First things first, I must inevitably apologise for the horrendous lateness of this podcast.  Between my mum visiting, the gig on Sunday and the Samantha Crain Toad Session we recorded on Monday there just hasn’t been enough time to catch up.

It’s that end of year time, too, when lists are being made, accounts submitted, the last releases of the year tended to and plans for next year being finalised, so just when I thought that I could coast into Christmas, it turns out I actually have just as much work now as at any other time of the year.  Ah well, whinge whinge, etc.

This podcast is called the Saxcast because I happened to be listening to Timber Timbre the other night, and one of their songs features the saxophone quite heavily.  It occurred to me at the time that not only does almost no-one use that instrument at the moment, but despite the eighties ending over twenty years ago, it still seems almost completely taboo, within the kind of musical circles I move in anyway.  Needless to say, this was all it took for me to devote an entire podcast to the instrument.

Direct download: Toadcast #202 – The Saxcast

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01. Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band – It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City (Live) (00.27)
02. Timber Timbre – Do I Have Power (09.02)
03. Quiet Americans – Summer House (16.54)
04. Samantha Crain – Two Sidedness (20.02)
05. Hazel O’Connor – Will You (25.09)
06. Woodenbox – Twisted Mile (33.42)
07. Monster Rally & RumTum – Raindrops (39.53)
08. My Tiny Robots – Guild of Defiants (42.37)
09. David Tattersall – The Typewriter Ribbon (47.51)
10. Mark Knopfler – Going Home (Theme From Local Hero) (58.30)

What a dipstick!  I did a whole post on comedy saxophone in the 80s and did I mentioned Dire Straits or the splendidly be-headgeared Mark Knopfler even once?  Did I bollocks.  What a tool.

Well that needs to be put right, because they were truly hilarious – the band, the headband and the brilliantly overblown saxophone molesting.  It’s so conflicting.  The thing is, I loved Dire Straits at the time, but they have become so ludicrous in retrospect that it’s impossible to disentangle the guilt, the shame, the love, the nostaligia, the humiliation and all the rest of it and produce anything like a coherent evaluation of my feelings towards the band.

Visually, they are as hilarious an anachronism as it is possible to be.  The sound, too, is that kind of soft rock with clenched-face guitar solos and deeply soulful sax that may end up being the great sniggering point of any 80s music retrospective.  But it must be said that Making Movies is a genuinely excellent album – I feel I can start there without really saying anything controversial.  Love Over Gold isn’t bad either.  Brothers in Arms, well that’s harder.  I’m sure I remember some good bits on that album, but it is so hated and ridiculed and I am so ashamed of ever having listened to it that I don’t know if I could ever unclench my ears or my dignity for long enough to really say which bits.

And then there’s nostalgia.  Anyone of my age remembers them being hue during our youth, and it is impossible to disentangle real opinions about anything so woven into your childhood like that.  So I can’t say, but I will confess, snigger though I’m sure you will, that I loved plenty of Dire Straits when I wa, erm, that age.  And I will even confess to really liking plenty of it in retrospect, but while my appreciation starts at one end of their canon, raucous and gleeful mockery starts at the other, and where the two collide I really just don’t know anymore.

Anyway, this all started because of comedy sax, and the theme to Local Hero is not only a classic example of this kind of thing, but the movie itself is something of a Scottish favourite, so it just had to go up.  Then I got sidetracked and confessed to far, far more than I should have.

Mark Knopfler – Going Home (Theme of The Local Hero)
More comedy (really comedy) sax: Dire Straits – Your Latest Trick
And a couple of decent tracks:
Dire Straits – Hand in Hand
Dire Straits – Private Investigations