Ah, mates.  Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em.  Mrs. Toad’s best friend from her reckless yoof is visiting us here in Edinburgh with her gentleman friend, and consequently I got to thinking about my own old friends, and all the people who, over the years, have introduced me to so much brilliant music.  So I started to patch together a playlist of all the important friends who have added a lot of music to my life.  The problem is that it became way too long for my one hour restriction, so for this week I cast that aside, and allowed myself an extra ten minutes.

Honestly though, old friends are so important, this could have gone on for two hours, easily.  Every one of the people I mention here has a whole story of their own, and it was quite difficult to resist telling all of them in proper detail.  It seems such a shame, actually, to reduce all of these people to a two-minute link.  I could almost do a whole podcast for any one of these scenarios really, and maybe I’ll do that in future.  For now, though, you’ll have to make do with this.  It may be shabby, but it really could have been so much worse.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Toad is fucking plastered.  Oh good.  Enjoy!

Toadcast #50 – The Friendcast

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

01. Pink Floyd – On the Turning Away (02.27)
02. Pearl Jam – Black (11.23)
03. The Tragically Hip – Wheat Kings (18.30)
04. Gene – Her Fifteen Years (25.23)
05. Radiohead – Black Star (28.04)
06. Verve – Lucky Man (34.41)
07. Weeping Willows – Eternal Flames (39.19)
08. Billy Bragg – Days Like These (DC Remix) (45.41)
09. Bob Dylan – Po’ Boy (49.42)
10. Elbow – Newborn (55.46)
11. Blanche – Do You Trust Me? (63.19)
12. Maximo Park – Apply Some Pressure (69.07)

I enjoyed reading this little bit in the Times about a judge in Manchester getting stuck into some goddamn awful talk show because it provoked one of its guests into nutting someone on air.  The quote from the Times piece is here:

“The circumstances of this case are exceptional and the provocation involved seems to be paramount. I have had the misfortune of viewing The Jeremy Kyle Show and I feel bound to make some observations.

“It seems to me that the whole purpose of the show is to effect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people who are in some kind of turmoil. It is for no more and no less than titillating members of the public who have nothing better to do with their mornings than sit and watch this show, which is a human form of bear-baiting under the guise of entertainment. The people responsible for this, namely the producers, should in my opinion be in the dock with you, Mr Staniforth.”

Good.  Fuck the producers of these things and fuck the audiences too. This must be one of the most utterly unedifying sights in modern culture, how we get together to mock, deride and humiliate the weak and the foolish in our society.  I am not saying they aren’t entertaining because I find them compellingly awful myself – they are the very epitome of car crash TV.  But I do not and will not watch them.  Circus talk shows, the love of reality TV, the mobs who gang up to attack paediatricians, the howls of self-righteous outrage that accompany press witch-hunts – they’re all part of the same ugly instinct and I really wish we knew better than to indulge it.

The people who watch shows like this remind me of the outraged mob who formed when the children who killed James Bulger were released in 2001.  Most of those people were dreadful human beings going about making threats and getting on their high horses about something for no other apparent reason than to simply manage to give their own lives a sheen of validity by forcibly making the point that no matter how worthless they were as individuals, at least they weren’t as bad as  those two Evil Child Murderers.  It had nothing to do with the issues at hand, it was just personal validation through facile, hysterical self-righteousness.

With talk shows the mechanism seems to be similar: part of the enjoyment of watching is intrinsically related with boosting our own self worth by claiming acres of distance between our own normal, banal lives and the freaks that are on the telly.  With Venables and Thompson, at least they actually did something bad.  The reaction to it was disgusting to behold, but they at least were responsible themselves, although given they were ten at the time, the extent is debatable.

In the talk show scenario all the exhibits need to do to deserve our vicious taunting and ridicule is to be dysfunctional.  Or stupid.  Or weak.  We are rounding up the lame and the impotent, putting them on show like animals and then provoking them to do something humiliating so we can all laugh at them.  How is this different from the early years of boxing, where some folks would ’round up a couple a niggers’ and make them batter each other to a bloody, comatose pulp for the entertainment and sport of the white audience?  This is the level at which the producers of these shows find themselves.  Congratulations.  You must be very proud.  How is this any different from dog fighting?  The only difference is that neither being mentally deficient, rather than actually brain damaged, nor emotionally crippled are currently recognised as being part of a neatly defined ‘minority’ deserving of protection or pity.

If you watch this shit you are essentially enjoying the humiliation of the weak to make yourself feel better and you should be abjectly fucking ashamed of yourself.  Is it any wonder bullying is on the rise in schools?  This is why I hate the Pete Doherty Tabloid Circus.  That is why watching these idiotically vain celebrities and pseudo-celebrities make fools of themselves for us all to laugh at on reality TV turns my stomach.  That’s why I felt such a dick for posting that Britney rant the other week.  Yes, they are culpable themselves and yes, it is compelling in a rather gut-wrenching way.  But we should have some fucking dignity and have our fun at the expense of someone capable of defending themselves for a change.

So, erm… Christ.  What songs do I put with that little honey, then?

