It’s fun, it really is fucking fun.  It’s culture too.  Not high culture of course, and there’s no way you could say that normal people getting involved in the arts and building communities and shared projects together could possibly do as much for the rich cultural life of the nation as keeping a handful fabulously wealthy people entertained at the ballet or the opera.  That would be crazy.  But nevertheless, music is fun, and it is culture.

Edinburgh is of course a city of great culture, and one which has invested a huge part of its considerable sense of self-worth into giving the impression that it supports culture.  And fun.  Although if one had to choose, then probably just culture.  Fun, after all, genuine balls-out taps aff belly laughing giddy fun is not really what we do here.  That is for vulgar people.  It is, in short, what Glasgow is for.

The kind of purposeful, determined fun had at the Edinburgh Festival – oh the wonderful festival, with its wonderful lineup of multi-cultural arts events and billions of pounds in profits for all the wonderful local industries like, er, Magners – that sort of fun is deliberate, and part of an image Edinburgh cultivates for itself more assiduously than any bowerbird, carefully building its nest from bits of discarded food packaging and used condoms.

Deliberate fun, or Compulsory Fun as a friend of mine so delightfully put it, is much more worthwhile that tawdry old spontaneous fun, because it is enriching, validating and nourishing for the soul.  It is also, generally, devoid of any actual fun.

You’d have thought the bonfire of the fucking bankers would have slapped the smug haughtiness out of Edinburgh a little bit recently, but the impression still remains that this is a city which secretly believes that for all people at nightclubs and pop concerts and ludicrous blockbuster movies think they are having fun, really that isn’t proper fun at all, and it most certainly isn’t culture.  Look, not one of the people in that band is even wearing tights!

So having defined, packaged, branded and then sold Compulsory Fun to the entire fucking world in August, Edinburgh seems to have recently realised that sneakily, under its own very nose, people in the damn capital have been having actual fun behind everyone’s backs.  That, of course, won’t do at all.

So, without ever needed any kind of grand conspiracy, but nevertheless somehow moving as one being with one purpose, the people of Edinburgh set about sorting out all fun which could be described as ‘really not our sort of thing’.

So first we burned down the Liquid Rooms.  Then fuck you Bowery, off you go, and balls to the Roxy too, which followed it.  Next we polished off The Lot, then set about losing the GRV/Octopus Diamond/Left Banke/whatever the fuck it called itself at the time.  Then the Forest, which probably self-combusted due to the sheer heat generated by all the burning incense.  The Red Door was also surplus to requirements, so fuck that as well.  And actually, who needs Cabaret Voltaire either, I have definitely seen Bad Fun taking place there, and you know what, fuck the Bongo Club too, as Edinburgh University are currently doing.

Sometimes I think we are actually trying to make it impossible to enjoy yourself in any more that one or two nice, approved ways in this fucking town.  Is it any wonder it’s a massive challenge to get decent bands to play here?  And contrary to the number of talentless, fat-tongued drama school toffs we import every August, and to how many tickets to the Ladyboys of fucking Bangkok we sell or how many companies get rich off the back of the fucking Festival, that has fuck all to do with culture in Edinburgh.

Culture in Edinburgh has far more to do with actual people from Edinburgh taking part in fucking culture, even if culture to them is being in a shit death metal band. In fact, I’d rather a hundred people in shit death metal bands actually doing something than two hundred serious muppets in museums looking suitably thoughtful at something painted a hundred years ago.

Still.  Despite all this shit, there’s a part of me which kind of thrills at the incredible case of venue suicides in Edinburgh in the last two years.  It’s almost like Nick at Sneaky’s, the guys at the Circus and Henry’s, hopefully now joined for the long term by the team at the Third Door are fighting a gallant last stand in the name of Unapproved Fun.  And fuck you, the harder it gets the more fun is to be had in fucking fighting it.  Fuck your Festival Theatre and your Scottish Ballet.  BOOOOOO-ring!

You can take every last fucking venue out of this town and force us to hold our gigs on the forecourts of fucking Tesco’s but Unapproved Fun will not fucking go away, you fucking twats.

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.

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.

At first they thought games and DVDs would save them, but the only reason those products aren’t just as problematic for retailers as music is simply that the files are larger, so as solutions go, that was obviously always going to be short term. Then for some utterly inexplicable (and borderline hilarious) reason they seemed to decide recently that the selling of headphones and mp3 players was the answer to their dreams.

The actual design of the shops themselves is fucking awful, so no-one wants to actually go there just for the sake of spending some time, and almost everything they sell is either directly downloadable from the internet or more easily and cheaply bought there instead.  And still they flail about, like a beetle which has been half crushed but somehow won’t just die.  It’s a bit like watching the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail desperately try and insist that he isn’t beaten.

