On the drive back from Glasgow yesterday, after the second of Yusuf Azak’s three album launch gigs, the snow started absolutely horsing it down, to the extent that all the traffic slowed to a sensible single file at about thirty miles an hour, and all you could see was little red tail-lights in the white.

It was, if I am being entirely honest, pretty cool. Although of course that’s easy to say when you’re no more than twenty miles from home and in no actual danger.

Anyway, this morning it’s all turned icy outside and Mrs. Toad is complaining about the heating not being up to the job, so I think we can safely say that the rituals of Winter have begun! Hence, the Coldcast.

Direct download: Toadcast #150 – The Coldcast

01. The Mountain Goats – You or Your Memory (00.28)
02. The 63 Crayons – Devils (07.02)
03. The Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant (15.50)
04. Brown Brogues – I Just Don’t Know (19.07)
05. The Beatles – Dear Prudence (25.16)
06. Girl Problems – Sancho (31.49)
07. Thirty Pounds of Bone – A Lesson in Talking (41.21)
08. Willy Mason – Carry On (44.33)
09. Y Niwl – Dau (52.42)
10. Songdog – A Life Eroding (So Much Sorrow) (61.26)

I seem to have two modes of sleep it seems – well rested and relatively funtional.  As I discovered over Christmas, I can happily sleep for about ten hours a night if possible, and I feel rested and chipper and happy.  That was great.  Oh how I miss those heady days – bed at one, pished, up by ooh, nearly noon just in time for lunch.  That was special.  I actually woke up in the morning of Monday 4th to come back to work and experienced a stunning sensation: I actually felt okay.  It wasn’t even a wrench to actually wake up!

This morning I experienced something similar.  It seems that I have a more commonplace sleep pattern as well – one which is not ideal, but with which I can live quite happily: six hours.  When the blog and the label are going full pelt I tend to go to sleep either exhausted or pished – working until the very small hours or, alternatively, taking the opportunity to blow off some steam.  This means a lot of three and four hour nights, which takes its toll on you, really it does.  Then there are times when I make a point of going to bed early and getting seven or eight hours and you know what? It doesn’t help.

What does seem to do the trick is six hours.  It’s not ideal, but I just seem to wake up feeling a bit shagged but basically alright – like this morning – and it seems to be a pretty consistent phenomenon.  Apparently this is thought to be largely down to the natural sleep cycle of your body – we all have one and they are all slightly different.  It seems that about six and a half hours kind of suits me, for some reason.

I don’t know much about this, but apparently there are theories that a lot of insomnia might be linked to the differences between the world’s twenty-four cycle and a person’s natural cycle, which may be twenty-two hours, or twenty-five and a half or whatever, and sometimes the two cycles interact incredibly disruptively, making it difficult for insomniacs to to find a sleep cycle which interacts positively with their body’s natural cycle.  So it’s not a problem with sleeping, exactly, more a disruptive interaction of the two frequencies, which can be very interesting mathematics in itself.  None of this, as is presumably evident, is anything I know much about, but I read about it once in a book and found it all very interesting.  Feel free to tell me I’m talking shit in the comments of course, because it’s quite possible, but make sure and do your five first because that’s the rules.

So, erm, not quite sure how that leads into five silly questions to invite the lurkers out of the shadows, but here goes…

1. When do you get your best lie-ins?
2. Strangest place you’ve ever had a night’s sleep.
3. Most inappropriate sleeping you’ve ever managed.
4. Longest time you’ve managed without sleep.
5. Last interesting science stuff you read about.  Nothing ‘sciencey’ like the Daily Mail and their ‘official saddest day of the year, as sponsored by shitey travel agents though please.  I am tipping Becky to win this one.

The Boo Radleys – Martin, Doom! It’s Seven O’Clock

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Ben Folds Five – Narcolepsy

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Bonnie Prince Billy – Cursed Sleep

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Dan of Green Gables – Nothing Could Stop You From Sleeping Tonight

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The Beatles – I’m So Tired

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John McCain, is fucking idiot, there are no two ways about it. Anyone who repeatedly refers to a nation called Czechoslovakia is a bozo and it is a masterpiece of the sheer catatonic passivity of the American press, as well as a nod to the audacity of Republican Party dialogue hijacking, that Obama is the one being doubted because of some imaginary relative weakness in areas of foreign policy.

In terms of being a weapons grade global irony whirlwind, on the other hand, the video below deliverys a valedictory masterclass from McCain. I haven’t seen many politicians manage to say anything so jaw-droppingly bald-faced and get away with it before. Perhaps the man is presidential material after all…!

[Video removed, presumably due to hilariously embarrassing content.]

