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”

 When 6Music was threatened with the axe a couple of years ago I objected on about three grounds, if I remember correctly.

- First was self-interest, because almost no-one else ever plays the stuff I release on the radio.

- Second was about the damage to the arts caused by effectively cutting adrift musicians and bands at lower levels by removing one of the only feasible remaining ladders to the higher levels, meaning the only way to financial viability now would be to leap from a few local blogs to Radio1 all in one go.

- And thirdly, I pointed out that the BBC has a remit to not overlap too much with the commercial sector, and to support the arts in the UK on a basis of artistic merit, the cultural health of the nation and some hazy notion of the public good.  They seem to rather inexplicably take this to imply cutting BBC4 and 6Music, channels not competing with anything out there in the commercial landscape, whereas I personally think it directly implies cutting Radio1 and Strictly Come fucking Dancing.

Now their excitable axe-man has turned his eye on the regional shows which make up the BBC Introducing network.  For those who don’t know, BBC Introducing has a flagship show late at night on Radio1 presented by Huw Stephens, a show on 6Music hosted by Tom Robinson, and then three regional Introducing shows in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it is these three which are being threatened with closure.

Now, first things first. I don’t know Ally McCrae, who presents Introducing in Scotland, all that well, but he and his producer Muslim Alim are nevertheless people I would consider to be pals.  So from the very start, my feeling about this is ‘hey, fuck off, those people are my friends, you fuckers’, so I am not entirely objective on this topic.

Also, the self-interest clause still very much applies: Introducing in Scotland have probably played more songs by artists on Song, by Toad Records than anyone else, with the possible exception of Gideon Coe.  Also, Muslim and the show’s previous presenter, Vic Galloway, were absolutely instrumental in getting Meursault a Maida Vale session a couple of years ago, a daytime playlisting on Radio1 and a prominent slot on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury.

So one thing you can be certain of, is that someone like me is absolutely never going to support the closure of BBC Introducing in Scotland, to the extent that I suppose I should barely need to even say it.  People in Newcastle and Leeds and places like that, however, must be laughing at us just a little bit.

In Scotland we get a whole Introducing show all to ourselves, for a population of something like five or six million people.  In Wales they get one for three million and in Northern Ireland a whole to show to represent just under two million people.  In England they get one show to represent a country of nearly fifty-five million – I have to say I far prefer our odds of getting played!

The English music media is incredibly London-centric, too.  I don’t mean that as an insult or an accusation either, it’s just the inevitable consequence of the size of the population, the fact that it is a massive cultural hub, and the fact that so many music people down there end up knowing one another, going to the same shows and stuff like that.

But it does mean that if you’re from Plymouth and you’re awesome you’re going to have the same difficulties breaking into the ‘British’ music scene as a band from Scotland would have, only without all the benefits we have courtesy of being a quasi-independent nation and having a mutually supportive and relatively inward-facing (alright, call it parochial if you want to) music media of our own.

So apart from Manchester bands (who might feasibly end up bumping into Marc Riley, Jo Good or Michelle Choudhry at a gig, although they face the same obstacles of cost in their efforts to engage with London) we in the officially recognised regions are in a particularly privileged position when it comes to BBC Introducing.  I wouldn’t think bands would have much sympathy with us if they come from other regions, like the North-East, which is less clearly-defined or pandered to, yet equally out in the sticks as far as the London music media is concerned.

And, in fact, say the regional Introducing shows do go, what then?  Well I was discussing this with a friend yesterday, and he pointed out that even if the regional shows themselves are axed, it would almost certainly be politically salved by a significantly increased emphasis on those regions in the remaining Introducing shows – Huw Stephens and Tom Robinson.

So instead of a very likely play to the population of Scotland, we’d end up less likely to be played, but still at a significant advantage to a lot of people, and the audience would now be able to reach would be a portion of the six-odd million population of the UK, rather than simply the tartan tranche.

There are political questions of course, such as what it says about the regard for the independence and national identities of the member states of the increasingly loose-knit United Kingdom.  There are questions about just how London-centric the BBC actually wishes to be.  There are personal questions about friends of mine losing their jobs, and the loss of a group which has played a significant role in the development and support of a music community of which I am a part.

So I will sign any petition you ask me to to help save BBC Introducing in Scotland, and I most certainly don’t want it to go, because that would be insane, particularly for someone in my position for whom Introducing has done so much.  But for some reason this week I have found myself looking at the other side of the coin, with a sort of morbid fascination.

