Song, by Toad

Well, after a bit of a lull last week there’s all sorts of crap going on in and around Edinburgh this week, so choose wisely because trying to attend everything could just be the end of you.  As well as the usual recommendations there are a couple of half-recommendations this week; gigs I feel I should want to go to, but am actually not that fussed about.  Crystal Antlers (I mean, come on, they have Crystal in their name, they have to be good, almost as guaranteed as having Fuck in your name last year, or Bear the year before that, or Wolf… well, never mind) are playing at Sneaky Pete’s with Times New Viking and Dupec.  These are all bands I feel I should like more than I do, for some reason.

The same applies to all of Glenn Tilbrook, Kristin Hersh and Alastair Roberts who are playing Cabaret Voltaire on Tuesday 19th, Wednesday 20th and Friday 22nd respectively.  I should be excited about them (well, maybe not Mr. Tilbrook in particular, no offence) but for all it is good that these guys are playing Edinburgh I find myself no more than vaguely interested in their gigs.  The splendid Rob St. John is supporting Alastair Roberts though, so that one is definitely the most appealing of the lot.

In terms of gigs I am likely to be attending, well let’s go, shall we.  And, er, just check Saturday out.  The Edinburgh gig going public might well be spread very thinly indeed this Saturday:

Thursday 21st May 2009: White Heath, Yusuf Azak & Colourmusic play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Well all know I think Yusuf Azak is bloody brilliant, but White Heath were also excellent at Trampoline last Saturday.  Their sound is very crowded, and their lead singer sounds a little like a muezzin who has rather badly lost his way, but they sound really, really promising to me.  Trombone and mental fiddle solos? Count me in!  And they even play the bongos without sounding shite, which is an achievement in itself.  They’re going to be working on some new recordings with Alex from Fentek Audio in the near future, and Alex appears to be carving out a reputation as one of Edinburgh’s most trusted sound guys, so this is very good news.  I’ll definitely be at this one.
Colourmusic – Spring Song

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Thursday 21st May:Benni Hemm Hemm and Withered Hand at the Bowery.

Glacial Icelandicism is no surprise these days, but this is more of a style we might associate with the rest of Scandinavia, with an almost januty instrumental pop style never far from the surface.  Benni will be at the Bowery on Thursday with the brilliant Withered Hand.

Friday 22nd May 2009: The Mannequins, The Pineapple Chunks and quite a few others at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

In amongst a lot of bigger names this week, I reckon this looks like the pick of the bunch when it comes to more under the radar slots.  I’ve been slack at checking the Henry’s listings recently because they’ve been rather quiet since the new year, but I hear that that is about to be taken firmly in hand and they will be making a bit of a push in the coming months.  The Mannequins have some pretty decent pop songs from the sound of it, and The Pineapple Chunks have done well at Limbo in the past, so I think this is gig to go to if you’re looking for something a little off the beaten track.
The Mannequins – Little Black Book

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Saturday 23rd May 2009: Cats in Paris & Mitchell Museum at Cabaret Voltaire.

I should really be at the Stag & Dagger Festival in Glasgow watching Meursault on Saturday, but they asked me to sign release forms so that Meursault’s set could be both filmed and recorded and then denied me permission to film at the festival myself, so they can go and fuck themselves with a bag full of scorpions, frankly.  Instead, I will be at Cabaret Voltaire watching the very fashionable Cats in Paris and the very excellent Mitchell Museum.  The last time I saw Mitchell Museum was in a rather large venue, so somewhere more intimate and a little sweatier should be great fun.
Mitchell Museum – Arthur Loves the Shadows

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Saturday 23rd May 2009: Found, Player Piano, The Pictish Trail & King Creosote at the GRV.

