I am at an industry-fest and there is a lot to be gained from these things, but sometimes the avalanche of new people to interact with kinda gets me down.  When I started writing this blog absolutely not one single fucker ever read the thing.  In fact, I wrote about music for about two and a half years on my own website which had precisely no readers at all, because I can lay a website out adequately, but search engine optimisation eludes me completely.

I started writing on the pretense that my little brother, who lives in Boston, could now read about the music I was listening to without waiting for me to send him a little packet of compilation CDs twice a year.  This was something of a fig leaf, however, and one which I did at least acknowledge to myself deep down, ineffectively trying to protect my modesty from the rather geekier truth.

I wrote album reviews on my old website for over two years with not one single reader.  Looking at how things are now, where an album review going uncommented for a few hours makes me just a little jumpy, I find that kind of amazing.  No comments (I didn’t know how to do that), no readers, no actual reward of any sort beyond clattering out reviews of albums no longer than about ten sentences long for no other reason than that I enjoyed writing.  I still enjoy writing.  This blog is a tad focussed at the moment, but I promise you I could witter on for hours about more or less any subject you could mention and just enjoy the process of turning buzzing thoughts into paragraphs.

Musicians get this too – so much work that they have to remind themselves what the fuck they’re doing this for.  For me this moment is right about now.  Schmooze, schmooze, schmooze… ack, fuck off somewhere quiet and sit down and have a pint and wash the constant fucking name-dropping one-upmanship out of your fucking hair with a few dozen gins.

The first time anyone started reading Song, by Toad was a while after I moved over to a Blogspot account, which was some time in 2006, and was when one or two of my favourite bloggers started talking about the site and telling their readers that they should pop over and have a read.  That was a weird thrill – that first incoming link.  I’m not even sure who it was from, but first real comment, first proper link, you remember these things.

1. What do you grit your teeth and get through during your working day?
2. And how do you wind down from it?
3. When did someone last acknowledge something you were doing out of the blue and make you happy.
4. Who is the recipient of your most often suppressed “FUCK OFF!”
5. What do you do for the sheer pointless satisfaction of it?

Peter Gabriel – Biko (12″ Version) From Jim at the Vinyl Villain.

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Thomas Mapfumo – Mwoyo Wangu From Davy at the Ghost of Electricity.

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Beulah – Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand From Marcy at Lost in Your Inbox.

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Pavement – Frontwards (Live) From Tim at The Daily Growl.

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Richard Thompson – 1952 Vincent Black Lightning From Ed at 17 Seconds.

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I got an email today from Cogstar, one of our readers. He didn’t want anything really, just to congratulate the Meursault lads on getting that slot at Glastonbury, and to ask if I’d be there so we could have a pint. And fuck me I was relieved to be talking to an actual real person instead of a music industry fucking contact for a fucking change.

I miss Mrs. Toad.  Can you tell?

Had a good rummage recently?

Well Davy H, from the truly excellent Ghost of Electricity started rummaging about in his 90s CD singles last week, and wrote this. Following that we had Mick from Raiding the Vinyl Archive, with his contribution.  And this weekend everyone’s favourite superannuated Weegie – JC from The Vinyl Villain – has got stuck in as well.

So now I have had a rummage through my own box of 90s CD singles, and unearthed a gem.  The CD single is a much-maligned animal, the distant, buck-toothed cousin to its urbane vinyl counterpart.  But it had something of a heyday in the 90s, before the re-birth of the 7″ and after the cassette tape had been effectively seen off.  I didn’t have a record player anyway so I had a huge pile of these things, and of course the 90s was when I first started getting into music with real determination.

It’s not an original purchase I’m afraid, because most of those were stolen when someone broke into our Glasgow basement flat, but it is one of many I have since painstakingly re-acquired with the aid of eBay and Amazon Marketplace in the years since.  There were many choices I could have made.  Gene would be an obvious example, I had Pulp’s masterpiece Common People too, and the unbelievably good Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave, but I thought I’d go for The Bluetones.

The Bluteones, like Gene before them, were the quintessential singles band.  Their albums were disappointing, but there was a period in about 1995 when a couple of superb singles had us all convinced that they were going to be the next massive thing in Britpop – a scene which had already peaked, but which still very much dominated the musical landscape.  The Bluetones have proved to be oddly long-lived actually, and still release albums today to a hard-core of dedicated fans, so it’s unfair to imply that they couldn’t cut the mustard.  One thing is for sure though, they have never ever matched the heady hype of those first few singles, and Bluetonic was the first and the best of the lot.

Rough Outline, a collection of their singles and b-sides can be bought from Amazon unless you want to scour eBay where there are both some vinyl and CD versions knocking around.

The Bluteones – Bluetonic
The Bluteones – Colorado Beetle
The Bluteones – Glad to See Y’Back Again