I pulled a time-honoured, if slightly risky skill out of the bag last night in order to get my own way, and it came through in spades.  I was most pleased!  Jonny from the Edinburgh Man podcast happened to have a spare Arcade Fire ticket spare, so I met him in town for a quick pint and we went up to the castle to what was my first properly big gig for years.

Gig cuntery, however, made itself know in the most irritating manner as soon as the band started playing.  First off, a considerable stream of cunts started shoving their way towards the front immediately, and not with any delicacy either, literally shoving.  Cunts.  And second, a pair of prize cunts who, rather deceptively, had the good manners to ask if they could get past us, then proceeded to stand right in the space we had vacated in order to let them get past.  What utter cunts!  We said ‘get past’ you cunts, not ‘here, have our spots’.

Even more annoying than their shitty dancing was the fact that one of these was quite a tall cunt, and he happened to stand right in front of me, and next to another tall cunt.  Seeing around this pair of cunts was a bit of a fucking challenge, seeing as the back of his head was pretty much right in my face, and the stupid cunt wouldn’t stay still, so no matter where I tried to stand, he would find a way of being really fucking irritating within a minute or two.  Because he was a right fucking cunt, see?

Anyhow, after five or six songs of seething homicidal rage I decided it was time to deploy a tactic I haven’t used since I had to combat aggressive armrest territorialism on the London Underground: the cuddle-a-cunt tactic.  Yes, instead of getting shovey or passive-aggressive about it or losing my temper, at the first opportunity I just moved from right behind the cunt to a position which was a little more next to him.  In fact both next to him, and quite uncomfortably close.  Then I let our bare arms rub together every time he jumped up and down, until the silly cunt started to inch slightly to his left to get away from me.

This was exactly the plan of course, and at every opportunity I inched slightly further to my left, all the time grinning and nodding my head along to the music as if we were all just happy happy Arcade Fire fans in this together – except with an unusually high level of just slightly homoerotic skin contact.  Slowly but surely I managed to nudge the cunt far enough away from the other tall cunt that I had a wonderfully interrupted view of the band and, just as I was congratulating myself on a slow and persitent success, the poor silly cunt gave up altogether and fucked off a good two metres away from me.

Come back, you daft cunt, things were just getting fun!

Anyway, this is a slightly risky tactic of course, and I hate to imagine what would happen if I actually pulled – it would be a little awkward to let someone down after making the first move – but it worked a fucking treat last night, and I really enjoyed the gig.  The really thrilling songs, sadly, still seemed to be the ones from Funeral, but so fucking what, it was a great show.

Anyhow, umm… yes, frivolous timewasting on a Friday afternoon, let’s get the fuck on with it, eh?  De-lurking amnesty time everyone, this is the perfect time to come out of the woodwork and say hello, especially if you’ve never done so before.

1. Last really massive gig you went to.
2. Sweatiest you’ve ever been.
3. What percentage of your clothes do you actually wear regularly?
4. What did your parents insist upon, that you hated at the time, but are now kinda grateful for?
5. Does anyone ever actually bother with the songs I put on the Fives?

The Von Bondies – Shallow Grave

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The Detroit Cobras – He Did It

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Liars – We Live N.E. of Compton

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The Small Faces – All or Nothing

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The Fall – Two Librans

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 Not of course, given the business I work in, like I can’t fill it up to the brim again in a second of course. I mean, there’s the Rob St. John and Ian Humberstone as well as the All Creatures Will Make Merry vinyl artwork to finalise of course.  But that can, realistically, wait until Monday.  I think.

So that leaves me with tomorrow and nothing to do but hang out with Mrs. Toad.  The house has been so hectic with guests, and with the Festival August might well be worse, that at least one day to spend just by ourselves will be a bloody relief.

Then on Sunday I am pottering through to Glasgow for Jonnie Common’s album launch. His new record Master of None was within a whisker of being on Song, by Toad Records actually, but we didn’t move fast enough (damn you holidays!) and also didn’t really have the money to press vinyl either.  Also the record label who did end up releasing – Manchester’s Red Deer Club – are one of the best indies around and Dunk Le Chunk, who runs the label, has been one of Jonnie’s staunchest supporters from back in the days of Down the Tiny Steps, so it is rather fitting that they release his debut album.

And as much as I would have liked to have the record on Song, by Toad Records, I’d rather anyone else release it if it means I get to have a copy on vinyl.  Fookin’ lovely!  Anyway, yes, The Captain’s Rest in Glasgow this Sunday if you fancy some superlative musicfuns.

1. Which bird looks the most evil?
2. Which sea creature looks the most benign?
3. Name your death metal band.
4. Best use of an animal in a film…
5. …and the worst.

Five songs from a boisterous compilation I made in the Winter about umm… six years ago is it now?

