You have no idea how many times I’ve read about people referencing Captain Beefheart when describing the music I love, but for some inexplicable reason I have never really explored his music.

The other day someone shared the video above on their Facebook timeline thingy and for the first time I actually listened to some Beefheart.  And you know what, pretty fucking good don’t you think.

After that I happened across this phenomenal video for The Blues Are Still Blue by Belle & Sebastian.  I am not convinced they gave permission for this directly, so it is yet another case of the sort of thing SOPA and IP fundamentalists will be stopping.  Nevertheless, Stuart from B&S is clearly chuffed to bits with the video, which goes to show that a large amount of grey area exists in copyright violation between what dying commercial behemoths want to demand from the government and what artists actually feel harms them.

Anyway, after that I was buggering about on the internet some more (I told you this was going to get tedious, didn’t I) and then I happened across some early Nirvana videos.  Really early Nirvana videos.  In fact, if the YouTube blurb is to be believed, some of the very earliest ones.

Those of you who listened to the Slackercast this weekend will know that I am in the process of digging back through some of the early US indie rock and slacker rock which is inspiring so many of today’s lo-fi garagey bands.  I was kind of aware of this stuff at the time, but only vaguely.

Most of the music I was into, even in my last years of high school, when you’re supposed to be being all rebellious, owed more to my parents than my peers, so I actually didn’t get as deep into this kind of stuff as you would think.  Pretty good videos though, eh?

Oh, and while I was buggering about I also happened across this trailer, which takes the form of a parody of recent low-budget British films.  And let’s face it, whilst it’s a little heavy-handed it’s still pretty funny, and rather accurate.

And so umm.. yes. I’ve been buggering about on YouTube. Fascinating, this shit, isn’t it.

Let’s get one thing straight, no matter how fucking busy I am today I will be out in that damned garden by four o’clock this afternoon with a beer in my hand or there will be hell to pay!

I am currently working on the Scottish Enlightenment Toad Session, due to go up tomorrow, and it’s going to be tight, but dammit the weather in Scotland is this nice so fucking rarely that days like this must be seized, with some determination.

Actually, if we can get it to stay this nice for a couple of days we are likely to have a barbecue before the Alex Cornish and Avital Raz House Gig tomorrow.  If it’s sunny come by from about five or six and we will be out the back relaxing!  If not, then just turn up whenever, of course.

I am really looking forward to this one, as well as being a little nervous.  Apparently Alex is bringing a full bloody string quartet with him, which is a slightly terrifying (if rather cool) prospect. As ever, please let me know if you’re coming down so we can be prepared!

Anyhow, better get this posted, or I’ll never meet my four o’clock deadline!

1. Favourite barbecue food.
2. Shorts – yes or no?
3. Can you manage to not look a tool in shades?
4. Do you burn quickly in the sun?
5. Are you passive or active when barbecues are being lit, and then cooked with?

Enfant Bastard – You Are My Fucking Sunshine

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Lambchop – Your Fucking Sunny Day

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The Bees – Sunshine

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Yo La Tengo – Beach Party Tonight

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Belle & Sebastian – A Summer Wasting

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Belle & Sebastian are one of my favourite bands, so I am pretty gutted that it feels like our relationship is comprehensively and irreparably broken.  That sounds rather idiotically melodramatic, but this feels a bit like breaking up with someone, seeing them hanging around some new friends and finding them so utterly unlike you that the breakup takes on a kind of finality, in the sense that if that’s what they really enjoy, then no amount of talking about it is going to make you right for each other anyway, so might as well just let it go.

You’ve probably guessed I’m talking about Norah Jones by now, haven’t you.  If Stuart Murdoch wants to make music with Norah Jones, then he is probably not making music for me anymore, and if I am going to react like this to him making music with Norah Jones then he probably won’t care in the slightest that he isn’t making music for me anymore.  And nor should he.

I remember seeing the first posters for Belle & Sebastian going up around Glasgow, and not being entirely sure they were real.  The artwork was so distinctive, despite being so simple, and the name of the band and the names of their songs had such an otherworldly air to them that it took a while for me to be sure they weren’t a spoof or a cinematic project or… well something other than a straightforward indie-pop band anyway.

My girlfriend at the time became enamoured with them, put a handful of songs on a series of mixtapes, and my own infatuation quickly followed suit.  There was something mischievous and enigmatic about their fey playfulness which made even its most sugar-sweet incarnations seem a little subversive.  It was as if underneath every pretty, breathless stanza there might be a tale of domestic abuse lurking.  It’s hard for me to personally put my finger on, but they just had that magic, even if the music often sounded like the most wide-eyed, innocent thing in the whole world.

