Song, by Toad

There is a betting shop under the house next door who once offered us something like seven or eight grand, or something like that, to build a fire exit out of their place into our back garden.  Quite apart from whether or not that compensation would actually match the resulting devaluation of the house, which it probably wouldn’t have, the idea of having Ladbrokes employees peering into our garden while we were sitting out there with a cup of tea didn’t really sound appealing.

Also, they claimed that the door would be alarmed, but we didn’t really have a lot of faith in that, and rather feared the employees finding a way around this and spending a lot of time smoking fags in our back garden.  In the words of Han Solo: “No reward is worth this!”

Anyway, betting shops have always kinda fascinated me.  They always look so desperate, like the people inside are clutching to the last tiny strand of courage they have left and vesting it all in some ropey old nag in the 4.30 at Doncaster.  It’s that haunted, defeated kind of look and the 1980s cross-channel ferry decor that just makes them look like the most appalling joy-sinks imaginable.

In any case, gambling is something I have never been drawn to in the slightest, primarily because games of chance are governed by mathematics and in the long run you will lose, and when it comes to placing bets based on close inside knowledge, I always seem to be surprised no matter how much I know about the topic in hand.

I mean, I know football inside out, particularly the English Premiership and I seem to have absolutely no ability whatsoever to predict the results.  I know the Scottish music scene pretty well these days, but would I honestly have faith in my ability to pick the Next Big Thing Out of Scotland?  No, probably not, not to the extent that I’d bet on it anyway.

Now you may say that in starting a record label that this is exactly what I’m doing, but I’m not, I’m making a different kind of bet altogether.  I have noticed over time that for all I like alternative stuff, my taste still conforms to a certain part of the mainstream, and I am betting that if I just stick to releasing stuff I really like, rather than trying to second-guess a band’s potential for making it big, then my natural overlap with the mainstream will mean that we release enough music people like to make the whole venture financially sensible.

That’s the theory anyway.

So, there are some good gigs this week, so please attend them and take the opportunity to take photos of hipsters looking hip and enter them into our competition to win a copy of the wonderful Communion Compilation.  Just email your pictures (old or new) to me at songbytoad -*- hotmail.co.uk, and we’ll pick a winner in a week or so.

Oh, and please do de-lurk, that’s what this thread is for, y’know.  You’ve read the comments before, you know the kind of clowns I’ll be stuck with if you don’t!

1. Ever bet on anything and won?
2. Which kind of gambling might you be tempted by?
3. Kind of gambling you’ll never understand.
4. What are your odds of scoring on Valentine’s Day?
5. Name your favourite underdog of all time (doesn’t matter what field).

The Pogues – Bottle of Smoke

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The Clash – The Card Cheat

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Bob Dylan – Rambling Gambling Willie

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Bruce Springsteen – Meeting Across the River

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Hem – Betting on Trains

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I posted a spot of video yesterday, which I don’t normally do.  Not that I don’t get sent videos by people, more that… well, I don’t know why, really.  I guess I spend enough time trying to figure out what I want to write about albums, I don’t really make time to think about videos much.  Besides, at the level of music I am generally interested in most videos are just a vehicle for the song anyway.  And I can listen to albums whilst doing my proper job, which also hel… you’ve dozed off haven’t you?  Sorry.

Anyhow, this week I have posted a massive THREE videos.  Three!  How ’bout that.  And this weekend there will be another eight going up, from the New Year’s House Gig, including something of an exclusive: a new Broken Records song.  So there you go, we’ve turned into some sort of multimedia news-whore hipster haven in the new year, shocking isn’t it.

