Song, by Toad

Well the truly mental Edinburgh August schedule is nearly past and I have to confess that, for the purpose of writing this post anyway, that is something of a relief.  This week I am involved in a couple of things – firstly, Thursday’s Born to be Wide in the Speakeasy at Cabaret Voltaire, Olaf Furniss’s regular night of chat and help and networking and stuff like that.  This week I have been asked to put together a playlist of unsigned Edinburgh bands for the Wheel of Fortune.  There’s something of a grey area in that signed/unsigned stuff, so I might cheat slightly and take the opportunity to plug Song, by Toad bands, which is highly dishonourable.  But then, I am a highly dishonourable man, so what do you expect.

Secondly, I have put together a lineup for Sneaky Pete’s Edge Festival stuff, including brand new Fife indie characters Ambulances, whose debut album I am really enjoying, as well as Art Fag, and the excellent Enfant Bastard.  It’s  a bit more of a loud and scruffy lineup to those you might be used to, but we all need to quit being so fucking delicate from time to time.  I may also do a spot of DJing, but hopefully the true masters will take over before anything too serious needs to be accomplished.  Any volunteers to help out?

[EDIT: Whoops, like a fuckwit I forgot the excellent Shipping Forecast Garden Party.  It's between 1 and 7pm at the Peartree (ie perfect for pre Toad Night bevvying) and you will be entertained by the splendid Woodenbox, Zoey Van Goey, The Stormy Seas and Come in Tokyo, amongst others.  Sorry for missing this one, lads.]

Wednesday 26th August 2009: Dinosaur Pile-Up & The Curators at Sneaky Pete’s.

I don’t know too much about Dinosaur Pile-Up, but I quite like some of the stuff I’ve heard.  It’s quite NME-friendly indie rock, but I remember rather liking a good few of their earliest tunes, although I’ll admit I’ve somewhat taken my eye off them since.

Dinosaur Pile-Up – Love is a Boat and We’re Sinking

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Thursday 27 August 2009: Malcolm Middleton & The Red Well at Cabaret Voltaire.

Do I need to tell you anything about Malcolm Middleton?  I shouldn’t, really, should I.

Malcolm Middleton – Fuck it, I Love You

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Friday 28th August 2009:  Frank Turner & Sam Beer at Cabaret Voltaire.

Frank Turner’s early solo stuff put me quite strongly in mind of Billy Bragg.  I really liked it, but I have to confess I haven’t seen him for a while now, so all I can tell you is that his newer stuff appears to embracing a more rounded, full rock ‘n’ roll sound.

Frank Turner – The Real Damage

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Saturday 29th August 2009: Penny Black Remedy, The Red Well, The Stormy Seas, Fanattica & All at Sea at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

The Stormy Seas and Fanattica I know and can recommend.  The others sound quite promising too, and Henry’s is bound to be a bargain, unlike some of the shinier venues in the city.  Should be a good night, this one.

The Stormy Seas – Blood on the Carpet

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Sunday 30th August 2009: Song, by Toad Night at Sneaky Pete’s, with Enfant Bastard, Ambulances & Art Fag.

You never really know what you’re going to get with Enfant Bastard, but I will say that I have never seen it be bad, and when he’s good he’s fucking amazing.  Art Fag, whose side project Meursault are doing quite well too, will support, as will the very-promising-indeed Ambulances.

Ambulances – What I Thought Of

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Hello, more Toadcastery. I’ve, erm, focussed on Dadrock for this one. Not too much of it on the playlist, fortunately, although there’s a couple of well-known names on there. In my defence though, I couldn’t bring myself to feature Coldplay, so I was forced into the compromise of playing an almighty butchering of one of their songs by the splendid Richard Cheese.

Basically I spend most of this podcast trying to justify the presence of so much bland music in the charts and how the hell that came to pass. There’s plenty of chatter about how music is used as a sort of social glue as well, in which case the quality of the stuff becomes almost secondary. There are some really good new bands on this as well – The Velcro Quartet are particularly brilliant, as are the songs by Mumford & Son, Yoshimi! and Honeytrap. Enjoy responsibly.