So it seems that 6Music has been saved for now, which is very good news.  Saved is not entirely accurate I suppose; perhaps reprieved might be more like it.  There is still every chance it could go if the BBC were to include the cut in a broader re-strategising of their digital radio offering.

The proposed cuts seemed punitive rather than strategic, a suspicion strongly reinforced by the recent utterances of Tim Montgomerie: “Disgraceful that 6Music has been saved.  When will the BBC share in the pain?” I think we can all agree that he comes across as a stupid cunt, but I am not really going to dig at that too much, as No Rock and Roll Fun has done a much better job of dismantling his nonsense here.

The thing which has been itching at me ever since this was announced was nicely summed up by the Daily Mash (a brilliant site, by the way – sort of like a British Onion) at the time the cuts were first threatened.  The first paragraph of this article sums it up quite neatly: “The closure of the BBC’s 6 Music has enraged thousands of people who insist it is the sort of thing they would probably have liked if they had ever got round to listening to it.”

I am thrilled that 6Music has been saved and it is the only radio station I would ever choose to listen to, but as many have said, what of the Asian Network?  Well it’s a slightly stupid question, and throws the point made by the Daily Mash above into sharp relief.  I like the idea of the Asian Network, in that it sounds like it is probably a good idea, it is nevertheless not aimed at me, not anything I ever listened to and therefore not something I know the slightest thing about.

So really, for me to weep and wail about the Asian Network all I would be doing would be rather hollowly defending something which sounded like the right sort of thing for the BBC to be doing. Honestly, though, it would be a shallow protest, because I have no fucking idea whether the Asian Network really does merit preservation or not.

As anyone who lamented the demise of the Bowery here in Edinburgh last year should have instinctively known when its takeover was first mooted, it is not enough to like the idea of something, we have to actually use it.  One of the reasons the Bowery ended up without a particularly strong negotiating position was that most of us who liked the idea of it didn’t actually go there often enough to keep it open.

Equally with 6Music, do those of us who hate the idea of it closing actually listen to the station all that much?  Do those of us who love independent music actually go to the gigs our favourite promoters put on, or buy the music our favourite labels and bands release?

One of the reasons the things I love are often called ‘alternative’ is simply descriptive: they are things which not all that many people really like all that much.  Things which are not popular often, for simple economic reasons, can no longer afford to exist.  All of which brings me back to the initial point, which is that it is all very well to like the idea of this sort of thing, and quite right to be thrilled that 6Music is, for now, not going to be shut down.  But really, protests and petitions are one thing, but the only real way to support this kind of stuff is to actually make a point of using it as often as possible.

[Alex Cornish (shown right on the Tom Robinson show) is an Edinburgh singer songwriter and a good friend of mine.  He has helped us out with contracts for Toad things for free, for no more reason than generosity and, although he may not be that well known in the alt-folk spheres inhabited by most people here, he has actually achieved considerable success, including being playlisted on Radio2, all using entirely DIY methods and entirely off his own back.  He wrote this on his own site recently, and gave me permission to re-post it here as part of this week's Sunday Supplement.]

I know everyone is writing about 6 Music being axed, but here is my viewpoint as an artist who works in a very DIY way and has first hand experience of sending out unsolicited CDs to producers at radio shows.

Once you have written and recorded the ‘masterpiece’, it’s time to decide who is likely to play it. This is all inapplicable if you have a wad of cash to pay a radio plugger, I didn’t, so I did it myself. Anyway, there’s no point sending out promo CDs to people who don’t play your sort of music and there’s no point sending it to the wrong address or the wrong producer. There’s also no point in sending it to the majority of commercial stations (XFM down south excepted). You need to spend a long time doing research on the old internet. After I had recorded Until the Traffic Stops first time around I spent said long time on the internet and the telephone (one of the great things about the BBC by the way is that if you telephone the switchboard they have to tell you who the production team for a show is, including the right box no. etc.). At that time, and this was before I had ever been played on the radio, I found that XFM Scotland might play it, so I sent a CD to Jim Gellatly for his new music show. I was also a massive fan of the Tom Robinson show on 6 Music, which at the time was on Monday – Thursday from 7pm to 9.30pm. There was also Vic Galloway’s Radio 1 Introducing show. So, out of all the radio stations, in general terms I had 6 Music, XFM and BBC Introducing on Radio 1. Now XFM Scotland has closed that leaves 6 Music and Radio 1 Introducing. If 6 Music closes it’s the introducing shows on Radio 1 as the only champions of new music, and to be honest they would rarely play my sort of music.

