News International (I do not need to tell you) is one of the most repellent organisations in the world, but this whole business might just end up working out to their advantage, in a twist of supremely Machiavellian achievement.

NI decided to close the News of the World a long time ago, as you can see from this Guardian article detailing the plans being set in place to deal with its disappearance, dating from weeks ago. The sunonsunday.com URL was registered before any of this even kicked off.

As much of a right wing, darkie-hating, shit stain of a wank rag that the NotW has always been, this might turn out to be a masterstroke by the Murdoch empire. They have been caught out in some of the most disgraceful acts of both illegality and moral offence in the history of the press, and they have managed to actually turn it to their advantage.

They close the NotW to show how serious they are about this sort of legal transgression, they reduce their market share of the UK press, and as a result they might just manage to persuade people that they are neither a monopoly concern, nor a dangerous blight on political discourse, and in doing so secure the kind of domination over the UK press and hence UK political debate which could turn us into the next United States – forever having to pander to the latest reactionary retard wheeled out on Fox News to agitate the bigots and the racists.

Because let’s face it, NI are not weakened by this event, they are consolidated. The Sun and the NotW basically catered to the same market: ignorant, unpleasant, narrow-minded racists. Closing one just strengthens the other, but if this PR stunt enables the BSkyB takeover to take place we will still be faced with one of the most conservative, racist, morally repellent organisations in the modern world owning a scarily large chunk of UK media.

Day-to-day journalists have all been fired (although given they work for the NotW in the first place I have no fucking sympathy), but the people who actually engineered and implemented all the craven, corrupt and utterly illegal actions we’ve learned about recently will all continue to work within Murdoch’s empire of sleaze.

In other words, what was potentially one of the greatest PR disasters in corporate history might just end up being turned into the kind of publicity stunt which turns the British media into a shameful mirror of the hatred, bigotry, and outright lies which is Fox News, by consolidating the power of a group of people who treat the world like their own fucking puppet show and care for nothing but insulating their own twisted version of reality to the point where a writer of dystopian science fiction simply couldn’t make this shit up.

Anyway, and breathe…

Here are your five questions for this week.

1. Your number one news media hate figure.
2. Compare someone in the news to a movie or cartoon villain.
3. Whose phone would you hack if you could?
4. Cameron and Murdoch is a predictable terrible twosome.  Pick a less predictable one.
5. What will your lunch be today?

This week’s five songs are from a tape called ‘Cheerful Choons, Innit’ which I found in the van recently.  I was living in Cambridge at the time, which was home to a surprising number of mockneys, hence the title.

Clem Snide – Ice Cube

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Lambchop – Up With People

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Eels – Jungle Telegraph

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The Pernice Brothers – Shaken

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Barry Adamson – Set the Controls for the Heart of the Pelvis (with Jarvis Cocker)

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I think it is fair to say that at the moment Eels really, really need editing.  I was reading a piece in Word Magazine this month about how, for all the label system and extremely narrow number of media outlets stifled the ability of a lot of good music to reach the ears of the public (that was very much not the emphasis of the writer, he seemed to have less appreciation of the strong negative aspects of this bottleneck), at least there was a very effective filter between the infinite number of bands in the world and the finite amount of time people chose to commit to music appreciation.

Nowadays, he argued, we have to be the editors ourselves.  Bands record and release anything and everything for no other reason than that they can, and we have to take personal responsibility for picking through it and separating the fragments of wheat from the avalanche of chaff.

Now, given the number of fine blogs and podcasts I myself enjoy I find his argument more than a little shaky, but there is a core of sense to his central point: when everything was more expensive and more complicated to do, people had to be damn sure they knew what they were doing before they went to all the effort of doing it.  This pressed artists to be sure that every note of their work was essential, and it pressed labels and producers to be damn certain that the work they released was as packed to the brim with quality as it possibly could be – it generated the creative conflicts without which it is actually very difficult to produce good art.

As the ‘head of a label’ (yes, that sounds as ridiculous to me as it does to you, but I don’t know the right term for ‘a bloke sat in his spare bedroom with a photocopier and an internet connection’) I never interfere with the artistic choices made by the artists I work with.  I’ve suggested changes to a piece of work no more than three times since I started doing this, twice that suggestion has been acted upon and once it was ignored – the right call on all three occasions, I think.

So I don’t really know how I would go about saying to a band ‘no, I don’t think that song needs to be on the album’ or ‘nah, I think it needs less instrumentation’ or anything like that.  I take the stance that I am not a musician and therefore my capacity to contribute is probably pretty marginal.

