Yes, that’s right, it’s Blue Peter weekend at Toad Hall this weekend.  Not in the kiddie fiddling, coke snorting, hard drinking sort of way (well, not all of them anyway) but in the stickyback plastic, here’s one I prepared earlier sort of manner.

What crafts, you ask?  Well the Meursault singles are being recorded in the living room for starters.  But while all that’s happening, the rest of us will be in the dining room with felt tips and hot glue guns doing the following things: painting and folding the Jesus H. Foxx EPs, which arrive today; painting, shading and titling the next run of Nothing Broke, which sold out last week; adding a little colour to the Builders & the Butchers/Loch Lomond Split 12″ vinyl covers; and finally, folding the inlays for ninety Song, by Toad Records Samplers for the Avalanche Album Club.  They are going to look brilliant, so it’s a shame we’ll be giving them all away.  I’d like to sell them on the site, but divvying up the money between twelve bands would be a pretty considerable pain in the arse, so I don’t think I’ll bother.

So, I am still up do my puckered anus in Proper Job, but there is a fine meal down at the Shore waiting for me this evening, with the light of my misspent and wayward life, the beautiful Mrs. Toad.  I am very much looking forward to that.

This weekend’s podcast and Sunday Supplement will be coming from Ruth, who runs the Bowery with her friend Jane.  After being turned into a Magner’s trough during the Festival, The Bowery is reopening on Monday 7th, so this is rather good timing.  I for one will be grateful to have it back, not least because the Jesus H. Foxx EP launch is being held there on Saturday 12th September, assuming the paint has dried on all the covers by then!

1. Last really Blue Petery handcraft thingy you did.
2. Did you make your own Christmas cards when you were a kid too?
3. Favourite kids TV programme which encouraged you to do things other than TV (and no, teenage pregnancy and experimenting with hard drugs do not count, so Grange Hill is forbidden – let’s maintain some innocence here please, people).
4. Most surreal kids’ TV programme you watched.
5. At what stage in the computer revolution did your childhood generally occur?

Jay Farrar – Cahokian

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Howe Gelb – Felonious

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Jim White – Christmas Day

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Kelly Joe Phelps – Taylor John

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Bonnie Prince Billy – Wolf Among Wolves

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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)

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

Mrs Toad and myself went to Bestival on the Isle of Wight last year and, although we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, I must admit that this year I was after something a little smaller. There’s something rather uninspiring about bald fields covered in a sea of broken plastic cups and a two hour queue for warm beer. Once the truly abysmal Bestival lineup for 2007 was announced – Beastie Boys, Chemical Brothers, Primal Scream? Have I gone back in time by ten years or something? – I decided that was it, I was looking for something smaller and far more friendly. Sod the bands, I just want a nice weekend.

Well I’d exchanged a few emails with Simon from End of the Road Records about The Young Republic, who are superb and recently signed to the label. I knew the label had formed from the End of the Road Festival so I thought it might be a good one to take a chance on. There wasn’t much in the lineup that I recognised, but what the hell – a festival full of smaller, less well known bands would be quite fun. And besides, Howe Gelb was on there, so that did it for me and I bought a couple of tickets.

That was something in the region of a month ago. Since then that lineup has just got better and better, as Simon has dropped one gem after another into the mix. This morning they announced Midlake and Yo La Tengo. I can’t believe it! Suddenly instead of just looking forward to this, I am excited as little boy.

Full line-up thus far (I’ve highlighted the ones I think are interesting and provided a few samples – although I haven’t used the little player this time as the javascript would slow the whole page down too much with this many links, sorry):

Alessi (music)
Archie Bronson Outfit
Architecture In Helsinki - Heart it Races
The Bees
Besnard Lakes – Cedric’s War
Brakes
The Broken Family Band
C. W. Stoneking
Charlie Parr
The Congregation
Dan Sartain
Darren Hayman
David Thomas Broughton
David Vandervelde
Devastations
Euros Childs
Findlay Brown
Fionn Regan
Herman Dune
Howe Gelb – Pontiac Slipstream
Hush the Many
Hyacinth House
Indigo Moss
James Yorkston – Someplace Simple
Jeffrey Lewis
Jim White
Joan As Police Woman
Johnny Flynn – Brown Trout Blues
Josh T Pearson
King Creosote – Missionary
Micah P Hinson – I Still Remember
Midlake – Van Occupanther
Misty’s Big Adventure
Monkey Swallows the Universe
My Brightest Diamond
Paris Motel - Entrez Dans la Salpetriere
Pete and the Pirates
Port O’Brien
Reigns
Richard Swift
Seasick Steve
Slow Club
Sons of Noel and Adrian
Stephanie Dosen – Vinalhaven Harbour
Sunny Day Sets Fire
Super Furry Animals
Telegrams
The Twilight Sad – And She Would Darken the Memory
Viking Moses
Woodpigeon – Home
Yo La Tengo – Tom Courtenay
The Young Republic – Your Heart Belongs in Tennessee

Now all Simon has to do is pull off some miracle of scheduling that allows me to see absolutely all these bands, as well as leaving some space for me to check out some of the new ones. Good luck, mate!

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.