The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people’s former bands.  There’s Shane MacGowan’s Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron’s Radiators, Shilpa Ray’s Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg’s Riff Raff.

I concentrate so much on new music these days that I often decide whether or not I like a band on the basis of a handful of demos, maybe a single, sometimes a debut EP, stuff like that.  And of course, bands don’t stumble into the world fully-formed, it takes some of them ages to become brilliant, and a lot of the time the initial forms of a band can be really strange, presumably because the people in question were still casting around a bit for their sound.

So there’s a bit of that here, but it’s not all that rigid a theme, and the playlist is a bit messy but, erm, well never mind.  There are some great songs, so enjoy!

Toadcast #96 – The Excast

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01. Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Beating St. Louis (04.07)
02. Beat the Devil – Plea Bargain (11.09)
03. Bright Eyes – Neely O’Hara (19.56)
04. Richard Hawley – Naked in Pitsmoor (26.16)
05. The Young Republic – The Alchemist (33.20)
06. Construction & Destruction – The Signal (41.24)
07. The Nipple Erectors – Nervous Wreck (48.34)
08. The Radiators – Walking Home Alone Again (50.39)
09. The Pogues – Lorca’s Novena (56.37)
10. Riff Raff – You Shaped House (63.33)

Don’t worry, I’m not going to be tackling anything quite so ambitious in the space of a mere handful of paragraphs, so don’t worry. You can read on without fear of impending pomposity.

Basically, I was reading this little piece in the Guardian about the future of digital media, and it got me to thinking about music on television and stuff like that. Basically, there isn’t any decent music on television, is there? Jools is okay, I guess, although I find him personally annoying and don’t like many of the bands he features. There’s the kiddie ones on weekend mornings too, I think – T4 or something like that must have one. There’s also some Jo Whiley thing or other, but I can never sit through more than a few minutes of that without feeling compelled to swear at the screen and throw crisps around the place. MTV and VH1 are music-based, but don’t seem to be actually about music, so to speak, as far as I am aware.

So there are things out there, but I find myself thinking about something genuinely ‘about’ music. Something with a bit of actual content beyond music videos and trying to reflect the whims of Teh Kidz(TM). Something, I suppose, like a blog – a vlog, I think they’re rather clumsily called. Something with some chatter, some new stuff, some old stuff, a bit of news, some thinking – stuff like that. Something, I suppose I am rather self-indulgently saying, that I would want to watch. Something for actual music fans, which is where a lot of the current stuff seems to be missing the mark just slightly. Read the rest of this entry »