Song, by Toad

Toadcast #71 – The Tough Lovecast

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

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)

Toad on Fresh Air – Tuesday 12th May, 2009

It’s that time of the week once again.  At 6.30pm, British Summer Time, myself and Dylan from Blueback Hotrod will be live on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station.  There will be no theme, no coherence and no real attempt to do anything more dynamic than just chatter about music, so please do tune in and listen to us blether.

Rather than emailing or (grrr) tweeting, I thought I might just leave this as an open thread for those who want to contribute, and I’ll add the playlist live as we go along.

Click the big ‘Listen Live’ button on this page to tune in, between 6.30pm and 8pm tonight.

01. The Bluetones – Glad to See You Back Again
02. James – Sound
03. Emily Scott – Pageant Queen
04. Frightened Rabbit – Old Old Fashioned (Live)
05. Kid Canaveral – Teenage Fanclub Song
06. Popup – Lucy, What are You Trying to Say?
07. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End
08. Gene – Dolce & Gabanna or Nowt
09. Meursault – Hard On (Charles Latham Cover)
10. Charles Latham – Nite Man
11. Withered Hand – Religious Songs
12. Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There
13. White Antelope – Silver Dagger
14. Cancel the Astronauts – I am the President of Your Fanclub and Last Night I Followed You Home

Cheers, see you next week at the same time.

Toadcast #54 – The Spacecast

The Spacecast is yet another podcast dreamed up in the pub, this time between myself and Dylan, the official Song, by Toad photographer.  And again it’s one of those podcast which could have gone on for over two hours quite easily, but we don’t do that anymore, not around here, we’re disciplined these days goddammit.

So I’ve missed off about a million other suggestions and come up with a combination of songs genuinely about space, and few that use space as some sort of metaphor and then a few which just stick a few spacey words in the title.  And of course, it starts with something rather splendid… but you’ll have to listen to find out what it is.  Alright, it’s not that special.  Just mildly amusing.

Toadcast #54 – The Spacecast

01. Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – Rocket Man (03.52)
02. David Bowie – Space Oddity (07.06)
03. Bob Geldof – Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things (15.09)
04. Inspiral Carpets – Saturn V (24.49)
05. The Only Ones – Another Girl Another Planet (28.30)
06. Shirley Bassey – In Other Words (Fly Me to the Moon) ( 32.36)
07. Yann Tiersen (Black Session w. Neil Hannon) – Life on Mars (36.04)
08. Riff-Raff – I Wanna be a Cosmonaut (41.34)
09. The Holy Modal Rounders – Mr. Spaceman (42.59)
10. Tom McRae – 2nd Law (48.29)
11. Blur – Far Out (51.46)
12. Queen – Flash Gordon Theme (57.30)

Don’t Be Evil

It’s hardly surprising that I find myself saying that Google have turned their old motto, Don’t Be Evil, into something of a sad parody, rather than the idealistic mission it once used to be. It’s also a little sad that what prompts me to write is not their spineless compliance with internet censorship in China, but something a little closer to home.

Ed, writer of 17 Seconds, is the latest to fall foul of Google’s draconian, utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt policies towards copyright. A year or so ago Ed wrote an in-depth interview with Glasvegas, back when the band were shopping about a few rough demos, barely more than a whisper on the lips of a few of us up here in Scotland. Yesterday Google deleted that interview from his blog. The whole thing, without permission, without dialogue, without warning: they just deleted it and told him it was gone.

The reason they gave was that it had been the subject of a DMCA complaint from Columbia Records, presumably on the basis that the interview write up contained links to long-since removed mp3 files of Glasvegas early demo recordings of songs now on their debut album. Despite the contemptuous, disgusting nature what both Columbia and Google have done, I can’t even feel angry about this; just depressed. But this is wrong in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start.

First and foremost, none of you should ever pay for a Columbia product ever again. Fuck them. If you feel you can’t live without their music then just download the bastard stuff illegally, better yet just live without it, but under no circumstances give these chiselling vipers a cent of your money ever again. Could someone who knows more about this correct me if I am wrong, but there is to my mind no way whatsoever that they could own the rights to those demos, which were recorded and circulated for free long before they were ever involved with the band. more »

The Music Fan’s Lament #4: Decreasing Quality

Well the series bumbles on into its final installment.  I am writing this from Vancouver Airport, waiting for a connection to Portland, so what better way to fill the time than with needless blathering about things I don’t really understand.  It’s taken a while to post, but I thought I’d finish this off before getting into all the Portland stuff and forever banishing the whiff of leeks from these pages.  Well, maybe not forever, but erm, well… oh never mind.

Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.

And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Quality

#4 Decreasing Quality

Reading JC’s article in particular put me in mind of this common complaint, and some of the commenters pushed the point even further.  Modern music is shit – where are the great bands?  Where, in particular, are the next Smiths, for example?

