Song, by Toad

IT disasters in Toad Hall meant that this podcast was delayed so long that I ended up posting pretty much all of it on the blog before I got to record the thing and all the news was so outdated that I had to find some more news. Fortunately we have some pre-release splendidness from Elbow, Goldfrapp and Stephen Malkmus to make up for it.

There’s also some excellent unsigned music to be had as well, from Maxwell Panther and Meursault, as well as some splendid new singles from Elle S’Appelle and Operahouse. So it’s late, but some of this stuff is really quite excellent. And then there’s LCD Soundsystem who have taken me so long to get into that I am only starting to even enjoy the album now, some eight months or so after its release. What a fuckwit.

There’s a fairly detailed explanation of what is going to be happened with Song, by Toad Records in the new year as well, and how I am going to move these podcasts onwards and upwards. Unfortunately it takes the longest bloody link in recorded history to actual explain it all, but explain it I do. There’s always the track timings listed at the side of the songs if you want to skip it altogether though! Have fun, chaps.

Toadcast #20 – The Late, Late News

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1. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks – Gardenia (01.27)
2. Elle S’Appelle – Little Flame (06.49)
3. Operahouse – Born a Boy (09.40)
4. LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends (14.54)
5. The Hollies – The Air That I Breathe (24.50)
6. Goldfrapp – Little Bird (28.51)
7. Maxwell Panther – Too Many Magazines (35.47)
8. Meursault – The Furnace (39.37)
9. The 4Qs – Pieces of a Puzzle (48.03)
10. Kid Harpoon – Riverside (50.42)
11. Dubious Ranger – Slow Day (56.18)
12. Roger McGuinn & Calexico – One More Cup of Coffee (68.29)
13. The Heavy Circles – Henri (72.45)
14. The Brute Chorus (feat. Tiggs) – The Cuckoo & the Stolen Heart (80.15)
15. Elbow – Grounds For Divorce (88.13)
16. The Cave Singers – Seeds of Night (94.51)

I was catching up on DC’s excellent and not-at-all-airport-related Christmas podcasts yesterday when I found myself thinking ‘fuck me, that Abba song sounds like Creep’.  After the song, DC was kind enough to explain that it wasn’t Abba at all it was The Hollies, and that there was a well-known school of thought linking the two songs.

Given how slow I am picking up on this sort of thing, probably because I don’t listen to the radio all that much, I wouldn’t be at all surprised for this post to raise a deafening chorus of ‘Well yeah, like duh, like where have you been dude, like everyone knows that’ or something else equally well-phrased and cutting.  But honestly, this is the first I’d ever heard of it and the similarities are uncanny.

I never cease to be amazed by this sort of thing, but why it should surprise me is a mystery.  In my own field, industrial design, it’s entirely common for someone to like the proportions or the surface transitions or the material finishes of any number of other products and then incorporate them, sometimes quite directly, into their own work.  Look at the rise of the secret-to-lit screen, or the ‘one black version, one white version’ approach and things like that.  Look what the iPod did to popularise really basic geometry in handheld products, something that led almost directly to the storming success of the SonyEricsson T610.

Switching these kinds of ideas back and forth isn’t copying as such, but it does exist on the same spectrum.  At some point drawing inspiration does become outright copying, but I think at the moment we are inclined to draw that line too soon, in a great many fields.  Human ingenuity is a cumulative process, as tiny improvements build on thousands of other tiny improvements – the Eureka! moment is largely a myth.

I’ve ranted this rant before, so I’ll shut up now and leave you to compare The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies with an acoustic version of Radiohead’s classic Creep. And never mention airports ever again.

The Hollies – The Air That I Breathe
Radiohead – Creep (Acoustic)