So given that their appeal was a little tricky to pin down in the first place, it’s inevitably going to be a little tricky to articulate exactly what I think they have lost.  I could say that this lacks any kind of essence, any kind of essential life-force, but then it would be hard for me to pinpoint exactly where I thought that resided before.  This album basically lacks the urgency to exist which the drive to make themselves known seems to give younger musicians, and without that inner flame, all we’re left with is the sugar-coated outer shell, resulting in an album which is so flaccid and suffocating I can barely bring myself to listen to it.

That compelling desire for self-expression simply seems to have evaporated, and I’d imagine it might well have.  How, as a successful, established older musician do you maintain that hunger?  Few can do it.  So I guess Murdoch simply isn’t making music for that market anymore, that excited, hungry listener with a passion for hearing something weird and unsettling which will make them sit up and take notice and spend two months figuring out if they like it or not.  Or maybe he is, but it doesn’t feel like it to me on this evidence.

What it feels like is an album by a band who have evolved into something I was never going to like, whether it was a good or bad version of itself, so in a sense I am really in no position to praise or criticise this record.  But one thing is for sure, Belle & Sebastian and I are very clearly not on the same page anymore because I think this is awful.

Belle & Sebastian – Come On Sister

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Belle & Sebastian – Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John (feat. Norah Jones)

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

Despite the title (and the first song) there is very little ranting about the fucking Pope on this podcast, I promise.  He may be a vicious, decaying old scorpion in charge of one of the most corrupt and evil institutions on Earth, but after a little bit of gentle joshing at the beginning I promise I do let it drop and carry on with the music.

We have a fair bit of new stuff this week, such as Belle & Sebastian, Broken Records, Li’l Daggers and various other bits, and then a brief detour into Mrs. Toad and my drunken late night vinyl escapades last night.

Enjoy!

Direct Download: Toadcast #140 – The Romecast

01. Tom Lehrer – The Vatican Rag (00.17)
02. Li’l Daggers – King Corpse (06.26)
03. Bastardgeist – Flee to the Hills (11.26)
04. Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love (20.23)
05. Broken Records – Ailene (23.10)
06. The Walkmen – Blue as Your Blood (31.31)
07. Common Grackle – At the Grindcore Show (36.07)
08. The Meteors – Out of Time (40.42)
09. The Housemartins – Five Get Over Excited (43.46)
10. The Delfields – Claire (50.03)

Another day, and another week pootles by.  Are there more made up, gibberish and yet entirely understandable words for pottering about that anything else?  Is it the English equivalent of the Eskimos and their bazillion words for snow?  Mrs. Toad always accuses the cat of ‘foostering about’ somewhere.  Dylan from Blueback Hotrod is forever going on about ‘bimbling’ off somewhere.

It’s all gibberish, but you all know exactly what it means, don’t you?  It’s obviously just something we English speakers take great pride in: doing something without any real sense of purpose and perfectly happy to be distracted at the slightest notice.

Anyhow, last week Matt from StayLoose PR, who arranged the Mumford & Sons Toad Session for us, asked that it be published on a Friday, to help him give it as much publicity as possible, and given that he’d gone to great lengths for us and that a bit of help with publicity is always welcome, I fucked with your Friday Fives to satisfy the whims of The Man.  The Man in this case being Matt. Who is by all accounts a man.  Raarrrr!

Anyhow, in the comments last week we had Outraged of Adelaide (Agnes from It All Started With Carbon Monoxide) actually filling in an imaginary five and, honestly, the results were fucking hilarious.  So this week’s five is actually Agnes’ five answers, and instead of coming up with answers, this week I would like you all to try and guess what the questions which Agnes was answering in her head actually were.

And just the Mumfords Session was mentioned in the Guardian today, and therefore we might have a few more Guardian readers here than usual, I feel obliged to mention once again that yes, of course, I did pinch the idea for the Friday Fives from the Guardian Talk boards, so don’t whinge.

So here you go, try and figure out what the question was:

1. Roadkill – it’s the other white meat.
2. A strategically-placed eyepatch.
3. I wouldn’t know, I have a horse.
4. Desperate fucking Housewives.
5. The bloody Dum Dum Girls.  Shudder.

These five songs come from living in a flat in Surbiton with a girl I should never have been with, cheating on her like a fucker, breaking up with her, her moving out and then getting my whole deposit back on the flat because the lady felt sorry for me being abandoned.  I am a much nicer person these days, I promise.  But I am NOT the sort of person who should ever live in Surbiton.

Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm

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Elvis Costello – 15 Petals

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Tom McRae – End of the World News

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Richard Hawley – Baby, You’re My Light

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The Gentle Waves – Emmanuelle, Skating on Thin Ice

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Yes, it’s Fresh Air time again, and Ruth is back from the bring of death and ready to chatter away once more.  This week we have Russell from Mammoeth playing live in session for us.  He has an album out on Mini50 Records some time in the relatively near future, so we may try an weasel a preview out of him if we can.