So, on yesterday’s posting of the new OK Go video, Bart suggested that I ask about favourite music videos for this week’s Friday Fives.  I thought I answered him politely enough, but the poor fellow’s gone completely off the rails.  I tried to get to the bottom of what he was burbling on about in that inscrutable ginger way of his, but all he said was this:

And erm, tee hee, sorry!  Gingers – the last ethnic minority it’s okay to ritualistically make fun of.  Anyhow, minor mentalist distractions aside, I thought this was an excellent idea, so this week’s five will all be about music videos.  This should be as good an opportunity to de-lurk as any, and of course, that’s what the Friday Fives are for – getting people out of the woodwork and onto the page – so have a go at these five.  the easiest way to answer is probably to just link to the YouTube videos where appropriate, I guess, but please don’t try and embed them in the comments.  I have no idea if it would work, and it will make the whole thread an ungodly mess – just paste in the URL and the link will be added automatically.

1. Favourite music video
2. Favourite laughably dated music video.
3. Favourite massively DIY music video.
4. Strongest memory of MTV.
5. Favourite band-related moment in an actual motion picture.

Clem Snide – Made for TV Movie

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Ben Folds Five – Video

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Nirvana – Dumb (MTV Unplugged)

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Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (MTV Unplugged)

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The A-Team Theme (Okay, the movie looks awful, but I couldn’t resist posting this)

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Baaaaaaart, help!  It appears that there is actually not one single musical event happening this week in Edinburgh which I personally would feel motivated to attened.  The only thing I’ve managed to find which I would actually like to go to is the Twilight Sad in-store performance at Avalanche Records tomorrow at one o’clock but erm, with it being one o’clock in the afternoon that might prove to be logistically challenging given I have a day job.

Generally when I write these listings, no matter how thorough I think I’ve been, ginger eagleweasel Bart pops up in the comments to set me straight about something wonderful which I have missed.  Maybe it’s my paranoia, but I always seem to read a slight smirk into his tone of voice too, the smug bastard.  In any case, come on Bart, if ever your truffle-snuffling spidey senses were needed it’s today.

Bruce Sprinsteen – 57 Channels (and Nothing On)

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So, I thought I might tell you what I am doing this weekend.  I wouldn’t bother reading this if you don’t like football, but you might enjoy the heartwarming story anyway.  On Saturday is the Sporting ICAPB Burton-Barry Cup Final, and I will hopefully be dragging my blubbery carcass around a footbally pitch for at least half of that match.  After that there will be (shit) curry and drinking. Read the rest of this entry »

The Times have raised something of a stink recently by announcing that they are going to start charging for the online content of their newspaper.  This isn’t new, exactly, because a lot of newspapers started out that way on the web, but quickly dropped all these clumsy logins and memberships and payment schemes because in the face of free and unlimited services like the Guardian and the BBC they quickly realised that they were losing out massively in the scramble for eyeballs, which is the one criterion everyone on the internet seems to agree is the key to influence, importance and, eventually, monetisation.

This kind of thing was reinforced by the same basic behaviour taking place in the real world, where newspaper prices plummetted and free papers like the Metro became everyone’s commuter read of choice, leveraging their impressive distribution to pull in the kind of advertising that rendered the price an individual might pay for the paper itself trivial.

You can see the same happening in music.  Bands are repeatedly told by the evangelists of the new e-conomy that they should largely turn a blind eye to torrent sites and p2p sharing which basically distribute their content for nothing to a wide audience, with zero income finding its way back to the band; directly at least.  And yes, that applies to Spotify too, particularly if you’re independent or on a small label – there’s just no money in it.

The money, for bands, is supposed to be on the gig circuit, which is quite simply one great big gigantic load of old bollocks.  It’s fucking expensive to drag a band around the country and, until you get pretty big, promoters simply aren’t willing to pay the fees.  It may be true for some bands, but for the vast majority it is not.  People are asked to play in-stores for free, sessions for sites like mine for free, and, not unusually enough, the gigs themselves for free as well.  The rationale is the same: give away the value – the content – for nothing, but in doing so win an audience, which then can be exploited.

