Mrs. Toad has been stranded in God Bless America by that infernal cloud of Icelandic ash, so I am home alone for the last week and all of the next one.  This is very much Not Fun, because as much as she’s a mean old bitch, I do seem to have developed a grudging affection for the silly old mare so a fortnight apart is very much unappreciated.  It’s about time those Icelanders re-established some bloody discipline, honestly.

Anyhew, there is some excellent stuff on this podcast, even though it really doesn’t hang together around a particular theme as they sometimes do.  In actual fact, I don’t think I’ve done a themey one for a while – might give that a go next week.

Toadcast #118 – The Ashcast

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01. Johnny Flynn – Kentucky Pill (4.11)
02. Burnt Island – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (10.51)
03. Draw Me Stories – Becomes the Hunted (18.25)
04. Haunted Stereo – Lock the Doors (22.29)
05. Ragged Claws – Lamed Wufniks (30.44)
06. Fleet Foxes – Silver Dagger (36.07)
07. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (40.13)
08. Cocorosie – Lemonade (42.14)
09. Br’er – Crocus (50.41)
10. Devolver – Promise (56.24)
11. Giant Sand – Anarchistic Bloshevistic Cowboy Bundle (58.44)

Well, not me obviously, because the answer to that is no-one.  But Mrs. Toad and I were purchasing a little wine on our way home from the pub tonight and instead of going into some sort of warehouse off-license we ventured into the Edinburgh Wine Shop, which is small, friendly and, I suppose, slightly dorky.  It’s the sort of place where the staff know about wine, where they sell lots of real ale and no fucking Fosters whatsoever and where, generally, they play classical music.

Classical music has always kind of baffled me, not out of general dislike or anything, more out of pure ignorance.  I don’t know it, understand it, or anything.  Nor could I hope to intelligently critique it.  However, I wonder sometimes about what causes stuff to stick in the memory, or to stand the test of time.  Great classical musicians, once they achieved fame, found their music performed to royal courts; to the largest audiences available at the time.  A bit like Britney Spears.

So was Mozart really the best available to his time, or was he just Madonna – some pushy, stringy old lady whose thirst for celebrity and knack for manipulating the press far outweighs any measurement of talent.  I don’t, as I’ve said, have the knowledge to really answer that question, but the people who read this blog are all fans of alternative music.  Not alternative in the sense of being NME readers rather than MTV fans, but in the sense of genuinely loving really alternative music.

Even fucking Celine Dion has performed to royal audiences.  Britney Spears, Take That, Madge, all these people have achieved something akin to the twenty-first century equivalents of patronage – the barometer for the best and best-remembered classical composers.  So, without wishing to enter into an argument about which classical composers truly deserve to be remembered at the expense of which others, what have we actually lost?

Where are the Nick Caves of that era, compared to the Coldplays?  Do we really need to remember Eric Clapton?  I mean, his politics are fucking detestable, but was he good enough to deserve immortalisation?  And even if you take the attitude that might means right – that being that popular is justification enough in itself – then what of the bands who would be the equivalent of Jeffrey Lewis.  Or the Wave Pictures.  Or even Wilco.  How long will these guys live in human memory without that massive groundswell of popular approval which ends up sanctifying an artist for all time.  And what of the likes of Daniel Johnston, for example, who is barely known in his own era and might so easily disappear within a couple of decades, once he passes on, because apparently All fucking Saints were invited to perform at the fucking Royal fucking Variety Show and he was not.

Pearl Jam – Jeremy (Yeah yeah, Nirvana, yadda yadda…)

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Giant Sand – Flying Around the Sun at Remarkable Speed

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Eef Barzelay – Ballad of Bitter Honey

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2001 was a very odd year for me on a personal level.  I spent most of it in a surprisingly long term relationship with a girl with whom I was not in the least bit compatible, and I was made redundant in November in the wake of the World Trade Centre attack and the dotcom crash.  Jolly times.