We’ve also got some interesting new stuff – Eels released a new song from their forthcoming album just the other day, and we’ll be playing the phenomenal new eagleowl single as well.  We are recording a Toad Session with them in December, which is also really fucking brilliant news.

On air 7pm-8.30pm GMT – listen live here.

This week’s playlist:
1. Modest Mouse – Float On
2. Taken By Trees – Anna
3. Mammoeth – Latin Scribe (Live in Session)
4. Dr. Dog – The World May Never Know
5. Mammoeth – Scramble Eggs (Live in Session)
6. Brian Eno & David Byrne – Strange Overtones
7. Belle & Sebastian – She’s Losing It
8. Arthur Russell – Love is Overtaking Me
9. Mammoeth – Writing on the Walls (Live in Session)
10. Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere

And as always we have last week’s session below the fold – it was with the Pineapple Chunks, and we have downloadable mp3s, and interview podcast and four live videos for you to check out. (All our videos can be found on our Vimeo page.) Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we are nearing the end of our time in Puglia.  We’re spending a couple of days in or near Napoli before we fly back on Sunday, presumably troughing like total pigs, rather than paying all that much attention to culture and all that bobbins.

Mrs. Toad is doing Sudoku and complaining about the ‘wrong sort of paper’.  I kid you not, it’s just like British fucking Rail and their ‘wrong type of snow’, but she insists it’s just for that reason that she can’t solve them, not because they’re too hard.  Personally I find myself wondering if ‘evil’ is used to describe the comments one’s spouse will inevitably make when you fail to complete it, rather than the actual difficulty of the Sudoku puzzle itself.

So yes, we have done the lazing about and there are now a few days of actually doing shit in between us and a return to the damp splendour of the British Isles.  I suppose this is what you’re supposed to do on holiday – pay attention to the country you’re in and return, eventually – but honestly, another week of doing bollocks-all wouldn’t hurt anyone would it?

Toadcast #75 – The Bone Idlecast

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01. Snow Patrol – An Olive Grove Facing the Sea (04.14)
02. Beck – The Golden Age (12.33)
03. Belle & Sebastian – Simple Things (19.32)
04. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Tom Justice, the Choirboy Robber (21.00)
05. Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues (29.10)
06. Navigator – Work is Done (NOT Change, as we announced, sorry!) (34.44)
07. Lord Cut Glass – Holy Fuck! (40.19)
08. Son Volt – Sultana (46.46)
09. Smog – Drinking at the Dam (56.30)
10. Alela Diane – Age Old Blue (60.17)

Oh dear god almighty I have a hangover.  Fucking bastard music people.  Last night there was gigging and drinking and wandering the streets of a most balmy and pleasant Edinburgh with an assortment of miscreants and other ne’er-do-wells.  We saw Honeytrap and Meursault play at Sneaky Pete’s – I was recording this podcast, hence late for X-Lion Tamer, sorry to both Ed and Tony – and it was fucking amazing.

And after that there was drinking.  Fuck me there was lots of drinking.  And then I came home and went into the local all night shop and purchased a couple of steaks for late-night snacking purposes, and was harassed by a bunch of young lads when I came out.  Not harassed in a bad way, but I think I was asked to buy them some fags or something like that.  Anyhow, the conversation… erm, well I’m not really sure how the conversation went, because I was fucking hammered, but at some point the van came up, which was parked just along the road.  So, ah, for some slightly bizarre reason I ended up with five high school lads and me sat in the van with the stereo up fucking loud – so loud apparently that you could hear it all the way down the street.  Or, at least, so Mrs. Toad tells me.  Because at some point she came home from wherever it was she was out drinking and hopped in as well.

So, after a little van-based rocking out, they came back into the house for a bit and Mrs. Toad played them Motorhead and The Sex Pistols and The Wedding Present so fucking loud the windows shook.  Funnily enough, these nice, polite lads kept insisting throughout that we should just let them know when we were bored and we would like them to go.  Such nice, polite boys!  I think one of them even did the dishes.  I didn’t want to have to try and explain what a couple of total fucking bozos they were dealing with, but erm, yeah, that was our Friday night.  Weird, huh?  I think we went to bed at about five, eventually.  And now to record a couple of Toad Sessions, at least one with a very, very hung over band.