There are two reasons why 6 Music is so important to me:

- the first is that Tom Robinson and his producer picked out my little unsolicited package, which led to it being played, then a session, then someone at 6 Music handed it up to Radio 2 and a year later I got on the Radio 2 palylist. The same thing happened with Jim Gellatly, he picked it up and from there it led to other things. Without those massive leg ups I wouldn’t have had anywhere near the level of the exposure that I have had. There are obviously people at Radio 2 and Radio Scotland who have taken big chances in backing me, but I wouldn’t have got to them without those intial acts of support.

- the second is the new music I have discovered as a fan – I remember hearing ‘ The Ride’ by Joan as Policewoman on 6 Music and buying it right away. There are lots of occasions when that has happened.

So, as a musician where does that leave you? Well, there are obviously blogs and they are great, and I send stuff to blogs already, but as a reader or listener on a blog site you have to be active i.e. you have to actually read and listen to the material on a blog. With the radio, it is more passive – it is on in your home and when you hear something new, you stop, check out the tracklisting online and buy it from itunes or whatever. 6 Music closing is going to leave a massive hole for both those that love discovering and supporting new music and for those musicians trying to reach those potential new fans. I’ll never forget the first time ‘This One’s for You’ was played on the Tom Robinson show – first radio play. A huge thrill. It’s a fucking shame.

[Mrs. Toad has very kindly contributed this Friday's Fives, as I am busy being mounted like a five-dollar hooker at Proper Job.  Enjoy.]

I am in the middle of a secondment at Proper Job which basically means that instead of rushing around trying to get new clients or speak to existing ones about what is going on in the world of stocks and shares, I am undertaking company analysis and have time on my hands to contemplate the mysteries of the future.

So at the moment, I am mulling what cars will be like in 2030 and how many of them will be on the roads. This is usually predicted using an S-Curve function which predicts growth of consumption goods accelerating from matching income growth at low levels at twice the rate of income growth for a certain range of income finally slowing again to match income growth at higher levels giving an S shaped graph. According to this, there will be 2 billion cars on the road in 2030 (there are about 800 million now). Scary stuff. However, population density is also rising (only 46% of New Yorkers own a car whereas 92% of Americans do) and car sharing (ZipCar/City Car club) is also on the rise. So how the hell am I supposed to come up with an even half sensible estimate? Even Volkswagen don’t seem to think we will all own our own cars.

Of course, the point is that you can’t get it right, you just have to make a reasonable estimate and assign a probability to it based on current evidence. Despite the shelves and shelves of strategy books in airports worldwide, there is a great deal of serendipity involved in most business successes. The guys at Google for instance, didn’t start out to be in the advertising business but ending up there is why their company is worth $135bn. There is also the occasional trying to be too clever moment. If I said to you that buying a share of 100 dodgy mortgages packaged together and sliced up is as safe as lending to a blue chip company like IBM, you’d laugh in my face but that’s what all the physics graduates and math whizzes at places like Lehman Bros really believed. Business is hard especially, when mistakes mean that you could go down the pan or get taken out. Its easy to err too far on the side of caution and become defensive and oppressive rather than innovative (yeah, that’s you Microsoft).

Which makes it all the more galling that a non profit entity such as the BBC has apparently confused “value for money” with “bums on seats” in its recent strategic review, leading to the closure of 6 Music, the watering down of local content, and the downsizing of their successful website. The questions in the review also point to them considering reducing some of the innovative projects that they have undertaken such as pushing DAB and developing iPlayer. iPlayer is in large part why people like Murdoch(s) have it in for them, Sky and Virgin Media cannot make money if they cannot control content provision. By pushing people online to a familiar and trusted brand, the BBC has hastened their demise.

This has already been linked to but I would urge you all to take some time to respond to the BBC’s strategic review in full because its clear that fear of Tory/Murdoch harpies is pushing them in an all together more stolid direction than we have seen in the last ten years and that would be a great shame.

1. What do you think cars will be like in 20 years time?
2. Best piece of bullshit bingo you have heard?
3. Company/brand or product you most admire?
4. Company/brand or product you detest?
5. Your soothsayer like prediction for the world in 2030?

Ballboy – All the Records on the Radio are Shite

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Depeche Mode – Everything Counts

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Phil Ochs – Automation Song

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The Clash – Complete Control

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Company Town

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I know there’s been a lot of chatter about this already, but I feel really strongly that we need to try and stop the closure of BBC 6Music if we can.  If you want to help, please sign both of the following petitions:

Petition FM
Go Petition

And if you’re a Facebooker, please join this group.

