Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr - Blueback Hotrod
Audio: zip download (right-click, save as).

Lach is the man behind the Antihoot, the New York open stage which gave rise to the term and the movement called Antifolk.  People bandy the word about so much these days it’s almost become as nebulous as the term ‘indie’, but it had a very specific origin and a very specific meaning back at the beginning.

Last year Lach brought the Antihoot to the Edinburgh Festival, and we recorded a Toad Session with him while he was here.  When we figured out that we would actually be releasing his new album as well, and that he would be returning to Edinburgh this year – running both the Antihoot at the Gilded Balloon as well as a free fringe show called Lach, the Waitress, the Walls and the Weirdos in The Speakeasy at Cabaret Voltaire – I figured we might as well wait a little while to publish this session.

Well Lach is back now, his album comes out on Song, by Toad Records on Monday and we are starting to get ready for both the one-man show at Cab Vol, and also the return of the Antihoot (tickets).  If you want to play at the Antihoot yourself, then just get in touch: info@antifolk.net.  The rules are that you get either two songs or eight minutes, whichever is shorter, and that has to include your setup, so best keep it simple, but otherwise pretty much anything goes.

Also, this year we’ll be picking a semifinalist each night, by a combination of audience acclaim and executive decision, and inviting them back to the Anti-idol on the last three nights of the show.  Those three nights will be recorded, with the best dozen or so performances being released on a Best of the Antihoot album on Song, by Toad Records.

As per usual with the Toad Sessions, the full interview podcast is immediately below, followed by free mp3 downloads of all the session tracks (zip file here), videos of the individual tracks themselves (all video here), and finally the tracklist for the podcast.  There aren’t as many pictures as usual, but that’s because we were a little short-staffed this time, and Dylan was too busy with the video camera to produce the usual number of pretty pictures.

Direct download: Toadcast #183 – Lach Toad Session

Lach – A Quiet Distance (Toad Session)

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Lach – Ambition Burns (Toad Session)

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Lach – Another Night Without You (Toad Session)

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Lach – Coffee Black (Toad Session)

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01. Lach – A Quiet Distance (Toad Session) (12.40)
02. The Love Gestures – Hey Man (16.40)
03. Phil Ochs – Small Circle of Friends (20.31)
04. Lach – Ambition Burns (Toad Session) (32.41)
05. Kirk Kelly – Stephen Foster (37.42)
06. Roger Manning – Pearly Blues (41.14)
07. Lach – Another Night Without You (Toad Session) (55.31)
08. Neil Halstead – Might Engine (62.05)
09. Lach – Coffee Black (Toad Session) (75.06)

The reason this is called the Nukecast is because I am pretty irritated by the exaggeration of just how horrible it is to be alive in 2011.  2011 is a total piece of piss.  It’s easy, unthreatening and perfectly comfortable, and the idea that the modern world is in any way topsy-turvy is just plain silly.

I am not all that old, but even the eighties, when I was a kid, were far rougher than this.  There was actual genuine menace, the world might just have been about to end in a nuclear fireball, and no-one had anything you could honestly call a proper job.

So I complain about this for about an hour, while Mrs. Toad calls me an idiot.  Welcome to the drunken Toadcasts.  Again.

Direct download: Toadcast #179 – The Nukecast

01. Tom Lehrer – Who’s Next (00.08)
02. Billy Bragg – Think Again (10.34)
03. Milk Maid – Girl (21.07)
04. Odonis Odonis – Mr. Smith (24.06)
05. Sonny & the Sunsets – I Wanna Do It (31.09)
06. Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis (41.19)
07. Crystal Swells – Dead Awake (47.43)
08. Male Bonding – Bones (52.07)
09. M.J. Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight for History (63.10)
10. Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (72.33)

I happened across that fascinating little video this week sometime, and it’s a really odd mixture of hypnotic, fascinating and really quite unsettling.

The video is simply a plot of nuclear explosions over time, and despite being ten minutes in length, is nevertheless really difficult to turn away from.  What’s particularly disturbing is watching how a flurry of test detonations in any one country seems to trigger a retaliatory fit of posturing in another.

It’s also kind of chilling to watch the increases in activity triggered by events like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It’s easy to think now that they’d never have really done it, but human beings are not particularly good at measuring self-interest when they decide that someone needs to be taught a lesson.  In fact being willing to inflict harm on yourself just to punish someone else with sufficient force is a notable quirk of how collective morality is maintained by social animals. So umm… yes, it was probably closer than we allow ourselves to think from the safe distance of 2011.

