So here were are once again on another distinctly mediocre morning in one of the most utterly unremarkable months of the calendar.  I was born in November and at least November is pretty reliably completely shit, whereas October doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.  It’s not even consistently rubbish enough to hate.

So far so fucking splendid.  I have been driven away from Facebook today by an over-abundance (i.e. one person) of grown fucking adults talking in fucking babyspeak.  “U cud of come 2 [insert name of some shit club or other].”  Dear lord, that makes me want to stamp on something fluffy and cute.

How much fucking time can you possibly be saving yourself by deliberately spelling things like a fucking clueless, infantile fucktard?  Just suppressing the urge to commit suicide for being such a shallow, vapid, hateful cunt must take more energy than just using the English language properly in the fucking first place. The universe will catch up with you twats, you know.  That kind of imbecility won’t go unpunished in a just world. Karma hates adults who think they’re illiterate twelve-year-olds, and you will get yours eventually.

Fuck it, that’s all I’ve got this week.  Here are some gigs.  Go to them.

Tuesday 11th October 2011: Lach performs at the Storytelling Night at The Stand.

Having hosted an open mic night in New York for the last thirty-odd years Lach not only has a lot to tell, but also has developed a knack for telling it.  He the kind of guy who can be funny without actually having to tell jokes – just a natural storyteller, really.

Lach – Blue Overcoat

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Thursday 13th October 2011: Men Diamler at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

Men Diamler, for those of you who live in St. Andrews, will be playing on an amazing bill on the 11th, with Jeffrey Lewis and Withered Hand, but for those of us Edinburgh-bound you can catch him here on Thursday at Henry’s Cellar Bar. Rich plays solo acoustic music, but that doesn’t really even begin to describe it – he can be singing tragic ballads one minute, and bellowing in your face the next.

Men Diamler – Naughty Songwriter Blues

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Thursday 13th October 2011: Vic Galloway presents Bwani Junction, Miniature Dinosaurs & Blank Canvas at the Electric Circus.

This is the first in a series of monthly gigs hosted by Vic at the Electric Circus. He’ll be introducing and interviewing the bands from the stage as well, so you’ll get to hear the voice of Scottish music radio coming from an actual person for a change, instead of a set of speakers.

Friday 14th October 2011: Michelle Shocked at the Caves.

I genuinely have no idea what Michelle Shocked is up to these days, and I haven’t listened to her music in ages, I have to confess.  But on hearing she was playing here I happened serendipitously upon a copy of Short Sharp Shocked in a secondhand record shop, and it reminds me how much I enjoyed her early records, which I discovered back when I first moved the UK in the early nineties.

Michelle Shocked – Black Widow

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Sunday 16th October 2011: Alasdair Roberts, Aileen Campbell & Wounded Knee at the Scottish Storytelling Center.

This is the Edinburgh leg of the Archive Trails tour, which I believe is a project organised by the artists and the ever-impressive Tracer Trails, creating new work inspired by the contents of the archives at the School of Scottish Studies.

Here we are once more, another week closer to the darkest day of the year, which will be upon us scarily soon. Actually, it’s not the darkest day at all, is it, just the shortest one.  But I think you’ll agree that darkest sounds better.

The week just gone has seen the collapse of the Edinburgh Settlement, a charity which had existed for over a hundred years.  They seemed to hold a rather irresponsibly large number of expensive mortgages, which I can only guess played a significant role in their collapse, and indeed The Forest Cafe, Bristo Hall, The GRV and The Roxy Art House had been on the market for quite a while before the charity finally felt the chop late last week.

That’s all just me speculating of course, so don’t take it too seriously, but at the very least, carrying a lot of debt would not have helped at all as things became progressively tighter towards the end.

More to the point, Edinburgh is now down three venues, and we didn’t really have enough to begin with.  One very important point made in Drowned in Sound’s recent Glasgow love-a-thon was that we suffer very much for a lack of good venues over on this side of the M8.  We’re also pretty bloody short of active promoters at the moment, and this is just going to make it worse, leaving just one or two people to be responsible for the entire musical life of the city, which is really no good at all.