They are so very fucked that they recently had to donate 2.5% of themselves to their suppliers to restructure their debt profile and remain something approaching legally solvent.  That sounds to me like a suspiciously sneaky way of phrasing a confession that they couldn’t pay their suppliers for their stock and hence had to offer them equity instead, in order to keep trading.

And presumably the likes of Disney, Warner’s, Sony and their ilk are still sufficiently determined to maintain a foothold on the high street that they feel they have no choice but to accept.  I suppose they aren’t comfortable with Amazon and places like Tesco’s being their main outlets and feel they need something in the centre of town as well.

HMV have sold a lot of our albums too – well, those above a certain threshold of nationwide profile anyway – so I can understand the major labels being scared of letting them go to the wall. I suppose that in their position, once you’ve let that one get away it must seem like you are pretty much giving up on selling music on bits of plastic in future, and that is still too bit a piece of pie to give up on just yet.

But honestly, I can’t imagine why you would ever shop in HMV.  It’s not a particularly appealing ‘destination store’, and Amazon has better choice and better prices.  If you are looking for specific or obscure stuff for the collector then buying direct from bands or labels or highly curated physical or online shops will always be a better bet.

Funnily enough I can see more hope for small independents that I can for HMV.  They can make a difference with knowledgeable and personable staff, they can make the shops themselves nice places to go without a rebranding directive from central command, and they have more freedom (and one would assume more inclination) to engage with the local music community as well.

I wouldn’t suggest that this is anything like a simple blueprint for running a successful indie shop, but it certainly feels like a more viable basis for a business than anything HMV can conceivably twist themselves into at the moment.

I do find myself wondering what happens if they do cease to exist though.  It may be to the advantage of the smaller shops, I can imagine that, although it may just serve to drive more people permanently towards Amazon instead.

From the perspective of the smaller labels from ourselves upwards, however, I wonder a little about the potential collapse of HMV and the removal of yet another ‘middle step’ for artists on the way up from obscurity to viability.

When 6Music was under threat one of my main worries was the gap it would leave between amateur podcasters and mainstream XFM/Radio1 exposure, and the enormous amount of resources and luck it would take to bridge that gap.  If HMV were to go I sort of worry about the same thing, but this time in terms of unit shifting.

To make a step from low level indie success to the kind of success required to become a viable, full-time professional band, you have to from selling a relatively small number of thousand albums – which you can do by selling through the band and label websites, at gigs and in small indie shops – to selling albums in the tens of thousands. I am not sure if you can do that currently without the kind of casual ubiquity provided by reasonable placement within high street shops.

Maybe I’m wrong about that of course.  I certainly have no love for HMV, and the desperate flailing generated by what appears to be their death throes is downright comical, but every time a piece of the existing music infrastructure crumbles I do inevitably find myself worrying a little about the implications.  As the established routes to viability collapse, those of us at the bottom are basically stuck here until we can figure out new ways to build those bridges, and the more of the existing structures which collapse the longer that will take.  That’s a commercial nuisance to us as a label of course, and it is a tragedy for the potentially great bands trapped in obscurity, who might otherwise have been able to actually crack it to at least some level.

But nevertheless I find it difficult to mourn at all for a company who have built great, ugly, cavernous shops and yet don’t seem to have the faintest idea what to put in them, and who even as their last limbs are hacked off keep loudly insisting that they will bite you to death. I used to actually shop in HMV regularly, you know, but I can’t possibly imagine anything they could turn themselves into which would ever make me really want to go back.

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

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

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

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

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.

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. 

And as much as my chief whinge about remixes is largely based around accusations of parasitism and attention whoring, I am not foolish enough to entirely dismiss remixing music as a skill – not least by the obvious test which excuses a similar accusation that DJing is just like a playlist plus cross-fade: if it can be done badly, which it very clearly can, then you cannot possibly deny that it is therefore indeed a skill, so I don’t lack respect for remixing which is done well.

And to continue in mitigation, the remix also serves a really nice social function amongst musicians too.  I know loads of musicians who swap around remixing duties with one another’s music, partly as a way of working with people they respect, partly out of sheer fascination in what will be done with their music, and partly as a sort of tangential way of making connections which bind their communities together.

And, to reiterate, I have heard some fantastically good remixes.

