As the more cunning of you might have noticed last week, Song, by Toad’s Friday Fives is now a radio show on Fresh Air, as well as just a means for you to waste your time on the internet on a Friday afternoon.

This means that from 3:30pm Brian Pokora and myself will be live on the radio, with some sort of attempt made to avoid the dreary old pish I would usually pick, out of respect for the fact that this is officially pre-pub radio and you probably want cheering up rather than bringing down.

Live on air from 3:30pm – listen here.

Also, there are a couple of live gigs to remind you about this weekend, including some late news which will hopefully be rather interesting for you.

Firstly, we have The Last Battle, Dad Rocks and Shoes & Socks Off at Henry’s tomorrow night.  It is only a fiver in, and those who come along will also be able to get into the second show of the night, which is as follows:

Secondly, Lach is opening for Viv Albertine (of The Slits) at Henry’s after our gig there on Saturday, and anyone who is there for the Ides of Toad night will get in for £4.

Thirdly, on Sunday in Anstruther we’ll be hosting a Song, by Toad all-dayer called Flamin’ Hott Toadzzz! at the Hew Scott Hall.  The lineup will be Avital Raz, Dan Mutch, Yusuf Azak, Jesus H. Foxx, Jonnie Common and Meursault, and tickets will be available on the door.

And on Monday I will sleep.

Today’s pointless questions for the internets.  Remember, fives first, pish-talking later.

1. Most shameful album you’ve seen your parents buy.
2. Coolest album you’ve seen your parents buy.
3. Most embarrassing gig you’ve been to.
4. Favourite type of weather.
5. If you had a parrot, what would teach it to say?

Playlist for Song, by Toad’s Friday Fives will appear below as we play stuff:
1. The Piranhas – Getting Beaten Up
2. Dad Rocks! - Aroused By Hair
3. Youth Lagoon – Posters
4. Tom Waits – Goin’ Out West
5. Easter – Somethin’ American
6. Dolfinz – Hot Pants
7. The Twilight Sad – Kill it in the Morning
8. Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
9. John Cooper Clarke – Gimmix
10. Yuck – Holing Out
11. Lil Daggers – Dada Brown
12. Horsecollar – Christopher
13. Other Lives – For 12
14. Blur – To the End (with Francoise Hardy)

Dammit, Edinburgh can be frustrating.  Because we’re coastal, warm weather tends to draw a chilling mist off the sea called the haar, which can fuck up the most promising of warm days.  Yesterday, just as things were getting nice, the fucking haar came down, and it’s still bloody well here.

Anyhow, just a little reminder that next weekend (Saturday 30th April) we will be doing the lifeboats collection here in Stockbridge, and would hugely appreciate any volunteers who fancied helping us shake a tin for an hour or two.  We make it worth your while, in that there will be booze and food, and once we’re finished we’ll settle down to a nice big roast dinner and get shitfaced, and it’s generally a really fun day.

The RNLI is staffed by volunteers, and is actually a charitable organisation, rather than being funded by the government, which is mind-bogglingly nuts.  We inherited the Stockbridge collection from our mental-but-lovely next door neighbour when he moved, and it’s nice to make a little bit of a contribution over and above just handing over some spare change once in a while, so if anyone can make it down to our house next Saturday and help out it would be hugely appreciated – just let us know if you’re coming.

And in the meantime, we should really be celebrating the most important chapter in the Bible – the one about the chocolate bunny rabbits which lay eggs and suchlike.  Ah well, I guess it’s about as plausible as the rest of it.

1. Favourite Easter treat (this applies irrespective of religion – an atheist can still enjoy chocolate bunnies and a couple of days off).
2. Chocolate preference.
3. Who really killed Jesus?
4. Closest you’ve been to a boat-related mishap.
5. Things that will never be said in a church (mosque, synagogue, whatever) sermon but ought to.