I just don’t go the GRV, not really on purpose, more because they so rarely have my kind of music on the bill there that I get a little lazy about checking the listings.  This one is pretty bloody obvious though: a kind of Fence Collective Allstars get together, with all the charismatic alt-folk you could wish for.  Player Piano is more of a lush pop band though, and Found aren’t really folky at all, so I don’t think this would be the Fence Collective of hushed and lovely balladry which you might expect if you were coming along on the basis of a hundred-word newspaper clipping.
Player Piano – Anything At All

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Saturday 23rd May 2009: Anathallo, Samamidon, The Stormy Seas & Your Boy Blair at Sneaky Pete’s.

Anathallo, although I know very little about them, sound rather lovely from a quick skim of their MySpace page.  Also on the bill is the truly gorgeous Samamidon, and anyone who missed either of his Bowery gigs this Winter really should not miss this.  He has the loveliest voice and the most amazing way with a banjo you are likely to hear anywhere, ever.
Anathallo – The River

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Saturday 23rd May 2009: Lach at the Bowery.

Lach pretty much started what is generally thought of as the modern anti-folk movement in New York, and he certainly coined the phrase itself.  It’s hardly a new thing of course – Bob Dylan rubbed the folkies all up the wrong way when he first turned up as well, but they couldn’t really ignore him for all that long.  Getting a legendary figure like Lach to the Bowery is something of a coup as far as I’m concerned so, er, what the fuck am I going to do on Saturday with all these bands to see.  I can’t miss this one.
Lach – A Quiet Distance

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Sunday 24th May: Defiance Ohio, Madeline, Withered Hand, Torn Strings & Billy Liar at the Bowery.

Madeline is a big favourite of my pal Rich who writes the Georgia (no, the one in the States) blog Cable & Tweed, so I really think I should go to this.  After all, without Rich we would have no Porlolo, no Builders & the Butchers, no Loch Lomond, no Sleepy Horses and no 63 Crayons.
Madeline – White Flag

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Hello everyone – sorry for the lateness of this post, but unfortunately sometimes actual jobs with wages and things have to take precedence over things Toad, just for a little while.  I have spent the day at a meeting in Inverness, and I am desperate for a really good sleep.

There’s not a lot on in Edinburgh this week as far as I can tell.  The brilliant Animal Magic Tricks is playing pretty much as I write this, and I am gutted that I won’t get the chance to see her.  Well, not until Saturday, anyway, which is when everything kicks off, as far as live music in Edinburgh is concerned.  You could (and I intend to) drink yourself into a peaceful oblivion over the course of the day, going from the Fence Collective’s fucking brilliant pre-season friendly (a Homegame warm-up) during the day to the Bear Scotland night at the Wee Red Bar in the evening.

Oh, and I recently mentioned in the comments section that there was a brilliant write-up of the Edinburgh music scene in The Scotsman this weekend.  Yours Toadly was mentioned on a couple of occasions, which was rather splendid, but in general Andrew Eaton, who wrote the article, was trying to cram so much information into his piece that there was barely any space for him to do any writing.  It’s a terrific article though, and a real vindication of all the hard work which I’ve witnessed here over the last few years.  So well done to everyone, and thanks to Andrew.

Friday 6th March 2009: The Gillyflowers at the Village, Leith.

Recently signed to local blog label Seventeen Seconds, the Gillyflowers are a brand spanking new country band who have emerged from Leith only very recently.  Riley Briggs of Aberfeldy produced their demos for them, and they have recently been reviewed in pretty fucking glowing terms by The Herald and The Scotsman.  I can’t tell you much more about them, other than that Country Boy, one of those demos, is bloody lovely.  I’ll find out more on Friday, I’d imagine.
The Gillyflowers – Country Boy

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Saturday 7th March 2009: Found, Player Piano, The Red Well & plenty more play the Fence Collective’s Pre-Season Friendly at Old St. Paul’s Church Hall.