You can also fill in the following consultation form if you can make the time, which would also be a big help.

Equally importantly, please email srconsultation@bbc.co.uk and tell them why they should keep 6Music.

And finally, make sure you listen to the bloody station.  I can’t stress this enough.  It’s not enough to support something by moaning, and it’s not enough just to like the idea of something existing, if you want to support something you have to actually use their product, whatever that might be.  Otherwise we become these people.

So, why, in all honesty, should we do all this?  What’s the big deal, and are we just being snotty about losing 6Music because it generally played ‘our kind of music’ or is there some wider purpose beyond specific taste which the station served which should be preserved?

The answer, from me, is yes on both counts.  Firstly and most obviously, in terms of supporting the actual making of new music, across all genres, 6Music was without parallel.  By giving so much opportunity to small and emerging bands, and by using specialist DJs who could put those bands into a broader historical context, the station fulfilled a unique function in actually supporting the development of music in the UK.

In saying this am I being insulting to the BBC Introducing network, with Vic Galloway, Bethan Elfyn and Huw Stephens?  No, I don’t think so.  As good a job as they do, and as grateful as I am to the consistent support and friendship Vic has shown Song, by Toad, they simply don’t have enough time to represent the entire BBC contribution to new music.  With so little time to play stuff, the volume of submissions to time allowed ratio means that the music cannot all be reasonably listened to or played and the whole thing becomes a crap-shoot, which becomes a real barrier to good things rising to the top.  6Music has enough airtime that good stuff is likely to be picked up – it’s still far from perfect, but it’s alright.

The other point is that in ditching 6Music the Beeb would basically be abdicating any role in cultural and artistic development in the field of popular music.  They may think that fits with their charter, but I do not.  Basically, Radio One is what is already happening, and Radio Two is what was never happening.  These stations are entirely dominated by the finished article, but who is going to finish that article for them?  In the absence of 6Music there will be the shiny, professional mainstream at one end, and tiny DIY enterprises like this one at the other, and absolutely not a single bloody thing inbetween.

How the hell are you supposed to progress, to step up, to actually make that massive leap without the developmental step of 6Music, where you can start out with a couple of airplays on one show, maybe get a session on another, and hope to eventually make the step up to a Maida Vale Session and perhaps eventually some Radio1 airplay.  Take away 6Music and you have to go from the Song, by Toad podcast to Radio1 in a single leap, which is not only a ludicrous expectation, but also makes the process increasingly arbitrary, because bands develop at different rates.  Not everyone can teach themselves all the stuff required to do this without intermediary steps, and even fewer have the stamina to keep going all that way without the encouragement they provide.

So from a label or band’s perspective, this is basically a disaster.  This was the closest we had to a reasonably understandable route to establishing ourselves, and in its absence this is going to become extremely challenging.  If I wanted to be a cynical bugger about it I would look at the Toad Sessions and look at the podcasts and watch the BBC and everyone else (XFM, anyone?) abandoning this middle ground for the higher echleons of pimping finished products and I would be rubbing my hands with glee at just how much audience they are surrendering and how much artistic ground they have abandoned, ground which we can now make a concerted effort to occupy.

Ultimately, though, that just isn’t how I feel.  Getting the likes of Gideon Coe, Marc Riley and Stuart Maconie off the air is a massive loss to anyone who cares about music and, more specific to the BBC, to anyone who cares about supporting cultural development in the UK.  The BBC are paid a lot in the form of tax, and they have a public service responsibility, and as far as I am concerned cutting 6Music will represent a very significant failure to fulfil that role.

So, erm, BBC 6Music seems to be closing, does it?  Well, firstly, let’s be clear on the fact that this is yet to be confirmed – in a rather strange turn of events even the BBC couldn’t find anyone from the BBC willing to comment.  Maybe it’s boycotting itself, in the Alex Ferguson style.

Anyhow, these reports originate from The Times, who are part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp media dinosaur who are themselves splashing about rather desperately in the ocean of free content, harried by internetters on one hand and the Beeb on the other.  So until this is actually confirmed by a credible source, I’d hold back on the histrionics a little – which is why I have yet to cover this month-old rumour until now as it is.

Still, it worries me because it’s part of a wider trend which I find rather scary at the moment: entertainment holding increasing sway over culture.