“In the 21st Century, nations do not invade other nations”? You cannot be serious! I am forever being drawn back to Tom Lehrer’s comment about satire being obsolete when I hear things like this. How the fuck is it possible to mock something as dismissively vacant a statement as that. He cannot, cannot surely, be so stupid as to fail to understand the irony of what he just said, and yet he still came out with it.

It amazes me that American politics has become so incredibly partisan that this kind of thing isn’t roundly and widely mocked amongst Republicans as well as Democrats, and all this foreign policy bollocks just laughed out of the room, but it doesn’t seem to be. Just amazing, truly, truly amazing.

I think this is finally reason enough to post this song – finally we have found something ironic enough. Alanis Morrisette – Ironic[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/Ironic.mp3]
I guess these two songs will be all over blog posts discussing this particular situation, but they are so approriate I just can’t stop myself:
Willie Nelson – Georgia on My Mind
The Beatles – Back in the USSR

Hannah from Modernaire rather kindly sent through this George Orwell essay which I rather like, especially the bit about the Toad (I assure you there is no such thing as a ‘common’ Toad, whatever George may think).

Maybe we should all step away from these pernicious computer machines, and go and lark about, carefree in the springtime lushness.

The excerpt was from ‘SomeThoughts on the Common Toad’ and whilst I object to his scurrilous accusations of lower class toadery which, as a species, we vigorously refute, it makes a nice read. Orwell may have been a stodgy novellist, by which I mean that his intellectual achievements as a writer outsrip the actual enjoyment of reading his fiction, but he was a truly excellent essayist. Anyone who is yet to read “The Decline of the English Murder” should do so immediately. But this is not really a literary site, so let’s leave it to George, shall we:

“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenom¬enon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of Left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so… People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.

I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader-worship.”

There’s not a lot of music related to Orwell that I can think of, although I assume there must be loads out there. Animal Farm and 1984 have entered into the popular imagination such that people use metaphors from these books all the time, even if they have no idea where they came from.

For Animal Farm (tenuous, these two):
Cocorosie – Animals
The Beatles – Piggies
For 1984:
Alanalda – There is Always Someone Watching
Tina Turner – 1984
David Bowie – 1984 (Live)
For Down and Out in Paris and London:
The Divine Comedy – In and Out in Paris and London
There must be some more though, surely? Help me out here people.

My latest excursion into the murky waters of The Waiting Room saw me praising big famous bands for a change, really rather ironic given the hassle talking about those same bands has caused around here recently.  Would I have done the same segment in hindsight?  Would I fucking bollocks!

The Waiting Room, Wednesday 16th April 2008

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It’s weird, I feel something of a tit now for bigging up the bands that then bring down teh haterz, even though I know it’s nothing to do with the actual bands themselves.  Or at least I should bloody well hope it’s nothing to do with the bands.  Odd how the behaviour of someone employed by someone who employs someone to look after a group can make a band look quite so bad, really.  Guilt by association.  I know the band could quite easily order off the attack dogs (would a really big label even pretend to listen?) or publically condemn this sort of bollocks, but why would they?  They make music, not politics.  Although REM are pretty politically involved so you would expect them to have a stance on all this web madness one way or another.

Hmm, well that’s another ramble for another day.

It’s a pig themed week for some reason, so I thought I’d lob these little gems into the mix just for fun.  The Sparklehorse song in particular is something of an enormously noisy, fuzzy masterpiece.

The Beatles – Piggies
Sparklehorse – Pig

Well OiNK appears to be about to bite the dust. For those of you who don’t know, OiNK is a filesharing site where people share pre-release copies of albums for nothing. There is a minimum quality, so you know you’re getting a good product and you are ‘invited’ to donate to the site, but not compelled.

Ultimately, I am completely unsure what I think about this sort of site as, I get the impression, are most people who aren’t either avaricious music industry parasites on one hand or some sort of self-absorbed teenager with a ridiculously overinflated sense of entitlement on the other.

Basically, there are arguments for and against unrestricted filesharing, but I still find it difficult to get my head around the idea of sharing high-quality copies of an artist’s work without them receiving a penny for it. Don’t tell me that people make their money from touring nowadays because, whilst that may be true for Radiohead or other groups big enough to generate their own publicity, it is definitely not true for small bands. I can’t emphasise this enough: they have told me this themselves, and for now it just doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately though, free-flowing filesharing can be very helpful to artists in many ways. I am also acutely aware of one of the central issues of this debate: can it ultimately be stopped? So in terms of unlimited filesharing I get the impression that monetising rather than simply trying to extinguish these things is going to be the way forward for the music industry. I know this is hardly a startling conclusion of course, so I am not pretending to have made an insightful statement here. All I’m saying is that I am not in principle against that side of OiNK’s service, but the fact that they aren’t paying artists a penny, despite anyone’s free-flowing information protestations, bothers me.