Human beings seem to have particularly laughable memories when it comes to this sort of thing actually.  I was spectacularly annoyed by all the financial analysts proclaiming the worst recession since the Great Depression, when the housing and credit markets collapsed a few years back.  Fuck, were none of these cunts alive during the eighties?

I know we remember the eighties as being full of comical haircuts, synth pop and twats from ‘The City’* making shitloads of money, but it was also the decade which spawned the Miners’ Strikes, the Poll Tax Riots (just) and Boys From the Black Stuff.

And even as a kid I remember the threat of nuclear annihilation feeling very, very real.  All this chat about the world not being a safe place now because of the ever-present terrorist threat is total bollocks.  The IRA were extremely active during the eighties, and they’ve killed more people than fucking Al Qaeda (thanks America, sucks when people harbour terrorists, doesn’t it), but beyond that we all lived with that constant feeling of low-level dread that at some point the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. might actual just melt humanity clean off the face of the fucking planet.

So umm, how about some fun, after that little rant then.

1. Can you think of a decent song about nuclear armageddon?
2. Name someone nowadays you would least trust with the Big Red Button.
3. Was there anything good about the Cold War?
4. Where were you when the Wall came down?
5. Who seems most likely to go fucking mental and nuke someone in the current political landscape?

M.J. Hibbett and the Validators – The Fight for History

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Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis

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Tom Lehrer – We Will All Go Together When We Go

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Billy Bragg – Think Again (Dick Gaughan Cover)

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The Piranhas – Tom Hark

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*The City?  That’s lovely, which one?

Well in all the chatter about the Beeb this week I was strongly considering ignoring it completely in this podcast and giving everyone a welcome break from the wailing and gnashing of teeth… but naah, that was never going to happen, was it.

So there’s a lot of railing against the Beeb and the threat to 6Music and yaddah yaddah you know the script don’t you.  Sadly, and somewhat ironically, we spend so much time talking about the state of the Beeb and the loss their support of small bands will represent, that we actually forgot to talk much about the small bands we ourselves put on the bloody podcast.

Toadcast #111 – The Beebcast

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01. Ballboy – All the Records on the Radio are Shite (03.21)
02. Love is All – Bigger Bolder (13.02)
03. Fredrik – Vinterbarn (15.53)
04. Exrays – Everything Goes (27.16)
05. Phil Ochs – Automation Song (34.33)
06. Ghostkeeper – By Morning (37.26)
07. The Light Footwork – Carlsbad Irrigation Project (47.54)
08. Mondrian – Rise and Fall of a Golden Boy Seen by a Porn Star Using No Sextoy (50.21)
09. The Leaf Library – Losing Places (ISAN Remix) (63.00)

[Mrs. Toad has very kindly contributed this Friday's Fives, as I am busy being mounted like a five-dollar hooker at Proper Job.  Enjoy.]

I am in the middle of a secondment at Proper Job which basically means that instead of rushing around trying to get new clients or speak to existing ones about what is going on in the world of stocks and shares, I am undertaking company analysis and have time on my hands to contemplate the mysteries of the future.

So at the moment, I am mulling what cars will be like in 2030 and how many of them will be on the roads. This is usually predicted using an S-Curve function which predicts growth of consumption goods accelerating from matching income growth at low levels at twice the rate of income growth for a certain range of income finally slowing again to match income growth at higher levels giving an S shaped graph. According to this, there will be 2 billion cars on the road in 2030 (there are about 800 million now). Scary stuff. However, population density is also rising (only 46% of New Yorkers own a car whereas 92% of Americans do) and car sharing (ZipCar/City Car club) is also on the rise. So how the hell am I supposed to come up with an even half sensible estimate? Even Volkswagen don’t seem to think we will all own our own cars.

Of course, the point is that you can’t get it right, you just have to make a reasonable estimate and assign a probability to it based on current evidence. Despite the shelves and shelves of strategy books in airports worldwide, there is a great deal of serendipity involved in most business successes. The guys at Google for instance, didn’t start out to be in the advertising business but ending up there is why their company is worth $135bn. There is also the occasional trying to be too clever moment. If I said to you that buying a share of 100 dodgy mortgages packaged together and sliced up is as safe as lending to a blue chip company like IBM, you’d laugh in my face but that’s what all the physics graduates and math whizzes at places like Lehman Bros really believed. Business is hard especially, when mistakes mean that you could go down the pan or get taken out. Its easy to err too far on the side of caution and become defensive and oppressive rather than innovative (yeah, that’s you Microsoft).