Now, imagine you are dealing with someone like Mark Oliver Everett – E, of Eels.  He has written a large number of my favourite songs of all time, and a good few of my favourite albums, and I am not alone there – it’s not like he has any need to prove anything to anyone anymore, and certainly not like he needs to justify his artistic choices to some jumped-up lackey at whatever record label he may chose to work with.

Nevertheless, his last three albums – Hombre Lobo, End Times and this one – were conceived, I believe, as a Triptych.  This is the Return of the Jedi of the three – the triumph over adversity.  The concept is lovely.  Quite a few of the songs are absolutely gorgeous.  But I have a nagging feeling that the whole business really could have been trimmed – and I mean brutally trimmed – and achieved a lot more impact.

There are a lot of songs on these three albums which we have very definitely heard before from Eels.  On this album alone Spectacular Girl and I Like the Way This is Going are the slightest reworkings of songs from Blinking Lights, and tracks like The Look You Give That Guy on End Times seems to be communicating something E has said so many times before that I really do wonder if it needed a whole new song for such an incremental change in sentiment.

I don’t know how you tell someone who has obviously achieved so much and shown time and again that he is one of the best songwriters of his generation that he really needs to be more unforgiving when it comes to deciding what does and does not merit a full commercial release.  These three albums could really easily have been whittled down to three EPs, maybe even all on one CD, and maybe a bonus CD of sketches – the songs which didn’t make the cut recorded in a simple acoustic session perhaps – and you would have had an album of highly concentrated Eels brilliance, along with some enigmatic sketches of songs to give you a glimpse into the thought process which goes into producing an album.

As it is, this feels like a glass of orange cordial which has been diluted with far, far too much water.  To return to the original point made by Word, perhaps if it still cost a shitload of money to record and release an album, some record executive would have forced this glut of material through a very strict funnel and turned it all into one album.

Whilst this would have been a great benefit to this record, I am not prepared to be so fickle as to wish for a return to the days when the making of music was so out of reach of all but the chosen few.  Where I do agree with Word, however, is that now we can record and release everything and there is no reason not to, we need to become just a little bit more savvy about what is an album release and what is a curious extra for the uber-fan.

Eels – That’s Not Her Way

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Eels – The Man

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

Firstly, the flurry of posts yesterday, from my rather tardy podcast to radio show post, meant that my brother’s Sunday Supplement – a rant about classical music – was buried rather too fast, so please do go back and check it out if you have a little time to waste this afternoon.

Secondly, the Edge Festival goes bloody nuts this week, and if I listed all the gigs then I’d be here all day, and there really is no need for that, so you can have it in paragraph form instead: on Monday 23rd we have Field Music at Sneaky Pete’s and Bear in Heaven at Electric Circus (late).  Tuesday sees The Phantom Band at the Electric Circus, Wednesday Eels at the Picturehouse and Thursday Mark Lanegan at the Liquid Room (who have finally got a website worthy of the name).  Friday is quiet, and then on the weekend we have Harlem at Sneaky Pete’s on Saturday and Modest Mouse at the Picturehouse on Sunday.  All these things you can Google yourselves if you are interested, and there is more info on the Edge site, here.

When it comes to more homegrown things, however, there is still plenty on this week, a good deal at the reassuringly active Bristo Hall – a really nice space which doesn’t get used as often as it might.

Monday 23rd August 2010: Pet, The Leg, The Pineapple Chunks, Sara & the Snakes at the Bristo Hall.

This might well be a late one (11pm-3am) so check it out before you go or you’ll be totally fucking wasted by the time the first band comes on.  I haven’t heard much from the Chunks for a while, as I believe they’ve been recording, so it would be rather cool if there were some new material here to be enjoyed.  There’s quite some distance covered from Sara & the Snakes’ swampy, bluesy garage stuff, the Chunks’ ramshackle whateverthefuckitistheyplay, and the Leg, who are so good they makes themselves sick down themselves (or so I hear anyway, because I have yet to see them live, for shame).

The Pineapple Chunks – Art Storage

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Tuesday 24th August 2010: White Heath, French Wives, Fiction Faction (Formerly Casino Brag,) Sebastian Dangerfield, Washington Irving, and Foxgang at the Bristo Hall.

