooges+Pavement way a lot of lo-fi stuff is retro these days.  No, this is indie-pop retro, with a touch of the early nineties, early Britpop guitar bands about them as well.  They’re quite fresh out of the box, and not quite the finished article yet in my view, but they’re cracking live and have some fine tunes.

Pet - I am not sure if these guys even exist anymore, but they have definitely had something of a staffing crisis recently.  If they have packed it in it would be a most spectacular implosion for a band who went from my Twitter feed to 6Music to the NME in the space of about a month when they released their first single in the middle of last year.

PAWS - I have to thank Olaf from Born to Be Wide and Andy and Paddy from Gerry Loves Records for getting me into these guys.  Unquestionably my new Scottish band of the year for 2011, and I am really looking forward to seeing what they can do with a little more resource behind them.

Palms - From one single song I can’t, and shouldn’t, draw too many conclusions, but it is such a very, very good song!  And with an endorsement from Tracer Trails’ Emily Roff, I find myself very much looking forward to their Ides of Toad show on February 24th.

John Knox Sex Club - An absolute beast of a live set and a brilliant album, and suddenly a band who I don’t think wanted to do a lot of the ‘normal band stuff’ when they started out have proved themselves better at normal band stuff than most of the ‘normal’ bands out there.

Zed Penguin - Alright, Matthew Winter’s stuff might be a little rough around the edges for a lot of people, but umm… well, I just like it.  It’s raw and can be really quite harsh live, but on his two EPs (one of which is yet to be released) so far he has produced some fucking great songs. I can’t see him ‘making it’ per se, but I can seem him making a lot of music that I fucking love so, er, balls to it, that’s good enough for me.

“All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit”

I might not become rich or famous in 2012, but I have a short list of modest ambitions…

To insult someone live on air - I haven’t yet had the chance to call someone out for talking absolute bollocks in a particularly public setting yet, but it would be quite fun.  It’s a tricky balance this, though, because you have to deliver a definite put down without ever seeming vindictive or angry, because that makes it look like you’re trying too hard – just a simple, matter of fact, irrefutably logical smackdown.

For some retard to announce that they’ve ‘discovered’ us - By this I mean not in the incredibly generous way Andrew Collins has talked about discovering Song, by Toad stuff.  No, more like someone who’s paid us no attention at all for the last five years to suddenly become a rabid fan in that creepy way people do when they seem to want some sort of ownership of something.  They do it in a way that implies that their excitement is more about how amazing they are at discovering shit, and not really all that much about the hard work of the people they are discovering. Mostly I just want this so I can tell them to fuck off.

Someone somewhere to add up all the Scottishness - Specifically, I would like someone to add up the number of times Scottish music blogs refer to the Scottishness of the Scottish bands they write about in 2012. I don’t want analysis, just a number.  I bet it will be a very, very big number indeed.

The NME to redesign its front cover - We all know that the NME is just Heat for music by now, don’t we?  Like Grazia for try-hard, middle of the road, not-even-hipster fashion drones.  So with this, it should really just fess up and redesign its logo in red and white like the rest of the weekly frotherati.

6Music to broaden its playlists a little - Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love 6Music, but I would like to see a little more variety in there, rather than just music aimed at, well, people like me I suppose.  How about some really old blues stuff, or non-corporate hip-hop or stuff like that.  Their daytime programming is still really quite bland. It sounds ridiculous, but I actually wish they played just a little less music that I like.

For Jools Holland and Lady Gaga to have a baby - Just to see what sort of deformed little homunculus they’d produce, really.

For Song, by Toad Records to find another thousand-seller - All but one of our bands sells albums in the hundreds.  This is absolutely fine, and we don’t want to make people think that we worry about commerce before deciding to release someone’s album, but it would do our financial health a world of good to have just one more band on the books who could shift records in four figures.  Until then, of course, limited edition vinyl it is!  On the subject of which…

For the world of music buyers to make up its fucking mind about formats – Yes, I know, tapes are fun and we all love vinyl most of all, but honestly, it’s expensive and it sells really slowly.  So if you want vinyl, make everyone else start buying it too.  And if it’s just another passing retro-fetishist fad can we all just get over it quickly so I can start releasing records on formats that might actually make us some money please.