Deep down, it is the actual content of the material swapped on OiNK that bothers me – pre-release copies, unfinished and leaked versions – all of it basically shows utter disrespect to the artist and the integrity of their art form. ‘Oh, fuck it Mr. Da Vinci, you’re nearly finished, just hand it over. It’s pretty obvious it’s just a picture of a woman sat there smirking anyway’.

This sort of service could be great if it could be done in a manner that respects both the artists’ intent and their financial entitlement. Yes, I said entitlement. They spend years of their lives making this shit and if we want it, they deserve money in return. That is the way the whole world works. Ultimately, OiNK was just piggy.

Ben Folds – All U Can Eat
The Beatles – Piggies

If you want to read the view of someone I really probably agree with about pretty much everything, but have somehow managed to come to an entirely different conclusion from, try this from The Rawking Refuses to Stop.

Sorry about the pun. Good though, wasn’t it! And thanks to Wendy for spotting both the picture and the excellent piggy noise.

I was writing about bands selling out a couple of days ago and the phrase ‘the anti-popular reflex’ cropped up. Now, there are plenty of instances of bands genuinely selling out that we covered in that post and the subsequent comments, but I thought this particular phenomenon needed a little more idle chatter devoted to it. Hooray, I hear you say.

I have an instinctive and barely controllable anti-popular reflex whereby no matter how much I like something, as soon as it starts to become hugely popular I find it very difficult to maintain my enthusiasm. Sometimes this goes so far as to instinctively hate things simply because they are so popular. I can’t bring myself to watch Lost, for example, despite the fact that plenty of people whose opinions I respect keep telling me how good it is. And if I did watch it, it would be with that wrinkled up nose a little child gets when forced to eat brussel sprouts.

I think a lot of indie lovers suffer from this, and I think there are a couple of reasons, one trivial and one a little deeper.

The trivial one is that we indie lovers care quite a lot about music, and the general public does not. We care about music and form close bonds of loyalty with our favourite groups because no-one else likes them and it can feel that our evangelism on their behalf is important for them. Whether this is true or not is a moot point, but it can often feel that way. When these groups get popular it can be impossible to maintain that intense relationship because, well, if they’re special to several million people then it’s stretching the definition of the word special a little, isn’t it.

The slightly (only slightly though, don’t look so scared) deeper reason is this: most indie lovers are alternative types in general. Virtually none of us were from the cool set in school, nor are we amongst the champagne and martinis set now we are older.

To those not at the beating heart of all things cool, this makes the attribute of coolness something which can be oppressive, condescending, and demeaning, not least because those in the inner circle tend to guard their status rather jealously. Many of us react to this by redefining cool as being the things we ourselves most like, rather than the things that the vagaries of fashion and public clamour tell us we should like, but this is still a slightly defensive position. What is held up to be cool in the magazines and on the telly is popularly defined as being better, at the direct expense of everything else.

The stance – well, my stance anyway – is ‘Fuck off, who the fuck do you think you are to look down your nose at me you vacuous, bovine imbecile. What makes you think I give a shit what your opinion is of my lifestyle, or care the slightest fig for your herd mentality, you hollow, empty shell of a human being, you.’ Or some such. My relationship, and I don’t think I am alone in this, with the world of high cool is a fractious one at very best.

So when bands I love go mainstream this hostility towards things in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of popularity can kick in and overwhelm the actual warmth I may feel for the music. And equally, if I first hear of a band or a TV program or a pair of trainers simply because they are already very cool, it is highly unusual that I will think anything other than ‘Ah right, just more shit the masses venerate for no reason whatsoever. Just like they venerated that stringy transvestite Sarah Jessica Parker. Or those vapid cunts in The OC. Or that self-indulgent idiot Pete Docherty. Or that unbearable shitfest Titanic (Oscars, that film actually won Oscars).’

So it may not always be entirely reasonable, but I don’t think the anti-popular reflex is completely unfair.

The Magnetic Fields – Famous
The Endrick Brothers – Star of the Silver Screen
The Beatles – Honey Pie
Ben Folds Five – Underground
The Extraordinaires – Seeds of Jealousy
And now the kicker. Yes, I am actually going to ask you to listen to Meat Loaf. Yes I own this album and no, I didn’t have to go and buy this song just for this post. Snigger all you want, but if you listen to the lyrics and replace the girl in question with your favourite music and the anti-popular reflex (reason #1) is perfectly described.

Meat Loaf – More Than You Deserve