Which makes it all the more galling that a non profit entity such as the BBC has apparently confused “value for money” with “bums on seats” in its recent strategic review, leading to the closure of 6 Music, the watering down of local content, and the downsizing of their successful website. The questions in the review also point to them considering reducing some of the innovative projects that they have undertaken such as pushing DAB and developing iPlayer. iPlayer is in large part why people like Murdoch(s) have it in for them, Sky and Virgin Media cannot make money if they cannot control content provision. By pushing people online to a familiar and trusted brand, the BBC has hastened their demise.

This has already been linked to but I would urge you all to take some time to respond to the BBC’s strategic review in full because its clear that fear of Tory/Murdoch harpies is pushing them in an all together more stolid direction than we have seen in the last ten years and that would be a great shame.

1. What do you think cars will be like in 20 years time?
2. Best piece of bullshit bingo you have heard?
3. Company/brand or product you most admire?
4. Company/brand or product you detest?
5. Your soothsayer like prediction for the world in 2030?

Ballboy – All the Records on the Radio are Shite

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Depeche Mode – Everything Counts

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Phil Ochs – Automation Song

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The Clash – Complete Control

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Company Town

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[Sorry, permissions appear to be a little broken - go here to view in the meantime]

I confidently sat down to write my Friday Fives this week and to introduce the Candy Claws‘ virtual tour video only to realise that I have managed to fuck things up.  I am a week late.  For some reason I had it absolutely fixed in my head that it was supposed to be this Friday, so all I can do is apologise profusely to the band and to Kev from Indiecater Records and hope that playing it this week will serve the purpose at least reasonably well.  Honestly lads, for some reason I was convinced it was supposed to be this week, I’m really sorry.

Your job, as readers, is to may up for my idiocy by taking extra time out of your day to listen to Candy Claws’ music and hence try and make my apologies for me.  And buy the album too, while you’re at it – the whole thing can be previewed here and it really is very good.

In other news did anyone see pictures of the Queen getting on a train this morning?  Christ she looks like a fucking bag lady.  I alternate between tolerance of and annoyance with the royal family.  They can be hugely entertaining, and of course they bring money into the country, but we pay for the cunts and frankly I think it’s time we started demanding a little more for our money.

Shortage of teachers or nurses?  Send in a minor royal for a few months to cover.  Traffic lights out in London town, get Phil the Greek to pop round and do the hand signals thing for a while.  Let’s face it, apart from buggering the servant and beating up foreigners he’s not going to be doing anything else with his time.

We could even save the NHS money by insisting that Charles follow his own guidance on alternative medicine.  Deny the stupid old fucker actual medical care and see if his sugar pills and anticlockwise kidney massages cure him of fucking cancer.  No? Good, now we can stop wasting money on them and he’ll be dead so we won’t have to keep repairing him in his dotage like we did the Queen Mum.  Actually, with her belligerence and monumental gin habit, she and Phil the Insulter are the only two I have any real affection for.

So, this is the last Friday Five before Christmas.  I promise to put one up on Boxing Day too, just for those of us who will need the internet to escape the gluttony.  Honestly, how many sherries with boring Uncle Brian can you really handle anyway – you know you’ll need your Five Fix!

1. What use could the Royals be best put to?
2. Favourite Royal (from any nation, past or present).
3. How much of your Christmas shopping remains to be done.
4. At what point does the self-loathing of gluttony kick in for you around Christmas time.
5. Fuck it, link to a silly picture on the internet just for shits and giggles (just paste the URL into your comment – WordPress will do the rest).

Here is my one and only concession to the world of Christmas.  I tend to avoid Christmas songs, except for Phil Ochs (miserable) and Tom Lehrer (caustic) but for the last Friday Five before the day itself I thought fuck it, why not.  So happy fucking Christmas you fuckers, that’s all you’re getting.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Traveling Salesman’s Young Wife Home Alone on Christmas in Montpelier, VT

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The Felice Brothers – Christmas Song

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Saint Etienne – I Was Born on Christmas Day

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Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol

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Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky

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I used to love taking the train down to London.  When GNER had the East Coast mainline Mrs. Toad and used to travel pretty regularly, in the days when I lived in London and we only saw one another every couple of weeks.  As often as we could we would go and sit in the dining car and slowly get drunk all the way to the end of the line.  Those were really rather romantic days.

