As per last year we shall once again be streaming the Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig live for those of you who are either at home sick or in a different time zone and hence grateful of the entertainment.

Again, as the player slows the whole page down I’ll put it below the break, so just click through and you’ll be able to see Kev from River of Slime play a short set around 10pm, Neil from Meursault play solo acoustic from about 10:45pm and then another half hour set (or so) from Kev at about half past midnight. Do say hello in the chat thingy too, so I know you’re there. I may have to type very quietly, but I will respond! Live stream player below the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Aaaaaaand another year rolls around, and we find ourselves once again at New Year’s Eve.  Or approaching it anyway.

And this time we have something a little different for you, an idea which was suggested to me the day that Kev from River of Slime (and FOUND) played a set in our front room which we streamed for Social Media Week.  There were three or four of us watching that evening, but it was pretty obvious there should have been more, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to put that right.

Kev will play a short set early in the night, then Neil from Meursault will play some songs just before the bells, we’ll all walk out into Inverleith Park* where you get a pretty good view of the fireworks, and then we’ll come back for some more River of Slime and then, er… well, fuck knows, frankly.  Tickets are only a fiver and very, very limited in number inevitably, so pick ‘em up quick.

All the money goes straight to the bands so there are no guesties, although Kev and Neil are welcome to fund your ticket out of their cut if you can persuade them to do so.

Sold out now, sorry.

*This is not obligatory of course, particularly if the weather is pish.

It’s the Gigpocalypse! Gigmageddon! A gigantic week-long party of musical funz! The final kick in the balls your exhausted, fading liver can’t quite handle before it gives up the ghost and implodes altogether.

After a pretty lacklustre musical showing thus far, the Edinburgh Festival finally earns its spurs this week with what can only be described as the inevitable descent of total and utter carnage.

Lach’s one-man show is back on (after illness) at Cabaret Voltaire, free every night this week at 8:45pm, and of course the Antihoot will be on every night this week except Tuesday from midnight to 3am in the Gilded Balloon.

Then there’s also the next two Toad at the Circus gigs, firstly an acoustic strummer affair, and then on Friday a thumping racket.  I will be DJing at these gigs, but don’t let that put you off, they might still be quite fun.

As well as conventional gigs, Avalanche Records have a full list of really rather excellent in-stores this week too, featuring the likes of Emily Scott and Edinburgh School for the Deaf – full details here. Oh, and of course the week finally stumbles to an alcoholic close with the return of the fantabulous Retreat Festival.  It will be awesome, and my liver will be begging for mercy long before the end.

Tuesday 23rd August 2011: Ulrich Schnauss & Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.

This will be a carnival of electro loveliness.  I know less about Mr. Schnauss, but Jonnie’s album is pretty damn close to being the best Scottish album of the year, for my money.

Jonnie Common – Summer is For Going Places

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Wednesday 24th August 2011: Neil Pennycook, Benjamin Shaw & John Egdell at the Electric Circus.

It’ll be an all-acoustic affair for our third Toad at the Circus gig.  Apart from Meursault’s Neil Pennycook performing solo, we have the amazing Benjamin Shaw coming up from London and the equally excellent John Egdell from Newcastle.

Benjamin Shaw – 12,000 Sentinels

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Wednesday 24th August 2011: Sebadoh at Cabaret Voltaire.

This is a bit straightforward isn’t it.  Sebadoh are lo-fi indie rock legends (to paint with the broadest of brushes) and they are playing in Edinburgh.  I think this might be sold out though, so there might be little point listing it but umm… it’s Sebadoh, y’know.

Sebadoh – Nothing Like You

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Thursday 25th August 2011: Withered Hand, eagleowl, Woodpigeon (solo) & Meursault (solo) at the Queen’s Hall.

Something of an Edinburgh all-stars gig this one.  If you aren’t from here and want to know why those of us in Edinburgh have been so excited by our homegrown music scene recently, then this and Retreat are the ones to show you.

Withered Hand – Religious Songs

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Thursday 25th August 2011: Willy Mason at Cabaret Voltaire.

Willy Mason has sort of slipped off the critical radar since the pop smash (relatively speaking of course) of Oxygen back in about 2005 or so.  I saw him live back in London before moving up here actually, and it was absolutely brilliant.

Willy Mason – We Can Be Strong

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Friday 26th August 2011: Brown Brogues, Ghost Outfit & Rollor at the Electric Circus.

Let’s see the babbling hen sluts talk over this.  Fuck you, motherfuckers, tonight is going to be loud!  Brown Brogues are a clattering racket and according to The Pigeon Post Ghost Outfit are the best live band in Manchester at the moment.

