Yep, I am off down to London to schmooze like a lickspittle get plastered and see some excellent bands.  And to catch up with one of my best and oldest friends.  Good times. And to watch the Champions League final.  Possibly slightly less good times.

I am running the gauntlet of the British Rail ticketing system as well.  For those who aren’t familiar with this particular challenge, in the UK they try and make it as difficult as possible for you to buy a/ the cheap tickets which they advertise so aggressively (£35 London-Edinburgh return, aye right!) or b/ the actual, right ticket for the train you happen to take.

I went on the website and specifically selected the 08:30 train, which is the one I am on, but when I collected my tickets they said ‘Off-peak Return’ on them, and I am highly dubious about any service leaving at 08:30 in the morning being classified as ‘off-peak’. And if I’m wrong presumably they will try and force me to buy a ‘full price’ single (i.e. about £300, instead of the £114 return I actually bought).  Ah well, I’ve had this argument before, so I suppose I can have it again if need be.

Anyhow, since the demise of the humble dining car (actually, balls to humble, I always preferred the more ostentatious dining cars) I see train journeys as things to tolerate rather than enjoy.  Mrs. Toad and I used to very much enjoy getting quietly pickled in the dining car as the Northumberland countryside rolled past the window, and somehow a little bag of goodies from Marks & Spencer at the station doesn’t quite make up for its loss.

1. Where, other than where you currently live, do you have the most friends.
2. How old were you when you met your oldest (non-blood relative) friend.
3. Least glamorous place you’ve ever travelled for business.
4. How many cups of grey, watery meeting coffee can you have before your bladder commits suicide?
5. What’s the highest proportion of fun to business you have ever achieved on what is nominally a business trip?

This week’s five songs ar… oh just look at the titles, you don’t need me to tell you I just searched for ‘train’ in my iTunes library and just lazily slapped up any old five from the results do you?

Tom Waits – Train Song 

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Half Man Half Biscuit – Time Flies By (When You’re the Driver of a Train)

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Hem – Betting on Trains

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The Divine Comedy – Europe By Train

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Billy Bragg – Train Train

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There is a betting shop under the house next door who once offered us something like seven or eight grand, or something like that, to build a fire exit out of their place into our back garden.  Quite apart from whether or not that compensation would actually match the resulting devaluation of the house, which it probably wouldn’t have, the idea of having Ladbrokes employees peering into our garden while we were sitting out there with a cup of tea didn’t really sound appealing.

Also, they claimed that the door would be alarmed, but we didn’t really have a lot of faith in that, and rather feared the employees finding a way around this and spending a lot of time smoking fags in our back garden.  In the words of Han Solo: “No reward is worth this!”

Anyway, betting shops have always kinda fascinated me.  They always look so desperate, like the people inside are clutching to the last tiny strand of courage they have left and vesting it all in some ropey old nag in the 4.30 at Doncaster.  It’s that haunted, defeated kind of look and the 1980s cross-channel ferry decor that just makes them look like the most appalling joy-sinks imaginable.

In any case, gambling is something I have never been drawn to in the slightest, primarily because games of chance are governed by mathematics and in the long run you will lose, and when it comes to placing bets based on close inside knowledge, I always seem to be surprised no matter how much I know about the topic in hand.

I mean, I know football inside out, particularly the English Premiership and I seem to have absolutely no ability whatsoever to predict the results.  I know the Scottish music scene pretty well these days, but would I honestly have faith in my ability to pick the Next Big Thing Out of Scotland?  No, probably not, not to the extent that I’d bet on it anyway.

Now you may say that in starting a record label that this is exactly what I’m doing, but I’m not, I’m making a different kind of bet altogether.  I have noticed over time that for all I like alternative stuff, my taste still conforms to a certain part of the mainstream, and I am betting that if I just stick to releasing stuff I really like, rather than trying to second-guess a band’s potential for making it big, then my natural overlap with the mainstream will mean that we release enough music people like to make the whole venture financially sensible.

That’s the theory anyway.

So, there are some good gigs this week, so please attend them and take the opportunity to take photos of hipsters looking hip and enter them into our competition to win a copy of the wonderful Communion Compilation.  Just email your pictures (old or new) to me at songbytoad -*- hotmail.co.uk, and we’ll pick a winner in a week or so.

Oh, and please do de-lurk, that’s what this thread is for, y’know.  You’ve read the comments before, you know the kind of clowns I’ll be stuck with if you don’t!

1. Ever bet on anything and won?
2. Which kind of gambling might you be tempted by?
3. Kind of gambling you’ll never understand.
4. What are your odds of scoring on Valentine’s Day?
5. Name your favourite underdog of all time (doesn’t matter what field).

The Pogues – Bottle of Smoke

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The Clash – The Card Cheat

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Bob Dylan – Rambling Gambling Willie

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Bruce Springsteen – Meeting Across the River

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Hem – Betting on Trains

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I know I promised the Notcraigcast last week, but it didn’t happen I’m afraid.  After last week’s amazing Craigcast Neil and I were intending to introduce Craig to all sorts of modern music which we thought continued some of the traditions of the blues music he was describing to us, but circumstances have rather conspired against us unfortunately.  Neil is off on tour with Meursault playing his songs, and Craig is off on tour with his liver, taking it around the watering holes of Edinburgh and giving it a good, hard kicking in each one.