The Magnetic Fields – Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits

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Broken Records – And They All Fell Into the Sea (Toad Session)

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Blur – Bank Holiday

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Bob Dylan – Green Eggs and Ham

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The Veils – Jesus for the Jugular

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Okay, so this one is a massively late Friday Fives, but there’s enough of a day to waste if you still feel like wasting it with me.  On this week’s podcast we will be kicking off with Thee Single Spy’s new single OK Corral, and Alice kindly sent me the video through for it this morning so I figured I would share it with you on this week’s Five.

The five songs I have chosen today are from a compilation named Arlington Baths, so called because I used to live in a basement flat on Arlington Street in Glasgow.  It was a truly abominable flat, cold damp, shitty and with tramps frequently to be found curled up asleep outside the front door.  This was back in about 1995, at about the height of Britpop, or at the beginning of its decline, whichever way you want to look at it.

Anyhow, at the end of Arlington Street there was an unassuming building which went under the title of the Arlington Baths Club.  Now, we knew that it was there and we were vaguely curious about what went on there, but we never thought that much about it until about a year after we moved out.  We didn’t move that far though, and our new flat may have been on a different street, but the kitchen window still actually overlooked the Arlington Baths Club.

Then one day we were slouching around watching telly, as students do, and this documentary came on about an amazingly preserved old Turkish baths.  There was shot after shot of amazingly preserved interiors, tiling, black-watered pools and deck chairs in steam rooms.  It was the Arlington Baths Club.  They didn’t mention this until after we’d been watching for about ten minutes and I remember when they did we all rushed to the kitchen window, as if to check that the place really was still there.

So delurk yourselves, don’t be like the Arlington Baths Club, all hidden behind a facade of Victorian stone, come and make a silly comment on the Friday Fives and then fritter away the rest of the afternoon talking pish on the internet with everyone else.

1. Worst place you’ve ever lived.
2. Ever been surprised to see somewhere you know on the telly?
3. Name a big pop hit from your student days which you like, sneakily or otherwise (yes, now counts if you’re still a student – Wilf and I Are Scientist, you don’t count as students even though you are at university).
4. Strangest accidental student flatmate.
5. Student living feature you miss most (if you’re still a student, take a guess).

Blur – There’s no Other Way

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Elastica – Connection

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The La’s – I Can’t Sleep

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The Bluetones – The Fountainhead

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Sleeper – Inbetweener

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Regular readers of my distracted piffle will know by now that I drive a red van with a tape player in it. This has led to a few changes in listening habits, not least because I hardly have any tapes left at all.  A bit like what happened to my vinyl back in about 1995, my collection has been shoved in a box at the back of a cupboard, and I honestly didn’t think I would ever play them again.

Unlike my vinyl, though, my parents didn’t eventually get bored of having it lying around the house and then throw it in the fucking bin.  Yes, they did that.  To my vinyl.  Not that I blame them really, I’d copied it all to tape (oh wait…) and was a student at the time, so there seemed little imminent prospect of me ever having a record player again.  How times change.

Now not only do we have a tape player in the van, we have actually bought one for the house, too.  I bought it off eBay for about fifteen quid a couple of years ago when I first got my hands on the Japanese War Effort’s brilliant Snowbird album, which exists only on cassette.  So for a long while, that tape player was simply a Snowbird Playing Machine, and in a sense the album itself, far from the eminently reasonable two pounds I paid for it at retail, had ended up costing me nearer twenty.

However, the box of tapes in our house is actually still stuffed away under the stairs somewhere, so at the moment the van’s tape player is subsisting on a pretty meagre diet.  In fact, due to the fact that even the van tapes have ended up buried under a pile of old crap somewhere under one of the back seats, I have actually only been listening to one single tape for the last month or so, over and over again.

I made this tape towards the tail end of the nineties and I called it, with tongue somewhat in cheek, Let’s Bop With the Brits.  It is basically just a collection of British music which, for one reason or another, was starting to sound quite old-fashioned by 1996 or so.  There was some Morrissey, some Inspiral Carpets, some Wonderstuff, some Gene, one solitary Stone Roses song, a couple of tracks from Parklife, hopefully you get the gist of it.