Of course, any fan of painting, sculpture, poetry, classical music or anything like that will tell you that this is just the same as it ever was and that basically it’s just our turn now for a change, and that they’ve had this problem for years.  If anything is killing the music industry, for example, it’s the fucking vacant populism of the X-Factor, it ain’t the internet.

Anyhow, late last year the Metro closed their regional arts offices, basically swinging the axe on some of the best local arts coverage in the UK.  Culture, simply, isn’t all that commercially viable.  But the Beeb themselves seem to have little idea what they are there for to begin with.  Why the fuck did they start trying to compete with reality TV?  Why the fuck did they foist the likes of George Lamb on 6Music and basically date-rape the daytime schedule?  Well the answer to the latter question is that apparently Lesley Douglas thinks that women are fucking idiots, but the whole thing speaks of general confusion as to what the BBC is actually supposed to do.

Tax is there to pay for things which commercial concerns will not cover, and to provide accountability to the public which commercial practises do not.  The Beeb is pretty clearly covered by the first, but it has slowly but surely been forgetting its remit and trying to compete with commercial channels on their terms.  6Music only costs £7m a year to run (just over a third of Wossy’s wages), and if they wanted to cut costs they could simply fire their fucking dreadful daytime celebrity presenters and return the station to the specialists for whom it was originally intended.  This mission creep has left it falling between two stools to a considerable degree

Mrs. Toad said to me once that you used to become famous by being on the radio, but nowadays the only way you got on the radio was by being famous to begin with.  This is patently not the Beeb’s job – they are there to ensure that all are represented, not just the most famous.  There is a sizeable audience for alternative music outside the Brits and Q fodder who represent the dismal indie mainstream, but the routes to success for small bands are continually being cut off by commercial pressures.

The problem with this is that in craving larger audiences the Beeb destroys the USP of the station, and risks turning it into XFM.  The trick is not to neuter your individuality by craving the mainstream, it is to accept what you are and budget accordingly.  If (and it is still an if, remember) 6Music goes then the BBC are essentially abandoning all pretense of supporting the development of alternative music culture in the UK.  Radio One is too populist, Radio Two too cautious, and therefore that will be pretty much the end of one of the most important points of access to their audience which existed for emerging musicians in Britain.

Or, to put it another way, how the fuck are any of us going to get our music out there now?  The States has already seen this happen, as print media failed completely and Clearchannel hoovered up and then euthanised all commercial radio, until all that was left was the blogs.  And inasmuch as I like blogs, I feel I need to stress the point that this is not a good thing.

However, there is a note or two of optimism to be struck.  As the major record labels have discovered, scrambling towards the lowest common denominator with such desperation leaves a void behind you which can eventually reach such critical mass that it swallows you up.  If the Beeb is abandoning the alternative to this extent, all it does it leave that space open for amateurs like us, and eventually they run the risk of making themselves so culturally irrelevant that they will lose their right to participate altogether and will have effectively ceded everything which makes them special to the rest of us.

The new Jesus H. Foxx EP is being given a full release on Song, by Toad Records in about a month’s time.  By full release, I mean that we will be making a run of five hundred copies, with hand-painted artwork and I will be doing my best to publicise it around the various magazines and radio stations and blogs out there.  It also implies that they are Song, by Toad Records’ latest signing, I suppose, in the sense that anyone is signed to Song, by Toad Records, which is something I am really pleased about because the stuff I’ve heard from them in the last year or so has been truly excellent.

I’ve not emailed bloggers yet, but we’re getting a little traction with radio it seems, with I’m Half the Man You Were appearing on both Gideon Coe’s 6Music show (my favourite show on the station, which makes it even nicer) and Jim Gellatly’s New Music show on Radio Magnetic.  And apparently I got hammered on the Toad night last Saturday and gave BBC Radio Scotland’s Mr. Vic Galloway a big sloppy kiss, so if that doesn’t get them some airtime on his show I don’t know what will.

That picture above is how the artwork is shaping up so far.  It will be printed on natural card, so there will be a texture to the flat areas of colour which should look really nice.  So, in general, I am really excited about this.  Publicising EPs is harder than albums in many ways, because a lot of magazines don’t cover them, but I am going to try to get through to as many online and community radio stations as possible and see if we can’t make up for it that way.

Any suggestions appreciated, and in the meantime, please enjoy Elegy For the Good Times from the Matter EP.

Jesus H. Foxx – Elegy For the Good Times

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Jesus H. Foxx on MySpace