So erm, does not having a traditional working week mean Friday is a bit less Friday-y now?  Kinda, I guess.  I have been deprived of my much-cherished King’s Wark lunches by the fact that I am on the other side of town now (well, not quite, but far enough away to make it impractical) and nowadays if I have two pints at lunch and then skive away the afternoon I am basically just ripping myself off.  Which rather makes it less fun, I have to confess.

Mind you, it’s sunny as arse out there, so the sooner I get my jobs done and can nip out into Inverleith Park to play some basketball the better.  I played for the first time since 1998 this week and, erm, well it really wasn’t pretty.  I actually used to be okay at this game, believe it or not.  By which I mean that I could at least shoot the fucking ball without having to fetch it from the adjacent field every two or three shots, which seems to be happening with disturbing regularity at the moment.

It’s a bit of a shame how you can lose skills, actually.  I used to be pretty much fluent in German.  I worked a telesales job in Austria over one Summer, all in German, and although I was shit at the job that was more to do with the fact that I despise telemarketing rather than any kind of language difficulty.  Embarrassingly enough, though, these days I could barely tell an old lady to fuck off in German.  And you’d be surprised how often you need to do that if you ever want to ride on public transport in Vienna…

*Cough*

Anyhewwwww… yes, it’s Friday, which means pish-talking and a big fat de-lurking amnesty, so come out of the woodwork and give us five silly answers to five banal questions and then while away the afternoon leaving silly comments and smart remarks.

1. What were you good at once, but would bungle horribly if you tried now?
2. What is your most obscure skill?
3. Name a talent you have seen someone display where your only thought was ‘how on earth could they be bothered actually putting in the time needed to be that good at something so utterly pointless’?
4. What do you wish you were good at?
5. Tell us about a public transport etiquette nitpick which winds you up.

Ugly Casanova – Hotcha Girls

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Kid Loco – Cocaine Diana

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Jason Ringenberg & Steve Earle – Bible and a Gun

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The Flatlanders – Going Away

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Pulp – Down By the River

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Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years.  That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident.  Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).

At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all.  Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.

I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point.  Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.

I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent.  I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.

So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website.  Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever.  Pick your madness.

1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*.  Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head

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Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes

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The Flatlanders – Going Away

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Supergrass – Moving

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*

Uncut Magazine and I had a pretty amazing relationship between the turn of the millennium and about 2004 or 2005.  Basically, I would buy it every month and turn straight to the reviews section and the cover mount CD of what they considered to be the best of new music released that month, and devour both simultaneously, taking notes about what I wanted to spend that month’s meagre wages on.

Those cover mount CDs were amazing, at the time, and almost invariably related to that month’s new releases, but in the last few years they have become way, way more concepty, and I have started to enjoy them less and less.  For some reason, Uncut’s relationship with contemporary music seems to have come adrift even faster than my own, even as I approach my mid-thirties.

Even if I am exaggerating that particular claim – maybe blogging is keeping my tastes young(ish), you never know – it seems a shame that I have drifted away from what was one of my major sources of new music for years, so this podcast is something of a retrospective  and also a salute to all the stuff I picked up from Uncut and in particular their amazing cover mount CDs over the years.

Toadcast #78 – The Uncast

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01. The Magnetic Fields – I Don’t Want to Get Over You (03.36)
02. Ismael Lo & Marianne Faithful – Without Blame (10.01)
03. Gemma Hayes – Over & Over (14.19)
04. Elliot Smith – Memory Lane (19.01)
05. The Woodentops – Well Well Well (26.59)
06. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (31.07)
07. Heather Nova – I’m On Fire (39.55)
08. Roddy Frame – I Can’t Start Now (46.36)
09. The Flatlanders – Going Away (50.10)
10. The Acorn – Crooked Legs (59.37)

…through the medium of popular song!

It wasn’t intentional, but as my relationship with an ex-girlfriend was coming to a rather long drawn-out and bitter end there were a couple of songs, all from Uncut compilations, that just kept popping up on the stereo. She took them as a message and, as much as it wasn’t intended to be one, I felt no need to disabuse her of this impression. You know when you’re just done with someone and they irritate you, you irritate yourself for not just getting rid, and then she irritates you more for tolerating you despite the fact you’ve clearly turned into a complete dickhead? Well, you get the picture. You know you’re being a dick when you actually blame someone else for letting you act like an arsehole, but I suppose most of us have done it at some stage.

It was a bit like letting an animal die from exhaustion rather than just putting a bullet through its head and being done with it.

Roddy Frame – I Can’t Start Now
The Replacements – Unsatisfied
The Flatlanders – Going Away