Toadcast #32 – The Tribecast

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01. Hercules & Love Affair – Hercules Theme (01.32)
02. The Velcro Quartet – Dead Dog’s Hill Replaced with Johnny Cashback, at the band’s request. (07.53)
03. Seabear – Teenage Kicks (11.17)
04. Athlete – Shake Those Windows (21.02)
05. Richard Cheese – Yellow (30.31)
06. ESL – Czarne Oczy (31.59)
07. Emiliana Torrini – Me & Armeni (39.50)
08. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal (43.24)
09. Snow Patrol – Last Ever Lone Gunman (48.11)
10. The Killers – All These Things That I’ve Done (58.17)
11. The Pictish Trail – All I Own (66.52)
12. Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page (73.01)
13. Honeytrap – Song For Nona (82.17)
14. The Velcro Quartet – How to Kill Your Wife (87.04)
15. Yoshimi! – Song For Suzy (Demo) (94.34)
16. Frank Turner – The Outdoor Type (100.34)

In preparation for applying for a slot on Edinburgh’s student radio station Fresh Air, I thought I would challenge myself to get through an entire podcast without actually swearing because, on public access radio, you can’t use naughty words. A Toad without swearing, you say, what the fuck has the world come to?

Well to make sure I don’t disappoint you in your noble quest for dissolute anti-culture I thought I’d compensate by playing a collection of the filthiest and most sweary songs I could lay my hands on. Thinking about it, I’ve managed to forget Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s truly foul ‘Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus’, but there you go. I could have improved just about every playlist I’ve ever done in retrospect, I think, so at some point I have to draw the line.

So, I use bad words when I quote other people and when I give you the names of the songs but I don’t think I let a single naughty word slip during my own chat on this one, but let me know if you catch me out.

Toadcast #23 – The Filthcast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Cunt (01.09)
02. The Pogues – Boys From the County Hell (05.24)
03. Adam Balbo -Let’s Make a Porno (10.03)
04. Celebrity Chimp – Pornstar (13.06)
05. The Tacticians – Hardcore Porn (15.37)
06. Billy Bragg – St. Swithin’s Day (21.05)
07. Grinderman – No Pussy Blues (26.05)
08. The Libertines – I Get Along (33.10)
09. Carbon/Silicon – What the Fuck (35.47)
10. Frank Turner – Heartless Bastard Motherfucker (42.03)
11. Les Enfant Bastard – U R My Fucking Sunshine U Cunt (44.52)
12. Plans & Apologies – Tony Blair Fucknut (49.50)
13. The Libertines – What a Waster (57.00)
14. Lambchop – Your Fucking Sunny Day (60.49)
15. The Ex-Men – Suck Her (67.35)
16. Micah P. Hinson – Patience (73.04)
17. Eels – It’s a Motherfucker (76.59)
18. Doug Anthony Allstars – I Fuck Dogs (80.07)

Steve from Festive Fifty kicked this off, but god knows how. I assume he doesn’t read the UK’s broadest toilet paper The Daily Telegraph, but he spotted their scathing article about John Peel nonetheless.  I am not linking to The Telegraph because this sort of nonsense is just that – link bait – but the text in its entirety is on Steve’s site if you want to read it.

I don’t intend to spend this post criticising The Daily Telegraph, which is basically The Daily Mail for people who know a few long words. Nor do I have any need to defend John Peel from people who think he was a bandwagon jumper because quite frankly making such baldly ignorant statements really just makes you look a tit and does pretty much nothing to the legacy of the Big Man, so snipe away, pygmy, no-one gives a shit. If you want to read a passionate and erudite defence of Mr. Peel, then read Ed.

The one thing that struck me, however, whilst reading Michael Henderson’s dismal article was how revealing it was of him personally. He represents the sort of utterly depressing human being whose presence on the planet sucks all life out of the human race. I’ve hated pricks like him all my life, it’s only now that I am sufficiently his equal in basic societal measures that I feel unchallengeable in saying that no, I am here, I have attained all you fetishise in life and no, you are still a spineless weasel. I am not jealous, you, mate, are a cunt.

The first and most petty of Henderson’s, erm, well, arguments I guess he’d like you to call them, is his paragraph-long forgiveness of grammatical errors in John Peel’s epitaph. It’s a quotation of course, so the grammatical errors should really be taken up with the writers of the song and thus have nothing to do with Peel. But they suffice to establish both an imagined moral high ground and a condescending generosity on the basis of someone else’s errors. Well done Michael.

Apart from picking on one of Peel’s most ill-considered quotes – “I wish I had the courage to be a terrorist”, which is not as bereft of merit as Henderson thinks: do you believe in anything that much? And if not, why not? – his main beef with Peel is that the man “never really grew up”.

And this is why I hate this article and hold its author in utter contempt. If you want to know why, then try this awful quote on for size:

Self-deception is exactly what is wrong with that memorial. Its banal sentiment is not child-like, merely childish. Pop music speaks to teenagers because, green in judgment, they lack the emotional resources to respond to anything deeper. With helpful instruction, and a bit of curiosity, that should come with age, though in this case it didn’t.