More people to come to our gigs -  Just saying.

People to realise how fucking awesome the Toad Sessions are - Honestly, they shit on pretty much any other session out there a band could do.  So albeit on a slightly more needy level, again, just saying!

Someone I really like and who really deserves it to really crack it and start making money - This could be anyone, honestly. Imagine how cool it would be if the next Pictish Trail or Withered Hand album went absolutely massive, for example.  Or Jonnie Common.  Or Sparrow and the Workshop.  Or if Cloud Sounds got picked up by Radio1.  Or if Gerry Loves Records were offered a massive investment from Beggars Group and told to release what they wanted.  Or if Bart Owl replaced Simon Cowell on the X-Factor. Wouldn’t it be fucking fantastic, for example, to see someone we all know and love play in and fill a massive fucking venue and have all the vapid London chatterati falling all over themselves arguing about who discovered them first.  Ain’t going to happen of course.  But that’s what we’re all in this for isn’t it, really: unrealistically ambitious daydreaming.

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Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Albums of the Year

 Well, after last year’s neck-and-neck battle between Meursault and The National, this year’s Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Albums was something of a stroll by comparison.

Although the field behind this album was congested, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins’ Diamond Mine was a comfortable winner in the end.  Whilst I doubt this quite makes up for missing out on the Mercury Prize to P.J. Harvey, it’s interesting to note that after a very strong initial showing, she didn’t even make the top five of this particular list.  And you can bet your arse she won’t be on mine.

A wee nod must also go to King Post Kitsch.  Home field advantage, whilst I assume it must have some effect, doesn’t seem to behave all that predictably when it comes to these votes, because other than Rob St. John, no-one else from the label has managed to force their way onto the podium. King Post Kitsch did really well on both the song and album of the year votes, however, missing out on a place in the top five by a single vote in each case, which is really impressive for an album released so early in the year by a band who haven’t played a single gig in 2011.

=4. FOUND – Factorycraft A little like King Post Kitsch, I thought this album might suffer a little from being released so early in the year, but it seems long memories and awesome live shows have kept this bloody brilliant record at the forefront of everyone’s minds.  It made a very late run to get into the top five, but I am delighted you lot decided to vote for this one.

FOUND – Machine Age Dancing

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=4. Josh T. Pearson – The Last of the Country Gentlemen This is a long, morose and emotionally rather heavy album, which makes the impression it has clearly had on people a little surprising, as far as I’m concerned.  I mean, I bloody love it, but I didn’t necessarily expect everyone else to.

Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Piano Version)

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=2. Rob St. John – Weald Well well well, once again, I’m not sure if I’m slightly embarrassed or highly gratified to have one of our own albums on here.  This whole thing was pretty much recorded in two days downstairs in our living room, and I knew that they were brewing something quite special.  Apart from the actual bits I heard, Tom, Neil and Rob were so giddy with excitement when they finished on the Friday night that you could tell something was definitely up – and up it most certainly proved to be!

Rob St. John – Sargasso Sea

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=2. Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – Everything’s Getting Older It’s probably going to come across as a little hypocritical from someone who loved the Josh T. Pearson album, but I actually find a lot of the introspection here a bit suffocating, meaning I never really got into this record to the extent a lot of other people seemed to.  Still, it’s been bloody popular, so fair play to ‘em.

Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – The Copper Top

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1. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine I am not entirely surprised that this won, but I have to say that I considerably prefer That Might Be it, Darling, if we’re discussing King Creosote’s recent output. That album has the tension and awkwardness which I think makes KC’s music so great, contrasting as it does with his incredibly lovely voice.  This record I just find a little smooth, if I’m honest.  KC for Guardian readers, I suppose.  The songs are exceptional, so I still enjoy the album, but I am not sure I’d have picked it myself.