It wasn’t bad though, funnily enough.  I hated work, sure, but it was my first professional job and I was living in Cambridge which, although it’s not somewhere I’d want to settle down, was extremely pleasant.  Actually, to be fair to the place, it’s not all that unlike Edinburgh in many ways – very genteel.

I also heard the album which led to me rediscovering folk music.  I got into popular music largely via the Pogues, and after moving to the UK in 1993 at age seventeen I got really into both Britpop and a lot of increasingly folky stuff.  That sort of petered out as I drifted more into indie over the years, and by about 1995/6 I was pretty much an out and out indie kid.  When I moved to Cambridge it was on the back of Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, Moby’s Play and Doves’ brilliant debut. Read the rest of this entry »

Well well, what a momentous week it’s been. Some brown fellow won an election in a trivial Chinese client state somewhere in the former British colonies, but far more importantly Glasgow Celtic managed a very creditable draw against Manchester United in the Champions’ League despite not actually passing the ball to one another more than half a dozen times during the entire ninety minutes. Momentous, I tell you. What a day for Scotland.

Snigger. Sorry, that was mean.

No, what I really meant was that it’s about time our side started winning elections again. There was a rash of lefty wins in the mid-nineties as Clinton and Blair won, accompanied by similar successes in France and Germany by Chirac and Schroeder. I know ‘lefty wins’ is not really the picture in retrospect, but at the time it seemed like social-democrats were winning all over the place. It’s odd, then, that as America finally shakes off the governance of fear and insularity, some of us in Europe seem rather worryingly to be embracing it: Sarkozy is a right-wing nutjob, and the Austrians have basically elected the Nazi Party. Cameron may be in a position of some strength in the UK, but he’s really far too wet and insubstantial to be considered much of anything, not that this can really be described as a good thing.

I know it’s going to take a different kind of politics to deal with the rise of the Indians and, particularly, the Chinese, who don’t seem to give a shit about anyone but themselves, but I am not sure nationalistic jingoism is quite the solution. We’ll see though.

And how about next week we try and make the prevailing topics of conversation a little lighter in tone, eh? We’ve had cultural witch hunts and dramatic elections these last two weeks, and it would be nice to get to the end of the week with nothing more grave than titties and beer on my mind, for a change.

So de-lurk, come out of the shadows, say hello and join in. And if you want to pick next Friday’s five, then email me with your picks – details on the Contact page.

1. Favourite U.S. state name.
2. First tipple of the evening.
3. Last tipple of the evening.
4. Blonde, brunette or redhead?
5. Nicest looking alphabet, with link if you can.
5 and a half. Can anyone identify that picture? Bonus points if you can.

Weddings, Parties, Anything – Father’s Day (Live)
Joe Cocker – Hitchcock Railway
Liz Green – Bad Medicine
The Fiery Furnaces – Single Again
Giant Sand – Red Right Hand

Hello people, more podcastenfun once again.  Having done the Deathcast recently, I thought it might be nice to do the polar opposite – the Birthcast.  This week’s podcast is all about the birth of Song, by Toad.  I’ll tell you about how I started writing about music, how I discovered blogs, how I discovered that what I was writing was in fact a blog and how I ultimately ended up on WordPress writing what you are now reading.  r casually skimming over, depending on your bent.

It has also ended up being something of a 2004 retrospective, because that’s when this all started, however slowly, and that side of it has been nice.  I had met Mrs. Toad by this point, and I was all excited, and despite the fact that my job was bollocks, living in London was great fun.  I was on a narrowboat at Nine Elms Pier at this point, which was an amazingly brilliant place to live, and I used to cook myself kettle noodles because I couldn’t be arsed firing up the stove.  I’d boil some water, throw it over some noodles and some stock and chuck in lots of fresh veg – bloody delicious.