This is a big lineup selected by Foxgang for their Festival Special.  Given the reluctance of local promoters to do anything at all during the festival (and I have every sympathy – I do the same) it is good to see these guys putting on their own showcase.  Highlights for me would be the indie-pop of Sebastian Dangerfield, and Glaswegian indie pair Washington Irving and French Wives, from Instinctive Raccoon.

Sebastian Dangerfield – The Flood (Pt.1)

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Saturday 28th August 2010: Broken Records and Sparrow & the Workshop at the Liquid Room.

These are two of the original Song, by Toad bands, in a certain sense.  Both now have labels and albums and careers, dammit, and it’s weird.  With debut albums fairly well in the rearview mirror I would imagine that there will be a fair amount of new material on show here, although I know Broken Records don’t want to ruin the surprise for when their second album comes out later in the year.  Their new stuff sounds a lot more layered and guitary and a lot less folky than their earliest material, and I am deeply curious about the new record.

Broken Records – A Leaving Song

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Saturday 28th/Sunday 29th August 2010: Retreat Festival at Pilrig St. Paul’s church.

A free download sampler featuring a large number of the bands playing can be downloaded from here, if you’d like a bit of a preview.  Other than that, take it from me, this is going to be the highlight of the Edinburgh gig calendar, no exceptions – full details here, and I reckon you should probably buy tickets in advance (weekend – Saturday – Sunday) too as I doubt there will be too many left on the door.

Contrary to what you might suspect from my location this week and the steady stream of silly videos from Anstruther , this podcast is not anything to do with the Fence Collective or Haarfest.

Actually, apart from a few brief intrusions from my pile of audio cassettes (a lot of time in the van, you see) this is generally just the usual stream of music news and new bits and pieces from my inbox.

Actually, I am way behind my inbox at the moment, due to a week of holiday and now a week in Anstruther, and things aren’t likely to get any better either, what with… oh never mind, you hear enough of my whining as it is.  Tunes…

Direct download: Toadcast #136 – The Haarcast

01. Eels – Jungle Telegraph (02.32)
02. Les Shelleys – The World is Waiting for the Sunrise (07.22)
03. Broken Records – A Leaving Song (13.41)
04. Women – Heat Distraction (19.56)
05. Let’s Talk About Trees – Wood of Rassay (23.50)
06. The Tragically Hip – Fireworks (31.57)
07. Grant Lee Buffalo – Testimony (35.48)
08. Inspector Tapehead – Grooming (44.48)
09. Nice Purse – Heart Medley (50.52)
10. Bombadil – Barcelona (54.55)

So, the Festival descendeth upon Edinburgh once more, and once more we are beset by London-based Home County Yahs braying their zany way through the city until finally someone snaps and sets fire to their stupid fucking stilts once and for all.

Actually, as I confess pretty sharpish, I am the classic Edinburgh Festival hypocrite, if I’m being honest with myself.  I love it as much as I loathe it and I enjoy moaning about it almost as much as I enjoy the Festival itself.

As a native you really do have to have the right attitude though.  If you come from outside just for the Festival then there’s little chance of you failing to take advantage of it, but if you live here the only way is to do it by extremes: either totally ignore it and stay as far away as you can, or just stop moaning, get stuck in, get pished and go to lots of shows.  I tend to prefer the latter option, but I’ll confess I don’t always do a good job of actually taking my own advice.

Direct download: Toadcast #134 – The Festicast

01. Thee Single Spy – OK Corral (02.53)
02. Lach – A Quiet Distance (11.50)
03. Bob Dylan – Man of Constant Sorrow (Live) (14.59)
04. Run On Sentence – Wide Open Sky (22.20)
05. Skeleton Bob – Findlove is a Housing Scheme (33.11)
06. Wounded Knee – Coffee Ballad (34.43)
07. The Delta Mirror – He Was Worse Than the Needle He Gave You (39.31)
08. Balkans – Georganne (45.50)
09. Modest Mouse – This Devil’s Workday (50.33)
10. Eels – I Put a Spell on You (58.36)

Tonight at 20:30 will see the return of my radio show to the airwaves of the student radio station in these parts; Fresh Air.  The station will be broadcasting through the Festival, and I myself have slots this evening, to kick things off, as well as Sunday 15th, 22nd and 29th (at the earlier time of 19:00-20:30) when Ruth will presumably be back.  The full schedule is (sort of) here.

We’re hoping to have live guests and stuff like that, and have Lach pencilled in for the 15th, to help publicise his Antihoot show, and have yet to line up anyone proper for the other two weekends yet.  We’ll hopefully get there though.

