I can’t think of a much more poignant song for an astronaut to sing than David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Knowing that the final verse about drifting off into the void is in fact an actual possibility rather than a vivid fictional picture gives the song a whole new level of meaning.

Chris Hadfield from the Canadian Space Agency did just that, however, whilst on board the International Space Station. It’s a daft version, but being sung by an actual astronaut gives it a certain degree of pathos, and the video is really rather cool as well.

Hadfield himself seems like an absolutely brilliant guy, as well. Whilst on the ISS he made a series of over seventy videos of various things, including the rather brilliant one below, answering a question from a bunch of school kids about what happens when you wring out a flannel in space.

 Hello again from Brighton. Ian and I are down at the Great Escape again this year, and will be joined later in the week by Mrs. Toad.

I like The Great Escape. Brighton is an awesome place to be, which is important if you’re going to try and lure Mrs. Toad to a music festival.

In some ways I prefer it to SXSW, because they don’t really focus on big-name headliners here, meaning that it really is all about new music and up and coming bands. At least, that makes it more fun for me personally, anyway, because that’s generally the kind of bands I am excited to see.

Anyhow, this year The Hype Machine asked me for five picks of bands to see at the Great Escape this year, and I thought I would pass them on before the chaos begins…

Glass Animals – I don’t like to play the ‘heard it here first’ card, but I genuinely wrote about these guys miles before pretty much anyone else. Not sure what else to call this, apart from muffled disco.

Temples – A touch of one-song syndrome here. Shelter Song was absolutely brilliant, but I am not so sure about their new tune (below). Time to go and see them live and find out for sure, I think.

Eagulls – Ian and I saw them on the end of Brighton pier last year and they were brilliant. Epic, nasty guitar rock and a lead singer who prowls the stage like he’s looking for a fight.

Lab Coast – These guys are eminently hipster-friendly, as you might guess from noting that they are signed to the effortlessly cool Faux Discx. It’s stylish, laid back, lo-fi guitar music, and very good it is too.

Mac DeMarco – This stuff is rather stylish too, but in a very different way to Lab Coast. Mac DeMarco also play hipster guitar music, but in more of a lounge-style, laid back, ‘I will have sex with your daughter’ kind of a way.

And just because the last two were rather unimaginative – you know full well already that I like these two bands, after all – here’s a band whose manager got in touch with me when I registered, to promote the band. Generally I sniff at that – not for any good reason of course, it’s just a rather dumb reflex – but this lot actually sound rather good, and I think I will go and see them. Meet Keebo:

 Alright, this can’t really be an album review, as such, mostly because even by my standards it would be unusually late for an album released back in 1970 – five years before I was even born. It’s an album I’ve listened to more than any other recently, however, so as I sit down to write something about music today it’s hard to get away from this, and eventually I just thought fuck it, why not. It’s my blog after all, and it’s not like I have advertisers to disappoint.

After the early days of leaving crisp wrappers and used coke cans in the van, bands seem to have changed their ways of late, and started leaving old tapes lying around, presumably bought in charity shops for about a pound while they were touring. The first, and still one of the most awesome, instance of this was when Jesus H. Foxx left behind a copy of Come on Feel The Lemonheads last year, and recently, after eagleowl toured in her, a copy of After the Gold Rush made an appearance.

My previous knowledge of Neil Young was practically nil. I suppose, having only really extensively listened to one album from such an extensive back catalogue you could reasonably say that it’s still pretty much nil, but at least it’s a start. My Dad is Canadian, and as a kid he introduced me to Dylan, The Band, Tom Waits and a few others. Neil Young was in there, but apart from Old Man and maybe Heart of Gold not too much really sank in back then. Even now, when one of my best friends would describe Neil Young as his favourite artist of all time, I’ve still either failed to make the effort or the connection, or maybe just a bit of both.