Franz Ferdinand – Darts of Pleasure

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The Von Bondies – No Regrets

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British Sea Power – Apologies to Insect Life

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The Detroit Cobras – Ya Ya Ya (Looking For My Baby)

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The Fiery Furnaces – Crystal Clear

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Oh deary me.  A somewhat slurred podcast this week.  I recorded this on Friday night after coming home from sharing about seven pints with my boss at Proper Job, who is a thoroughly decent chap and doesn’t get out for beers as often as he used to due to an unfortunate breeding accident in which his wife had a baby, thus confining him to the house.  The lesson – gentlemen, for the love of god, don’t let them breed!

So I came back to the house and wanted to play some loud music.  I popped a bottle of beer, bought some munchies and mumbled my way through a pile of loud, rambunctious songs that I played far too loud as I sorted out the playlist, and great fun it all was too. I asked about modern rowdy music this week, and Bart kindly recommended some bands, a couple of whom I assume I may have been a little quick to dismiss in the past, so I am going to have another go at them.

Looking through the playlist, I find one thing sticking out more than anything else: how the hell can you tell a Sex Pistols demo from a Sex Pistols recording?

Toadcast #42 – Noise Please

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01. The Libertines – What a Waster (02.56)
02. The Von Bondies – Shallow Grave (08.59)
03. The Bellrays – Blues For Godzilla (12.05)
04. Ian Dury & the Blockheads – Ballad of the Sulphate Strangler (17.49)
05. The Damned – Thrill Kill (23.07)
06. Hoggboy – Left & Right (29.31)
07. Liars – Mr You’re on Fire Mr (35.33)
08. Monster Magnet – Kiss of the Scorpion (37.57)
09. The Sex Pistols – Anarchy in the UK (Demo) (43.24)
10. The Fall – Two Librans (49.47)
11. The Small Faces – All or Nothing (Live) (53.41)
12. The Detroit Cobras – Hey Sailor (59.44)

Well folks, tonight I get my revenge. You all know DC -One Half of Drunk Country – the foul-mouthed miscreant who is forever coming on this site and ruining my thoughtful and sophisticated analysis with vulgar outbursts and showers of obscenity and invective? And the one who did THAT!!–> to my lovely drawings? Well tonight it’s my turn to chuck a spanner into his works for a change.

DC, as well as being an International Man of Mystery, presents the splendid radio show that is The Waiting Room. He’s done it with Hope, he’s done it with Mr. Fisk, he’s done it with The Mouse, and now he’s doing it with, erm, no… perhaps this sentence isn’t quite going where I’d intended. Well, tonight I am making the first of what will hopefully become regular appearances on his show with a little segment called Song, by Toad Presents… where I pick four tracks and tell DC’s horrified listeners about what I’ve chosen to oil their eardrums with and why. Given the distinctly cool reception that Fisk character has given my selections when DC has presented them himself, my little slot may be met with a chorus of boos, but we’ll see.

In any case, those of you of an internet radio bent can catch the show tonight from 10pm to midnight GMT on Error FM, and those of you who prefer to your music cast in pods can download the show from here as of some time tomorrow. This is pencilled in to be a weekly feature and, although this week I’ve mostly used Song, by Toad tracks, I will try not to duplicate songs I have posted here or used on my own podcasts in future, so please do stop by and have a listen.

In other news, the Contrast Podcast turned 100 this week. Tim has a celebratory episode up, to which I have contributed Carlton Rees’s version of 99½ Won’t Do. It’s an amazing job that Tim does, pulling all that together so please pop over and have a listen. People giving their time to other folk in that sort of way is one of the best things about the internet, and Tim’s project is one of the best and most well-loved going, so swing by and give it a go.

Here’s another version of 99½ Won’t Do, this time by Detroit’s throatiest warblers, The Detroit Cobras:
The Detroit Cobras – 99½ Won’t Do
The Detroit Cobras – Insane Asylum Seemed appropriate for The Waiting Room
The Detroit Cobras – He Did It

Sony amaze me. Ever since the Walkman they have consistently designed really nice physical products, but their marketing department has shown a surreal determination to completely ruin them by saddling every nice object with comically stupid systems and interaction strategies so ill-conceived that not even an mp3 player born of a lesbian mating between Jessica Alba and Diane Lane could survive their buffoonery.

Remember the disastrously poor Sonicstage software that crippled their excellent mp3 players? Well we are only just shot of that monster at long last. And remember their idiotic obsession on the ATRAC file format for these players? ATRAC was a good format, but insisting on their players using it meant that anything transferred to them had to first be converted, which took hours. Just insanity, when their players were very, very superior products indeed. The engineers must have wanted to roast the marketing department over a slow flame.

