Guerilla Mixtapes
On the weekend Mrs. Toad and I used a City Car Club car to tool around the place trying to find a camera for the Toad Sessions. They’re really useful things to have available, those cars, because you sign up to the scheme, they’re all over the city and whenever you need one you just take it. Easy peasy.
Anyhow, when we turned on the stereo it turned out someone had left a compilation CD in the player when the car was last used, and the first song that came from the speakers the second we pressed the on button was the wonderful Can’t Hurry Love by Phil Collins the Concretes. This is hardly a well-known song, or at least so I would have said. Not obscure exactly, but it was a genuine surprise to hear it. Fascinated, I flicked back to the start of the CD – The Concretes was song six or seven or something like that – and what should come on but The Boy With the Arab Strap by Belle & Sebastian. It was like a gift from the gods of music nerdery!
Next came a couple of Arctic Monkeys songs – Fake Tales of San Francisco and Mardy Bum, two of their better ones – and then something else I can’t remember, and then this bizarre bit of music that sounded quite like Ian Dury & the Blockheads, but wasn’t. By this point I was singing the praises of our mysterious benefactor as if he or she were some sort of benevolent indie god. It didn’t last, unfortunately. There was some shitty hip hop after that and then it descended into the sort of shit you imagine an ageing indie kid might be forced to put on his compilation by his girlfriend. That sounds rather sexist, and it is, but Mrs. Toad said it before I did, so sod off.
So it may not have ended up as the euphoric celebration of indie serendipity which it teasingly suggested it might be in the beginning, but it was still a wonderful accident of circumstance, particularly starting with that Concretes track. And it got me to thinking how cool it would be to make a pile of Song, by Toad mix CDs and then rent City Car Club cars one at a time and every time leave a little musical present behind when we return the car. It would be amazing. I suppose a lot of people would just think it was shit and throw it out, but I wonder how many people would listen. And how populist do you think you’d have to make something for them to stick with it long enough to discover some hidden gems?
The Concretes – You Can’t Hurry Love
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Belle & Sebastian – The Boy With the Arab Strap
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