Song, by Toad

Hooray for us – possibly the vilest and least romantic Valentine’s Day Podcast yet!  And before anyone whinges about that picture, go to fucking Wikipedia and complain, because that’s where we bloody got it from.  I know!  Scandalous!  Someone should complain.

So erm, yes.  I don’t think we left anyone unoffended this year.  I sincerely hope not because I don’t like to think of people out there nurturing an anticipated false outrage complex only to be let down.

We do not like romance, we do not like being told when to have fun by people who are simply hoping to exploit our disposable income, we do not like it being implied that being single is some sort of failure, we do not like people measuring their self-worth by how much their partner can be emotionally blackmailed into spending on them, we do not like having to live up to commercially defined standards to demonstrate that we love one another, we do not like having to skip the football just cos we’re supposed to behave one some particular day or other, we do not like fucking teddy bears or fucking chocolates, we do not like sitting in tumbleweed-infested restaurants whilst people glance nervously around them wondering if they’ve done it right, and we do not like having a list of things to live up to before our relationship is considered functional thank you very fucking much.

We do like lazy Saturdays in the garden, swearing at the fire for twenty minutes trying to get it to light with damp logs, meals with friends, new places, listening to vinyl so loud the floor shakes, a bit too much to drink with people that we really like, laughing/shouting at films, arguing about the side of the bed, swearing blind it’s not your turn with the chores when you know damn well it is, drinking coffee in the garden when it’s sunny, slagging off almost everyone, shouting at reactionaries on TV, emailing one another stupid stuff all day, insulting the cat, surprise cups of tea, buying shit on the internet when we’re drunk, only coping with the washing mountain when it threatens to start a SARs epidemic, watering the plants mere minutes before death and walking hand in hand through the park and peering at cool old dudes chuntering around at the allotments or sailing model boats in the park pond.

Oh, and getting pished and recording offensive podcasts for Valentine’s Day… enjoy!

Toadcast #108 – The Boabycast

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01. Cracker – Mr. Wrong (03.10)
02. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key (09.57)
03. The Smiths – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me (17.11)
04. Eels – Love of the Loveless (20.16)
05. The Clash – Brand New Cadillac (29.40)
06. Bill Hicks – Pussywhipped Satan (31.41)
07. Evan Dando – Hard Drive (44.33)
08. The Coathangers – Nestle in My Boobies (48.11)
09. Virgin of the Birds – She’s in the Moon Again (59.10)
10. David Cross – Your Baby is FUCKING BORING! (65.59)

Instead of being at a friend’s stag do in Berlin I am stranded in Edinburgh.  Even more frustrating, this stag do was going to involve going to a football match and indie clubs instead of strip bars and nightclubs, so would almost certainly have been excellent fun.  Given my general terror of stag nights, I was actually rather looking forward to this one.

I actually didn’t bother to have a stag do, largely because I couldn’t be bothered, but also I have never had enough of a predominance of male friends to make it seem anything other than awkward.  Contrary to the suspicions of the feminists I have outraged on these pages, I have always got along very well with women in general.  Presumably this is because I tend to judge people entirely on whether they irritate the shit out of me or not, so despite being an offensive bastard, I’m not all that prejudiced really.  So erm, how do you decide to head off with all your male pals and leave the women behind, especially when, like myself, you would have no intention of doing anything especially blokey in the first place.

My brother had an excellent stag do actually (more of that later), and Mrs. Toad got absolutely wrecked with her family and ended up dancing around the kitchen with her sister-in-law and niece bellowing pop classics into mop-head microphones.  There are pictures and no, no they aren’t good.

The reason I am not in Berlin an hammered off my tits at this precise moment in time is because we are having something of a mental panic at Proper Job, motivated by our most incredible client.  They should give up on medical devices and turn their attention to a perpetual motion machine, because the sheer inexhaustible power of their knee-jerking just never seems to run out.  It’s not even a complicated product, but there you go.  The decision paralysis that descends upon large groups of people is a powerful force indeed.

Ach, so take pity on me and de-lurk.  Last weekend lots of new London people de-lurked at the Meursault shows and said hello, which was rather nice.  And just last night Jesus H. Foxx de-lurked as well, opening their new blog to the public, where they are going to post news on the recording of their new album as well as demos and works in progress from the recording sessions, so I recommend you keep an eye on that one.

1. Ideal stag/hen do.
2. Stag/hen do from hell (anecdotal or imaginary).
3. Most dubious place you’ve ever allowed a partner to go, unsupervised.
4. Marriage: is there really any point (this is not a loaded question; I am married myself, remember, and I still don’t think I have an answer).
5. Proportion of your life you’ve known your current/last partner.

Billy Bragg – The Marriage

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Tom Waits – Better off Without a Wife (Yes, I know I always play this one.)

