Song, by Toad

I took a real physical roll of camera film to be developed yesterday. Haven’t done that in a while. Unfortunately the photos it contained were a series of rather grisly images taken with a fish-eye camera at a late-night after-party back at ours last weekend at Homegame.

The guy in the camera shop did look at me a bit funny when I went back in to collect them.

I didn’t bother getting real photo prints, though. I figured the photos were only going up on Facebook for a bit of a giggle, so they might as well just go straight onto a CD. There was no point paying extra for a pack of prints. Which struck me as very revealing about how we interact with photos now in the Web 2.0 world, populated with Facebook, Twitpic and Flickr. It’s like the old joke that asks when was the last time you played Solitaire with a real pack of cards.

When was the last time you looked through a real set of photos?

Matthew only asked me to compose this Friday Five late last night, and I had a panic on the bus this morning because I realised I hadn’t copied five MP3s off my hard-drive at home to put up on the post.

Then I remembered that I had meant to take a compilation CD to the Homegame mix-tape swap bin; (You drop a compilation CD off when you arrive on Friday, then return on Saturday to collect a random CD of someone else’s in return. A bit like a mix-tape Secret Santa.) but I managed to leave the CD itself at home after compiling and burning it. Luckily for us today I still had all the tracks for my compilation on my portable USB hard drive that lives in my bag.

So that has ended up giving today’s chioce of tunes the same theme as my compilation CD was going to have; classic ‘Side One: Track One’ songs.

So here’s today’s test:

1. Tell us a fishing story. Come on, everyone’s got at least one fishing story.

2. What embarassing things tend to happen around you when you stay up late?

3. What was on the last real camera film you had developed?

4. What do you do with photos you take nowadays?

5. Best Side One: Track One ever.

And here are the choons:

Beck – Loser

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Blur – For Tomorrow

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Grand Champeen – Cottonmouth

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Mercury Rev – Secret for a Song

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Ramones – Blitzkrieg Bop

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Sorry this has been so late coming, but we have spent the day recording the sixth Toad Session with the Pictish Trail.  And now I am off to London to see some friends and speak to people about getting Meursault onto some bills down South.  We’re also going to be talking to Pure Groove and Rough Trade about stocking the record, which should hopefully go alright.

So yes, I’m going to be sitting on a train down to London as you read this, leafing through magazines and trying to find people who might be interested in reviewing future Toad releases.  There’s no rest for the wicked and I don’t even have time to write any more on this post either.  DC will be posting his show tomorrow in place of the Toadcast, and I will be back properly functioning on Monday or Tuesday with a bit of luck.  This week’s five and five songs have been chosen by Johnny Pictish, Fee, Gavin, myself and Dylan at the end of the Toad Session.  I am now going to get pissed and fuck off down South.  Have a good weekend Toadlings.

1. Who put the Ram in a a-ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?
2. Ideal next Toad Session.
3. Whis is Irn-Bru orange?
4. Favourite daytime TV show for when you have a day off during the week.
5. Chicken or fish?

Grandaddy – Jeez Louise

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The Pictish Trail – I Don’t Know Where to Begin

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The Walkmen – The Rat

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Ryan Adams – To Be Young

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Mercury Rev – Opus 40

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[The third in our Introduce Your Local Record Shop series is the first celebrity post, in which local pop superstar and all round glamorous lothario, the Russell Brand of Edinburgh, Rob St. John describes his deprived upbringing in a tiny little village in Hobbiton somewhere.  He's going to kill me for this, isn't he.]

Independent record shops have a pivotal role in the expansion and evolution of many people’s listening habits and I’m no exception. I grew up in village in rural Lancashire, and Townsend Records was the only record shop (ok, I’m definitely excluding Woolworths) in the nearest market town, Clitheroe. Now, in communities this size, to be viewed as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ is as easy as watching MTV2 or dabbing on a bit of black mascara. There’s very little of the one-upmanship (“what do you mean you don’t own Tigermilk on vinyl, you philistine!?”) I later encountered and wholeheartedly avoid in the inevitable move to the big-ish city. Even the “The band” explosion of the Libertines/Strokes/White Stripes in my late teens caused barely a ripple outside a devoted few. Mentioning Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy brought a response of “yeah, he’s that Scottish guy – dead, isn’t he?”

Yet in this musical backwater, with no bands (except, ahem, Zydeco Blues, lets say little more on that..) and aside from one multimillion white elephant of a venue run by religious zealots who wouldn’t allow gigs, no venues, Townsend did, and still does, pretty well. We had sporadic and slow internet, and very little preconception of what was “in” and what wasn’t. Hearing new music was pretty much the Peel Show or mate’s compilations. This was two or three years before file-sharing became accessible to us. As a result, the varied, even unashamedly random stocking policy in store led to adventures in buying CDs for their name/cover art/vague recommendation etc, resulting in some huge successes (Television, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mercury Rev, Pavement, The Beta Band) and some shockers which I still look at ruefully in my CD collection (Athlete remain the main culprits here).

There was a 3 for £20 deal on all but the newest CDs, but the stock at the shop was so low that there were barely ever three CDs you cared to buy. So we learnt to covertly accumulate viable purchases in out-of-the-way and dusty parts of the shop like classical and “golden oldies” and hope that in the next week new stock would arrive to make up the deficit. Sometimes, of course they would disappear in the interim, though I do like the idea that a classical music fan happened upon and subsequently bought the GY!BE or Soundgarden CD I was stashing. Compared to these (slightly wealthier, but not much) days, I bought so much more music then. We were the poorest patrons around, and that the shop still survives in such a musically stagnant town heartens me, particularly when bigger and more varied independent shops in cities are closing their doors. As ever, if you are in the area (and I would recommend it for a day or a week, though not 18 years), pop in, have a look, keep tiny indie shops like this alive, some of my 3 for £20 stashes will probably still be in the free jazz section, slowly eroding.

Here’s three discoveries from albums that still remain favourites:

Gomez – Get Miles (from Bring It On)
Mercury Rev – Holes (from Deserter’s Songs)
Television – Friction (from Marquee Moon)