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Bubble

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Ha ha no P.J. Harvey.

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Yes, But Are You Happy?

 ”Yes, but are you happy?” said with that kind of inflection, usually accompanied with a sideways head-tilt, is such an odd question.

Firstly, it always seems to imply, at least a little, that the person asking it already thinks they know the answer.  Particularly if the head-tilt makes an appearance.

Secondly, as I have recently discovered, I am actually incapable of answering it.  If I answer it literally, I am answering it dishonestly, and if I try and answer it honestly… umm, well I find it almost impossible.

People have asked me this question a couple of times recently, mostly related to the fact that I gave up my job in 2010 to run Song, by Toad full-time. Are you happy? they ask, presumably trying to figure out if I regret taking the risk, or feel like I should have stayed in my sensible, grown-up job, or sometimes to find an opportunity to trot out that tired old cliche about it being ‘great to be doing something you’re passionate about’.

I am a prickly fucker, deep down, so the ‘something you’re passionate about’ thing always feels slightly condescending.  Oh, so you’re not making any money and you’re not really successful, but at least you’re passionate about it, right?  At least you’re happy.

So, ungracious irritability aside, I have, as I mentioned earlier, discovered that I am incapable of actually answering that question.  More worrying for the people who ask it (my mum, Mrs. Toad, etc…) I find I am incapable of answering it with a yes.  But that doesn’t mean the answer isn’t yes, exac… oh, balls to this, let me explain.

The fact is that I am not ‘happy’ in the sense that I could ever say it like that.  Not content, exactly.  We’ve done amazingly well, I can’t imagine ever being able to go back to working for someone else, the label keeps growing, the sessions have been amazing, our bands are doing better and better, and my personal profile seems to be improving pretty steadily – in short, there’s pretty much no way to say that things aren’t going really, really well.

And yet for every amazing review we get, and all the radio play, I still find myself niggled by the shows who didn’t play our stuff, or by the reviews which never happened.  Every single release we put out, no matter how well it goes, just serves to remind me of things we should be doing better next time.  And it’s not in a dissatisfied way, exactly, just a combination of determined competitiveness, and the thrill you get from knowing that the next level is within touching distance. Because every baby step you take in this business leads you on to the next one, and being the kind of person I am I guess I am always more focussed on how we can improve, rather than what we’ve just achieved.

Another side of it is a refusal to really let myself worry about other people’s opinions.  It’s not easy to do of course, but it’s something you need to learn when the inevitable bad reviews start to appear here and there.  In many ways it’s a measure of success, because at the beginning the only people motivated to really write about you, label or band, are the people who love you.  As you get more widely known, your records are more likely to be thrust into the hands of some random person who doesn’t care – a jaded hack, a random work-experience kid, someone who only really likes chip-tunes or trad folk, it could be almost anyone.

As I’ve pointed out before, bad reviews are really just one random person’s opinion, and not worth getting yourself wound up about.  You should only be working in this industry because you personally believe in what you’re doing, and you have to derive enough satisfaction and fulfillment from what you do that if people slag your work off you still want to do it because you are proud of it yourself, and fuck the people who don’t like it.

The flipside of that attitude, however, is that you don’t really get to crow when things go right.  If you train yourself to ignore the bad reviews because you are in it for your own satisfaction, you can’t suddenly start taking reviews seriously when they’re nice to you.  Good reviews are commercially valuable, and they enhance the trust our artists have in us, so I am delighted when we get them, but for the same reason you learn to brush off bad ones, the good ones end up not really affecting your self-esteem or the value you have in your own project either. I suppose it’s a variation on how footballers are advised to handle their own press: “You’re never as good as they say you are, but you’re never as bad as they say you are either.”

So I end up in a situation where where when things go well I find it impossible not to think about how much better they could have gone, and when people say nice things about us it’s good of course, and I appreciate it, but it doesn’t exactly change how I feel about Toad things really.  I already trained myself not to let that kind of thing affect me when people started to write bad stuff.

