Song, by Toad

It’s fucking Friday, three hours from Beer O’Clock, bloody marvellous! Mrs. Toad is away for over a week in Australia, which is quite frankly disastrous news. I’ll have a wanking hand like a fucking Fiddler Crab by the end of the week. Still, on the plus side I will have loads of time to do worky things. Not Proper Job worky things obviously, no, Toady worky things like getting promo copies of the first couple of Toad releases off to the music magazines, writing up interviews and editing the video, and publishing the Sparrow & the Workshop Toad Session.

So it’s another week in my underpants, glued to a computer screen and eating gherkins out of the jar for me I’m afraid.  Think of that while you’re out leading your exciting, exotic lives, snorting coke and banging hot babes.  Yeah, yeah, it’s fine for you lot you bunch of fly-by-night flibbertigibbets, but just you mind who puts in the real work around here.

This week’s splendid Five for Friday is as follows, and as usual please do take this opportunity to come out of the closet and spit your penny’s worth into the communal bucket.

1. A band none of us have mentioned but who we really should love (MySpace link might help).
2. Book that most reminds you of your childhood.
3. Worst thing you’ve ever said about an ex (no names, obviously).
4. Percentage of your day not spent doing what you are being paid to do.
5. Percentage of your internet usage that would qualify as being too porny to comfortably share with your other half.  If you have no shame about sharing that sort of thing with your other half, then pretend you do for the purposes of this list.

The Raincoats – Balloonacy
Jake Flowers & the Carol-Anne Showband – Rosalie
Eva Cassidy – Kathy’s Song Is there a more heartbreakingly lovely line in all of music than “There but for the grace of you go I”?
My Teenage Stride – The But for the Grace of You Go I
Art Brut – Emily Kane

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

[After the success of Crash and Nate, I am afraid I have been bullied into allowing my darling girl a go, by dint of threats of castration, involuntary abstinence and not having my tea on the goddam table when I get home from work. So without further ado I cast you into the arms of my one true love, the gorgeous, the swoonsome, the dazzling Mrs. Toad...]

Ah, the High School Movie, that much maligned genre. Cherished by few regular movie goers, certainly few over the age of 25. My guilty pleasure and the cause of numerous taunts and exclamations of, “oh, for fuck’s sake” from Mr Toad at the video store.

These films are inevitably focused on a few themes; the ascendance to high social status through some crafty plan, bet or blackmail (The New Guy, She’s All That, Can’t Buy Me Love), the last blast of youth before adulthood beckons (American Pie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), breaking down social boundaries (The Breakfast Club) or a love story worthy of Austen or Choderlos de Laclos (Clueless, Cruel Intentions). Occasionally attracting critical acclaim (Brick) but more often leaning towards the execrable (Road Trip), I hire them all with a frisson of pleasure and anticipation.

Snort with disdain, but some of the films above helped launch the careers of George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker and Reese Witherspoon, a fair shake of Oscar winners and nominees. So the next time you see some teenage pap on the boards at the multiplex, take a shufti. You may just find yourself one up in the “I saw him/her first” Dinner Party Artistic Oeuvre Sweepstakes one day.

Now, the other facet of High School Movies is that they generally enjoy a healthy turn from their soundtracks. A party scene is inevitable, being the main forum (apart from exactly where one sits in the canteen/bleachers, a curiously US phenomenon) where social wheat is sorted from chaff. If you wish to see dancing scenes that approach the horrific brilliance of David Brent in The Office, 80’s High School Movies are often fertile ground for a spot of coordinated white boy body poppin with bat wing sweaters and rat tails flying (Corey Haim has a lot to answer for). You can laugh but 20 years ago you wanted to be them, Ice Ice Baby…