Still, when you drive pretty much every day, some of the tapes in your care have a habit of falling into very, very heavy rotation indeed, and this has been one of them. As albums go, and opening side of Tell Me Why, After the Gold Rush, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Southern Man and Till the Morning Comes is probably as good as I’ve heard anywhere. Tell Me Why is an odd one, too. For an album encompassing the ferocity of Southern Man and the bereft self-pity of Lonesome Me I would always be tempted to start with something either raucous or maudlin, just so you can shock people with track two, whichever way you go. Tell Me Why is an odd sort of mid-paced tune though, although I suppose given that his previous record was something of a rocker, an acoustic-guitar tune laden with harmonies is still a pretty bold statement, even if out of context it seems a bit gentle.

Like a lot of people, I knew the Saint Etienne version of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, but it was only a few years ago that I realised it was a cover at all, never mind having actually heard the original. It took me a while to adjust, I have to confess. It’s pretty hard to let go of the first version of a song that you come to love, even if you like subsequent versions as well, that first one often remains the one you secretly think of as definitive. In this case the two are too different, really, for that good, better, best comparison to really kick in, but here it’s a song of fairly tender melancholy, and it does a devious job of pulling you onto the almighty sucker punch of Southern Man.

Having worked in the States, and realised that even in New England it seems to be compulsory to play Sweet Home Alabama at least once an hour in every fucking bar you ever walk into, I always assumed that the ‘Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow’ was a comeback to a mild throwaway criticism, so gentle is the rebuke, but holy shit! Fuck me, Southern Man is blistering! I know the U.S. has some rather uncomfortable internal politics going on, and I’ve heard Phil Ochs equally searing Here’s to the State of Mississippi, but I never realised quite how much Neil Young spat this song out, or with how much rage and contempt. If I’d known that I’d have half expected Lynyrd Skynyrd to sing something more along the lines of ‘We will fucking hunt and kill you, you total bastard’.

Neil Young’s voice is rather thin, and hence he has never had quite that richness to his sound which I tend to like in acoustic music, and his louder stuff which earned him the nickname The Godfather of Grunge just passed me by altogether. So all told, some 25 years after my dad first started playing his stuff to me, this is the first time I’ve ever really sat down and properly listened to a Neil Young record, and gosh don’t I feel like a dick now.

A little while ago Coda – the music shop on The Mound which specialises mostly in folk and roots music –  got in touch with me to ask about stocking some of our records in their new vinyl room, which they opened on Record Store Day.

I was running around like a blue-arsed fly on Record Store Day itself, so I didn’t get the chance to pop up and have a look, and due to parking in that part of town being mental I had to stay with the van and didn’t even get to go in when we dropped off stock the day before.

Yesterday, however, on my way back from a meeting with Charlotte at Venus Flytrap Tattoo (and yes, that means exactly what you think it does) I popped in briefly for what was inevitably an expensive visit. I just can’t walk away from this fucking stuff, dammit! According to Rose, who runs the place, the vinyl room was pretty ravaged after the previous day’s feeding frenzy, but it still looked pretty good to me. The vertical display racks worked particularly well, showing off the artwork as much as possible.

The first stuff I saw when I came in was the Sparklehorse and Fennesz album (above, and which I promptly purchased), Josh T Pearson’s album and a weird compilation called Gallus Songs of Glasgow, and that pretty much sums up why the vinyl room was so good. Talking to Rose, she said that they had no real idea what to put in there, so they just filled it with stuff they liked. It means the collection is all over the place, but it also gives it proper character.

Given Coda specialise in folk stuff I suppose their expansion could have been a little ham-fisted or perhaps too reliant on commercial indicators, but instead they’ve just gone for stuff they themselves find interesting and the results are ace. There is some truly weird stuff in there, as well as some excellent stuff, and also a decent amount of the stuff you’d expect. The selection is also pretty extensive, considering it lives in a relatively small back room off the main shop.

The nice thing about talking to Rose was the very obvious sense that she cares about music, and I hope the vinyl room proves to be a success. You should check it out, if you get the chance.

As you may know by now, every year Mrs. Toad manages the lifeboats collection in Stockbridge, and every year we try and bribe you into coming and helping us to collect money for what rather shockingly remains a volunteer service. This year the collection is on Saturday 27th April, and we’d be really grateful if you were to volunteer to come along and help out.