Anyway, when GNER’s parent company got into trouble they were forced to sell off the East Coast mainline under some obscure rule of Capitalism which requires failing companies to get rid of the only bits of them which work – in other words the only parts of the company which might actually help them work through their problems and get back on their feet.  Obviously if this doesn’t make perfect sense to you then you must be some sort of Communist, but it strikes me as some sort of ludicrous rule dreamt up by the vultures rather than the victims, but hey ho.  If nationwide healthcare is too Communisty for you then what chance do sensible rules of business have?

Anyhow, that line went to National Express who have made an unspeakable balls up of the whole operation.  Apart from running a previously healthy line into near-bankruptcy they have taken away the fucking dining cars, which now only operate on a fraction of the trains.  So yes, making a service notably more shit and that service therefore becoming markedly less favourable with customers, who’d have thought those two were connected.  Gosh the world can be a strange place sometimes.

So, this being Friday, please take the opportunity to de-lurk and fill in your Friday Five:

1. Favourite mode of long-distance transport.
2. Weirdest place you’ve had a surprisingly civillised meal.
3. Thing that just isn’t what it used to be.
4. Most boring everyday thing which actually turned out to be quite romantic.
5. Most annoying train habit.

Beck – Broken Train

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Eels – Railroad Man

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Billy Bragg – Train Train

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iLiKETRAiNS – The Beeching Report

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Phil Ochs – Automation Song

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Brilliant.  In today’s fucking inevitable shitfest of the fucking week, it seems that I am coming down with a nasty flu just in time to go on holiday.  My malingering mistress Mrs. Toad has had the indulgence of missing an entire week of work, only to return to health just in time for two weeks off, the bloody chancer.  I, on the other hand, find myself brewing her particularly virulent brand of flu just in time to ruin my two week break.  Minge.

We’ve neglected to really do any Christmas shopping as yet, but we actually have a tree for the first time since we’ve been together and trees sort of demand presents, so despite the fact that we generally don’t bother we may actually make an exception this year, if just to avoid being stared down by a stupid fucking fir tree draped in tat.

On the subject of presents, actually, a friend of mine asked a question once that rather amused me.  You know those Americans who insist on pronouncing presentation as if it were written preesentation?  Well what do they give each other at Christmas, preesents?

And, just to be even more crap, I have a festive joke for you as well, and what a special one it is:
Q: How did Luke Skywalker know what his dad was getting him for Christmas?
A: He felt his presents!

And oh how we laughed.  So welcome to Friday Fives again, and please do take the opportunity to delurk and save us from ourselves.  And anyone who wants to suggest next week’s five, email me at the address on the contact page.  Enjoy, and happy Christmas.

1. Favourite comment of the year on Song, by Toad.
2. At what time do you hit the pub today?
3. What’s the state of your Christmas shopping?
4. What will be the defining sin of your Christmas, sloth, gluttony, covetousness, or something else?
5. What percentage of your Christmas holiday will actually be your own, to do with as you please?

Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky Thanks DC.

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Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol

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Tom Waits – Silent Night/Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis (Live)

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Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Cold White Christmas

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Christmas in Nevada

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It’s teh next Great Depreshun oh noes!  Or maybe we’re just moaning like a bunch of fucking girls.  After the doom and gloom in the papers it seems time to actually compare the current financial tantrum to the Great Depression and tell anyone who makes that comparison to fuck right off and stop being so self-indulgent.

It’s even ridiculous when compared to the rough times in the fucking eighties when Margaret Thatcher eviscerated everywhere in England outside the M25.  She destroyed the country.  Annihilating nationalised industries which were no longer economic makes sense, but completely destroying the industries that keep a town alive at the same time as you destroy the support networks provided by the state and also refusing to do anything to encourage industries to grow that might replace the thousands of jobs you have just made vanish is just slash and burn social policy.

There may be a little too much opinionated political opinion and general drunken rambling between myself and my darling girl Mrs. Toad, but erm, well, fuck it you’re own your own.  Listen if you think you can face it.  But you must understand, we were vewy bewwwy drnk.

