Yes, bitches, this Friday is no mercy day.  Not really sure why, but Yarrrgh and so on.  Actually this Friday might finally mark my DJ debut.  I have to confess that a considerable part of me wants to suggest just taking my iPod and sticking the fucking thing on random, but any committed Music Nazi is always going to be happy to force other people to listen to their choice of tunes, the only real question I have is what the fuck everyone else gets out of it.  So if you want to come along and point and laugh whilst I break other people’s equipment, then Sneaky Pete’s this evening is the place to come.

Mrs Toad is away, you know.  Another week of solitude to endure, and then the silly old bag is home again next weekend.  The street lights have just gone off, indicating morning, I believe.  So what, though.  Fuck you and your breakfast.  I actually don’t think I’ve eaten breakfast in about fifteen years.  It’s pretty fucking dark actually, so I’m a little surprised to see the council decided that tomorrow has arrived.

Erm, so I’m going to be at work with a colossal hangover and an air of desperation, hoping for the weekend.  You, on the other hand, are going to illuminate your day by participating in the Song, by Toad Friday Fives.  I don’t care that you’ve never taken part before, and I don’t care that you might not necessarily have anything side-splittingly witty to say.  That doesn’t matter – just chip in and then go for a pint to celebrate the latest in a long sequence of weekends.

1. DJs – can you name a good one, or are they basically just a hairy version of the random function which takes a shit occasionally?
2. What is your normal breakfast?
3. Hve you ever DJd anywhere other than your own party?
4. Do you actually like the music they play in nightclubs or do you just go in order to drink more and maybe pull some pointless old skank?
5. Who do you think actually does like the music in nightclubs?

The Smiths – Panic

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The Pierces – Boring

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Clem Snide – Your Favourite Music

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The Mountain Goats – Dance Music

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R.E.M. – I’m Gonna DJ

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Greetings and Happy Valentine’s day my little Toadlings. Wait, what’s that? You hate Valentine’s Day? Loathe it in fact? Would dearly love to nuke fucking Hallmark and every last shitty little shop peddling their tawdry baubles and meaningless rubbish that serve no purpose other than to defile the pure concept of true love and disrespect the dignity of the un-mated?

Good. Me too. In fact, us too, for the wildly popular (grumble, sulk) Mrs. Toad is back to do the great Valentine’s anti-podcast with me. To bitch and moan, to get side-tracked, to ramble and to poke pointed sticks in the side of the great marketing behemoth that the most shallow and meaningless of public celebrations has become. If you do not like Valentine’s Day very much, then this is the place to be.

Toadcast #21 – The Lurvecast

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01. Nirvana – Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (00.23)
02. The Velvet Underground – Femme Fatale (08.06)
03. The Raveonettes – Little Animal (10.57)
04. R.E.M. – The One I Love (13.57)
05. Half-Man Half-Biscuit – Paintball’s Coming Home (20.54)
06. The Pierces – Boring (25.43)
07. (The Real) Tuesday Weld – Terminally Ambivalent Over You (31.03)
08. Shane MacGowan & the Popes – Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway (34.41)
09. The Wave Pictures – When I Leave You For Somebody Else (38.30)
10. Pulp – Pink Glove (45.33)
11. The Raincoats – Don’t Be Mean (50.15)
12. Rufus Wainright – One Man Guy (59.34)
13. William Shatner – Ideal Woman (66.34)
14. The Sequins – Nobody Dreams About Me (71.45)
15. The Smiths – Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (77.31)
16. The Walkmen – Don’t Forget Me (82.58)
Feeding BritCaster.com

I have tried and tried and tried again to like Cat Power and there is one inescapable conclusion I can manage: I am not just ‘not getting it’, she is just fucking unimaginative, uninspired and dull.   Lounge, souley, mellow blues MOR is all very well but even with a set of memorable tunes such as these it ends up sounding like a bloody novelty album.  What this is is no more than very posh, elaborate and well-funded karaoke.

Basically, I know it might been seen as snobbery to say so, but if these muppets on reality programs show us anything it’s that there are millions of otherwise talentless muppets out there who can really sing.  Throwing a sly cover onto an album is one thing, and playing an unexpected one at a gig is another, but releasing a whole album of them is just plain self-indulgent. I know that Ella and her lot all sang other people’s songs and that it is only since the Beatles that we have required our pop music to be penned by the band themselves.

So am I saying that Ella Fitzgerald was a lesser artist for not writing her own music?  Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.  Why do you think Kylie came storming back into fashion so notably?  A cunning stylist and, most importantly, she shelled out for some really memorable tunes – Spinning Around, Can’t Get You Out of My Head – these are excellent pop songs upon which she depends for the career she has now.  Writing songs that stick in people’s heads or impact on their emotions is the hard part.

Trotting out an album of other people’s songs and, by virtue of your own particularly bland and lifeless style of music, turning them into one indistinguishable, homogeneous mulch is just utterly pointless.  Do not buy this album, it’s shit.

Cat Power – Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
The Pierces – Boring

As the Interveb Nazis are not allowing sharing of this music in order to keep its mediocrity a secret from potential dupes for as long as possible I can’t even play you anything off it to demonstrate my point.  So here’s one of hers off the soundtrack to the recent Dylan biopic as well as another song I thought was rather appropriately titled.

website | hype | buy the album

“The car didn’t actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the petrol.”

Ah, watching the British determinedly shrug their shoulders at yet another terrorist attack (I feel I must remind my American readers that we did have the IRA making a nuisance of themselves for a while and they were quite often harboured in America. What, a country harbouring terrorists? Invade them! Ahh, how quickly things change…)

Anyhow – sorry about that, that was a bit of cheap shot – but anyhow; this casts my mind back to the London bombings a few years ago which I was actually right in the middle of and yet had no idea it was even happening. In other words I was a station away on the same tube line but when they all stopped working I got off and walked to work, cursing Transport for London’s bloody inefficiency as I went. Sort of a London ritual really – ‘Sake! Bloody trains.’ I only found out about the attacks when I got a frantic phonecall ten minutes from the door wondering if I was okay.

The reaction then – to an actual bomb – reminds me of the reaction to this latest damp squib: an absolute refusal to countenance anything other than a shrug of the shoulders and and a cup of tea. This insistence that it’s nothing really seems sort of the polar opposite of the usual American reaction – ie that their disasters are the biggest and the most tragic and the most important the world has ever seen – despite the fact that the two cultures are so incredibly similar in most other ways. Quite how we’ve ended up so different on this one point seems quite bizarre.

Anyhow, not that two failed car bombs and a minor fire constitutes much of much in the grand scheme of things, but it really put me in mind of the media immediately after the July bombings frantically hunting for drama and emotion and being greeted with a mass response along the lines of ‘Well it’s all pretty much back to normal really. Bloody nuisance that the tube’s not running, of course, but there you go.’ The Americans have their excitement, the French have the utterly brilliant Gallic shrug and we have a sort of resigned indifference. Fair brings a tear to my eye, so it does.

Billy Bragg – The Home Front Is this the greatest song ever in history? If not, it’s bloody close.
The Pierces – Boring