Song, by Toad

This week I am piling on the music snobbery.  Oh, okay, I’m not really – if anything I’m undermining it with some truly guilty pleasures.  There’s not much modern fluffy pop music which I happen to enjoy despite my snobbery because… well, because I just don’t think there’s anything I can think of which fits that bill at the moment.

I know nostalgic guilty pleasures and truly embracing low-brow music purely for the enjoyment of it aren’t quite the same thing but I think I’ve budged about as far as I am going to go on this one.  Girls Aloud are unlikely to ever make an appearance on this podcast, but there’s a spot of memory-tickling being indulged in with picks from Kylie and Guns ‘n’ Roses.  You can tell Mrs. Toad has been involved in choosing a playlist when it contains Guns and fucking Roses, but she was sacked from co-presenting duties due to excessive drunkenness, so her imprint on this particular episode is in selections only, and not in the presence of her dulcet tones on the interwaves.

Toadcast #70 – The Snobcast

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01. Kid Canaveral – Couldn’t Dance (03.52)
02. Popup – Lucy, What Are You Trying to Say (07.04)
03. Art Fag – Nakhla Dog (15.48)
04. Kylie Minogue – Confide In Me (23.27)
05. Motorhead – Ace of Spades (28.50)
06. The Seventeenth Century – Mid October (36.16)
07. Alan Pownall – The Others (43.56)
08. Haggard the Listener Group – Blackette (47.29)
09. Soft Cell – Tainted Love (51.22)
10. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Sweet Child o’ Mine (58.12)

My dearest Toadlings it is with enormous pleasure and brimming pride that I present the light of my silly life, the bright and shining star at the centre of my universe and the bad tempered little Scottish strumpet to whom my every waking hour is devoted.  That sounds sarcastic, but it isn’t.

She treats the music I play with a sort of contemptuous indifference and has some truly shocking stuff in her rather limited collection.  But she has a punk side, she loves Bob Dylan and has taken to some unexpected groups recently, like The Sequins, The Builders & the Butchers and Grandaddy.  It slowly started to dawn on me that actually, Dolly Parton aside for the moment, she could probably put together a better playlist than I could, and I was absolutely mortified to be proved absolutely right.

So I thought I’d get her along to co-present too, which seemed like it might be fun.  It was a bit odd at first, but we warm up a bit by the end and it turns slowly into what I think it a pretty decent podcast, all told.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to talk her into doing this too often, but if it proves a success I promise to do my best.

Toadcast #13 – The Mrs. Toadcast

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01. Lambchop – Dallas Theme Song (00.00)
02. Sham 69 – Borstal Breakout (03.10)
03. The Clash – I Fought the Law (06.49)
04. Stiff Little Fingers – Alternative Ulster (10.53)
05. Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Enough (16.18)
06. The Cure – Just Like Heaven (19.50)
07. Ennio Morricone – The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (26.14)
08. Nirvana – Sliver (33.02)
09. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Get in the Ring (38.32)
10. Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue (48.21)
11. Eels – Fresh Feeling (53.58)
12. The Von Bondies – No Regrets (61.31)
13. The 63 Crayons – Spoils For Survivors (66.16)
14. Honeytrap – Andy the Freefaller (71.15)
15. The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses (76.11)
16. Night Jar – Poor Man’s Son (81.46)
17. The Indelicates – Waiting For Pete Doherty to Die (89.54)

Whilst it was a year in Glasgow with the redoubtable James Strath that finally marked my transition into the world of cutting edge indie, there had been signs in previous years that I was ready to abandon the steadying hand of my parents’ Stones, Dylan and Bowie records and take those tentative first steps on my own, into the brave new world of popular music.

Unsurprisingly I tottered a little at first, and there were a few bumps and bruises along the way. Living in Austria meant there was no Madchester for me – not even The Stone Roses. My peers were loosely divided into heavy metal fans (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Guns ‘n’ Roses, although they don’t half sound tame now) and dance fans (shudder). There quite simply was no indie in Austria.

Consequently, the first really popular songs that I liked at the actual time they were popular were a hodge-podge of tracks that leaked out of these two camps and reached just far enough into the indie territory that I still didn’t realise was my genre that I was able to get a handle on them. Mostly, I must confess, it was the rock stuff that I liked, albeit generally the less shouty stuff that tended to catch my ears, but it was a pretty incoherently mixed bag of bits and bobs at the beginning.

The album that I finally connected with completely, the one that marked my actual participation in mainstream popular music for the first time, came in about 1991 when Pearl Jam released 10. But until then it was these stray songs here and there that I was starting to catch onto and began slowly to realise that there was something in this popular music thing that might just be for me…

Ugly Kid Joe – Cat’s in the Cradle
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under the Bridge
Metallica – Nothing Else Matters Heavy metal for people who really don’t like heavy metal!
Faith No More – Easy

And a couple released a bit later that I was actually aware of as they were released – the first time this happened to me.

Guns ‘n’ Roses – Live & Let Die Kids in my class actually cut school to run to the shops and buy this the second it hit the shops.
Stone Temple Pilots – Plush That Beavis & Butthead favourite. I thought B&B were really, really fucking cool!