Toadcast #40 – The Birthcast

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01. Modest Mouse – Bury Me With It (01.39)
02. The Fiery Furnaces – Chris Matthews (07.57)
03. The Innocence Mission – I Have Not Seen This Day Before (Live) (17.54)
04. American Music Club – Only Love Can Set You Free (22.57)
05. Brian Wilson – Cabin Essence (28.40)
06. Andrew Bird – Lull (35.30)
07. Jim White – Static on the Radio (42.52)
08. Tom Waits – Trampled Rose (49.09)
09. The Dears – Lost in the Plot (54.36)
10. Giant Sand – Anarchistic Bolshevistic Cowboy Bundle (59.43)

I will go so far as to say that I don’t actually like this very much.  Don’t get me wrong, Howe Gelb is one of the most remarkable and gifted musicians of his generation as far as I am concerned, but then, you can’t always like it all.

Basically, the part about Gelb with which I am the most smitten is his amazing ability to let his songs amble along as if they have lost all sense of where they were going.  His tracks stop and start, fade in and out, lurch, stumble and generally carry on as if there are times he has forgotten that he was even playing a song to begin with.  ‘Hm?  What? Oh, right the guitar.  Um, yes, what was I doi.. oh yes, that song!’

It shows real confidence in both his music and his audience if you ask me, not that he shouldn’t have that confidence after so many years at the pinnacle of his art form.  Sno Angel Like You was a break though, incorporating gospel choirs into freshly polished pop songs to wondrous effect.  I thought it was brilliant, and still very much Gelb.  There followed an abrasive, spiky Giant Sand record, All Over the Map, and since then there have been a couple of slightly loose home recordings.

This is Howe’s first serious, shiny release in a few years, and I am just not as smitten as usual. The songs are still the polished ones that we saw no Sno Angel, but the eccentric edge has gone.  There is barely any noodling, scratching or teasing.  In their place come thirteen slightly squishy alt-country numbers that lack almost all of the idosyncratic genius for which I love their creator.  If you want to start with Giant Sand, I wouldn’t start with this.  If you are a fan, I think you can skip this with confidence and, like me, settle back down again to wait for the next one.

Giant Sand – Increment of Love
Giant Sand – Stranded Pearl

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…or Poshfest, as I like to call it.  Honestly, it was the most middle-class, civillised event I can possibly imagine.  Even the toilets remained usable all the way through the weekend.

That may sound like I am mocking it, and in a way I am, but myself along with it because you see, I loved this festival.  It was absolutely, absolutely inch perfect for me and from the looks of it a good few others too.  I don’t know if it’s a sign of age, but I truly don’t think I have ever liked the grotty side of festivals – the shit-splattered toilets, swimming in a sea of someone else’s piss; the denuded field covered in used cans and broken plastic glasses, the seas of polystyrene shit and leftover food strewn about the place, the ninety minute queue at the bar for warm beer that is invariably the flavourless and piss-weak rubbish that is Tennents and a whole myriad of other whining-old-bastard-in-his-slippers complaints.

End of the Road, on the other hand was superb, primarily I think because it was pretty small.  The fields generally retained their grass, people were spread pretty nice and thinly throughout the gardens, the toilets were kept clean and even had bog roll in them pretty much all the time, the food was good, the bar queues were genuinely pretty minimal and the beer was really quite nice.  A pint of Leffe for £3 is pretty comparable to a high street bar, unlike the usual almighty fleecing you tend to get at these things, and the fact that Leffe was available at all is in itself a good sign.

You know the only complaint I have about End of the Road: the lineup was actually just too good.  It was a brilliant combination of the up-and-coming, the alternative staple and the indie legend.  I had to miss about half a dozen things I really wanted to see just because there was so much good stuff on, and that’s even with Dan Sartain and Micah P. Hinson dropping out.  I didn’t get to sample the excellent film and comedy selections for example, which I would have loved to do, but I am delighted they are there as it means I am almost certain to be able to persuade the musically indifferent Mrs. Toad to come along with me next year.