Brown Brogues – Treet U Beta

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Friday 26th & Saturday 27th August 2011: Lach’s Antihoot Antifolk-off at the Gilded Balloon.

As the Antihoot has been taking place this year Lach and myself have been selecting, with the help of the audience, the favourite act of each night and we’re inviting them all back this weekend, where we’ll be recording the performances to release as The Best of the Antihoot on Song, by Toad Records.  It’ll also be a fantastic way to have a big fuck off party to celebrate the end of an awesome run at this year’s Festival which has, of course, seen me make my stand-up comedy debut.  But the less said about that the better.

Saturday 27th August 2011: The Machine Room, Land of Cakes & Plastic Animals at Sneaky Pete’s.

Continuing the excellence of their Festival booking, Sneaky Pete’s have three excellent new Edinburgh bands on on Saturday.   I’ll be at Retreat, but if it happens to sell out then this looks like an excellent alternative.

The Machine Room – Your Head on the Floor Next Door

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Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th August 2011: Retreat Festival at Pilrig St. Paul’s church.

There are a couple of events which define my musical calendar.  Most Fence events would pretty much be included in there, and the other would be Retreat.  The best bands in Edinburgh, fucking lovely people and the nicest atmosphere at any music even I’ve been to in the city.  Bart Owl is a hero. A sarcastic, ginger hero.

I don’t really need to add anything to the following, do I?  Apart from a big thanks to the Electric Circus for suggesting I put these nights on, thanks to all the bands for agreeing to play and umm… well, I hope to fuck you all turn up, eh!

The player for the live stream slows down the whole page massively, so I’ve put it below the fold so those of you who wish to can watch our house gig.  My guess is that Brits will be out on the piss, so mostly Americans wasting the last of their afternoon in the office or massively hungover Australians will be tuning in. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel like an unwashed pair of old socks.  Not so much for the boozing, which was surprisingly restrained actually.  I suppose, to be fair, there’s only so much bevvy you can pour down a gullet already creaking with frightening levels of food.  And so it proved – I have generally been so full this weekend that I haven’t ended up getting all that pissed.

Anyway, listings first, let’s be properly efficient about this.  I have my own shit to pimp, after all, and let’s not forget that cynical self-promotion is the prime focus of this site.  There are only a couple of things on this week… well, sorry, scratch that.  If you are looking for entertainment in Edinburgh on New Year’s Eve of all nights, and you need me to point you towards it, then your Fun-O-Meter is in serious need of calibration.  Or replacement.  Or both.

However, if you are looking for proper, actual fun, of a musical bent then your options are a lot thinner.  There might possibly be some decent bands playing the official Princes St. Gardens Hogmanay thingy (I haven’t checked), but between the crowds and the weather there is absolutely no fucking way in the universe you should be contemplating that.  Honestly.  This is not Approved Fun, people, it is Bad Fun, and should be avoided.  There are a couple of interesting things happening this week though:

Wednesday 29th December 2010: Scars, TV21, Ballboy & Kid Canaveral at the Picturehouse.

On the topic of Approved Fun, anything Kid Canaveral do is very much Approved Fun as far as I am concerned.  I don’t do a best live band thing on Song, by Toad – there are really only so many lists I can be arsed making – but they would have been there or thereabouts had I done so.  Scars are a different proposition altogether: they were part of a thriving Edinburgh scene which seemed to simmer along around the time of the Shop Assistants, Josef K and Fire Engines.  This is their first gig in many, many years.

Ballboy – All the Records on the Radio are Shite

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Friday 31st December 2010: Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig, with Jonnie Common, Neil Pennycook and Jamie Scott.

The grumbling and whingeing about large parties in the centre of town is the primary reason Mrs. Toad and I decided bollocks, why not have a gig in the house. Last year was the first one, and we enjoyed ourselves so much we have decided to make it a tradition, this year being graced by three gentlemen who are as likely to leave you scratching your heads as bawling your eyes out.  But in a good way, promise!  We’ll be getting a keg of Copper Cascade from Stewart’s and, if the weather’s at least passable, might well wander into Inverleith Park to watch the fireworks.  If we can be arsed. There’s a ticket link below too, because it would really help out if you bought your tickets in advance, just so’s we know how full the place is likely to be.

Sold out now, sorry.

So, splendid – hope to see you there.  And to leave you this week I have this little gem, as the selected highlight from all our lazy weekend of watching appalling films and doing, well, basically bugger all else.  Quite how people in the eighties thought this was macho I have no idea.  But it is a whole new world of buttock-clenchingly, teeth-grindingly, face-contortingly cringeworthy awesome.