Now take their latest. As DRM is being abandoned the world over, Warner, Universal and EMI, three of the big four, of which Sony is the fourth, have all to some extent committed to making their music available DRM-free; on Amazon in the case of the first two and iTunes in the case of EMI. So Sony have decided to follow suit and jump into the DRMlessness but have a look at how they’ve decided to do it, and swallow that mouthful of coffee before you read:

Quoting from Wired:

Sony BMG announced it will release a mishmash of 37 albums in the unrestricted MP3 format, confirming last week’s report that the label would ditch DRM. Under Sony’s new plan, consumers would purchase a credit-card-like ticket from Best Buy, Target, Fred’s, Winn-Dixie or other outlets. The cards will have a number that must be entered into the MusicPass site, where the full album can be downloaded.

“The MP3 files delivered through MusicPass play on computers, as well as on all MP3 players, including iPods,” said Thomas Hesse, a Sony BMG sales president. “This makes them a simple, easy-to-use solution that will appeal to fans who already access their music on the internet, as well as to consumers who are just getting into the digital realm.”

I keep re-reading it to try and see where the part of of this plan that isn’t a hilarious disaster might be hiding. There are two potential fragments of sense in there, pointed out by this character on the Slashdot forums: firstly, this scheme would be open to children who would not need a credit card to access digital music; and secondly given the lack of necessary shelf-space, they could be available in a far wider variety of shops. So far so moderately sensible, although they are not unbundling the albums into individual tracks, which may not endear them to the children who might be their only really viable market.

The other thing worth bearing in mind is that somewhere like Walmart, where these things would be sold, is now just about the largest single distributor of CDs in the States. I don’t know if this is just amongst bricks and mortar retailers, but I read on Billboard that they have a massive 22% of the physical CD market, and big box retailers as a whole have a collosal 65% of the entire musical retail market in the States according to the Wall Street Journal – digital and physical. Basically, this deal smacks of an unholy amount of arm-twisting by physical retailers with an awful lot of clout, who would not be happy at being so neatly snipped out of the music purchase process. So I can see how it might have come about.

But the scheme itself? Pure, hilarious lunacy. Possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. One of the biggest reasons for the continued popularity of illegal downloading is that there has never ever once been a single viable alternative of similar quality offered by a legitimate source. If there was a reasonably priced, legitimate source for high-quality, DRM-free mp3s with a suitably extensive back catalogue, then my bet is it would make a significant dent in illegal downloads, because people just are less comfortable doing illegal things. But anything that falls short of that quality of service is simply pointless – given the ineffectiveness of legislation, what is the incentive supposed to be? An inferior product for more money.

In this case, instead of just going to one of dozens of torrent sites and downloading the whole lot for bollocks all, you are expected to go to the shop and instead of just buying the CD for the same price and ripping it yourself in whatever format or quality you choose, you buy the card for $12, go home, go to their site, scratch the card, fill in the code, and then download the music as a 192 Kbps mp3 file. On other words, the worst of both worlds: you still have to go to a shop, and then also have access to an internet connection, and the quality of the final listening experience is inferior.

I have worked for plenty of big companies as a consultant and I know just how these decisions come about. Instead of taking fifty steps towards a sensible goal they take fifty steps, each of which is knocked subtly off target by toadying to the whim of a director, or vocal retards in important meetings, or the inability to achieve consensus amongst large groups of people, or the impossibility of getting every single stakeholder to take part in every important decision for logistical reasons. The result: you are still fifty steps on, but you haven’t ended up at a goal, you’ve just ended up wherever these random fifty steps took you, and after all the meetings and all the investment you end up releasing the product because, well, what do you do, start again? This despite the fact that you have created something that does absolutely everything no better than reasonably, and nothing at all Very Well Indeed.

And then it fails, and you make an announcement that consumers aren’t ready for DRM-free mp3s because you’ve tried to make them available and the market clearly just isn’t there.

That is why it will not be a big company that solves the problem of making money in the digital era, it will be a small label or an individual artist or a small entrepreneurial enterprise or an artists’ collective. It may then be bought or hastily adopted by Sony, but will Sony solve the problem themselves? Absolutely, categorically no.

Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind (Original NYC Recording – see below)
The Detroit Cobras – Stupidity

And of the best songs ever, from one of my favourite albums of all time, and most appropriate as it happens:
Grandaddy – He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot

During the year I’ve been so desperately thrashing about, trying not to get behind with this blog, that I’ve never really had a worry about what to write about next, apart from choosing between the dozen or so things fluttering about in my head at the time.

I’ve never seriously suffered from writer’s block, and I’m not suffering from it now exactly, but I don’t actually have anything to write about today. Habits form quickly, and I have not blogged for almost two weeks over the Christmas period and am squarely out of the habit of writing. I suppose that during the year I was always thinking about posts, even if not writing them, and for the last few days I’ve not been thinking about posts at all. So here I sit at the computer to write one and there just isn’t one there.