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Mark Lanegan – Wedding Dress

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Clem Snide – Forever, Now & Then

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Snow Patrol – Make Love to Me Forever

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The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people’s former bands.  There’s Shane MacGowan’s Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron’s Radiators, Shilpa Ray’s Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg’s Riff Raff.

I concentrate so much on new music these days that I often decide whether or not I like a band on the basis of a handful of demos, maybe a single, sometimes a debut EP, stuff like that.  And of course, bands don’t stumble into the world fully-formed, it takes some of them ages to become brilliant, and a lot of the time the initial forms of a band can be really strange, presumably because the people in question were still casting around a bit for their sound.

So there’s a bit of that here, but it’s not all that rigid a theme, and the playlist is a bit messy but, erm, well never mind.  There are some great songs, so enjoy!

Toadcast #96 – The Excast

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01. Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Beating St. Louis (04.07)
02. Beat the Devil – Plea Bargain (11.09)
03. Bright Eyes – Neely O’Hara (19.56)
04. Richard Hawley – Naked in Pitsmoor (26.16)
05. The Young Republic – The Alchemist (33.20)
06. Construction & Destruction – The Signal (41.24)
07. The Nipple Erectors – Nervous Wreck (48.34)
08. The Radiators – Walking Home Alone Again (50.39)
09. The Pogues – Lorca’s Novena (56.37)
10. Riff Raff – You Shaped House (63.33)

This podcast is a little bit random, I have to say.  There are songs which follow on from the like folk/hate covers posts which have appeared over the course of the last week or so on the site, a couple are related to the fact that Mrs. Toad is once more away in God Bless America shooting illegal aliens, chewing gum, whistling Dixie, or whatever the fuck it is they do over there, while most of the first half is related to the fact that my friend Andrew is coming to visit this weekend.

They do sort of relate to one another, the songs, at least.  Or there’s a bit of overlap anyway.  I never keep much track of it, but this is at least the second version of Blues Run the Game we’ve had on the podcasts, and I have no idea if I’ve ever actually repeated a song on these things.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I had, because I’m bloody disorganised when it comes to this kind of thing.

Anyhow, no scary metal bastards making your ears bleed this week, just a lot of lovely folky stuff and a couple of scratchy indie bands.  Oh, and Jack White.  I’d say that he was an egomaniacal dick, but he’s massive and would probably kick my arse, so I won’t.  Recent stuttering aside, though, he’s produced some cracking tunes, whatever you think of the guy.

Toadcast #92 – The Pantscast

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01. Soul Asylum – New World (04.17)
02. The Tragically Hip – Pigeon Camera (10.29)
03. Beck – Guess I’m Doing Fine (14.47)
04. The White Stripes – I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself (24.46)
05. Elbow – Fugitive Motel (29.57)
06. Billy Bragg – Wishing the Days Away (Alternative Version) (34.53)
07. Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy – Thunder Road (43.15)
08. Christopher Bell – Pretty Thing (53.53)
09. Nick Drake – Blues Run the Game (55.33)
10. Fairport Convention – Crazy Man Michael (60.52)

I used to love taking the train down to London.  When GNER had the East Coast mainline Mrs. Toad and used to travel pretty regularly, in the days when I lived in London and we only saw one another every couple of weeks.  As often as we could we would go and sit in the dining car and slowly get drunk all the way to the end of the line.  Those were really rather romantic days.

Anyway, when GNER’s parent company got into trouble they were forced to sell off the East Coast mainline under some obscure rule of Capitalism which requires failing companies to get rid of the only bits of them which work – in other words the only parts of the company which might actually help them work through their problems and get back on their feet.  Obviously if this doesn’t make perfect sense to you then you must be some sort of Communist, but it strikes me as some sort of ludicrous rule dreamt up by the vultures rather than the victims, but hey ho.  If nationwide healthcare is too Communisty for you then what chance do sensible rules of business have?

Anyhow, that line went to National Express who have made an unspeakable balls up of the whole operation.  Apart from running a previously healthy line into near-bankruptcy they have taken away the fucking dining cars, which now only operate on a fraction of the trains.  So yes, making a service notably more shit and that service therefore becoming markedly less favourable with customers, who’d have thought those two were connected.  Gosh the world can be a strange place sometimes.

So, this being Friday, please take the opportunity to de-lurk and fill in your Friday Five:

1. Favourite mode of long-distance transport.
2. Weirdest place you’ve had a surprisingly civillised meal.
3. Thing that just isn’t what it used to be.
4. Most boring everyday thing which actually turned out to be quite romantic.
5. Most annoying train habit.