Toadcast #44 – The Whingecast

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01. Woody Guthrie – Do Re Mi (04.20)
02. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (12.52)
03. The Specials – Ghost Town (15.31)
04. The Clash – Career Opportunities (25.33)
05. Billy Bragg – To Have and to Have Not (36.04)
06. Jane’s Addiction – Been Caught Stealing (36.03)
07. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (39.25)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Ghosts of Cable Street (52.29)
09. The Willard Grant Conspiracy – Evening Mass (62.44)
10. Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky (68.29)

Final score: Bottles of wine: 5.  Bottles of beer: 3.  Night night bitches.

I find the idea of posting endless Christmas novelty tracks around this time of year to be both tedious and lazy. When I think about the best things that Christmas means to me, it is warmth and family time and the chance to just relax and spend time with the people I love the most. It is not sleigh bells and fucking mistletoe. Consequently, when I think about Christmas music it most certainly does not include some indie group either rattling off an ironic version of some shitty festive song, nor does it include some ‘twist’ on the genre either, where misery and unhappiness are overplayed to try and subvert the overweening saccharine of the genre as a whole.

What Christmas music tends to include for me is music that makes me feel warm and cosy inside. Intimate, emotional songs that are warm and sincere and have a wonderfully enveloping atmosphere, to go with the crackling fire. This pretty much excludes everything that anyone could describe as a Christmas song, but that is, in a musical sense anyway, how I see Christmas.

This song, on the other hand, is a song about Christmas that is in no way a Christmas song. There is nothing about this track that you would ever want to play as you munched on mince pies with a slosh of expensive brandy lurching dangerously about your glass as you sway precariously back and forth in mid-conversation with some elderly aunt you never speak to at all for the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year.

Phil Ochs is a genuine genius. He wrote some of the most directly political, the angriest and the most conscientious music in history. If you are one of those who looks at the hideous gargoyle that modern America has become, with its total disregard for its own poor, its warped, impotent rage manifesting itself as foreign policy, and the vain, selfish avarice that the charred ashes of the American dream have become, and feels nothing but disgust, it is people like Phil Ochs that should temper your views.

For the same society that produces such bloated parasites as Bush and Falwell, such vicious scorpions as Rumsfeld and Cheney, the kind of self-regarding insecurity that condones the genocide of anyone other than themselves as long as it ameliorates their own contemptuous sense of self-righteous indignation, and the sort of business practises that define what others do as immorally anti-competitive and what one does oneself as enshrined in the imaginary declaration of the rights of the greedy, the grasping and the aspirational, must also produce its antitheses. Any country that produces this kind of rottenness must, almost by definition, produce the people who fight against it the most directly and with the most courage.

In other words, if you think it takes courage to sit on this side of the Atlantic and snipe about stripping Americans of their civil liberties, destroying the rule of law in order to give the government unchecked power to do as it pleases, suppressing internal dissent and calling all who question this madness traitors, imagine what it takes to deal with it face to face. Phil Ochs was just that man. He was far from just a political singer, he was also a brave activist. He never flinched from anything, and spoke with his heart and conscience and he acted on his beliefs with the courage barely a single caustic commentator today could come within a mile of equalling.

Eventually, disillusioned by the brutal police attacks on an anti-Vietnam war protest, amongst other things, and emotionally devastated by an attack in South Africa that left his voice permanently damaged, he took his own life in April 1976. For a better history, try reading this, from which I have lifted the following quote.

His nephew David found him hanging from his own belt in his sister’s bathroom. He was thirty-five years old. I can make no case for martyrdom here. There is nothing noble about suicide, regardless of how that suicide may have been the result of social forces or diminished expectations. Had he lived, I doubt Phil would have made any new songs, and if he had, they probably would not have compared favorably with his best work. But it remains a fact that whenever I read about some ludicrous injustice or monumental hypocrisy, I wonder what Ochs would have said about it, how he would have summed up the situation with an acerbic line or two. And I wonder who the next dead hero will be.

He reminds me of Bill Hicks a little in that sense. In fact, I have Bill’s commentary on the last war in Iraq, and its just frightening how applicable it is to this one. So for those who berate America, of whom I am definitely one, think on this: those of us who so smugly criticise, where is our Bill Hicks, and where is our Phil Ochs?

Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky
Phil Ochs – The Ballad of William Worthy
Phil Ochs – Here’s to the State of Mississippi
Bill Hicks – Hello Oxford (Best bits towards the end)
Bill Hicks – Polls (Excerpt)

Buy some Phil Ochs here. You’ll be a better person for it.
Also, visit The Waiting Room and have a listen.  If it hadn’t been for DC I might never have found No Christmas in Kentucky.  Thanks mate!