Song, by Toad

It’s that time of the week once again.  At 6.30pm, British Summer Time, myself and Dylan from Blueback Hotrod will be live on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station.  There will be no theme, no coherence and no real attempt to do anything more dynamic than just chatter about music, so please do tune in and listen to us blether.

Rather than emailing or (grrr) tweeting, I thought I might just leave this as an open thread for those who want to contribute, and I’ll add the playlist live as we go along.

Click the big ‘Listen Live’ button on this page to tune in, between 6.30pm and 8pm tonight.

01. The Bluetones – Glad to See You Back Again
02. James – Sound
03. Emily Scott – Pageant Queen
04. Frightened Rabbit – Old Old Fashioned (Live)
05. Kid Canaveral – Teenage Fanclub Song
06. Popup – Lucy, What are You Trying to Say?
07. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End
08. Gene – Dolce & Gabanna or Nowt
09. Meursault – Hard On (Charles Latham Cover)
10. Charles Latham – Nite Man
11. Withered Hand – Religious Songs
12. Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There
13. White Antelope – Silver Dagger
14. Cancel the Astronauts – I am the President of Your Fanclub and Last Night I Followed You Home

Cheers, see you next week at the same time.

Remember the giddy days when this blog used to be about music, rather than futile attempts to influence political machinations incomprehensibly bigger than ourselves? It was only a week ago, but it feels like fucking ages.

I don’t have a lot of new music to post at the moment, so I thought I’d mention this interesting little snippet. Last night on my Fresh Air show I played a couple of (relatively) obscure songs, along with the popular songs which they had inspired. Which, In fact, they Inspired so very much that writing credits were given to the writers of the first song, so heavily was it borrowed from.

The first one was pretty obvious: Creep by Radiohead borrows so heavily from The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies that they were credited on the album cover to Pablo Honey, and apparently everyone but me knew this until quite recently.

The second one, however, was a little more obscure. I bought R.E.M.’s Up back when it was released, in about 1998. I loved it then, and I still do; in fact I think it might be just about their most under-rated album. They had lost drummer Bill Berry and instead of trying to paper over the cracks, they seem to have decided to turn a potential failing into a virtue. The album is shot through with synths and drum machines, successfullly embracing the fact that it is largely drumless instead of just fudging through and hoping no-one would notice Bill was gone.

About halfway through this record is a song called Hope, which I think is brilliant, but when the sharp-eared (not in a Star Trek sense) young lady I was seeing at the time made some throwaway comment about it being pretty much a Leonard Cohen cover, I was completely baffled. I just couldn’t hear any Leonard Cohen in there, so we went back through his album and eventually tracked down Suzanne. It’s such a classic I am more than a little surprised I couldn’t hear the similarities to begin with, but you know what, I still can’t. If I hear them one after another then it’s pretty obvious, but if I try and just listen to hope in isolation I genuinely can’t make the leap in my head, even though I know it’s there.

R.E.M. actually credited Cohen for his influence on the song in their inlay card. I love both, frankly, and the French version of Suzanne by Francoise Hardy is also gorgeous. Enjoy.

Leonard Cohen – Suzanne
R.E.M. – Hope
Francoise Hardy – Suzanne

The wench is away and I am here by myself, managing the last few days of our house project. You can imagine what fun that must be, I’m sure.  Still, we move back in this weekend, so it may be a crap couple of days but it’ll all be over soon and then you’ll be relieved of me constantly whinging about it, which will be nice for you.

Given we’re living in a basement flat on a short term let for a month I got quite into the basementy idea with this playlist. I digressed into The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, but mostly it’s music from ‘95/6 when I was living in a damp, grotty basement flat in Glasgow with a mate and the girl I was seeing at the time.

I bought stacks of CD singles back then and lost them all when someone broke into the flat.  Thanks to the joys of the internet I’ve been able to track most of them down recently, so you get a few of those, as well as some of the stuff I was listening to at the time.

It’s interesting as a historical document, to me anyway, but I am not sure how well the playlist itself works.  There’s something about this podcast that I’m not sure I like as much as the others, even though I like all the songs on it.  I don’t know, let me know what you think.  Perhaps Tears of Rage, Oasis and the Cranberries aren’t good enough songs to have all on the same podcast.

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

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01. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End (03.33)
02. Oasis – Rocking Chair (10.54)
03. Bob Dylan & the Band – Tears of Rage (17.59)
04. Bob Dylan – Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Live) (25.54)
05. The Band – Rockin’ Chair (29.17)
06. Lloyd Cole – Unhappy Song (37.59)
07. Hootie & the Blowfish – Sad Caper (48.40)
08. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Shallow Grave (54.03)
09. Tom Waits – November (55.55)
10. Barenaked Ladies – The Old Apartment (63.26)
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (68.33)
12. The Bluetones – Colorado Beetle (71.08)
13. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (79.35)
14. The Cranberries – Joe (87.07)
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Ballad of Robert Moore & Betty Coltrane (96.13)

Marcy from the rather wonderful Lost in Your Inbox has inspired me to write a post I’ve been intending to scribble out for a wee while now; one about an exotic visitor I used to have, and hope I still do. Back when this site was on Blogger I used to have an almost daily visit from someone in French Polynesia. Now that Song, by Toad has moved to Wordpress I don’t get anything like the quality of stats I used to, so I have no idea if my Polynesian friend is still a regular visitor here. If you are: hello there, delighted to have you with us, and do say hi in the comments section.

Anyhow, as Mrs. Toad observed, this is a small example of one of my favourite things about the information age. Only very recently, it would have been unimaginable for someone living on an island that is part of a remote Pacific archipelago to maintain any sort of an active, everyday interest in obscure indie music, but now it is not just possible, but really rather easy. I sort of like that. Why someone living in a tropical island paradise would want to waste part of his day reading my dithering cynicism is rather beyond me, but it’s a nice thought.

So in honour of my visitor from French Polynesia I am going to post some French songs. Or some with bits of French in them. The poor bastard may be utterly sick of the sound of the French language by now, so this might be irritating as hell, but it seemed sort of appropriate.

Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End One of the best b-sides of all time by anyone, ever.
The Wedding Present – Pourquoi Est-tu Devenue Si Raisonnable? Splendidly shit French accent from Mr. Gedge.
Francoiz Breut – Si Tu Disais Excellent, sultry French girl indie.
Calexico – Si Tu Disais An English version of the same song. Brilliant.
Calexico – The Ballad of Cable Hogue
Marianne Dissard – Merci de Rien du Tout Marianne’s lovely voice sang the French part in The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Her solo stuff is truly lovely stuff.