So good luck to all the now unemployed staff, and as for the rest of us (myself included): time to get things happening again please, because otherwise we’re going to end up with no bands at all putting Edinburgh on their tour itinerary.

Tuesday 2nd November 2010: Happy Birthday, Mitchell Museum & Morris Major at Sneaky Pete’s.

This will be straightforward, boisterous, bouncy indie pop from start to finish.  If you can’t have fun at this gig, I am tempted to suggest that you can’t have fun at all.

Mitchell Museum – Take the Tongue Out

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Tuesday 2nd November 2010: Michelle Shocked at the Queen’s Hall.

Michelle Shocked? I hear you ask.  Yes, Michelle Shocked.  She’s possibly gone a bit gospelly, rocky, souly recently – just look at the rather worrying blurb on the QH page – but in her early, acoustic days she wrote some truly wonderful songs.  So approach this with a little caution, but it could be really good.

Michelle Shocked – The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore

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Thursday 4th November 2010: Born to Be Wide: Playing Away at the Electric Circus.

The B2BW team bring us more practical tips and advice from the experts in the field.  After briefly shoehorning my way into the back of their A&R one last month, before remembering that I am not in a band and hence have no interest in getting signed and promptly fucking off to the pub instead, I am thinking that this one will be a little quieter and, from my perspective at least, a lot more directly relevant.  It’s about booking tours and getting gigs in faraway places.  Skills it would greatly improve our label to have at our disposal.

Thursday 4th November 2010: The Last Battle, The Scottish Enlightenment & Very Well at the Wee Red Bar.

Two bands you already know fine well I like, with the Scottish Enlightenment mere weeks away from their debut album launch.  A debut album which is, in case you were wondering, very very good indeed.  Very Well, though.  Anyone know anything about them?

The Scottish Enlightenment – The First Will Be Last

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I know it’s a bit obvious to do a podcast like this so shortly after my birthday, but it gives me the opportunity to ramble a bit and play some classics I might not otherwise have played.

There are so many wonderful songs about growing old, and I actually think I may have missed most of them.  I have no fear of being old, but for some reason it feels a little more immediate this year but I don’t know why.

So goodnight people, it’s been a pleasure.  Sleep well and don’t be too rough on yourselves.  Take Kirsty’s advice and “don’t be too rough on my cold, cold heart; it’s all I’ve got left to me now.”

That may be the smart-arsed line, but the most important line in this song is the bit where she says that “there’s a light in your eyes tells me somebody’s in and you won’t come the cowboy with me”.  It’s such a crucial judgment, isn’t it.  You take a bet on someone, you throw in your chips and you hope for the best.  So if you’re feeling brave, good luck to you.  Look after her, I’ll be there anytime soon.

Toadcast #47 – The Oldcast

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01. The Rolling Stones – Mother’s Little Helper (00.01)
02. The Band – Rockin’ Chair (07.46)
03. Michelle Shocked – Memories of East Texas (11.21)
04. Hafdis Huld – Tomoko (20.57)
05. Baby Walrus – Some Dawns No Bird Will Sing (28.44)
07. Donny Hue & the Colors – The World Came Running (30.25)
08. Mumford & Sons – Little Lion Man (34.21)
08. Soko – The Dandy Cowboys (43.31)
09. Kirsty MacColl – Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim (47.04)
10. Neil Young – Old Man (55.09)
11. Jeffrey Lewis – Back When I Was Four (58.12)

I was reading Marcy’s excellent Lost in Your Inbox today and happened across a post of hers that gave me pause for thought, and just a little wistful remembering.

The last few years of my life have been relatively stable. I have been in Edinburgh for about three years, and was in London for three and a half before that, but I haven’t always been so sedentary. In the years preceding London, in reverse order, I managed the following: Cambridge – 18 months, Manchester – 6 months, Montreal – three months, Cape Cod – a year, Glasgow – ten months, Cape Cod – four months, Grongingen – ten months, Glasgow – three years, Manchester – one year, Vienna – three years, Singapore – three years. In other words, over the course of about fifteen years I upped sticks and vanished about fifteen times.