Radiohead – Karma Police
Daniel Johnston – Like a Monkey in the Zoo
Eef Barzelay – Ballad of Bitter Honey
Bob Dylan – Who Killed Davey Moore?
Pearl Jam – Jeremy

I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone with this podcast.  Firstly, I am throwing in a couple of songs that I wanted to put on the Contrast Podcast episode entitled Young a few weeks ago.  I was away at my brother’s wedding at the time, and I never got the chance so here they are.

Secondly, a good while ago a regular reader of mine called Allen Lulu tagged me with one of these internetty meme thingies whereby you write about the music that was in the charts the year you turned 18.  Well for me that year was 1993, but the chart music was abysmal, so I couldn’t possibly do that to you.  Instead I had a look at what I was listening to myself from that year and came across so many excellent old songs I haven’t heard for ages that a quick post turned into an entire podcast.  And this is that podcast – me at age 18.

Toadcast #9 – The Folly of Youth

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

1. The Spin Doctors – Two Princes (03.21)
2. Stereo MCs – Connected (09.08)
3. Radiohead – Anyone Can Play Guitar (13.41)
4. Stone Temple Pilots – Plush (17.30)
5. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Loverman (25.12)
6. Levellers – This Garden (31.29)
7. James – Five-O (38.24)
8. The Long Blondes – Once & Never Again (6Music Acoustic Session) (43.12)
9. Gogol Bordello – Never Want to be Young Again (49.48)
10. The Mathletes – Linger (Cranberries Cover) (55.27)
11. Pearl Jam – Daughter (57.45)
12. Blind Melon – No Rain (63.19)
13. Soul Asylum – New World (67.57)
14. The Lemonheads – If I Could Talk I’d Tell You (71.50)
15. Portishead – Mysterons (75.24)
16. Engine Alley – Song For Someone (82.26)

The blogosphere is cheering me up a little at the moment folks – people are writing political rants. With venom. And swears. Actually, not too many swears, but plenty of vim and vigour and I think this is fucking brilliant.

If anything has been symbolic of the problems of modern democracy it has been the recent disregard for its very mechanisms – by the leaders the whole bloody system served to elect in the first place. First there was the public theft of an election by George Bush – one of the most spectacular and flagrant cases of utter disregard for the democratic process I have ever come across. What an amphibiously dishonest, grasping, over-privileged, mentally deficient grotesque parody of a human being that man is. On the outside he’s just a gurning cretin, but on the inside he is a Mr. Creosote of acquisitive greed with a heart like a little black ball-bearing of condensed evil.

Then there was the war in Iraq. At least Americans were broadly in favour of the war beforehand, albeit only because they were force-fed a never-ending avalanche of bare-faced lies and treated like retarded children by their own repellent government. Generally, however, I think a referendum at the time would have favoured the war although I’m entirely open to correction on this point. But on our side you get Tony Blair, purporting to lead a country who almost entirely rejected the spurious and at times virulently dishonest and utterly pathetic cajoling we were subjected to in order to justify prosecuting a war of abject immorality, craven avarice and genocidal, racist contempt for the lives of people whose crime was simply being a bit brown and rather foreign. Blair pushed through his personal, evangelical agenda directly against the will of the people in a spectacular exhibition of psychotic, single-minded vanity.

Why give this long-dead horse another poke? Well because the 90s seemed to nurture a demoralising apathy to all things political. The consensus view seemed to lapse into a defeated shrug of the shoulders and a general impression that politicians were so utterly morally bankrupt and entirely self-interested that there was no point even attempting to engage the tawdry little weasels because they’d just do whatever the fuck they pleased anyway. Now, this point of view is pretty accurate, but the apathy it engendered has basically led politicians and business leaders (who are all unelected politicians these days, given the enormous power of large corporations) to feel, as they are no longer being scrutinised with any semblance of genuine interest, that they can abandon even the pantomime of giving a fuck what the populus thinks and just do whatever the flaming bollocks they want.

Tony Blair is perhaps the living embodiment of where the politics of apathy leads. So it is with great pleasure that I read people like Crash Calloway getting pissed off at the woo merchants and peddlers of pseudo-science, and Another Form of Relief getting stuck into the lamentable legacy of Tony Blair. It may be fucking futile, people, but if we don’t at least shout as loud we can then it gives these vicious cunts the license to do exactly what the fuck they please with utter impunity, and you can bet the anal virginity of your first born son that the dirty little cock-smokers will do nothing, absolutely nothing, that is even remotely in our interests unless they are pinned down and bloody well forced to. If we don’t say anything then they get away with it all for absolutely nothing.

Go get stuck in, lads, kick the dirty little fuckers as hard as you bloody well can.

Grinderman – Get it On
I am not the world’s biggest Pearl Jam fan, but this is a great song and I have yet to hear a better description of George Bush than ‘Born on third, thinks he got a triple.’ I hope all you non-Americans understand that reference! Pearl Jam – Bu$hleaguer
Plans & Apologies – Tony Blair, Fucknut
This is a brilliant song, and very apposite. One thing we must not do is let Blair manipulate his own legacy to read as anything other than his being the evangelical psychopath who led this country into an illegal, genocidal war against its will and on the domestic front managed to achieve a greater disparity between rich and poor than any other Prime Minister in history. That is your legacy, Tony. Good fucking riddance, you are a twat. MJ Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight For History
And is any political rant complete without this song? Billy Bragg – Ideology