Beck – Broken Train

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Eels – Railroad Man

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Billy Bragg – Train Train

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iLiKETRAiNS – The Beeching Report

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Phil Ochs – Automation Song

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Sometimes your taste just stops progressing.  You can see it happen with clothes, too – there is no way in hell I am ever going to wear skinny jeans, for example.  Oddly, I think they look can quite cool on cool people, but they always seem to be monumentally physically unflattering, no matter who’s wearing them.  My taste in trousers basically stopped moving forward around the time the hipsters of the world started to leave the bootcut on the shelf a few years ago.  A good few years ago now, actually.

This happens to people with music all the time.  Here at Proper Job one of my bosses’ musical taste pretty much ceased to have a particularly close relationship with the cutting edge at the tail end of the nineties – about the time he and I both lived around Byres Road in Glasgow, shopping in all the same record shops, unbeknownst to one another.

JC over at the Vinyl Villain has said on numerous occasions (usually when praising Frightened Rabbit for being the exception) that he just doesn’t connect with current music – he finds it difficult not to sigh the weary, jaded sigh of someone who has heard it all before*.

I remember the moment my cousin Steve said how much he liked the new Neneh Cherry song when it came on the car radio one afternoon many years ago.  It was spongy, soft, banal R ‘n’ B and I was quite shocked – this is the man who introduced me to the Dead Kennedys, The Piranhas, The Specials, The Clash, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, REM, John Cooper Clark, Madness and Adam & the Ants when I was no more than a nipper.

It’s particularly obvious with radio presenters and magazine editors whose taste clearly and publically starts to stagnate – failing to ever really move forward from the sound they were into when their fascinations and those of the hip and the cool truly coincided for a while.  I presume the same will happen to me and this site.  Hopefully not yet, but I suppose it’s probably inevitable, notwithstanding the fact that it was never all that hip to begin with.

I always wonder why this happens.  Do you just stop caring?  That’s what happened with my boss – he says it just stopped being all that important to him.  Do you slowly but surely stop surrounding yourself with people who are going to play you the new and the weird stuff until you get over the initial disomfort and get to like it?  Do you just get to the point where you fill up?  People seem to have the ability to get excited about new television series much later in their lives, although I suppose we all seem to lapse into Midsomer Murders eventually, but why does the musical interest seem to tail off so much earlier?  I guess people just watch a fuck of a lot more telly, so they are probably kept closer to the cutting edge just by default, but why do fifty year olds seem so much more likely to get excited about the new series of The Wire than the new album by Animal Collective or someone like that?  Or is that not really true, am I missing my guess on that one?

Whatever, it doesn’t really matter, I’m just idly speculating.  I think I’ve managed to keep my parents’ taste relatively young, actually, by constantly sending them new stuff.  Not NME haircut young, but a respectably alternative kind of young**.  They struggle a bit with some of the electronic stuff though, and I didn’t send them the Meursault album, for example; except Small Stretch of Land, all parents love that one.  But I hope someone does the same for me.  At thirty-three I reckon I have a couple more years of  youthful enthusiasm in me before the will to live slowly dies and I begin the long, slow, depressing slide into that awful form of dementia that leads you to believe that Noah and the Whale are any sort of a band at all.  When that happens, someone please just give me a massive overdose of Coldplay and put me out of my misery as quickly as possible.

R.E.M. – Radio free Europe

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Billy Bragg – World Turned Upside Down

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The Beat – Whine & Grine/Stand Down Margaret

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*That’s just because he’s so incredibly fucking old, by the way, not because he’s a snob.
**I never liked mainstream music when I was young, so I’m not likely to aspire to it in old age.  I just mean stuff that’s still current and innovative.

I recently did an interview with Billy from The Scotsman’s Under the Radar blog (amongst other venerable organs) which took the form of an interesting chat about the current tension between  bloggers and professional journalists.  He has played off my opinions against those of his friend Mike Diver, who is currently the online editor for (the excellent) Clash magazine.  The whole thing can be found here, along with plenty of comments from Ally and Milo, professional writers from around these parts, and myself and Tart, on the side of the bloggers.  The comments on that thread make for some rather interesting reading in themselves, I have to say.

It’s an interesting debate, frankly, and one which, as a blogger with aspirations, as opposed to someone who is happy to simply chat for the sake of it, I have applied a fair deal of thought to.  Ultimately, though, I think it is something of a false dichotomy: some of the best reporters keep blogs as ways of expressing themselves outwith the constraints of the editorial policy of whatever rag pays their wages and a lot of the best bloggers end up parlaying their writing skills into professional careers in journalism.  And of either side there is a vast amount of detritus, professional and amateur.

So, yes, the Toad once again holds forth passionately on subjects he knows far too little about and may in general be making a fool of himself once more.  The, erm, songs are good though.