But it costs a lot to make music, just as it costs a lot to generate quality news coverage. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello again, Ruth and I are back on air tonight on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station.  As per usual we’ll be having some live session stuff, this time from The Japanese War Effort.  Jamie is a bit of a band-whore actually, and plays in the Occasional Flickers and Conquering Animal Sound as well as ploughing his own solo furrow.  It’s this stuff, however, which is my favourite.  I haven’t much idea what it will sound like, stripped back to the extent that it will need to be in order to be played in the Fresh Air studio, but I am certain that it will be good.

The tracklisting will be filled out below live as we go along, and it would be nice if you would use the comment thread to chip and have your say during the show.  Believe me, it’s a hell of a lot easier than me trying to man Facebook, Twitter and bloody emails all at the same time as working the desk in the studio and the camera to record the session.  Still, Ruth’s back this week and so I should be a little calmer this time than last!

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

Tonight’s playlist:
1. Tom Waits – The Part You Throw Away (Live in Edinburgh, July 2008)
2. The Cave Singers – Belmar
3. The Japanese War Effort- Winning Eleven (Live in Session)
4. Dan Mangan – Robots
5. The Silver Columns – Brow Beaten
6. The Japanese War Effort – Lanark (Live in Session)
7. Yusuf Azak – The Key Underground
8. Rob St John – December & Whisky (Live at the Retreat Festival)
9. Doveman – Angel’s Share
10. Hudson Mohawke – Fuse
11.. Helen Love – Debbie Loves Joey
12. Tune Yards – Hap-B
13. The Japanese War Effort – Face Like A Lemon – Ivor Cutler Cover (Live in Session)
14. Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A (Nebraska Sessions Version)
15. Japanese War Effort – Punk’s Not Dead (Live in Session)
16. Leonard Cohen – Lover Lover Lover

Here is the podcast of last week’s session with the excellent Candythief, along with the session tracks and video of the performances, after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

DO NOT WORRY!  This is not a podcast stuffed full of tedious moralising and empty pontificating and generally depressing garbage about a subject far too weighty and philosophical for this sort of half-arsed internet enterprise.  In fact, towards the end it really gets quite chipper.

Basically, there are so many extraordinarily good murder ballads that that particular aspect could so easily have entirely overtaken a podcast ostensibly about prison, crime and criminal justice.

This week, however, I have still managed to marginalise the role of the murder ballad, because the concept of death incorporates so many disparate emotions and aspects that simply doing a whole podcast about murderous folk tales and their musical counterparts seemed unnecessarily narrow.  So you get this.  Which starts out a little heavy but becomes positively gleeful by the end, I promise you.

Toadcast #86 – The Deathcast

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01. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Painter Blue (03.01)
02. Samamidon – O Death (12.33)
03. Eels – Going to Your Funeral (22.31)
04. Melanie Rivaud & Strange Weather – The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits Cover) (25.05)
05. Bob Frank & John Murry – Jesse Washington 1916 (31.53)
06. Bruce Springsteen – Dead Man Walking (37.02)
07. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Up Jumped the Devil (41.15)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (48.26)
09. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Tramp the Dirt Down (57.02)
10. Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471 (66.35)

Generally when we describe something as good enough, there’s an air of resigned disappointment about the phrase.  A weary shrug of the shoulders, as if all the lofty ambitions had failed to be achieved and we were somehow settling for something which, contrary to the literal meaning of the term, was inadequate.

I suppose it’s a language thing, but ‘good enough’ rarely seems to actually mean ‘good enough’.  It tends to mean ‘not as good as we expected’.  There’s an interesting article on Wired at the moment describing this exact phenomenon.  They cite a number of example, from the Flip camera to unmanned combat aircraft, and online alternatives to Microsoft Office (Google Docs being the most obvious and successful).  The term they use as a catch-all for this general trend, whereby high-quality, high-fidelity and feature-rich products are suffering at the hands of their bare-bones brethren is “The mp3 Effect”.

I have heard countless arguments amongst audiophiles about labels using high-quality mp3s or FLAC or AIFF files to reclaim territory lost to illegal downloaders and I really think they are making a mistake.  Some people will care about that, but most simply do not give a shit.  There are studies, albeit somewhat off-the-cuff ones, referenced in that article which show users are actually growing to prefer the lossy, compressed sound of an mp3 file to its higher fidelity cousin.  Personally, I really don’t give a shit 95% of the time, either.