Toadcast #71 – The Tough Lovecast

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01. Belle & Sebastian – Take Your Carriage Clock & Shove It (03.46)
02. Adam Balbo – Debating a Time Metaphor (07.16)
03. The Sequins – The Usual Delights (14.05)
04. Situationists – A Cold Front (16.31)
05. Blur – Out of Time (23.02)
06. New Ruins – Symptoms (32.37)
07. The Laurel Collective – Hindenburg Mile High Club (41.26)
08. The Lovely Eggs – Tyrannosaurus Rex for Christmas (45.07)
09. The Empty Set – A Challenge to Copernicus (49.34)
10. Honeytrap – Mussolini’s Son (55.29)

Me and the missus are rambling away together on this one.  It’s largely new music, bookended by a couple of more well-known things.  We Invent a new term – a weird combination of food and sex called culiniungus.  We offend the Irish and the Scots.  In fact, we are as offensively and predictably us as you could imagine.

We were out and totally smashed at the Broken Records gig at the Bowery yesterday, followed by some hot Sneaky Pete’s action.  There are some disastrously embarrassing pictures here, if you want to point and laugh.  The gig was amazing.  I knew a group like Broken Records would be amazing in a small space like that, and so it proved.

I had to do some very pointed Standing Up though, which was fucking annoying.  What the fuck is it with people, sitting down at fucking gigs?  If the room’s empty that’s one thing, but the room was full, people were on tiptoes up the back, and this shower of cunts insisted on sitting on their fucking arses down the front, protecting a meter and a half of empty floor space between them and the band.  So, as Mr. Discreetandtactful, I went and stood in front of them.  Fuckwits.  The band did get everyone on their feet after a song or two, which was a fucking relief, but honestly… it’s rock ‘n’ roll bitches, get up off your fucking hippy folk arseholes and stop acting like the Chipping Sodbury Chapter of the National Union of Knitting Champions.  It’s not, to paraphrase a friend of mine, the fucking Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

This delightful little anecdote does have a darker side, however.  Some lass tugged on my sleeve to ask me to sit down during the first song, and I attempted to politely but firmly say no thank you.  Unfortunately I may have succeeded more at the latter than the former, and ended up just being rude to the woman.  Who was very pregnant.  Well done me.  Picking fights with pregnant women isn’t really all that clever, is it.  So, er, sorry pregnant lady, I didn’t mean to be quite so terse, nor did I mean to imply that you should just stop moaning about your baby and stand up.  But then, you can’t really expect to sit two metres back from the stage and object to anyone standing in front of you either, because that’s just silly.

Oh, and we met Peej, a reader from New York, who was in town for the week and said hello.  He was a really nice chap, so why he reads this fucking site is a mystery, to be honest, but it was brilliant of him to say hello, and then to put up with our drunken stumbling later on as well.   Sometimes I love teh internetz.  Not times like this of course, but sometimes.

Toadcast #68 – The Leprecast

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1. Joy Zipper – Dosed & Became Invisible (01.40)
2. Love Like Fire – William (08.37)
3. Rock Plaza Central – O Lord, How Many are My Foes (13.17)
4. Animal Magic Tricks & Neil Pennycook (17.24)
5. Ambulances – Last Old Fiver (24.45)
6. King Creosote – Camels Swapped for Wives (27.11)
7. Jesus H. Foxx – I’m Half the Man You Were (33.51)
8. God Help the Girl – Act of the Apostle (44.15)
9. The Limes – Dead Furniture (46.47)
10. The Pogues – Night Train to Lorca (58.06)

This week I welcome you to the absolutely 100% guaranteed non-controversial podcast.  Nothing to see here. Move along.  Although, it might be slightly controversial, just possibly, around two thirds of the way through if you are excessively religious or perhaps if you have some objection to pointing and laughing as Jade Goody dies of cancer or Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse slowly expire in the full and relentless gaze of the public eye.

Has anyone seen the film Deathwatch?  It’s set in Glasgow in the 1980s and almost entirely obscure, despite an amazing cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow.  What it amounts to is that a woman discovers that she is going to die, and then a TV company ask to buy the rights to film her last weeks.  It’s a bit over the top at times, but a pretty visionary movie nevertheless.  It’s always disconcerting where something like that makes a prediction which proves to be so uncannily true.  I think the scariest thing about 1984 is how utterly determined the species seems to be to make sure that it comes true.

If you can find a copy, I’d recommend that you watch it.  It’s pretty hard to track down though – we had to get ours from Amazon France for some bizarre reason, so good luck to you.

Toadcast #60 – The Blandcast

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1. Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm (04.41)
2. Clem Snide – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience (09.00)
3. Pree – Light Falls (17.05)
4. Frivolous Laura – A Lullaby (20.22)
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Statues (27.27)
6. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin (37.18)
7. Kill It Kid – Burst its Banks (41.31)
8. Pete Doherty – The Last of the English Roses (49.03)
9. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (59.41)