Anyhow, tonight Dylan will stand in for Ruth, and we will be previewing the Festival and talking pish about what music things are happening here throughout the month of August.

Listen Here – Live from 20:30BST

As ever, the tracklist will be updated live below and if you have any trouble with the feed you should be able to get rid of it by pausing and un-pausing the player.  Alternatively, you can find the station on iTunes as well, listed somewhere under college radio stations, I think.

1. Honeytrap – Little Johnny Winter
2. Mark Lanegan – Methamphetamine Blues
3. FOUND – Let Fidelity Break
4. Eels – Souljacker
5. Roky Erickson and Okkervil River – Goodbye Sweet Dreams
6. The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard
7. Arcade Fire – City With No Children
8. Inspector Tapehead – Yarvil
9. Yusuf Azak – Turn on the Long Wire
10. King Post Kitsch – Walking on Eggshells
11. Milk – Wilma, There’s Been a Fire!
12. Benni Hemm Hemm – Retaliate
13. Lach – I Want To Be With You

Night night!

Oooft.  It has been a heavy week, and oddly enough I am going to be taking the weekend as an opportunity not to drink, which is a bit backwards.  But then, that’s how these things go sometimes I guess.

The good thing about my current job, of course, is that I don’t have to be all that professional.  So instead of sitting at a desk trying to look like I’m being efficient this afternoon, I can put a movie on talk shite on the Friday Fives and fold Cold Seeds inserts.  It’s work, of course, and it does need to be done, but that doesn’t mean I have to make things hard on myself.

One nice thing about being in the house during the day is that we happen to live near just about the best butchers and the best fishmongers in the city.  So when I pop out for my lunch I can also pick up something extremely tasty for dinner as well.  I haven’t spent much time in the kitchen over the last couple of years, largely due to coming home and getting straight on the computer to do Toad things, so I have actually been quite enjoying getting back in touch with my inner housewife.

Anyhow, Fridays, as we all know, are de-lurking amnesties, where you the silent masses save me from the incessant chirping of my regular gobshites by answering five largely frivolous questions about nothing much in particular and then annoying your bosses by doing nothing at all for the rest of the afternoon except talk shite on the internet.

1. Weirdest foodstuff you have ever sampled.
2. Something you thought would taste horrid, but was lovely.
3. Something you thought you would enjoy, but was disgusting.
4. Tastiest food which is completely boring.
5. Hangover munchies of choice.

The Divine Comedy – A Seafood Song

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Grandaddy – Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food

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Adam Balbo – Convenient Dinner

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Donny Hue & the Colors – With the Onions (from their series of free e-singles)

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Eels – Hospital Food (Live at the BBC)

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I’ve been talking to Anthony from God Don’t Like It recently, and I think we both agree that longevity is the key to achieving anything in the music industry, particularly if you are a publication or a label or a promoter or a venue or anything like that – just make sure you stick at it for as long as possible.  For bands, maybe the flash in the pan model is a bit more feasible, but even then only if you play a particular kind of music.

Applied to mp3 blogs the same is true, particularly when you take their popularity boom into consideration.  Most music blogs started up about the time I moved to a Blogger account, in around 2006.  Around that time there was something of an explosion, with new ones popping into existence every few weeks, and consequently the older ones, dating back to 2003/4 and so on ended up with a kind of mythical status in the eyes of many writers (and readers) of these sites, because they blazed the trail that we all follow.

Muruch is a music blog written by a friend of mine, and it trumps all of these whippersnappers: it recently celebrated its tenth birthday!  There are a few reasons why this is an incredible achievement.  Firstly, the sheer slog of writing even a handful of posts a week for no tangible reward is a lot harder than most people think.  I pretty much go from internal monologue to blog post with barely a filter inbetween, which is why I get myself in hot water from time to time, but it is still the only way I can generate this amount of writing this regularly.  For Muruch to have managed ten years of consistent posting is a feat of endurance which I doubt many will be fully able to appreciate.

There is a little more to it than that, however.  Most mp3 blogs, this one included, play pretty fast and loose with the law.  Almost everything I post is sent to me by bands and PR people and therefore cleared for posting, but there are definitely times when I think ‘aw, fuck it’ and just fire something up on the assumption that a/ the band probably don’t mind and b/ if they do mind then they probably don’t care all that much and are unlikely to ever find out anyway.  This applies to a lot of music blogs, but not to Muruch.