The whole Meursault album has been released on (not-particularly high bitrate) mp3s.  Neil’s rationale: it was never supposed to be a high-fidelity record.  It wasn’t recorded like that, so why should it be released like that?  He’s right of course, but there is always the more practically expedient question – had he pushed for something more high-quality, requiring more expensive equipment, maybe studio time… well, it all just makes it increasingly unlikely to happen, doesn’t it.  What’s more important to you, that it be perfect or that it happen.

I often ask myself this question with this blog.  Is a timely review of a live show more important than the writer figuring out exactly what they want to say?  Are the Toad Sessions much better – in terms of production values, depth of content and so on – than they need to be?  Would you rather twenty quicker, easier, more cut-and-shut Toad Sessions in a year or eight ones with a lot more work put into them?

Now, I do appreciate a high quality recording played on shit-hot equipment, but honestly, the vast, vast majority of the time I just wouldn’t notice.  I also appreciate quality writing and great production values on internet video, I appreciate all kinds of very very nice things, just not very often.  Most of the time, and I doubt I am alone here, I just want good enough.  It’s fair enough to blame idiots for the rise in reality TV or mediocre chick lit or banal blockbusters or poor sound recordings or crappy convenience food or low quality pictures posted on the internet or pretty much any proliferation of ‘not as good as we expected’ in a field we care about, but I think we are all like that most of the time.  When you watch telly do you wait for something good, or do you just fancy emptying your brain for a bit and just make do with whatever you can find, most of the time?

I really can’t face the idea of convenience food… doesn’t mean I never eat it though.  How much time, in all honesty, do any of us have to appreciate real quality most of the time?  I love music, and I am perfectly happy with mp3s 98% of the time.  I love eating well and we cook a really decent meal no more than a couple of times a week.  Real quality generally needs a degree of attention to be truly appreciated and how much of our life can we really devote to that kind of proper indulgence?  Kids, jobs, admin, chores, there just isn’t room enough in everyone’s lives for ‘good enough’ not to make up 97.36%* of our requirements for pretty much everything.

Like all good ideas, it just seems so bloody obvious when someone points it out to you, but the idea of making something just good enough rarely gets past the drawing board in most places because people always seem to take it mean slightly less than good enough.

Bruce Springsteen – My Best Was Never Good Enough

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*Warning: Approximately 88.6% percent of statistics in this post were made up on the spot.

When we were out in Italy on our holidays Mrs. Toad and I had very few CDs with us but one of them was an Uncut compilation of prison blues and murder ballads which, amazingly, given the very promising subject matter, really wasn’t very good.  In fact, it was rotten, so I’ve made a podcast based on the self same concept, but with what I personally think are vastly better songs.

Most  obviously, to my mind, there were very few contemporary songs in there, and I thought that was a little weird.  Now, I actually think that the level of political commentary in popular music is just a little weak at the moment, but there are nevertheless some amazingly good prison and criminal justice-related songs to be had, and certainly some exceptional murder ballads, although I must confess that the most recent bit of genuine social commentary here pre-dates the 1990s by a couple of years.  There was probably more recent material I could have used, it just didn’t spring to mind at the time I’m afraid.

So here we have the Jailcast, complete with some largely incoherent ranting about politics and my own stupid fucking jail story which Mr.s Toad takes such delight in sniggering about at every available opportunity, the bitch.  It’s not that exciting, really it isn’t.