Whilst the goodness of your heart would be appreciated, we don’t expect you to help us out for that reason alone of course, and we will bribe you with booze and food. Mrs. Toad generally both bakes and cooks a roast dinner, and there is hardly any kind of occasion where we don’t lay on plenty of wine, so you will be well-treated, we can promise you that.  There’s no need to over-stress yourselves either, as all we ask is that you come along and shake a tin in Stockbridge for an hour or so at some point during the day. Generally pretty girls seem to work best, although once one of our pals turned up with his wee baby and he was a stone cold hit, but even socially awkward men with beards are more than welcome – we’ll basically take any and all help we can get.

So let you know if you think you’ll come down, just so we know how many we’ll be feeding and how much wine to lay on.  Thanks in advance.

I think you get 9 out of 10 on the hipster scale for VIP passes to Youth Lagoon, don’t you? You better, anyway, because young Ian pretty much had a hipstergasm when this happened to us yesterday.  I don’t even know the band that well, but everyone I know seems to love them, so I was very much looking forward to seeing them play, and they really were bloody excellent.

While last year it seemed like I was kind of done with music after a couple of days, this year I’ve managed to maintain genuine enthusiasm for the whole business and have been to see loads of bands. Foxygen are hip as balls and rubbish, Wampire are hip as balls and excellent, as were some Sudanese band from New York called Sinkane, to whom I was dragged to by Vic Galloway… in fact, I think getting dragged to stuff by your pals is probably the best way to treat music festivals. Even pals who drink cocktails which look like this:

SXSW just gets bigger every year, too. When I first came out East Austin was pretty quiet, and now it’s absolutely rammed with stuff. Even last year Rainey Street was the chilled place to go for a drink, and this year it too has been absorbed into the madness.

South Congress has always been busy of course, and yesterday myself and Ian went out there with Paddy and Andy from Gerry Loves Records too see Paws play at Home Slice. It was the second time I’ve seen Paws this week, and something like the fourth for Andy and Paddy – something which highlights one of the absurdities of SXSW – that you travel thousands of miles to see bands from home.

The other enduring truth about SXSW of course, is that there are times when you simply have to walk away. Vic and myself balked at queues for Surfer Blood and the Secretly Canadian showcase before heading out to Rainey Street to see Sinkane, but you usually get a chance to see people you want to see at some point. Suuns, for example, may have been impossible at their official showcase, but they turned up at a Planet Quebec show later that night and so I got the chance to see them then, courtesy of a tip-off from Vic and Huw Stephens, who were taking advantage of one of those rare breaks in the slog for people who have to work here, and actually seeing some bands.

Oh, and given I was in desperate need of hipster points, after missing out on the Jagjaguar showcase and not being entirely familiar with the entire Youth Lagoon back catalogue, there was, erm… well there was also this.  My mum is going to go fucking mental. But let’s be honest, it was either that or buy a pair of paedophile shorts, and frankly I couldn’t really have lived with myself if I had chosen the latter.

Oh, and Thee Oh Sees were fucking incredible at the Panache Booking showcase. Really brilliant.

Well, yesterday was the last of the serious stuff, and today the madness commences. I went to a couple of talks yesterday, but they weren’t that serious, and by the evening the music had kicked off in earnest and this morning I have my first official SXSW Stinking Hangover. Joyous.

Firstly, I dragged myself out of bed at 10am to see A Conversation With Nick Cave. I wouldn’t do that for just anyone, and for a while I wasn’t convinced I was going to get in, such was the queue. Fortunately young Ian was there before me and saved me a seat. A seat right behind the bloody projector, and as you can see from above the view wasn’t great. Thanks Ian.

Fortunately, that chair you can see in the tiny gap between the projector stand and those two heads is exactly where he sat, so it didn’t end up being all that bad, and the talk was awesome.  You’re not really looking to learn anything at this kind of thing, I guess, more just get a feel for what one of your musical heroes is really like. And in this case it turned out he was laid back, comfortable, permanently amused, and enjoying himself.