It wasn’t quite as crazy as that, but it was quite hectic, and most of the time it involved abandoning pretty much my entire life and all my friends and disappearing off with no more than a couple of suitcases to my name. Because of growing up in international schools where people changed countries, and hence schools, on a regular basis, I have seen so many disrupted friendships dwindle as well-intentioned letter-writing slowly tailed off. Consequently since high school, whenever I move country I tend to just cut the cord and go.

It’s very, very rare that I stay in touch with anyone from my past actually. Once gone, I tend to just look forward and try and make a life wherever it is that I have ended up and reading Marcy’s words I was reminded of just how many people I have ended up just abandoning to the swirling mists of my past – how many good friendships have been aborted, how many shared things have been forgotten, how much human kindness has gone unremembered.

It’s sad, I suppose, but it’s not a bad thing, I don’t think. There’s little point in stringing these things out beyond their natural lifespan. Most friendships are surprisingly context-dependent and there have been quite a few times when I have known them to have an uneccessary cloud cast over them by ill-advised and utlimately fruitless attempts to keep them going once the environment in which they first grew has ceased to exist. Nowadays I tend to just wrap them up in my history as good, complete entities and let them rest there. Some day a song or a coincidence or a conversation will remind me of them and there will be one of those warm, nostalgic moments where you relive that time for a little while, before setting it carefully back in place and returning to the present.

So it is sad I suppose. Or melancholy. But there’s a warm, happy core to the sadness too, so I still think it’s a good thing in most ways. Ironic, too, that I ended up marrying a girl I knew from high school and hadn’t seen for the best part of ten years by the time we met up again.

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
Gene – I Can’t Decide If She Really Loves Me
Supergrass – Moving
Tom Waits – Shiver Me Timbers

I recently picked up a copy of an album that takes me very precisely back in time to a specific year, a specific place and a specific girl.

I was raised, for the most part, in Vienna and only came to the UK at age 17 to go to university. Because my Mum is from Manchester that is where I went to do my Foundation Course in Art & Design, despite having been offered a place at Wimbledon School of Art which, with crystal clear 20/20 hindsight, would have been a far better choice. After Vienna where I was, compared to the people of all sorts of nations with whom I went to school, extremely English, it was a massive shock to find out quite how English I actually wasn’t, in reality. I also didn’t have the saving grace of being obviously foreign, which gets you quite a lot of slack cut for odd behaviour.

Consequently, it was a pretty horrendous year of rather merciless culture shock. Once I was offered my place at the Glasgow School of Art, in early January, I packed in the course, which I hated, and took a job in one of the local 5 Star hotels (at least my BBC accent, otherwise a liability in Manchester, was good for something). There I met a very intelligent and very prickly and rather pretty Irish girl who I spent the next two and a half years of my life with. She was easily the most musically interested of any of my other girlfriends and we got into all sorts of really good bands together.

She also, as my only ex to actually own any music, took a fair bit with her when we split up. Generally I replaced this stuff pretty immediately, but this one I never got round to buying again until last week. This enforced break meant that when I heard the music again, for the first time in oh, about ten years, all these incredibly vivid memories came flooding back, as it will with music.

So I thought I’d share some songs from Michelle Shocked’s 1988 album, Short Sharp Shocked. It’s a singer songwriter affair with heavily Southern country, gospel and folk influences. One of my favourite songs on the album is Anchorage, if just because of Michelle’s relationship with her friend’s husband: ‘Leroy says send a picture/ Leroy says hello/ Leroy says keep on rocking girl.’ There’s something so generous and real about the picture of friendship she paints, it really has me choking a little and having to hastily remember the aloof, macho image of cool indifference I have so carefully constructed for myself. Ahem.

Have a listen though. It’s interesting: in the light of Jenny Lewis and Neko Case’s recent success with a very similar sort of music it is interesting to hear some of their precursors. And have a little covert sniffle at the loveliness of the songs as we do so!

Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
Michelle Shocked – The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore
Michelle Shocked – Black Widow