Pop music speaks to people, in much the same way that classical art forms do, because it has a fucking good tune. For those intent on creating something more meaningful out of it, then it can also appeal to the innate snobbery of the listener, which is helpful. The pathetic illusion that classical art forms are in any way superior to or more sophisticated than popular ones is just the same kind of infantile snobbery that indie-kids employ to persuade themselves that no-one but them really gets it. Art forms are different and require different parts of our brain to interact with them. Joseph Conrad may have been a technically brilliant writer, but fuck me his books are dull to read. Are you saying that his intellectual pretensions are innately superior to George MacDonald Fraser’s jarring Flash For Freedom? If so, then I think you are looking for the veneer of smug superiority above actual intellectual or artistic merit.

If ever there was a sound reason to entirely dismiss the attention-starved ramblings of this clown it is here:

People in their fifties and even sixties are seen on our streets every day behaving like teenagers. In their eating and drinking habits, clothing, language, and leisure pursuits, they can be hard to distinguish from people young enough to be their grandchildren. No wonder those youngsters fail to grow up.Funeral directors across the land have spoken with sadness in recent years of the lack of respect shown to the dead. The passing of loved ones used to release feelings of love, loss and reflection. Now they are just excuses to have a bit of a larf.

If this poor fellow had ever read any books he would know that lamenting the digressions of today’s wayward youth has been a favourite past-time of the unimaginative since god was a boy. The world, believe me, has always been going to hell in a hand-basket. And Peel was also a football fan, don’t you know, and they’re all thugs and sheep. Ooh, Betty!

I’ve had this quarrel with people who claim age as a virtue since I was about four years old, and I haven’t changed since then. I am better at certain things, and worse at others, but I am no cleverer nor any better a person. The article implies that you actually become more intelligent as you get older which is simply factually incorrect. Any teenager with a brain knows that real life forces you to compromise on your ambitions and your ideals. Teenagers are not stupid, they just know less and that isn’t always a bad thing. If your teenage dreams were so divorced from reality that you have had to abandon them in order to accommodate the real world, Mr. Henderson, then it implies that you weren’t a very bright teenager. And if you can’t see how someone who looks at the world with different fundamental premises than yours might come to different conclusions as to how to inhabit it, then I can only conclude that you aren’t a very bright adult either.

I have made some compromises due to the practical facts of life, but I have no illusions that I was forced to make them. You can always be an iconoclast if you choose, Henderson, but have the courage to acknowledge your compromises for what they are. I accept the discipline of a 9-5 job not because the world is more complicated than I realised, but because I have looked at the options and decided that the restrictions on my personal freedom are worth the sacrifice, and I make no apology to my teenage self for this decision.

What Michael Henderson manages to come across as, and I would be amazed if this weren’t accurate, is morally vacant with no courage, no principles and no integrity. We have all made the same compromises as you, Michael, but we do not try and pretend our cynical self-interest makes us better people. And we treat that as cause to admire the idealism of our youth, not denigrate it. For who has the greater courage, you spineless turkey, the man who knows no better and yet believes in idealistic principles, the man who surrenders his idealism at the first sign of conflict with his own self-interest, or the man who accepts that his ideals may never be achievable, may be at odds with the world, and yet strives to live up to them nonetheless?

And yes, there is a right and a wrong answer to that question. People like you, Michael Henderson, make the world a significantly worse place simply by lumbering about in it in your own snivelling, cowardly little weaselly way. As I get older the more I realise there is less and less excuse for giving in to the multi-nuanced ‘real world’. That is basically just a limp excuse for abandoning moral responsibility, and I would far rather deal with a futile idealist than a successful cynic.

Teenage dreams are hard to beat precisely because they are naive, but that is a good thing and any attempt to paint them as infantile, rather than occasionally just wrong, is almost invariably the work of someone sniffing about for any justification for his own selfish moral capitulation. They take their fat corporate salaries and pretend that they actually earn them, but that voice in the back of their heads never quite gives up whispering to them that they might just have turned into a dull, insecure, spiritless little lickspittle. People like this just depress me. What the fuck purpose is there for this sort of depressing individual, with his cowardly outlook and childish obfuscation? If you have no moral courage, Henderson, and you’ve surrendered your ideals to pamper your vanity then just fucking admit it you spineless bimbo.

It’s nearly lunchtime and christ I need my pint!

Billy Bragg – From Red to Blue
Tom Waits – I Don’t Wanna Grow Up
Frank Turner – Once We Were Anarchists

Yes, another one. Mwah hah haaa. Lock up the kids, Campfires & Battlefields, because the Song, by Toad musical cuss-o-rama is back on air for more blethering, swearing, slurring and first class tunery.

