Song, by Toad

Yes, I know it’s early for you, but it’s late for me and a massive greasy great kebab is calling to me like the siren song of a thousand virgins who just might be persuadable that hours spent in one’s bedroom listening to sincere young men complain about how unfulfilling their tediously middle class life is constitutes some sort of social protest.

I remember living in Cambridge and having a kebab at the sterling Gardenia.  Crikey that was good stuff.  In Manchester Abduls was always the place, although admittedly that was something like fifteen years ago, and things have probably changed since then.  In general though, this Friday Five is going to be more cheese related than kebab related.  Although I am admittedly a massive music snob, there were times before the global internetosphere made all my fashion choices for me, and so I thought it might be time to celebrate those times.  Were you a stupid sappy cunt once?  Yes, me too.

Since pretty much everyone reading this was a bit of a pillock at some point in their past I think that the idea of commenting for the first time should probably pale into insignificance.  Generally speaking this site can be more than a little cliquey, but on Fridays absolutely everyone, from Kim Jong Il to Kim Basinger is encouraged to chip in have their say.  What, after all, is the point of a website if people don’t come along and tell me what a tit I am on the comments page.

So to encourage you, I have come up with the silliest moments in my life, set them to music, and asked you to do the same.  Enjoy, Toadlings.

1. Cheesiest song you’ve ever bawled your eyes out to because of some lost lover.
2. You’re at a disco, the songs are shit, the crowd is shit, and suddenly some contemptibly populist nonsense comes on the stereo and you find yourself boogying away like a muppet anyway.  What’s the song?
3. Yes it’s shit, but which song gets you fist-pumping like Song 2 by Blur?
4. I’m alone, I’m miserable, but I’M GONNA BE OKAY dammit!
5. Let’s get pished!

Bruce Hornsby & the Range – The Road not Taken (I was a very sensitive child.  Stop laughing – very sensitive.)

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Erasure – Sometimes (I know, I know, I know, but it’s just so… catchy, I guess.  Oh, the shame.)

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Bon Jovi – You Give Love a Bad Name

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Fare Thee Well

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The Walkmen – The Rat

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Okay, there have been some comments recently about… well, read the title of the post and guess for yourself. So I thought it was time to address this issue, although not in as confrontational a manner as you might expect, given my enthusiasm for invective.

I like – now prepare yourselves here – quite a few songs by the following artists: Dave Fucking Matthews Fucking Band, Phish, Counting Crows, Sheryl Crow, Hootie & the Blowfish and Bruce Hornsby & the Range. I don’t particularly feel the need to make excuses for any of this, but I do wonder slightly that these bands are so hated by my peers, when I think they’re okay, for the most part, despite the borderline self-parodying sludge they degenerated into later in their careers.

Bruce Hornsby doesn’t really fit with the other lot, I guess, and I think that may be a nostalgia thing. I used to hear his first couple of albums quite a bit when I was growing up, so it’s kind of stuck with me. It’s funny that I have a similar sort of nostalgic affection for Cyndi Lauper’s first (I think) album, but because that’s so ironic it doesn’t seem to attract quite the same derision.

I don’t know who has any sort of liking for the softer side of the indie spectrum – Bloc Party, The Killers’ first, early Snow Patrol, stuff like that. It’s sort of like indie, but a softer sort with a lot of the edges rubbed off and something of a fuller, more radio-friendly sound. I’ll admit, I love the early stuff by all three of these groups. I also find myself thinking that my Dave Fucking Matthews and Counting Crows liking is probably the equivalent to this, but for Americana. I like a fair bit more Americana than a lot of the readers of this site, I get the impression, and maybe the softer end of that scale leaves me less hostile to the sort of musical territory we’re talking about here.

The other thing is that this is squarely in the 90s American indie rock camp, which should be just about due for its period of loathing, before the inevitable nostalgia trips begin in a few years. I’m not saying the nostalgia will exonerate any of these bands of course, but it’s funny who it leaves behind. The 80s revival seemed to rather oddly exclude Phil Collins, when you’d think that anyone so universally loathed would make for perfect ironic re-appraisal for the arch and superior. On the other end of the spectrum, Springsteen’s classic Born in the USA doesn’t seem to have been able to avoid being dragged down by the 80s production values with which it is saddled. So it’s a bit of a lottery, I suppose.

Before anything gets reappraised it seems to go through this period where it is detested with a more frantic passion than ever before. We’re getting on for ten years away from the 90s now, and 90s indie is probably about as unfashionable a sound as exists at the moment.  Also, the rabid enthusiasm for the 80s seems to be waning somewhat. Even clothes are starting to resemble early 90s away kits from the Premier League, albeit only on the hippest of kids.

So, I think the reason this stuff is so hated is not unrelated to the fact that the mid 90s are currently approaching the nadir of their appreciation, before the inevitable sea change. Whether or not this revival will take any of this stuff with it I have no idea, but nor do I care in particular. The Dave Fucking Matthews Fucking Band have two, if not three, really good albums. Fairweather Johnson by Hootie & the Blowfish is good. Farmhouse by Phish is good. Even Sheryl Crow produced half a good album, with her self-titled ‘98 release. So you can snigger all you want, but I stand by this, and there’s absolutely no way there isn’t an equivalent MOR secret in your music collection somewhere.

Counting Crows – Have You Seen Me Lately?
Hootie & the Blowfish – Sad Caper
Phish – Bug
Bruce Hornsby & the Range – The Old Playground
Dave Fucking Matthews Fucking Band – Jimi Thing

I have to confess – actually I don’t have to; Mrs. Toad would be right on here to correct me if I pretended anything else – that I was a right pussy when I was a teenager. I was still a nice sensitive boy by the time I met my darling girl at fifteen, but I was even worse before that. Even so, even by the time we met, I was still far too soft for a leather-jacket-sporting, drinking, drug-taking party girl who hung out with the school’s rock band to even consider indulging in foolishness with me.  We got on incredibly well and had that sort of unspoken trust that you get sometimes when you click with someone.  So rather, we both considered it – sort of – but in a rare show of good sense for either of us we both knew instantly that it would be an unmitigated disaster, so put that idea to bed for another ten years to mature.

Anyhow, if I was bad then, I was worse in Singapore. I moved back to Vienna from South East Asia at fourteen and it was in Singapore that I first got into genuinely tragic and completely wet teenage heartbreak. Frankly it was, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, just a little pathetic. I look back and I think ‘oh for fuck’s sake man, grow a fucking spine!‘ but t’was not to be. I was a state, a sincere, cowardly sexual retard with another nine years to go before I was to spontaneously and unprecedentedly grow a pair of balls at about age twenty or twenty-one.

Anyhow, want to hear what I cried myself to sleep to after yet another crushing rejection?  Every one to the time-honoured mantra of ‘You’re like a brother to me’ and ‘What we have is so special, I don’t want to ruin it by going out with you’ and ‘But you’re my best friend’ and other such cunning euphemisms for ‘don’t be ridiculous, you dickless wonder’. My friends and I called it ‘the old fuck-off-and-die routine’ because frankly we’d have found being told to fuck off and die more dignified. Lots more dignified.

Anyhow, I’m better now, but I can’t hear these songs without cringing. Worryingly, there may have been worse, but I think my mind has blocked them out, thankfully.

Jackson Browne – For a Dancer
Bruce Hornsby & the Range – The Road Not Taken
Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band – You’ll Accomp’ny Me
The Eagles – Desperado