But I have heard so, so many hundreds which are shite.  Not just shite, but embarrassing shite.  And, the worst, and the reason for this rant, not just shite, not just embarrassing shite, but embarrassing shite done solely for the purpose of cynical attention whoring and parasitically exploiting someone else’s success.  And the fact that this latter category seems to far, far outweigh any of the former in the volume with which it is ejaculated and the shrillness with which it demands our ears is the chief reason remixes have slowly but surely made me come to despise music.

For those who do not know it, The Hype Machine is not just ‘a’ but probably ‘the’ music blog aggregator.  When it first started out mp3 blogs were relatively few and far between, so aggregating them all made sense, and the Hype Machine’s chart was a relatively significant chart of what those people mental enough to spend all day writing about music for no obvious benefit to themselves. A song I posted by an unknown band from Norwich called Bambi Get Over It stubbornly stayed at the top of the chart for days back in 2008, despite precisely zero PR effort, just because people liked it that much.

Bambi Get Over It – Badman

Slowly but surely, as the mainstream music press both collapsed and developed appalling tunnel vision, music blogs became more or less the one place people who were into ‘alternative’ music of any stripe went to find the stuff, and consequently the Hype Machine became a big fucking deal.  However, people soon learned that certain keywords would be searched for regularly on the Hype Machine and because of the way the front page acted like a ticker of what every mp3 blogger out there was posting, there were certain ways to game the system.

It got to the point a few years ago where we music bloggers were openly taking the piss out of Anthony who runs the Hype Machine by pointing out that, balls to actual musical relevance, crapping out a remix of a Radiohead cover was the obvious and inexorable way to get to the top of the Hype Machine chart.  The charts were fucking infested with fucking awful remixes.

Now, the guys at the Hype Machine put a lot of work into making sure their chart is highly relevant of course, and not just PR fodder or remix attention whoring, so at the time and on numerous occasions since they have seriously tweaked how they calculated their chart to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

This was more of a problem in the US of course, because their mainstream press collapsed much more than ours here in the UK, and that which remains is still for the most part hopelessly afflicted with tunnel vision.  Blogs have never really had the same prominence here, so to a degree we escaped this problem… until Twitter and fucking Facebook.

Now what was a problem for the Hype Machine is no-one’s problem at all.  Do either Facebook or Twitter care how much utter garbage people’s feeds are clogged up with?  No, of course not, they just care that you have them, what’s in them is your problem.  But the old trick of gaming the information-feed-rubbernecking habits of the human animal is still just as effective.

Back then it was Radiohead, but the very second I heard the term ‘Lana Del Rey remix’ it was pretty fucking obvious what would cause me to mash my head against the desk the most in the early months of 2012.  Now, Lana Del Rey herself is someone I already despise for being an attention whore – it is the single characteristic which most consistently defines her career thus far – but at least she is using her own tunes and her own image, depressing as it may be, to get us to glance her way for a few minutes.

The countless shitty remixes on the other hand are no more than fucking parasitism.  She got famous more or less on her own terms.  It was, albeit, with significant financial help from her label who saw someone with the beginnings of a product they could polish and whose goal was simply fame and would therefore presumably be obedient and pliable, but nevertheless Lizzy Grant is at least famous for being Lana Del Rey.  Which in the modern world is a kind of warped form of integrity I suppose.

The remixers on the other hand, or at least the herds of those who are suddenly remixing her songs, are bringing next to nothing to the fucking table.  She is famous, and they desperately want to put their name in brackets after hers in an mp3 tag in the contemptible hope that people looking for her might notice them clinging onto her skirts and that somehow by association someone might end up giving the tiniest fragment of a fuck about their worthless contribution to the world.

As a music blogger, my inbox is testament to this sort of parasitism.  When a band gets famous, particularly if they exhibit flash in the pan symptoms, or generate a degree of fevered hysteria which, love her or loathe her, Lana Del Rey most certainly did, you can be absolutely certain that I will see a depressing influx of two things: covers of their material, which is one of the reasons I am so very skeptical of cover versions, and a considerably more significant spike in remixes of their material.

And this inevitable flood of utter, exploitative, worthless garbage which floods the world of remixes makes me fucking despise the bastard things, and the people in music who encourage that sort of shit.  It’s leeching off other people’s skills, whilst contributing the bare minimum of anything at all to the world yourself, and it’s fucking pathetic.  And worse, there are good things to be done with remixes and good people who do them very, very well indeed, and I will probably never hear them now because the deluge of utter shit contaminating the term remix means I will never open another email which contains the word ever again.

Fucking do some actual creative work yourselves, you cunts, and stop exploiting other people’s skills and stop giving a bad name to the people who do that stuff well.

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:

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”

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

=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)

=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

=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

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

Ha ha no P.J. Harvey.

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.