Soundtracks are often complemented by “live” prom turns from bands on the up and coming (or down and out..). The prom night denouement is virtually universal and real bands often turn up to have a turn on the silver screen. The legendary Pretty in Pink features the Plimsouls and the Rave-Ups at various points. Its such lucrative ground that some artists such as Sixpence None The Richer specialise in offering journeymanlike poppy nonsense just for the market, having scored “Kiss Me” on She’s All That, they later feature in Smallville (TV) and Not Another Teen Movie (shitting on their own doorstep surely?). Still, it has to be a step above screeching “Whoaaah, Bodyform!!! Bodyformed for youuuuuuuuu” in fanny pad ads at least. We can’t all be Radiohead (who condescended to have a song on the Clueless soundtrack btw). Of course, featuring on a film soundtrack is no guarantee of enduring success. One hit wonders are a frequent occurrence, Steal My Sunshine by Len anyone?

I could talk High School Movies all day and I’m always looking for more to watch, so suggestions welcome. In the meantime, I will leave you with a few instantly recognisable tracks from High School Movies past. In memory of Heath Ledger, who you may remember from an Oscar winning turn in Brokeback Mountain but I from such delights as 10 Things I Hate About You and medieval High School Movie, A Knight’s Tale, I have listed a couple of tracks from those movies.

Len – Steal My Sunshine (From Go)
David Bowie – Golden Years (From A Knight’s Tale)
The Raincoats – Lola (They weren’t on the soundtrack to 10 Things I Hate About You, but pretending to like them was Heath Ledger’s opening gambit in snaring Julia Stiles.)
Sixpence None the Richer – Kiss Me (From She’s All That)
The Platters – The Great Pretender (From American Graffiti)

Posts in this series:
- Crash Calloway from Pretending Life is Like a Song writes about The Commitments.
- Nate, who plays viola in The Young Republic explains why some terrible films have excellent scores.
- My dearest darling Mrs. Toad sings the praises of the High School Movie.
- DC, presenter of The Waiting Room, goes on a truly interminable ramble about the great Tom Waits and One From the Heart.
- Brother of Toad talks about how the context of music can interfere with its use in a movie.
- John sums up Natural Born Killers in three sentences.
- I have a go myself by writing about the art of referencing films in your song lyrics and what it lets you do.
- Tim from The Daily Growl digs away at the sensual texture of In the Mood For Love.
- Matt from Draped in Velvet might never forgive the false start of the world of rap-rock.
- Ian from Broken Records delivers the rant that started this all off: why soundtracks just don’t work!

Remember the teeth-grindingly bad teen adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (not one of Shakespeare’s better efforts to begin with) called 10 Things I Hate About You?

Once you’ve all quite finished sniggering, if there is one thing I remember about that movie it is this: in order to prove how cool they were to The Kidz(TM) they had to have the protagonist – the Kate character – like a really cool underground band, and they chose The Raincoats.

I look on this choice with a degree of amused sympathy for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, an ex-girlfriend of mine once gave me a mix-tape with Don’t Be Mean by The Raincoats on, so I actually knew who they were.  It is with a strange mixture of smug pride and utter humiliation that one recognises the cool band in a movie aimed at American high school girls, but there you go.  The other reason of course, is that the Raincoats were one of those resolutely underground band who, despite the enthusiastic endorsement of the (warning, controversial statement approaching) hugely over-fucking-rated Kurt Cobain (oh get over it, Nirvana just weren’t that good) steadfastly refused to become famous and pretty much ceased realeasing stuff at all around that time.

The other thing that struck me is that The Raincoats were a pretty high-credibility alternative band – how the fuck did they persuade them to appear in that crummy little film? Jesus, money must talk. Either that or it looked way better on paper than it ended up being in reality.

Just goes to show, eh, no matter how much you research and think you know about popular music, the vagaries of bands themselves and the whims of the general public defeat the best of us.

The Raincoats – Lola

[Disclaimer: I am actually on holiday at the moment, probably fucking up my brother's wedding by swearing too much in the best man's speech, so it's all a bit minimal at the moment.  Normal service will be resumed after we return on about the 25th July]