Once again this New Year’s Eve Mrs. Toad and I shall be forgoing the dubious pleasure of stumbling about in the freezing cold city centre surrounded by other people’s sick, and will instead be having a glass or two of wine in the house, like we did last year.

Like last year there will be live music, and like last year you are all invited.  Jonnie Common (Inspector Tapehead), Neil Pennycook (Meursault) and Jamie Scott (Japanese War Effort) will be playing, and the set may well include some collaborative stuff, or just three solo sets, depending how effectively they get their shit together in between now and then.

We’ll get another keg, I think, because that was a great success at the Christmas Party.  Kegs tend to cost us around £1.80 per pint (70 pints, £130) so please come prepared to chip in if you fancy guzzling posh beer all night instead of cans of Tennent’s.  Also, we’d really appreciate if you could buy your tickets in advance, just so we have an idea of numbers.  All the money goes directly to the bands, so it is for a good cause.

Sold out now, sorry.

Many thanks – hope to see you there!

In the new year Song, by Toad will be putting on more live shows.  In many ways this is in reaction to our friends Bart and Euan seeming to drop out of regular promotion, and the closure of far too many good venues in Edinburgh over the latter half of 2010.

So, after Euan spoke so consistently well of Colvin at the Wee Red Bar, I have had a word, and we have booked Saturday nights in January and February for Toad nights.  I think I am going to call them the Ides of Toad, simply because I am looking to pick a Saturday as close to the middle of the month as possible. The plan is to have a gig once a month at the Wee Red, except for June and December, when we will try and get the Caves and do something a bit shinier.

Also, we are doing a New Year’s House Gig once again this year, primarily because neither Mrs. Toad nor I can be even remotely arsed schlepping up to Princes Street in the pissing rain to watch some fucking fireworks surrounded by half of fucking Scotland.  Instead we will be in our house, and might traipse up to Inverleith Park to watch the fireworks for free, but only if the weather is good.  And there will be songs – many excellent, excellent songs.

So, by way of a preview of what we have coming up in the immediate future, here are the imminent Song, by Toad Live Stuff Listings:

Friday, 31st December 2010: Neil Pennycook, Jamie Scott & Jonnie Common at the Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig.

Jamie, Jonnie and Neil are all working on a collaborative album at the moment, although I don’t know how much of this will be ready for a first viewing on New Year’s Eve.  In any case, these are three of the most creative musicians in Scotland, as far as I am concerned, and I am immensely looking forward to this one.  It will, as has become tradition for Toad House Gigs, be broadcast live on the web too.

Jonnie Common – Photosynth

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Saturday, 22nd January 2011: The Scottish Englightenment, Johnny Reb & Morris Major at the Wee Red Bar.

I haven’t exactly performed many scientific tests and so on, but I think The Scottish Enlightenment are probably my favourite Scottish band to emerge this year.  I know they’re a lot more than a year old, but it seems like 2010 was the year they got their shit in gear and suddenly produced a shedload of material to make everyone really sit up and take notice.  Johnny Reb have a pile of really promising songs, and will hopefully be one of the bands to really rekindle my love of basic guitar indie, and Morris Major are a new Edinburgh band who seem to have an awful lot of potential as well.  It’s a very guitary lineup, this on, but fuck it, it’s a bloody good lineup as well.

The Scottish Enlightenment – Little Sleep

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Saturday 19th February 2011: Rob St. John, Thirty Pounds of Bone +1 TBC at the Wee Red Bar.

Rob is currently working on his debut full-length, which is something I am hugely looking forward to.  30 Pounds of Bone released one of my favourite albums of 2010.  I could basically add a dancing monkey to this bill and it would still be fucking awesome. Actually…

Thirty Pounds of Bone – Crack Shandy in the Harbour

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[Three more videos below.]

Lach’s famous New York open mic night the Antihoot is responsible for launching the careers of many of the bands people who read this site love the most.  He is, in fact, the man responsible for terms like anti-folk and the movement it represents.

I have to confess I find this kind of odd.  The term is something which has been so ingrained in my musical vocabulary ever since I started writing about music that the idea of it having been invented so recently seems really rather odd.

I always kind of knew I was into anti-folk as well, because the rinky-dinky super traditional stuff has never really attracted me that much, so even before I knew the term I was drawn to bands like The Pogues and Bob Dylan (and even to a degree people like Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg) who would take traditional formats and give them a good beating before they sent them out there.  In fact, Dylan’s own struggles with the New York folk establishment rather mirror those of Lach, so the concept of anti-folk has been around for a while, even if the coherent, more unified movement which gave rise to the likes of Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson did not.