I tend to put my foot down about standing in line for stuff, particularly at events like SXSW where there is always something fun happening somewhere else you could go to instead, but I made an exception for Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal and got into my second ludicrously long queue of the day (above) for his keynote speech.

He was funny. There wasn’t much in the speech you wouldn’t know from reading his website, so if you missed out you didn’t really miss much. Nevertheless he was an entertaining speaker, slightly hyper, but very engaging. He described himself during his talk as a stand-up comedian who works through the medium of comics, and that summed it up pretty nicely I think.

Anyhow, after that I met Mrs. Toad for an early dinner. What with chasing from one queue to the next I realised I hadn’t eaten all day, so I was suddenly starving. We find we’ve formed quite a few nice habits early on in Austin – I suppose it helps you feel at home in a new city a little more quickly – and one of them, as of last year, is dinner at Truluck’s, above.

It’s over the top as hell, they have a piano player who plays along to a schmalzy backing track, utterly repellent blue cheese martinis, and a rather preposterous Art Deco interior. They even have a dish of prawns served over dry ice, so that there is a sort of bed of billowing smoke – it’s all a bit silly, but for some reason we love it. That ‘some reason’ might just be related to their awesome food, of course. The steaks are amazing. Unusually for America they are left alone as well, which is a relief, and served bloody with just some steamed asparagus. Perfect! And the crab claws are awesome too – the shells perfectly smashed, but the meat undamaged.

Anyway, after that, and swaying somewhat from excessive consumption of martinis and French red, we stumbled along to Latitude for the first of the British showcases. We caught Y Niwl (below), who were excellent, and someone else, and I think I said something stupid to Huw Stephens, and then the fog of booze descended completely. We got home somehow, but I am not sure how. And we did buy some strawberry laces from the garage, which is nice. And the whole crazy party doesn’t even really start until today…!

So, the first couple of days of SXSW and where are we? Well, I don’t really want to bore you with too much stuff, so these entries for the next few days will be pretty brief.

Deep down, for me and Mrs. Toad, this is a week of holiday in Austin, one of the nicest US cities we’ve visited, and a mile away from the middle-American nightmares she tends to visit on business. We’re here on holiday, to have some fun, to eat some amazing food, and to wander around in a pleasant sunshine a long way removed from the pissing rain and sleet in Edinburgh.

We have some pals here who we only see at SXSW as well, from Song, by Toad commenter Campfires and Battlefields, to Dev from The Hype Machine, Peej and Farah, our pals who live here and whoever else we happen to stumble across while we’re here. So it’s fun, it’s sociable and the food and drink are both awesome.

There are three aspects to the professional side of this conference, however, and I may be a mere record label mogul, but Mrs. Toad works in investment management, so the Interactive side discusses technological developments which are actually pretty worth her paying attention to. Film we’re a bit sketchy on, and music is allegedly my forte.  So during the first few days, while all the interactive stuff is going on, we go to presentations. She because it is professionally useful, and I simply because I find them interesting.

I got into town on Saturday night, for example, met up with Mrs. Toad, young Ian, and Andy from Gerry Loves Records. We drank a shitload of gin, sold one of our party in sexual servitude, and woke up feeling distinctly groggy.

So yesterday we ignored the conference, and Mrs. Toad and I walked into East Austin to have some cocktails at the awesome Rio Rita’s. It’s hipster as fuck, but the Bloody Marys (below) are the best you’ll get anywhere, and we love the place. We had some scran at the Boiling Pot after that – they literally just tip a bucket of crab’s legs, corn and crayfish onto the table, give you a hammer and let you get on with it – and had a relatively early night, by SXSW standards.

Today, however, the serious shit commenced. And by serious, I mean AWESOME! For some reason, on this year’s schedule there is a lot of stuff on spaceflight and space exploration, so I started off at the main convention centre with two talks: The New Golden Age of Human Spaceflight, and 100 Year Starship: Interstellar Travel and Beyond. Both were interesting, but the second, despite being slightly less practical, trumped the first by having an astronaut, an astronomer, and Jordi fucking LaForge from Star Trek on the panel. Yes, seriously!