I can’t, and won’t, argue that there is a current band that I could honestly describe as the new Smiths.  But then, there wasn’t an old Smiths either.  You are talking about the very cream of the crop – that sort of band come along maybe once a decade, don’t they?  Radiohead for the 90s, I suppose, and erm, who for the noughties?  I really am not sure, so I can see where he’s coming from in that respect.

I don’t, predictably enough, agree entirely though.  One of the things JC seems to be doing, as do a lot of the people who criticise a living music scene by comparing it unfavourably to the past, is ignoring the fact of hindsight.  It’s easy to tell that the Smiths were something special, because we can look back on anything and everything that was around at the time and evaluate them in a relatively dispassionate way – something we just can’t do for anything current.  The Stone Roses first and the early Radiohead albums stand up very strongly in retrospect, but as we get closer to the present day how can we tell how good the bands are that we’re listening to now?

A couple of the groups mentioned in the comment thread on JC’s post are DeVotchKa and Calexico, but these bands are both a good solid handful of albums into their careers by now.  Think back over the last couple of years and the records that made real impact: LCD Soundsystem, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes – all these bands have pretty broad appeal, but only the White Stripes are more than a couple of albums into their careers, and we just don’t know who is going to be remembered from this era yet.  If the Arctic Monkeys continue to peter out, then maybe they’ll be forgotten about altogether.  It would just take one more brilliant album from any of these groups to cement their reputation as one of the really key bands of the first decade of this century.  Do we really think that the riff from Seven Nation Army is going to be less memorable in ten years than Johnny Marr’s equally iconic performance on How Soon is Now?  I know there’s more to genius that a few memorable riffs, but I think the more general point still stands.

The other question is this: who even remembers the Kasabian of the 80s anyway?  We can look back on the 90s now and identify bands like Blur and Pulp, Radiohead and early James as iconic and brilliant.  But how many Menswears and Kula Shakers are we consigning to the dustbins of forgetfullness in order to do so?  If no-one gives much of a fuck about the View now, then their memory may not survive the next full moon, never mind twenty years worth of rosy-tinted nostaligia.

Then again, as popular entertainment has made ever-greater inroads into the world of indie, having realised that there was a sizable market out there that their dancing karaoke whores were not capable of suitably exploiting, it seems that the world of indie is being over-run by preening, prancing piss-artists like the Hoosiers, Joe Lean and the Short Tight Pants, that one who’s pumping, er… Kate Moss.  Whoever they are.  They’re shit, anyway.  This is indie rock as commerical product, but it must be remembered that in no meaningful way is it actually indie.  It’s a branch of the celebrity industry, approached as such, and does not deserve our attention.  The bands are in it for the fame, the coke and the floosies, the music is fucking dreadful, and the marketing spend in proportion to investment in the actual ‘product’ is repellently high.  This last one is always a good metric to use when considering whether or not something might just be fucking rubbish.

At the other end of the scale, there are a lot of piss-poor bedroom bands reaching out using MySpace and the like, and we have a lot more contact with them than before because they can reach us directly.  They don’t need the middle-man, who might just have pointed out that they are shit, and so our MySpace inboxes are clogged with shit by groups that barely deserve to call themselves bands, nevermind command anyone’s ears.

If you’re used to listening to all this stuff because you want the buzz of that one exciting discovery, then you really do have to stop moaning and just accept it.  The people who got to be the arbiters of what was and wasn’t worth our time before the internet all had to wade through this stuff, so if we want to liberate ourselves from being told what to like, then we have to do the work that goes with it.  With great power comes gr… er, sorry, wrong speech.  The other option is to quitchabitchin and just find a few bloggers and a couple of radio stations that you trust and let them do it for you.  If you want to participate, you are just going to have to put the time in to listen.

So although I wouldn’t say that there are fewer great bands out there, I would certainly concede that we have exposure to far more really shit ones.  But as for greatness, I just don’t think we can tell right now what is going to be remembered in twenty years.  And I also think we conveniently forget all the crap that there was milling about on the airwaves at the time we thought the Smiths were so great.  I can see how you would get full, too.  After thirty-odd years scouring the country for great new bands, like JC has, there must come a point where you’re just full up.  There is a limit to the amount of music we can really find special, because if there was more of it then it would by definition be less special, but I really don’t buy the argument that bands then were better than they are now.

And as Mrs. Toad is whispering in my ear, great bands tend to be born into times of economic hardship – it’s what makes the release all the more euphoric – so you never know, we could be on the cusp of great things over the next five years or so.