Toadcast #80 – The Jailcast

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01. Tom Waits – Jockey Full of Bourbon (02.05)
02. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Drunkard’s Prayer (08.37)
03. Pulp – Down by the River (16.14)
04. Bob Dylan & the Rolling Thunder Revue – The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Live, 1975) (19.42)
05. The Pogues – Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six (31.36)
06. Bruce Springsteen – Vigilante Man (Woody Guthrie Cover) (39.33)
07. The Radiators – Prison Bars (43.34)
08. Enfant Bastard – Compilation Tapes (50.10)
09. Nightjar – The Hanging Tree (55.30)
10. Pete Wylie – Stay Free (Clash Cover) (60.49)

Well, only if you are Nicolas Cage.  And actually, if you were Nicolas Cage, then some of the films you have made in the last ten years or so might well merit a rampaging witch-hunt by some of the more embittered members of the acting community as you comically jam your two facial expressions (grim determination and spastic incomprehension) into one tedious, one-dimensional character after another for millions of dollars in reward, while they subsist on the breadline only by waiting table and selling their tender little chocolate blossoms in the backstreets for an insulting pittance.

Actually, maybe Song, by Toad should be looking to start some sort of ‘Burn Nicolas Cage campaign’.  It would be a righteous mission and I think we could get a lot of people on board.

Erm, not sure how that started.  Oh yes, Wickerman.  Myself, Mrs. Toad and several of Scotland’s finest young bands will be heading down to the Wickerman Festival this weekend (that’s why I was thinking of burning Nicolas Cage).  I am trying not to work too hard, so I haven’t arranged an awful lot of interviews, and I will not be taking the video camera with me.

What I will try and do though is record a podcast, or maybe two, while we’re there.  I’ll be taking our wee Tascam voice recorder and my Blue Snowflake microphone and will try and get some bits and pieces from the bands and some chat and so on and upload it all on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  I have no idea about the press facilities though, so god knows how successful this little plan is likely to be.  If it all fails, I will simply upload a podcast on Sunday afternoon when we get back.  So you’ll have to wait, but it will happen, promise.

In the meantime let’s get Five-tastic… no, sorry, that’s a disgraceful turn of phrase, I can’t countenance that sort of garbage.  Come on then, spit out your Friday Fives and remember that Fridays are de-lurking amnesties, open to all and sundry and especially encouraged for those who have never commented before.  Could this be your day?  Go on, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

1. Most hated pointless remake of a classic film.
2. Mostly guiltily loved pointless remake of a classic film (no, Star Wars as a remake of The Fortress does not count).
3. Favourite Nic Cage film.
4. Most abysmal Nic Cage film.
(I’ll even help you with those – no need to know much, or even to care, just click here.)
5.Name another wooden beefcake actor who irritates the living shit out of you.

Is this post sexist?

Bonnie Prince Billy (fuck his fucking quotation marks) – You Will Miss Me When I Burn

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Sargasso Trio – It’s Hot in Hell

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Bruce Springsteen – I’m On Fire

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Hellfire & Damnation

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Fortunately, the festival will be over by Sunday, but rain is never a bad bet in Scotland:
The Groove Farm – It Always Rains on Sunday

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This is the last Song, by Toad show on Fresh Air for this term – so the last one until about October time, basically.  As the band are long time Toad friends, and as their long (loooong)-awaited debut album is being released on Monday, it seemed only fitting that Broken Records pop into the studio and have a chat about things, talk through the album itself (read: TOAD EXCLUSIVE!!!1!1 or something like that), and generally shoot the breeze.

To tune in, go to the Fresh Air homepage and click on the big Listen Now button on the left hand side, from about 6.30pm-8pm, UK time.  As per usual, I’ll fill in the playlist below, and you can take the opportunity to leave compliments, questions and abuse in the comments section as you see fit.

01. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band – Hard to be a Saint in the City (Live at Hammersmith Odeon 1975)
02. White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme
03. Broken Records – Wolves (Toad Session)
04. Linfinity – Holy Rain
05. Ambulances – Come With Us
06. Broken Records – Lies
07. Sparrow & the Workshop – Last Chance (Toad Session)
08. The Lovely Eggs – Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion
09. The Low Miffs – Dear Josephine
10. Broken Records – Nearly Home
11. Bruce Springsteen – Dancing in the Dark

Whee – pub!