A couple of beers later, and I went to another talk about The Myth of the Lone Inventor. It was kicked off by the speaker – Matt Novak from Paleofutures – discussing a comic from the Oatmeal, and finished by Matthew Inman, the writer of The Oatmeal, getting up to debate the point of his comic as compared to the point of the lecture. That, too, was pretty cool.

So here I sit, with yet another beer, in a hotel which reminds me of a slightly larger version of the Great Glass Elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (see below), and I have one more seminar to attend, on the future of 3D printing, and then I’ll be off with Mrs. Toad for a really nice meal and (quite possibly) some more drinking.

I’ll be trying to take it slowly though, because there’s a couple more days of this before the music even starts. Last year I burned myself out, and this year that is not happening!

This is a press release I genuinely just received:

“Band that this release is about has done nothing noteworthy, but by sending a press release, would like you to believe that they have. They’re (Choose one) [making waves, turning heads, breaking the mold, or gaining national attention]! (Please note the exclamation point as a mark of enthusiasm that you should share).

““Made up quote about the recording process,” says band member, who plays guitar. “Secondary quote with less merit than the first.”

“Over the past [year, month, week, 24 hours], the album has been getting a lot of attention (not really, but who cares). Honestly, people haven’t said anything about the new album yet, but here’s a quote from their friend Greg that not-so-subtly mentions the bands he thinks they sound like. “This record has hints of FAMOUS-BAND, NOT-SO FAMOUS BAND, and the guitar work of Peter Frampton.”

“[Band Name] has been gaining quite the following on social media outlets such as Myspace and Email. If you haven’t heard of them yet, there’s a good chance you never will. They’re finishing college soon and their made-up-genre scene will soon disappear. Recent accolades include:

• iTunes

““Closing quote from another band member that rambles and takes up space,” says temporary drummer.

“For more information, please contact us by cell phone please.”

http://andthegiraffe.com

Now, you may think I’m about to condemn them to the PR FAIL series on my Tumblr site for this sort of silliness, but I’m not. You see, this little bit of comedy highlights one of the most understandable reasons why so many press releases are so awful.

I know I am hard on PR people, largely because they clutter my inbox with the most unimaginable wildly unsuitable guff most of the time, but whilst doing the job badly is all too easy, doing it well is incredibly difficult.

Take the writing of press releases, for example. For bands people know about, they’re often redundant, because we already know about them and are just interested in the data – new album, new tour, etc.

For new bands, however, it’s almost impossible. ‘Find an angle’ you are told, ‘find a story’. But often there just isn’t one.  What are you supposed to do then, squeeze blood from a stone? Yes, I suppose you could answer, as a PR person that is your job, if there isn’t much of a story then it’s your job to find one, but honestly that results in some of the most forced, contrived, and ultimately the most stilted and unengaging press releases I have ever read.

They can also seem a little bit silly, too, which is never a help when you are trying to get people to listen to your music. Adding superlatives to a young band who haven’t really achieved anything yet just makes you look stupid. Grandiose comparisons are even worse.

So really, we go back to the press release at the top of the page and honestly, I tell you, it’s not all that far from the truth. We tend to work with bands no-one knows that much about, who tend to be on their first release, and what can you possibly say? ‘Here are some friends who made some music, and we hope you can make the time to give them a chance and have a listen’ is about all you can really say before you head off into the murky realms of empty hyperbole, needless filler, and pure fiction.

And then the problem is, of course, that you end up with an article like this, where the whole post is about the press release and not about the music. Because actually I did click through to listen to the music and unfortunately, after enjoying their email, I wasn’t that keen, honestly. But I suppose it still worked, really, because you can’t force people to like your stuff, but hopefully you can persuade them to have a listen and give it a chance, which is the very first job of a press release.

So please do them the courtesy of giving the Bandcamp embed below a chance, because actually this is the most honest press release I’ve read in ages.