Apart from the lineup actually listed, there will be little inbetweeny performances from all sorts of other great bands at this one – Animal Magic Tricks and Meursault to name a couple – and the chance for a leisurely afternoon drinking session (the gig takes place from 2pm-8pm) in such a lovely venue really is not one to be missed.
Found – Some Fracas of a Sissy

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Saturday 7th March 2009: Dead Boy Robotics, The Foundling Wheel & Enfant Bastard at the Wee Red Bar.

This is a Bear Scotland night, and the first time I will get to see proper full sets by both Dead Boy Robotics and the Foundling Wheel, although I have caught some bits and pieces by both before.  Enfant Bastard though – oh yes please!  This gig really shows the breadth of the Bear Scotland umbrella, too, from the experimental thunder of The Foundling Wheel to the electronic, dancey pop tunes of Dead Boy Robotics to the… well, whatever Cammy feels like playing that particular night as Enfant Bastard.
Enfant Bastard – Joanna Newsom 666

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Saturday 7th March 2009: Maybe Myrtle Turtle & Fanattica at the Bowery.

This should be pure mayhem.  Both bands play folk-based stuff with added off-kilter whirlwinds of pure carnival frenzy.  It sounds to me like it should be a truly amazing gig, honestly, and if you don’t come out of the Bowery grinning from ear to ear and bouncing up and down like a delighted infant then I’ll be fucking amazed.  Told you Saturday was going to be busy.

The 28th Toadcast is all about the Fence Collective. People who read this site regularly must know them, I assume, but I’ve been intending to do this post for a while as they might be my favourite label in music at the moment.

After Kenny Anderson’s last band fell apart about ten years ago or more, he started releasing his own stuff on hand made CD-Rs under the name of King Creosote and between him and his brothers and some of the other local musicians he’d grown up with in Fife, a collective started to form which has grown and grown. Now, thanks to the spotlight cast their direction by Kenny’s brother Gordon’s involvement with The Beta Band and The Aliens, the success of King Creosote and James Yorkston, and the rising of KT Tunstall (also a Fence alumnus, believe it or not) Fence Records have turned into one of the most beloved record labels in the country.

And actually, I think their approach of building a community rather than just pimping product might just have the potential to make them one of the success stories of Music 2.0, although that’s another story. So this podcast is all about Fence Records and the bands I have discovered due to their hard work, and why I think they’re great. What an arse-kisser I’ve turned into.

(Warning: I’m drunker than I sound and there is way too much talking in this one.)

Toadcast #28 – The Fencecast

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01. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Our Last Needle (03.17)
02. King Creosote – You’ve No Clue Do You (09.21)
03. James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick (16.33)
04. Art Pedro – Joanne (21.19)
05. MC Quake – It Feels Good to Be In Scotland (27.57)
06. Down the Tiny Steps – Handstand (36.44)
07. Adam Beattie – Bank Street (46.39)
08. Player Piano – Mercy (AC Mix) (49.35)
09. Candythief – A Good Day (56.47)
10. Rob St. John – Tipping In (60.06)
11. Adrian Crowley – Star of the Harbour (65.11)
12. Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day (67.47)
13. OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs (77.04)
14. HMS Ginafore – You Built a City Inside of Me (85.41)
15. Gummi Bako – She’s the Carrot & I’m the Stick (87.44)
16. The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now (94.39)
17. Rich Amino – Chicken & Chips (99.02)
18. Sara Lowes – Uniform Days (104.22)
19. Magic Arm – Outdoor Games (108.11)
20. King Creosote – I’ll Fly By the Seat of My Pants (115.32)

< Day One
Day Three >

I awoke with a considerable hangover on Saturday, but a bloody great greasy breakfast saw to that. Tattie scones – anyone outside Scotland know them? Magic for mopping up the egg yolk and bacon grease from your plate as you swill the last of your coffee.