Toadcast #76 – The Presscast

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01. Billy Bragg – Which Side Are You On? (03.17)
02. The Decemberists – Cautionary Song (Live) (11.03)
03. Jens Lekman – No Time For Breaking Up (14.09)
04. The Meteors – Out of Time (22.21)
05. Franz Ferdinand – Darts of Pleasure (32.47)
06. The Dead 60s – Horizontal (35.17)
07. Sleepy Horses – Lubbock Love Song (42.27)
08. Eels – I Write the B-sides (52.05)
09. The Replacements – Unsatisfied (62.30)
10. David Cross – My Kids are Amish (68.09)

This is not so much the holiday podcast as the pre-holiday podcast because, for all we are away now, I recorded this on Thursday night before going away, as we prepared ourselves for the unspeakable burden of doing absolutely fuck all for two weeks.

I am taking a pile of books and a pile of new music and we are going to do pretty much nothing at all.  My parents used to do really adventurous travelling when we were young, but honestly I don’t have the energy.  I am so incredibly fucking exhausted from constant Toadery that actually, despite having a holiday inferiority complex, pretty much all I can cope with at the moment is a couple of weeks of fuck all.

Even last year when we went to Portland for a couple of weeks, we took all the technology and recorded interviews and all sorts at Pickathon.  It was relaxing and nice, but I still got a hell of a lot of work done.  This time I will take along some tunes which I have been meaning to catch up with, perhaps record a podcast or two, and basically spend the rest of the time lying in the sun by the pool.  My folks might not be all that impressed, but the recharging of the batteries is the sole purpose of this trip and I think we might manage just that.

Toadcast #73 – The Holiday Podcast

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01. MJ Hibbett & the Validators – Being Happy Doesn’t Make You Stupid (04.17)
02. Midnight Oil – Bushfire (10.06)
03. Headless Heroes – Hey, Who Really Cares? (Jon Hopkins Remix) (16.56)
04. Alela Diane – Pieces of String (21.05)
05. Inspector Tapehead – A Fillet of Bozo (25.42)
06. Maxwell Panther – Shiver on a Twist of Fate (33.19)
07. Jack Richold – Lady of the Calico (37.00)
08. Grant-Lee Phillips – Calamity Jane (41.16)
09. Billy Bragg – Bread & Circuses (50.20)
10. The Divine Comedy – Les Jours Tristes (57.45)

This is called the Slowcast because there are so many songs and, more commonly, whole albums out there which I took ages and ages to get into, and for no really obvious reason.

There are several reasons, I guess: how familiar a sound is, your emotional state at the time, what your mates are listening to, how popular something is and stuff like that.  I know I’ve admitted plenty of times in the past that I have a habit of refusing to like things if they get too popular.  That sounds ludicrous, but it’s not exactly a conscious decision, more an instinctive recoiling.  I never have liked much popular stuff, although I do certainly go through phases.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons that, with the label, I am not looking to sign or work with the modern equivalent of a Top 40 band – I have never much liked Top 40 music.

Anyway, that’s not really the point of the podcast.  This is dedicated to those albums which for some reason you have to hear about a million times before you eventually, out of nowhere, realise that you love them.

Toadcast #72 – The Slowcast

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01. Billy Bragg – Honey I’m a Big Boy Now (04.36)
02. Tom Waits – Goin’ Out West (08.37)
03. Radiohead – My Iron Lung (14.14)
04. The Mutton Birds – Envy of Angels (23.42)
05. Mancino – Definition of an Accident (32.26)
06. The Mabuses – I’m the Greatest (36.09)
07. Interpol – Obstacle #1 (43.31)
08. My Latest Novel – Wolves (49.30)
09. The Wedding Present – 2, 3, Go! (55.29)
10. Yo La Tengo – Big Day Coming (59.56)

Today I am angry at Capitalism.  Partly, funnily enough, I am angry at Capitalism because in many ways I myself am a Capitalist.  The problem I have with Capitalism is not really the theory, but the practise.  So many people and companies who chant the free market mantra simply are not free marketeers.  They want isolationism and protectionism as much as the most paranoid Marxist when it will protect their interests, but they won’t for a second entertain the economic theory behind that sort of behaviour – gosh no!

So there is plenty of paranoid ranting in this week’s podcast, railing against people who talk all Capitalist whilst not actually being Capitalist, people who are moral and honorable in their personal lives but who turn into voracious whores as soon as they put on a suit and, erm, well generally there’s lots of pish to be talked, sorry.

Still, at least it’s marginally better than last week.

Toadcast #66 – The Greedcast

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01. Pet Shop Boys – Opportunities (03.27)
02. Billy Bragg – NPWA (16.27)
03. Eric Bachmann – Liars & Thieves (21.30)
04. The Zincs – Moguls’ Wives (28.04)
05. Tom Lehrer – Selling Out (34.24)
06. Depeche Mode – Everything Counts (39.16)
07. The Clash – Bankrobber (45.07)
08. Tom Waits – God’s Away on Business (54.07)
09. Billy Bragg – To Have and to Have Not (65.56)