The other problem with the strength of the lineup was that, apart from missing several things I wanted to see – Malcolm Middleton, Herman Dune, James Yorkston, Jens Lekman, Josh T. Pearson, Giant Sand, just the list of people I missed would make an impressive festival lineup by itself – but also it never gave me time to just wander in on something random and discover new things.  It’s nice at festivals to idly meander from one small venue to the next and take a chance on things you’ve never heard, and I couldn’t do that this time because there was just so much stuff on that I really wanted to see.

So Simon, my only complaint about your festival is that it was just a bit too bloody good!  Oh, and a few more showers would have been handy.  But all in all, I could have gone to the exact same festival the following weekend and still not been bored – superb it was!

So here are some tracks from the groups I missed.  I’ll be writing up the bands from the individual days pretty soon, but for now, here’s what I could have won…

Malcolm Middleton – Fuck It, I Love You
Herman Dune – 123 Apple Tree
James Yorkston & the Athletes – A Man With My Skills
Jens Lekman – No Time For Breaking Up
Lift to Experience – These Are the Days
Giant Sand – Cracklin’ Water

Hmm, I was listening to Radio1 the other day and began to realise how few records by current pop people I’d actually ever heard. I heard my first Kate Nash song about three days ago. I know this isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but I could barely name the charts at the moment. I know virtually no music I don’t actively go an seek out. It sounds harmless, but it is a worrying trend, I think.

With virtually all things at the moment, from religious and political debate right through to more trivial things like music, it is becoming easier and easier to refuse to expose yourself to people you disagree with. This is really, really bad news not least because it tends to lead people into an echo chamber that is full of people who only ever tell them that they are right.

How are you supposed to know what you think if you are never challenged on it, never contradicted, never forced to defend your arguments? If you are never exposed to people who disagree with you and can actually out-debate you? What does it do to your convictions if you are out-argued on a point of, say, political ethics by someone else? Well increasingly this is something people just don’t ever have to find out.

I know that as you get older you tend to become more and more entrenched in your beliefs of all kinds, and I know that to a large extent this isn’t just narrow-mindedness it’s what you really think. But in so many ways the fact that we are gathering into communities, particularly online, of exclusively like-minded souls is bad for us. It leads to religious people thinking that Darwin’s theory of evolution is anti-god. Indie kids assuming that all hip-hop is by definition shit. Football fans having no way of disagreeing with one another without it getting aggressive.

Basically, it leads to people plucking their ideas from a very, very small pool and having an inflated sense of their own rightness. That’s not how we learn. We learn from being exposed to new things, things we don’t understand, and trying to come to terms with how they affect our world-view.

In a musical sense it can lead to drifting completely into a single niche and having no idea that, for example, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is not a bad song, despite being a Kylie number. More importantly, it leads to a lack of appreciation of context: of the world into which a song is born. Punk was a revolution not just for being great music, but because it blew away the stodgy pretension of the status quo. If you don’t understand the context of the group, how good do you think the Sex Pistols were?

So I am making a conscious effort to break out of my comfort zone a bit more.

Here are some more songs I got from the splendid Comes With a Smile a few years ago:

Jim White – Cinderblock Walls
Unbunny – Water & the Spanish Tongue (Alternate Version)
Jim Guthrie – Ain’t Got No/I Got Life
Giant Sand – Capitulation Blues

Well chaps I am absolutely buggering knackered, but never fear, for the eminently lovely Mrs. Toad and myself are off on holiday tomorrow for two weeks. Thank fucking bollocks for that – the last time we had a proper break was this time last year for our wedding and even that involved a bit too much organising and signing things and so on to be entirely restful.

Will this year’s holiday be restful? Well who knows. My little brother is getting married and I have to give a speech, so by this time next week you could be talking to the man who ruined his little brother’s big day. I say this only because he lives out in Boston and is marrying n American girl. She is brilliant, so no worries there, but about a hundred and fifty of her friends and family members will be at this bloody thing, none of whom I have met before, and the chances of my giving an even vaguely coherent speech without mortally offending half of them seem slim.

