[This week's Sunday Supplement is brought to you by Jenny Soep (pronounced 'Soup'), who has made it her mission to hunt down 'bloody good gigs' and draw her experience of them onto paper. A bit more time-consuming than taking a photo. But that's what she does, and she's pretty damned good at it, if you ask me.  Last weekend Jenny was at the Matt Groening ATP, where she captured the moments below. You can see more of her stuff over on her own blog, which you should obviously take a look at.]

Hello folks. This is the complete antithesis of Song By Toad, as in no words of wisdom, complaint, rant or fancy shall flow forth from my firmly clamped bouche.

Not this time anyway.

Instead I am offering up the following laid out on a delightfully sparkly silver platter for you to feast your eyes and cogitating mind upon.  They are (this bit is the informative bit, so pay attention) all drawings, hand-drawn from the press pit at Matt Groening’s most fabulously embroidered-together festival set list.  I will admit they’re not the actual papery drawings – that would be impossible, and some skull-duggery has been afoot with photoshop as you may notice, but all the squiggly sketch-like marks you see on the images were done during the live performance of each artist.  I have lightened or darkened some areas to suit my memory, and for just a bit of fun really. However it has meant about 24 hours extra work that I never intended.

Yes I met Matt Groening. Yes I was inwardly spasm-dancing-about-manic-excited, but yes, I activated my super-secret-superficial-forcefield to appear composed and unaffected.  Most people at the festival met Matt, and a huge amount even got photos complete with cuddles and probably even a leg over, signed and doodled-on posters, t-shirts and other extremities, some folks queueing for hours without titbit. I however, got Matt’s email address, and the cute little lady that was with him – could have been his wife, could have been his PA. She asked specifically for my contact details. So let’s see if anything comes of it.

Meanwhile, I got a cracking load of drawings done of the best music festival I’ve had the joy of infiltrating.  Got the attention of most of the musicians, met a good few of them impressing them with my doodle power before exiting with a flourish and a promise of a copy to be mailed toute-de-suite in the digital post before a fortnight was dead and gone.

So here you are. The first instalment of my favourite acts of Matt Groening’s ATP and his delicious music taste quenchers. Enjoy.

I’ll be sticking them up on my own neglected blog at some point soon with the rest of ‘em. (PS You may have noticed, being an observant bunch, I chucked in an extra drawing of Pavement who are curating and playing their own ATP this precise weekend. I drew it at their Barrowlands gig the week before. It was an excellent but thickly steamy hot gig. I was sweating and I was just in the press-pit holding a sketchbook. Pansy.)

Click on the thumbnails below to open a larger image…

Mrs. Toad has been stranded in God Bless America by that infernal cloud of Icelandic ash, so I am home alone for the last week and all of the next one.  This is very much Not Fun, because as much as she’s a mean old bitch, I do seem to have developed a grudging affection for the silly old mare so a fortnight apart is very much unappreciated.  It’s about time those Icelanders re-established some bloody discipline, honestly.

Anyhew, there is some excellent stuff on this podcast, even though it really doesn’t hang together around a particular theme as they sometimes do.  In actual fact, I don’t think I’ve done a themey one for a while – might give that a go next week.

Toadcast #118 – The Ashcast

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01. Johnny Flynn – Kentucky Pill (4.11)
02. Burnt Island – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (10.51)
03. Draw Me Stories – Becomes the Hunted (18.25)
04. Haunted Stereo – Lock the Doors (22.29)
05. Ragged Claws – Lamed Wufniks (30.44)
06. Fleet Foxes – Silver Dagger (36.07)
07. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (40.13)
08. Cocorosie – Lemonade (42.14)
09. Br’er – Crocus (50.41)
10. Devolver – Promise (56.24)
11. Giant Sand – Anarchistic Bloshevistic Cowboy Bundle (58.44)

Hannah from Modernaire rather kindly sent through this George Orwell essay which I rather like, especially the bit about the Toad (I assure you there is no such thing as a ‘common’ Toad, whatever George may think).

Maybe we should all step away from these pernicious computer machines, and go and lark about, carefree in the springtime lushness.

The excerpt was from ‘SomeThoughts on the Common Toad’ and whilst I object to his scurrilous accusations of lower class toadery which, as a species, we vigorously refute, it makes a nice read. Orwell may have been a stodgy novellist, by which I mean that his intellectual achievements as a writer outsrip the actual enjoyment of reading his fiction, but he was a truly excellent essayist. Anyone who is yet to read “The Decline of the English Murder” should do so immediately. But this is not really a literary site, so let’s leave it to George, shall we:

“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenom¬enon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of Left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so… People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.

I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader-worship.”

There’s not a lot of music related to Orwell that I can think of, although I assume there must be loads out there. Animal Farm and 1984 have entered into the popular imagination such that people use metaphors from these books all the time, even if they have no idea where they came from.

For Animal Farm (tenuous, these two):
Cocorosie – Animals
The Beatles – Piggies
For 1984:
Alanalda – There is Always Someone Watching
Tina Turner – 1984
David Bowie – 1984 (Live)
For Down and Out in Paris and London:
The Divine Comedy – In and Out in Paris and London
There must be some more though, surely? Help me out here people.

I almost feel that, given my general indifference to Feist, I shouldn’t really like this much either, but I do. I couldn’t even tell you why I connect the two in my head, but I do. It’s probably just a trick of the mind because there’s something much more otherwordly about this – something slightly mythical, almost – and it’s something I find quite beguiling.

In musical terms it sounds like something of a cross between the early, thick and slightly mucous Goldfrapp material and a dinner party Bjork on her best behaviour. It’s much more folky than either of those two, and the juxtaposition of thickness and breathiness makes it quite an intense album, heavy on magical atmospheres and strangely evocative ambience. Occasionally they lapse into the fairground macabre, such as the uncharacteristic but nevertheless excellent Japan. This reminds of the first Goldfrapp album as well, with its Oompa Radar circus interlude.

They’re an interesting pair, the Casady sisters, who basically are CocoRosie. Sierra was shunted aroud European boarding schools from her early teens, after failing to settle in a household with her mother and younger sister Bianca, following the breakup of their parents’ marriage. Estranged for nearly ten years, Bianca unexpectedly appeared at her sister’s Paris apartment in about 2003, having grown restless in the States. They hit it off pretty much immediately from the looks of things and have pretty much been going at the music hammer and tongs ever since. Luckily for us.

CocoRosie – Werewolf
CocoRosie – Japan

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