The Smiths – How Soon is Now?
Blur – Clover Over Dover
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Arcade Fire – Intervention

Musical Maturity of a 25-Year-Old

I am a mere 32 years old. Some of you may be gasping at such superannuation, others chuckling indulgently at callow youth. In the world of music there seem to be a large clump of enthusiastic kids, a big chunk of people like me – getting a little too old to be indie kids but still are – and then another big clump of folk in their forties who decided a few years back that they were never going to be too old for all this and fuck anyone who suggests they are.

I seem to find myself easily identified as the middle category: not enough knowledge of Joy Division to be the latter, nor enough enthusiasm for Blood Red Shoes to be the former, and this is pretty much accurate. The problem is that almost everyone in this country of my age grew up listening to the sort of music that is being reprised right at this very moment, and I missed it. Spending your teenage years in Vienna and Singapore you just didn’t hear current music, ever. Beyond pantomime metal and shitty disco pop it just didn’t make the leap.

This means that when I hear groups like Cats on Fire, Decoration, The Siddeleys, My Teenage Stride, Shout Out Louds and countless others who are either reinterpreting – or just plain ripping off, depending on your view – this sort of sound I actually don’t hear a rip off.  I am hearing a good chunk of this music for the first time, despite it conjuring up a slightly disembodied sense of nostaligia, which is slightly odd because just about everyone my age over here is pretty familiar with this sound from the first time round.  There are patches of knowledge because we did have MTV and my cousin Steve used to send me mix tapes on my birthday, but for the most part my musical knowledge starts almost entirely from scratch in 1993, when I first moved to the UK to go to university.  I was seventeen.

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Soupdragons, The Wonderstuff and The Levellers were just fading from public approval and Britpop was about to take off.  My first year in Manchester was the year Definitely Maybe, His ‘n’ Hers and Parklife were released.  So I missed C86, despite the fact that I should just have been starting to develop an interest in music at the time.  I was the only person I knew who had heard of The Stone Roses.

This is why you will often hear me get all excited about groups almost anyone else my age would probably dismiss as a bland knock-off of stuff they heard years ago.  For me the first time that is likely to happen is when the 90s Revival kicks in and grunge comes back.

The Cure – Killing an Arab
The Smiths -  Shakespeare’s Sister
The Siddeleys – Sunshine Thuggery
My Teenage Stride – Terror Bends
The Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Levellers – Liberty Song
Pulp – Pink Glove
Blur – Tracy Jacks

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

The wench is away and I am here by myself, managing the last few days of our house project. You can imagine what fun that must be, I’m sure.  Still, we move back in this weekend, so it may be a crap couple of days but it’ll all be over soon and then you’ll be relieved of me constantly whinging about it, which will be nice for you.

Given we’re living in a basement flat on a short term let for a month I got quite into the basementy idea with this playlist. I digressed into The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, but mostly it’s music from ‘95/6 when I was living in a damp, grotty basement flat in Glasgow with a mate and the girl I was seeing at the time.

I bought stacks of CD singles back then and lost them all when someone broke into the flat.  Thanks to the joys of the internet I’ve been able to track most of them down recently, so you get a few of those, as well as some of the stuff I was listening to at the time.

It’s interesting as a historical document, to me anyway, but I am not sure how well the playlist itself works.  There’s something about this podcast that I’m not sure I like as much as the others, even though I like all the songs on it.  I don’t know, let me know what you think.  Perhaps Tears of Rage, Oasis and the Cranberries aren’t good enough songs to have all on the same podcast.

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

01. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End (03.33)
02. Oasis – Rocking Chair (10.54)
03. Bob Dylan & the Band – Tears of Rage (17.59)
04. Bob Dylan – Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Live) (25.54)
05. The Band – Rockin’ Chair (29.17)
06. Lloyd Cole – Unhappy Song (37.59)
07. Hootie & the Blowfish – Sad Caper (48.40)
08. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Shallow Grave (54.03)
09. Tom Waits – November (55.55)
10. Barenaked Ladies – The Old Apartment (63.26)
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (68.33)
12. The Bluetones – Colorado Beetle (71.08)
13. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (79.35)
14. The Cranberries – Joe (87.07)
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Ballad of Robert Moore & Betty Coltrane (96.13)

Vieux Farka Toure – Live, The Arches Glasgow, Sunday 25th November 2007

World music of all sorts basically reminds me of two things.  Smooth tossers in minimalist flats with just a little bit of faux-ethnic tat who sported ponytails and appreciated poetry in the 1980s are the first.  The second is this, one of the greatest songs of all time:

The Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/DeadKennedys-HolidayinCambodia.mp3]

So, you remember I told you about my friend Morgan, who has declared a mission to take me to gigs I don’t want to go to – the man responsible for getting me to the Battles gig?  Well you can see what he was up against when he suggested we go along to see the son of Malian legend Ali Farka Touré at the weekend.  I am getting pretty fed up with just how narrow my musical taste is becoming these days though, so I thought I’d give it a go, especially after how much I loved Think Tank, Albarn’s post-Mali Blur album with such strong African influences.