So I’m not happy exactly, because we can do better.  We should be doing better. And every little thing you do you always shows you at least some things you can do next time to make it better. And for all the fun and games and gin and swearing, I still have a black kernel of competitive rage in the depths of my soul, and that inner demon needs to have a target.  It needs a mission, something to be a little bit mental about – nothing outward, necessarily, or aggressive or unpleasant, just something to stoke the fires a little.

Back when I was in London it was trying to teach myself how to rebuild a canal boat from scratch.  When I moved up here it was trying to salvage Mrs. Toad’s flat from her comical DIY efforts.  There’s always something. I just need something to be mental about, I suppose. The result being that I am not what you’d describe as ‘happy’, and I would never use that word – it seems to imply contentment with where you are, as if you have arrived already and there is no work still to be done.  I need to have something to be internally raging about, whether it’s the awful records ahead of ours in people’s end of year lists, the shows who didn’t play the music we released, other labels being talked about in hushed tones when it should be us goddamit, and so on and so forth.

So the answer, rather awkwardly, is that since giving up my job to do this full time, no, I am not happy or content at all.  But that’s actually not a bad thing. I’m like a dog.  I need a rabbit to chase.

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Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Songs 2011

Well here we are again, with lists this time generated by yourselves rather than me.  With one exception none of these songs would have been anywhere near my personal Festive Fifty, and the one which would have made it is forbidden due to an obvious clash of interests.

It’s weird, but it does at the very least go to show that the idea of the blogosphere being just a great big mutual back-slapping exercise, with everyone telling everyone else just how awesome they are most of the time, isn’t entirely accurate.  Still, just because I am an opinionated fucker doesn’t mean I don’t want to be disagreed with – just the opposite in fact, because it’s generally much more fun.

Honorable mentions must also go to FOUND and Adam Stafford, who managed an awful lot of votes as bands, but not consistently for the same song, resulting in them missing out on the top five, despite having a lot of votes in total.

So, without further ado, I hereby present the Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Songs of 2011:

=3: King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Bats in the Attic Despite being one of my favourite artists, and previous remix work by Jon Hopkins being some of my favourite KC stuff, this album didn’t personally grab me as much as it seems to have everyone else, but this is most certainly my favourite song on it.  I included votes for the ‘Unravelled’ version from their EP as well, partly because it only seemed fair, and partly because I too preferred it.

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Bats in the Attic

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=3: P.J. Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder Alright, I’ll admit, I just don’t get P.J. Harvey.  She won the Mercury Prize though, she’s on every damn end of year list I’ve read, and some of my best friends and favourite musicians think she’s awesome.  So I guess I just have to shrug and let this one pass, and confess that I must just be missing something.

P.J. Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder

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=3: The Twilight Sad – Sick This is a very good song, but I’ll admit it ain’t in my personal Festive Fifty.  They were fantastic at the Bongo Club a couple of months ago though, and I have really high hopes for the album.

The Twilight Sad – Sick

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2: Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – The Copper Top The only song which came even close to giving the winner a run for its money. This is from another album which hasn’t really captured my imagination anything like as much as it seems to have with everyone else.  Nevertheless, of all the songs I heard on it I will agree that this was my favourite as well.

Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – The Copper Top

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1: Rob St. John – Sargasso Sea Part of me thinks that this poll would look more genuine if one of our own acts hadn’t finished at the top, and part of me knows full well that if no-one had voted for any of our bands then I would have had a gigantic sulk to myself, so I guess there’s no winning, really.  And oddly enough, I might have picked Domino, Stainforth Force or maybe Vanishing Points ahead of this, if I were picking favourite songs from Weald. Nevertheless, this is a stunning record, and I am glad you voted for it, because I obviously can’t do so myself and it clearly deserves some sort of bloody recognition!

Rob St. John – Sargasso Sea

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