Ultimately, I get the impression Americans take weddings terribly seriously, and as you know I don’t really take much of much seriously at all. Also, as my regular readers will know, I swear, rage, rail and slander. This is pretty much my entire sense of humour, apart from baiting people who take anything at all too seriously. What are my chances of giving a speech to ahundred and fifty American Christians without causing mortal offence? I would say Nil.

So fingers crossed, chaps. Wish me luck. If all goes well, Ben will still be speaking to me at this time next week, but I wouldn’t exactly put more than a fiver on it.

In terms of the blog, I have uploaded a song for each day I’m away and have written a few mini-posts in advance, timed to be posted once a day for the two weeks I’m off. I’ll pop in from time to time to say hi and play nicely with people in the comments section, and I have pre-recorded a new podcast to go up next weekend. So you won’t be entirely neglected, but I won’t be matching JC’s awe-inspiring dedication over at the Vinyl Villain and blogging away all through my holiday. Partly because I want to stay married and partly because, obsessive though I am, I am sorry to have to confess that I just don’t love you all that much. It’s my fucking holidays, cut me some slack.

Giant Sand – Wayfaring Stranger/Fly Me to the Moon
James Yorkston – Someplace Simple
Yo La Tengo – I Feel Like Going Home
The Postal Service – We Will Become Silhouettes
James – Runaground

During my time in London I spent a lot of time living at Nine Elms Pier, on a succession of boats. Initially, I was on a huge Humber Keel barge called the Charles William, until the owner sold her. I was incredibly lazy about arranging somewhere else to live, but it looked like I was going to have to move off the pier, which I really didn’t want. Then, by some happy accident, on the day before I had to move out someone appeared on the permanently empty little narrowboat moored just next to the Charles William. We got chatting, and I moved in the following morning – he was unable to make any use of the boat due to living a bit too far away, and was glad of the rent.

I loved living on the pier so much I actually bought a narrowboat when one came up for sale later that year, see here, and the picture above. This was, as Sod’s Law would have it, just before I was finally offered a job in Edinburgh to be with Mrs. Toad. The timing was rotten, but I did a lot of work on her and was able to sell on reasonably easily, so I managed to do okay out of it all. I was pretty lucky though. Boats degrade pretty bloody fast and I could have been sitting on a colossal, gradually sinking white elephant if things had gone badly.

Anyhow, at about the time I moved from the Charles William to the Lagom – the tiny little Narrowboat – I was really enjoying reading the independent music magazine Comes With a Smile. It was run by Matt who I think is a graphic designer by profession, and this really showed in the gorgeous layouts and artwork. Every issue (roughly quarterly) he would compile a CD for us which was a perfect combination of new things, with a fine dash of stuff I already knew, just for familiarity’s sake. He had a real love for intimate, mellow Americana and I discovered loads of groups through his compilations.

CWaS folded eventually, and the last issue was in late 2005. Perhaps in this internet age, printing an actual magazine was always going to be an impossible enterprise for so small an operation, but I very much miss my occasional brown envelopes from Matt. There was so much personal thought and emotional investment in the stuff, it was almost like being round at his house while he played tapes for you.

I mentioned this because I have two CDs of highlights from various samplers which I made simultaneously at about the time I was moving between boats, called, not terribly imaginatively, ‘Farewell to the Charles William’ and ‘Welcome to the Lagom’. They are both so full of Comes With a Smile songs that every time I hear them I think of Matt and his ultimately doomed labour of love. He’ll probably never read this of course, but thanks, wherever you are.

Sun Kil Moon – Carry Me Ohio
Micah P. Hinson – Close Your Eyes
Jim White – Static on the Radio
Giant Sand – Brand New Cumberland Gap
American Music Club – Mantovani the Mind Reader

Ah, that felt good. I’ve been so busy trying to catch up with all the music I want to tell you about that it’s been ages since I remembered to prattle on aimlessy about nothing much in particular for an entire post.