Anyhow, yes, for some reason I have had that one tape on repeat constantly for the last four weeks and I now know the words to most of the songs pretty much off by heart, never mind the playlist itself.  With modern music libraries comprising thousands and thousands of files, I am not sure when the last time is that happened to me.

Morrissey – Certain People I Know

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Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide

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Blur – End of a Century

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Because of electiony things and my trip down South this weekend I am writing this after an evening out drinking gin, and a night spent watching the election and drinking wine whilst Mrs. Toad snoozes on the couch.

Voting for the fucking Tories, honestly what a bunch of idiots this country has turned out to be (see graphic).  If you’re minted, you can afford to vote with your conscience.  If you’re less than wealthy then voting Conservative is basically just voting for aggressive, hostile rhetoric over self-interest, which is just weird.

I am getting sick of this ‘voting for change’ pish which is being dropped into chat all over the place.  Change?  Change?  Seriously?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Change would have meant the Lib Dems becoming a serious third party, which I actually think would have been good news.  Multiple parties implies something closer to proportional representation, and it happens and works across Europe.

Adversarial two-party politics is a weird concept, when you look at it.  You end up with Celtic v Rangers, United v City, God Bless America vs Evil Communist Russia – it’s just such a simplistic and superficial narrative to apply to a question which is actually quite nuanced and complex I am not sure how we ended up here.

Anyway, delurking, that’s the message for today.  Delurk, unlurk, exlurk and say hello.  That’s what these Friday posts are for, and I will be on a train all afternoon and eager for some sort of entertainment so please come out with some bollocks.  Any old bollocks will do!

1. Name your independent political party.
2. Make a spurious election promise.
3. Suitable insult for your opponent.
4. Something vs what?  Name a new deathmatch!
5. What the fucking fuck happened to the fucking Lib Dems?  Eh?  Fucksake.

Blur – Death of a Party

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Supergrass – In it for the Money

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Pulp – Pencil Skirt

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Belly – Gepeto

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The Bluetones – The Fountainhead

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I took a real physical roll of camera film to be developed yesterday. Haven’t done that in a while. Unfortunately the photos it contained were a series of rather grisly images taken with a fish-eye camera at a late-night after-party back at ours last weekend at Homegame.

The guy in the camera shop did look at me a bit funny when I went back in to collect them.

I didn’t bother getting real photo prints, though. I figured the photos were only going up on Facebook for a bit of a giggle, so they might as well just go straight onto a CD. There was no point paying extra for a pack of prints. Which struck me as very revealing about how we interact with photos now in the Web 2.0 world, populated with Facebook, Twitpic and Flickr. It’s like the old joke that asks when was the last time you played Solitaire with a real pack of cards.

When was the last time you looked through a real set of photos?

Matthew only asked me to compose this Friday Five late last night, and I had a panic on the bus this morning because I realised I hadn’t copied five MP3s off my hard-drive at home to put up on the post.

Then I remembered that I had meant to take a compilation CD to the Homegame mix-tape swap bin; (You drop a compilation CD off when you arrive on Friday, then return on Saturday to collect a random CD of someone else’s in return. A bit like a mix-tape Secret Santa.) but I managed to leave the CD itself at home after compiling and burning it. Luckily for us today I still had all the tracks for my compilation on my portable USB hard drive that lives in my bag.

So that has ended up giving today’s chioce of tunes the same theme as my compilation CD was going to have; classic ‘Side One: Track One’ songs.

So here’s today’s test:

1. Tell us a fishing story. Come on, everyone’s got at least one fishing story.

2. What embarassing things tend to happen around you when you stay up late?

3. What was on the last real camera film you had developed?

4. What do you do with photos you take nowadays?

5. Best Side One: Track One ever.

And here are the choons:

Beck – Loser

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Blur – For Tomorrow

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Grand Champeen – Cottonmouth

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Mercury Rev – Secret for a Song

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Ramones – Blitzkrieg Bop

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Welcome back to the Song, by Toad Fresh Air show, with the lovely Ruth.  This week we have Russell from Mammoeth live in session, although the poor bugger’s already done a brilliant session for us before Christmas which was unfortunately swallowed by the Fresh Air computers, which are a bit like a suspiciously special needs version of Hal most of the time.