Mrs. Toad and I tend to ignore Valentine’s Day. That’s not to say that we are scrooges when it comes to romance, in fact I would say exactly the opposite, but for us the compulsory nature of it doesn’t feel very romantic.  Everyone’s different, but we’d rather take our sentimentality when it naturally wells up during the normal working week, which is actually pretty frequently, so we don’t exactly miss out by missing out.

We also, as I suppose do most couples, have a few songs which have ended up being strongly associated with our relationship for a variety of reasons – songs we played a lot when we were courting, songs which played at our wedding at key moments (even if entirely by happy accident of the shuffle function), or songs with lyrics with which we strongly identify.  It’s all the usual stuff really and the songs themselves, whilst not exactly classic choices, are at least the sort of songs you would expect people to gravitate towards for this kind of thing.

This one is an exception though, and it’s also one I have never mentioned to Mrs. Toad either, as it is a song which I have ended up associating with her, and with my falling in love with her, entirely by accident: All the Lights Went Out by Marcy Playground.

It is a love song, I suppose, but it’s not even my favourite song on what is not even my favourite Marcy Playground album. The reason it stuck is a bit convoluted, but bear with me…

I was always pretty pragmatic about love and marriage.  At the time I met Mrs. Toad I had had a couple of girlfriends I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with, so I had an inkling I would know what I was looking for when I found it.  I never expected the struck-by-lightning, love at first sight thunderbolt stuff, but I knew that those previous relationships had lacked something, even if I didn’t know what it was, so I guessed that when I met the girl I wanted to marry the lack of that absence at least would be some sort of indication.

That wasn’t the case, though.  It was a classic case of an absolute, life-changing, instantaneous thunderbolt. It even seems silly to me now, but right from the the very start I knew absolutely and without a shred of doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Mrs. Toad.

The result was in some ways related to the shock of grief you feel at extremely bad news, in that I was walking around in a sort of glazed over, detached daze for days afterwards. Of course, it didn’t have that hollow, sickening undertone that grief brings, it brought a sort of terrified, wobbly excitement instead, but I think the sense of shock was similar.

Of course, I still had a job to go to, but I found myself sitting at work with my headphones on gazing into the middle distance an awful lot of the time.  I remember exactly what I was thinking, too. I was thinking ‘Holy shit, is this it? Is this the girl I want to marry? Can I really be this sure this fast? This really is it, isn’t it?  She really is the one.  This is what it feels like.  This is what people talk about when they say ‘you know’.  You really do fucking know.  Holy fuck.  I think this really might be it.  Fuck. Oh crap. Fucking hell this really is it!’

I was not, as you can probably imagine, at my most capable.

At that point I was listening to Shapeshifter by Marcy Playground an awful lot, and I tended to turn the volume up a wee bit louder, just to drown out the rest of the office so I could be alone with my thoughts. I ended up playing All the Lights Went Out over and over again, without ever really knowing why.

The lyrics aren’t exactly sophisticated, but maybe that helped.  Maybe that hypnotic repetition of the line “Well today, all the lights went out in heaven” helped soothe my dizzy brain.  Maybe that talk of short-circuiting, well, basically everything struck a nerve too, because that’s what I felt like, like my brain had blown a fuse and was scrabbling about trying to get everything working again before it had to do something complicated like cross the road safely.

And the music isn’t exactly classic love song stuff either.  It’s not the most aggressive guitar in the world, but the crescendo of the song is a bit loud for a serenade.  Again though, maybe that helped, maybe the volume to which the song builds struck a chord with the kind of inner turmoil I was experiencing at the time; it was like a tornado was bouncing around inside my head half the time.

This was, of course, never a love song between Mrs. Toad and I, like most of the songs you would tend to associate with a relationship. Instead, it was a song which caught me at the exact moment lightning struck and somehow seemed to represent what had happened better than anything else around me at the time, so I sat in work and stared into the middle distance, turned up the volume, and played it again and again thinking ‘Holy shit, is this really it?’

And yes, it was really it.  I knew immediately, and with total certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and every single day since has done nothing but cement the clarity of that decision. It was easy, really.  Obvious. And the best and most important thing that has ever happened to me.  There are just a few odd quirks in the soundtrack, that’s all.