Ultimately, this kind of thing is often far better live than recorded, where the energy and charisma of the performers can bring home some of the local atmosphere of music not well suited to the Glasgow drizzle.  It was a good performance, Touré’s annoyance with the sound guy notwithstanding, although as the latter improved so did the former.  Being outshone by his own guitarist was clearly not part of the plan, and Touré looked pretty bloody miffed early on.  He cheered up though as things improved, and the bonhomie extended to repeated invitations to members of Zeep, their support, to come and join in at various points.

Ultimately though, this wasn’t my bag.  Old fashioned Malian blues I may well enjoy but this stuff was a bit ho-hum.  I salute Morgs for having a go of course, but perhaps this is what you get for going to see Son Of rather than the big man himself.

Blur, on the other hand, never seem to get anything like enough credit for Think Tank.  Honestly, I think it’s one of my favourite albums of the last ten years.  I know Damon Albarn puts a lot of people off but come on, people, this is just a wonderful album.

Blur -  Good Song
Blur – Caravan

Toadcast #10 – The Pink Podcast

The tenth Toadcast is a Pink Podcast, celebrating all things gay in indie music, but trying to steer well clear of any sort of annoying Graham Norton stereotypes. So, in avoiding anything that might have seen this lapse into the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert podcast I enlisted the help of my friend James, who was Mrs. Toad’s best man at our wedding.

As well as being gay, James is a real indie fan so I though he’d be perfect to consult with on the playlist and most of these songs are his choices.It’s surprising actually, just how indie this ended up being.I left off quite a few things I really wanted to play and it’s still the longest ever Toadcast.

Ultimately, I’ve tried to explore the relationship between the gay community and indie music, but needless to say there are times where it descends into slightly angry ranting. Hopefully not too much to allow you to enjoy the music though. It’s also not really ended up being as much of a discussion of gay culture as I’d hoped and that is almost entirely down to my own ignorance. I should probably have got James round to help actually present, but that would have been a right pain the arse logistically, as well as technically in terms of capturing both voices on one shitty little webcam microphone.

On a technical point, there is a bit of an echo on the vocal recording. This is because we have moved out of our house for a couple of months while builders tear it to pieces and I am having to rather make do in terms of recording location. I’ll try and sort this out by next week. And I at one point describe the Book of Ruth as being in the New Testament, which is also wrong. What a muppet.

Toadcast #10 – The Pink Podcast

01. Pet Shop Boys – It’s a Sin (01.20)
02. The Mamas & the Papas – Dream a Little Dream of Me (08.35)
03. Bloc Party – This Modern Love (13.55)
04. Rufus Wainwright – The Rebel Prince (18.08)
05. The Radiators – Under Clery’s Clock (24.34)
06. The Magnetic Fields – When My Boy Walks Down the Street (29.15)
07. Donna Summer – I Feel Love (35.28)
08. Soft Cell – Sex Dwarf (41.36)
09. The Ballet – I Hate the War (47.52)
10. Madonna – Ray of Light (51.02)
11. Blur – Girls & Boys (60.00)
12. M.J. Hibbett & the Validators – The Gay Train (67.25)
13. David Bowie – China Girl (71.50)
14. Morrissey – November Spawned a Monster (80.40)
15. R.E.M. – First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin (90.27)
16. Scissor Sisters – Return to Oz (103.20)
17. Elton John – Ballad of a Well-Known Gun (112.12)

More Folk to Vote For…

There are some more people to vote for in the Digital Music Awards, so get going. If you actually go to the site and see the excruciating list of utter shit listed under ‘blogs’ then you will see why it’s so important to get actual blogs by actual people with actual brain cells voted for on this bastard. Unbelievable, the shit that is listed there – preening, self-important, utterly vacuous and dripping in corporate jism. Fuck them, and the horse they rode in on.

So, vote for me.

And the Growl.
And the Hum.
And the Dance.
And the Rawk.
And the Sex.
And the Sweep.

And the tunes:

As a shameless incentive, I’ve thrown together a wee pile of songs from my first couple of years in Glasgow. I bought loads of CD singles at the time, half of which got pinched, but there was some cracking stuff around at this time, really there was.

The Bluetones – The Fountainhead
Blur – There’s No Other Way
Elastica – Vaseline
Sleeper – Vegas
The La’s – Son of a Gun (No, I checked, and apparently this one is a little debatable. When it’s a plural of a word as a word, rather than the object it represents then you use an apostrophe. So fuck off, smart-arse. Besides, The Las looks like a different band altogether.)