Last week’s Session with The Last Battle can be found at the bottom of the page, in the form of downloadable session tracks, a podcast of the interview and session videos.  The sound is really nice considering there were six of them and we only have two microphones.

Live on Air 8pm-9.30pm – Listen live here.

I’ll fill in the playlist live below from 8pm onwards, so please come and say hello, shout mindless abuse or whatever else it is you internet people spend your time doing.

1. The Besnard Lakes – Chicago Train
2. Liars – Scarecrow On A Killer Slant
3. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse – Revenge
4. Bjork – Generous Palmstroke (Live)
5. Mammoeth- Scrambled Eggs (Live in Session)
6. Dirty Projectors – Two Doves
7. Mammoeth – Trigonometry (Live in Session)
8. Berzilla Wallin – Conversation with Death (Oh Death)
9. Sparklehorse – Heart of Darkness
10. Mammoeth – I’m Glad That I Died Today (Live in Session)
11. Mammoeth – Lap Dog
12. Fleetwood Mac – Honey Hi
13. Mammoeth – Wendy House (Live in Session)
14. Blur – Out of Time
15. Joanna Newsom – ’81

Last week’s session can be found after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure why the end of the noughties should necessarily lead to any kind of retrospective of the nineties, but it has.  I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that I just feel it’s way too early for me to figure out what I make of the noughties.

So, given that it must be about time for the nineties revival (actually, probably best give it another year or so) and given that the nineties are now quite a long way away and given that, erm… well I dunno. Given I was poking around at that stuff recently and listening to some Pulp and Gene and Blur and stuff I figured I might as well pop the whole bloody lot into a podcast.

Toadcast #97 – The Nineties

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01. Pearl Jam – Even Flow (Unplugged) (4.16)
02. The Stone Roses – (Song For My) Sugar Spun Sister (12.23)
03. Belly – Untitled & Unsung (18.37)
04. Echobelly – Insomniac (22.13)
05. Blur – Yuko & Hiro (29.00)
06. Gene – Wasteland (36.14)
07. Ben Folds Five – Underground (38.49)
08. Blur – Country Sad Ballad Man (44.56)
09. REM – Parakeet (52.03)
10. Radiohead – Everything in its Right Place (59.30)

Right, given we’ve come down to Manchester for the Meursault gig, I thought I might make a podcast based around the two years I spent living here.  As I mentioned on this week’s Friday Five, however, those were really not very happy times so basically this podcast is just a great big hour-long whinge about how shit my life was a couple of times a few years ago.

Nah, not really.  I mean, I do describe why life was tough then but it really isn’t just a great big moan, I promise.  For some reason the music in my life at those times seems to have really stuck in my head and become incredibly strongly associated with the period in question.  Partly, I suppose, because the emotional succour you get from music when things are a bit rough is something you’re grateful enough for for it to really form an important connection.

The other aspect is that on both those occasions I had so little music with me that the stuff I did have got played over and over again, so a really small amount of stuff really dominated my listening habits at that point, and became incredibly strongly intertwined with all of my memories of the time.  So, er, yes.  Here you go: The Manchester Podcast.

Toadcast #88 – The Manchester Podcast

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01. Pearl Jam – Dissident (03.16)
02. The Newcranes – Box of Shadows (08.53)
03. James – Say Something (17.17)
04. The Lemonheads – Into Your Arms (20.30)
05. Blur – Clover Over Dover (27.00)
06. Yo La Tengo – On Our Way to Fall (39.47)
07. Moby – Southside (41.31)
08. Calexico – Removed (48.10)
09. Jolene – Constantinople (51.46)
10. The Magnetic Fields – Yeah! Oh, Yeah! (57.57)

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)