Muruch, is entirely, 100% legal, which is one of the reasons they don’t feature all that many mp3s, a fact which hurts their audience somewhat when you consider the importance to blogs of things like the Hype Machine blog aggregator.  As well as this, when the music industry started wielding the ludicrous DMCA and making invalid, nuisance complaints against anyone and everyone, resulting in blogs being vandalised by their hosts or just shut down altogether, Muruch was one of the only ones to stand up and fight back.

Because everything they post is legal they were able to pursue a counter-claim all the way back to the source of the complaint, and by doing so highlighting just how little control bands actually have over their own music.  It was a brave and rather thankless task, but something which I think deserves an awful lot of respect.  So well done Vic, thanks for all the support for the record label, thanks for the last ten years, and good luck for the next ten!

George Davis – Sixteen Tons

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Eels – Sixteen Tons

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So, erm, yes, this podcast should really have happened on Sunday, but it was so unspeakably bakingly hot (alright, in all honesty it was only about 28 degrees, but it felt much fucking hotter, okay) that there was basically no fucking chance it was going to happen.

I’ve also been adjusting to not having a day job, which in its own way made this easier.  I’d write posts when I could during the day, but at the moment my only job is Song, by Toad so I have focussed entirely on the important jobs, not on the day to day business of posting on the site.

Also, this is late and it may be (early) Thursday, but there will still be a podcast on the weekend, but I thought this was an opportunity which should not be passed up.  It’s Glastonbury for fuck’s sake, and it really did need its own podcast pretty sharpish, even if just to wonder why on Earth Glastonbury needs its own podcast when there are so many better festivals out there!

Toadcast #128 – The Glastocast

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01. Radiohead – Idioteque (06.55)
02. Flaming Lips – God Walks Among Us Now (19.26)
03. Eels – Looking Up (24.06)
04. The Avett Brothers – Murder in the City (39.57)
05. The National – England (42.57)
06. The Books – A Cold Freezin’ Night (57.02)
07. Devendra Banhart – The Charles C Leary (70.57)
08. Broken Social Scene – 7/4 (shoreline) (73.34)
09. Wild Nothing – Your Rabbit Feet (81.06)
10. LCD Soundsystem – All Your Friends (96.59)

Instead of prattling on about whether or not early Bonnie Raitt was heavily influenced by the Arcade Fire, this week we shall be doing something extremely constructive with our time.  Thomas Western, shortly to be unveiled as half of Edinburgh’s answer to the Silver Columns (I’ve not heard it yet, but all I have to say is woo hoo!), is actually a highly studious gentleman (see pic) in his spare time and has asked if I wouldn’t mind posting five questions to help him with his research.  Quite what he thinks the nonsensical bollocks we talk here on a Friday is going to do for his academic ambitions I don’t know, but I thought we might as well humour him.

He’s actually studying something to with the sociological aspects of live music, which anyone who has ever seen the queue outside a Hadouken gig (yes okay, it was some time ago, but it was still hilarious) will know is a rather interesting topic. I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the social dynamics of gig-going, from the tribal self-identification to the impact of the crowd mood on the show itself, so I’m looking forward to finding out a bit more about this.

Until then, however, here are five questions for you from Thomas.  And once you’ve de-lurked to help push forward the boundaries of academia, feel free to talk utter shite with the rest of us all afternoon.

1. What is the best thing you’ve ever seen live? Including where and when this took place.
2. Why was it so good? Try and keep this answer as open as possible – it can cover factors such as the music being played, the performance, some kind of cultural significance, or just people having an ace time together.
3. Is familiarity with material a prerequisite for a great gig? Or has anyone been to a gig to see the headline act, only to be blown away by an unknown support band?
4. How important is a venue when we go to gigs? Do they have their own aura that can contribute to our enjoyment of a performance?
5. And do people go to gigs because folks like me tell them to? This is about the idea of blogs and online critics as cultural tastemakers – Pitchfork being the most obvious example. In other words, when you read a positive preview of something in my Monday listings, are you more likely to attend, and perhaps more likely to enjoy the gig as a conequence?

Now, some great live recordings, including a song from Nick Cave’s Live Seeds, possibly the greatest live album of all time.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – John Finn’s Wife (Live)

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Eels – I Put a Spell On You (Live)

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Radiohead – No Surprises (Live Acoustic)

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Frightened Rabbit – Poke (Live)

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Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band – Thunder Road (Live)

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