Which, in a way, is refreshing. That’s what a holiday is for, and I have a bulging inbox of new things, some of which are presumably going to be at least half decent – including an email from someone in Pakistan which I am looking forward to – so there’ll be no shortage of new stuff coming up I shouldn’t think.

Also, there are new releases by The Magnetic Fields, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Mountain Goats, Cat Power and Honeytrap to look forward to over the first few months of 2008, so things are looking good. Honeytrap in particular is one I’m looking forward to. There’s also a new Destroyer record and an apparently folkier album by Goldfrapp on the horizon as well, which should be interesting. I love Alison Goldfrapp’s voice, but there’s only so much disco I am really up for, so this new project sounds interesting.

So we set sail for 2008 on the Good Ship Toad and all, it would appear, looks rather rosy. Here are some old American folk songs, which is an area I think I might just explore a little more in the year ahead, along with some contemporary versions of the same songs.

Carlton Rees – 99½ Won’t Do
The Detroit Cobras – 99½ Won’t Do
Doc Watson – John Henry
Bruce Springsteen – John Henry
Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger
Blanche – Wayfaring Stranger

Right, disclaimers first. Apparently Sasha Frere-Jones is a respected music critic, so presumably this implies that he is not this bone-headed all the time. Also, given I’ve only read one of his articles I am in no position to judge his general output, but his recent excretion ‘A Paler Shade of White‘ is just bloody thick. He manages to shoehorn needless racist divisiveness, outdated stereotyping and a truly impressive ignorance of indie music into one article which is about… yes, the racial compartmentalisation of popular music.

Generally when people write nonsense like this they defend their idiotic statements by describing it as a ‘thought piece – intended to provoke reflection and debate’. The problem I have with this is that it is possible to justify pretty much any cretinous rubbish on this basis, no matter how infantile, shallow, facile or ignorant. This is not a thought piece, it is lazy and intellectually vacant, and were it not for the fact it happens to be in the New Yorker it would merit no more than a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, perhaps accompanied by a murmur of ‘fuckwit’ or some such similar response. Read the rest of this entry »

I may be the only one out there who does, but I think that this is a terrible idea. According to The Scotsman, victims of crime are to be given the chance to make a statement in court prior to sentencing.

[Kenny MacAskill, the justice secretary] said that, for too long, victims had been treated as “baggage” by the system, but the statement would give them the chance to say how the crime had impacted on their lives, whether emotionally, physically or financially. In murder cases, the family of the victim would have the right to provide a statement.

In all instances, the statement would have to be taken into account by the sheriff or the judge, and it could result in a longer sentence.

Basically the criminal justice system only works because it does not do this. It is supposed to be dispassionate, objective and detached because this is the best way to ensure equal treatment for all – divorce the process from emotion and evaluate the facts. I know that emotional damage is one of the facts that must be evaluated, but sentences based more heavily on pity, anger or vengeance is the only thing this will achieve. There is a reason judges are experts in the law and not supposed to have any sort of interest in the outcome of a case – if you let people with direct involvement become too involved then they will just be looking to exact revenge which is absolutely, squarely not what criminal justice is about.

Criminal justice is about one thing: deterrence. In a social animal there are several ways to subvert the common social contract and perpetuate one’s genes by undesirable methods and the credible threat of punishment is the way in which we prevent it. So a criminal justice system must be forceful, objective as possible and not so severe that its mistakes destroy its validity to the social group it is there to police. Human beings are basically evolutionary animals and we have to understand the role of punishment and social rules in governing our instinctive behaviours.

MacAskill also said the following:

“We have to put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system”

No, Kenny, we don’t. In fact I suspect that is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. Does their victim status have to depend on the vagaries of the criminal justice system? Surely victim support should be an unconditional right of all victims of crime, irrespective of whether or not there is someone there to prosecute. Victims should be at the heart of the victim support system, criminals should be at the heart of the criminal justice system.

The courtroom is not the place for support group-style psychotherapy in the form of cathartic confessions. I understand that people may want this, I’m saying that they shouldn’t get it. This sort of emotional minefield needs to be dealt with by professionals somewhere else. The courtroom is for prosecuting criminals and the only thing that should matter should surely be what they did and whether or not it is legal, not how anyone feels about it. Otherwise we take another hugely unwelcome step towards a Jerry Springer style lynch mob justice system.

I may be completely wrong about this, so please do set me straight if you think so, but this whole idea seems deeply suspect to me.

Bob Dylan – Who Killed Davey Moore? (Live 1964)
The Detroit Cobras – Cry On
The Nips – Vengeance Shane MacGowan’s band before The Pogues.
The Doug Anthony All Stars – Oprah