Most of the Edinburgh alt-folkies I know speak of the original anti-folk movement with a kind of hushed reverence, so I guess it’s no surprise that most of them are making an appearance at some point during the Antihoot’s three week Edinburgh run.

On the first night we had a couple of Toad Records favourites down; Yusuf Azak and Neil Pennycook from Meursault.  I’ve seen both of these guys perform like this many times however, so the happiest surprise of the night was actually Finn from Trapped in Kansas.  He hunched over his guitar and sang in an oddly nasal voice, but his was the genuine ‘Oh, hello, what’s this?’ moment for me on the opening night, particularly as I had no idea who he was until he mentioned his band halfway through his set.

Invariably in the midst of a Festival best known for its stand up comedy there were a few in the crowd who, by one in the morning, had optimistically decided that they too were funny, funny guys.  Lach himself, as compere, did a good job of keeping them quiet, but the bands dealt with it well too.  Most satisfyingly, I heard a couple of the performers talking about getting their mates down on a regular basis so that there was always a hardcore presence of people who were there to enjoy the music.

One thing, however, which became increasingly obvious as the night wore on was this: when the bands were good, the shushing didn’t have to last beyond the first thirty seconds of the song because the most talented musicians, irrespective of genre, were consistently able to keep the crowd’s attention.  This, I suppose, is the double-edged sword of the open mic night.

I also thought the show benefitted from the format: eight minutes or two songs, whichever came first.  It meant that if someone was shit, they were off too quickly to become tiresome.  That alone makes it worth going along, particularly if one or two people you know are likely to be playing, because there were a lot of good performers there who I’ve never heard a whisper of before.

Dylan has also put a few photos up on Blueback Hotrod, if you fancied a look at those too.

Me and the missus are rambling away together on this one.  It’s largely new music, bookended by a couple of more well-known things.  We Invent a new term – a weird combination of food and sex called culiniungus.  We offend the Irish and the Scots.  In fact, we are as offensively and predictably us as you could imagine.

We were out and totally smashed at the Broken Records gig at the Bowery yesterday, followed by some hot Sneaky Pete’s action.  There are some disastrously embarrassing pictures here, if you want to point and laugh.  The gig was amazing.  I knew a group like Broken Records would be amazing in a small space like that, and so it proved.

I had to do some very pointed Standing Up though, which was fucking annoying.  What the fuck is it with people, sitting down at fucking gigs?  If the room’s empty that’s one thing, but the room was full, people were on tiptoes up the back, and this shower of cunts insisted on sitting on their fucking arses down the front, protecting a meter and a half of empty floor space between them and the band.  So, as Mr. Discreetandtactful, I went and stood in front of them.  Fuckwits.  The band did get everyone on their feet after a song or two, which was a fucking relief, but honestly… it’s rock ‘n’ roll bitches, get up off your fucking hippy folk arseholes and stop acting like the Chipping Sodbury Chapter of the National Union of Knitting Champions.  It’s not, to paraphrase a friend of mine, the fucking Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

This delightful little anecdote does have a darker side, however.  Some lass tugged on my sleeve to ask me to sit down during the first song, and I attempted to politely but firmly say no thank you.  Unfortunately I may have succeeded more at the latter than the former, and ended up just being rude to the woman.  Who was very pregnant.  Well done me.  Picking fights with pregnant women isn’t really all that clever, is it.  So, er, sorry pregnant lady, I didn’t mean to be quite so terse, nor did I mean to imply that you should just stop moaning about your baby and stand up.  But then, you can’t really expect to sit two metres back from the stage and object to anyone standing in front of you either, because that’s just silly.

Oh, and we met Peej, a reader from New York, who was in town for the week and said hello.  He was a really nice chap, so why he reads this fucking site is a mystery, to be honest, but it was brilliant of him to say hello, and then to put up with our drunken stumbling later on as well.   Sometimes I love teh internetz.  Not times like this of course, but sometimes.

Toadcast #68 – The Leprecast

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1. Joy Zipper – Dosed & Became Invisible (01.40)
2. Love Like Fire – William (08.37)
3. Rock Plaza Central – O Lord, How Many are My Foes (13.17)
4. Animal Magic Tricks & Neil Pennycook (17.24)
5. Ambulances – Last Old Fiver (24.45)
6. King Creosote – Camels Swapped for Wives (27.11)
7. Jesus H. Foxx – I’m Half the Man You Were (33.51)
8. God Help the Girl – Act of the Apostle (44.15)
9. The Limes – Dead Furniture (46.47)
10. The Pogues – Night Train to Lorca (58.06)