Actually, I don’t think this one is anything like as good as the first, if I’m honest. It’s a bit over-long at fifteen songs so I think in future I’m going to limit myself to ten or twelve at the most, not least because my shitbox of a computer starts having a panic once I’ve stuffed that many audio files into a single project. So, fifteen songs then, with a bit of an emphasis on late 80s jangly indie guitar and containing one of the most brilliant ever drunken fuck-ups about three-quarters of the way through. Beware the horrors of letting your children turn into indie kids, people! So a bit too long, and occasionally too much inconsequential chatter, but we live and learn and the next one will be better, I promise.

Toadcast #2, the 80s English Indie One

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1. My Teenage Stride – Terror Bends (01.00)
2. Honeytrap – Let’s Do Naked Dancing (03.37)
3. The Mutton Birds – The Queen’s English (09.38)
4. The Veils – The Wild Son (17.38)
5. The 63 Crayons – Devils (21.40)
6. The Smiths – I Started Something (26.05)
7. Honeytrap – Death Before the Silver Screen (31.03)
8. Lloyd Cole & the Commotions – Morning is Broken (36.14)
9. The Indelicates – New Art For the People (41.57)
10. The Indelicates – Stars (45.51)
11. MJ Hibbett & the Validators – The Lesson of The Smiths (50.32)
12. The Specials – Guns of Navarone (55.02)
13. Echo & the Bunnymen – The Killing Moon (57.20)
14. Honeytrap – Mussolini’s Son (66.06)
15. Frank Turner – Heartless Bastard Motherfucker (73.25)

My short companion and myself are in London for the weekend, so there will be a paucity of posting until perhaps Sunday evening or some time on Monday.

I understand how devastating this will be for you all, but such is life. I can’t spend all my time keeping you muppets entertained you know. Bugger off and do something a little more wholesome like surf internet porn or get drunk and shag someone you shouldn’t.  Face it, I’m nothing like as diligent as a certain Villain we all know and love.

I’ll be going to see Andrew Bird at the Scala while I’m down, so there’ll be a review of that one to look forward to in the near future. Having read how much the lovely Marcy enjoyed it, I am positively twitchy with anticipation for this one.

I miss my old London pals actually. I lived there for about three years and loved the place. People in Edinburgh have this sort of insecure reflex whereby they have to instantly assert London’s inferiority, long and loud, as soon as you mention not having hated the place. I think this comes from the fact that quite a few folk from here move down to London at some point (both places have huge financial industries, for example), miss the more laid back pace of life and move back up quite quickly. Generally, they seem nervous that this is seen as some kind of cop out and that people will think less of them for it, particularly someone who loves London, like myself. It’s weird though. Try saying you love London around Edinburgh people, they really don’t like it.

I don’t personally care, myself. I like both cities, they are in no way comparable and I am quite happy to like both for different reasons. So, a few days meeting up with old pals, and I’ll be back with you all early next week. And by way of apology, lots and lots of songs with this one.

Calexico – Guns of Brixton
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Grief Came Riding[
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Blackfriars Bridge
The Pogues – The Dark Streets of London
Cinerama – London
Saint Etienne – London Belongs to Me
Frank Turner – The Ladies of London Town

Sometimes I just love gigs; there are so many ways for them to be good. This was a classic example of the kind of gig where it is all about the performer, and the person, and how you relate to him. Turner is confident, charming and very, very funny on stage with the kind of sense of humour that is everywhere at once, although at times a tad too caustic for one or two of the audience members. Personally I appreciated this, as it is comforting to see someone else say something they think is funny, and have the room collectively take a sharp intake of breath, for a change instead of it always being me.

Apart from putting some genuine welly into his songs, his lively chat was the real highlight of this gig, but musically it was great as well. You can tell Turner comes from a punk rock background because, despite the dominance of the acoustic in his songwriting, he really gives the music a good seeing-to. It’s odd though – he’s younger than my little brother, but his songs sound kind of old-fashioned somehow. There is definitely something of the real grass-roots acoustic protest hero of the 80s about him. I reckon 90% of you will think he’s dreadful, but the rest will love him, but I can’t imagine much indifference somehow. Although there were a sizeable number of cool young things listening to this anachronistic-sounding acoustic punk-folk soap-box botherer who reminds me of Billy Bragg more than anyone, which really struck me as odd. Skinny jeans and brightly coloured, stripey tops? Ah well, they’re closer to his age than I am, if I’m honest.

What I like about Turner’s music is that at least half a dozen songs from his album, Sleep is For the Week, make me want to devote an entire essay to them by themselves. I won’t though, so don’t look so scared, I’ll just pop up a couple of tracks and urge you to give him a listen. The Real Damage is going to be released as the title track of a new EP in a few weeks. It’ll have four new songs on it, so keep an eye out for that one.

Frank Turner – The Real Damage
Frank Turner – Once We Were Anarchists

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