Consequently I’ve sort of cobbled together a podcast from fragments of the Pantscast and the stuff I’d intended to play for Craig.  It’s largely folky, but that wasn’t wholly by design, more to do with the fact that listening to the really early blues stuff Craig played for us sent me back to listening to old Smithsonian Folkways stuff and so there are a couple of songs from there, as well as a couple of modern things which those recordings brought to mind.

Smithsonian Folkways, incidentally, is a non-profit record label run by the Smithsonian Institute to preserve and support a truly epic amount of our musical heritage.  Just go and have a browse through their archives – it’s amazing how much incredible stuff these guys are looking after on everyone else’s behalf.

Toadcast #94 – The Not-Notcraigcast

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1. Micah P. Hinson – She Don’t Own Me (02.57)
2. Hem – The Cuckoo (11.13)
3. Saint Etienne – Like a Motorway (16.52)
4. White Antelope – Silver Dagger (22.15)
5. The Boggs – Plant Me a Rose (28.00)
6. Willard Grant Conspiracy – River in the Pines (31.47)
7. Berzilla Wallin – Conversation With Death (Oh Death) (39.22)
8. Samamidon – O Death (44.26.)
9. Dock Boggs – Sugar Baby (49.21)
10. Alela Diane – White as Diamonds (Daytrotter Session) (54.09)
11. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (59.07)

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 »

Hello and welcome back to the Toad Sessions. I was a little drunk when I noticed that Alela Diane was playing in Edinburgh as part of the Triptych Festival, so the idea of emailing her label and inviting her to do a Toad Session didn’t seem quite so preposterous. In the morning, I thought I was mad and would be laughed at, but amazingly they agreed, and now here it is.

This one was also recorded by Nick at Bananarow and he’s done another amazing job – the songs sound absolutely gorgeous. Dylan’s pictures can be found at the Flickr page, and we have some more videos at the Song, by Toad YouTube page. Here’s the interview podcast, with the tracklisting at the bottom of the page.

Toadcast #30 – Alela Diane & Mariee Sioux Toad Session

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Here are the sessions tracks themselves. The Cuckoo is a traditional song, and Dry Grass & the Shadows is from Alela’s new album which should hopefully be out later this year. Mariee’s songs are Flowers & Blood from her recent album Faces in the Rocks, whereas the gorgeous Icarus Eye is an old song from a home release.

Alela Diane – Dry Grass & the Shadows

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Alela Diane – The Cuckoo

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Mariee Sioux – The Icarus Eye

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Mariee Sioux – Flowers & Blood

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Here are the videos, all hosted at the YouTube page. Again, the interview is going to have to go up later because I seem to have entirely lost Morgan, my resident editing expert, so I’ve had to cobble these things together myself. I am going to work on the interview movies as best I can, so they should hopefully be available in a week or two.

01. Alela Diane – Dry Grass & the Shadows (Toad Session) (04.51)
02. The Shaky Hands – Summer’s Life (08.36)
03. Johnny Cash – I See a Darkness (11.45)
04. The Holy Modal Rounders – Hesitation Blues (20.42)
05. Neutral Milk Hotel – The Communist’s Daughter (24.10)
06. Mariee Sioux – Flowers & Blood (Toad Session) (26.07)
07. Hem – Half Acre (32.29)
08. Bonnie Prince Billy – No Bad News (41.41)
09. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Twistification (46.05)
10. Vashti Bunyan – Glow Worms (53.35)
11. Mariee Sioux – The Icarus Eye (Toad Session) (58.10)
12. Alela Diane – The Cuckoo (Toad Session) (62.56)

Well I hope you like these. The next session is going to be with local band Meursault, and will be the first one to be recorded in Toad Hall. Very exciting!

It’s all gone a bit American this week, Toadlings. I have no intention of putting out a series of strictly themed podcasts, but it’s still early days and there are so many massive chunks of my music collection I want to poke about in that this may happen a couple of times before things settle down. So I started with a couple of vaguely American-sounding tracks this week and before you know it I ended up with a podcast with a definite Americana theme.

I’m quite happy with how it’s all turned out though, I must confess – a nice combination of classics and small, small bands, so the playlist is working quite well by itself. And actually handling the microphone is getting easier as well. I am quite liking this podcasting business, I’d say!

Toadcast #3 – With added Americana

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1. The Band – The Weight (02.16)
2. Hem – Half Acre (09.18)
3. Elvis Perkins – While You Were Sleeping (12.38)
4. Cherry Ghost – Mathematics (20.27)
5. The Holy Modal Rounders – Hey Hey Baby (25.30)
6. Night Jar – Sweet Annie Lee (28.30)
7. Caramel Jack – Lincoln Jackson Incident (33.45)
8. The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song (39.27)
9. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Ballad of a Thin Man (49.51)
10. Rick Redbeard – Blood (54.06)
11. Billie Holiday – Georgia on My Mind (59.26)
12. Night Jar – Big Black Horse (64.05)
13. Broken Records – Lies (71.45)
14. DeVotchka – The Enemy Guns (77.57)