I did some husbandly things in the morning, traipsing into St. Andrews with Mrs. Toad to find a memory card for the camera, so we only caught The Pictish Trail in the morning. Johnny played a solo set which was, bar something of a deranged electro wig-out on the last song, a guitar based affair. He’s some set of lungs on him does Mr. Lynch, and has an album coming out very soon, on Fence Records. Given the amount of time he dedicates to the label itself and to playing in King Creosote’s band, it’s nothing short of a miracle he found the time.

The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now

Bar brief excursions for OLO Worms and Player Piano, I spent pretty much the rest of the evening in the Hew Scott Hall at the Tracer Trails evening.

OLO Worms are really not my thing at all – a little bit too much experimentation going on there and not really enough straightforward tune-writing. Not that they don’t have some genuinely lovely bits of course, but there’s a lot of mentalism there that I struggle to quite come to terms with. But that, folks, is the beauty of the Fence Collective: nowhere are you more likely to be exposed to something new and peculiar that they have taken a chance on, and that is there just because someone has found something interesting in the music was enough to spark genuine interest. Fingers & Thumbs is about as straight-up a pop song as you’re likely to hear from them.

OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs

A little bit more traditional is Player Piano, a star of Homegame, erm, three I think. Mrs. Toad and I saw his excellent solo set in the Erskine Hall in 2006, and this was the only gig of all of Homegame that she insisted in coming to this year. Jeremy Radway plays an old-fashioned kind of music, part rock ‘n’ roll, part music hall in a sense, and with a little bit of soul in there as well. For this set he amped it up a bit and made some noise, bringing touches of 70s proto-metal to the evening, which was odd, but good. And if you like the sound of that, listen to this – just gorgeous:

Player Piano – Mercy (A.C. Mix)

As for the Tracer Trails stuff, well regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with most of the bands mentioned – Eagleowl, Rob St. John, Adrian Crowley, Rich Amino and Withered Hand all played – so there’s no need to go into the music too much, apart from pointing out that I pretty much enjoyed the lot. As much as any one act I actually enjoyed the atmosphere and the evening the most. A couple of the band members swapped around, there was a blinding reworking of Rich Amino’s Ribena song, making the subject of necrophilia the focus, and Mrs. Toad got a little mashed and insisted to me that we release virtually fucking everyone on Song, by Toad Records and get the lot round to record sessions.

This is the beauty of a small, friendly scene like this. I mentioned Song, by Toad Records to Johnny Lynch who pretty much runs Fence and he had all sorts of useful tips and advice and help. Hopefully he’ll be on the Toad Sessions pretty soon as well. Fence also invited Manchester’s Red Deer Club Records to take over an evening in one of the halls as well – small enterprises run by genuine enthusiasts and who see one another as potential sources of support and help and fun and not as adversaries.

So we sat there in that hall, people drifting in and out as they went to other things, half the people discussing their little personal projects with one another, chatting to the musicians and chatting to friends they largely know from the Fence forums, or the Beef Board, as it is known, and it was genuinely fucking brilliant. This is one of the things that is oddly contradictory about Web 2.0 and all this technological shite that so isolates us at our desks, using MySpace and email and blogs and discussion boards and Facebook and IM and anything else rather than actually having a conversation with anyone: I have made friends with more real, flesh and blood people by fannying about on the internet than I ever have by any other way.

And would Fence Records or the Edinburgh indie-folk scene or the Red Deer Club and all these disparate-yet-interrelated communities still exist without all this? Of course they would, I’m no deranged technology evangelist, but the slightly contradictory link between all these virtual friends and the easy, friendly, cosy atmosphere of the Hew Scott Hall on the Saturday makes me feel quite optimistic. And it also gave me a stinking fucking hangover. But virtual friendships clearly are actually real, they are not poor second-cousins to meeting people in the flesh, they are every bit as real and as meaningful.

Rob St. John – The Acid Test
Rich Amino – One Hundred & Blue
Adrian Crowley – Bless Our Tiny Hearts
Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day

Sorry a couple of these songs are re-posts, but I just don’t have that much stuff by Rob & Eagleowl in particular that I can share.