Song, by Toad

Well I am Ruthless and bandless to begin this term’s broadcasts, so you’ll have to wait until next week for the first Toadly Fresh Air Session I’m afraid.

Having said that, however, I have a shiteload of excellent and very shiny new material to play tonight, so people wanting the pop hits are likely to be rather disappointed as there are few old favourites and lots of new demos which I am very much hoping will end up on albums before the end of the year.

Ruth will be back with me as of next week, but she’s currently nursing Michael H. Foxx, who is in hospital with the nasties.  So best wishes to both of them, but we’ll be back in the normal swing of things from next Monday onwards.

Live on Air 8pm-9.30pm – Listen live here.

Incidentally, if you know anyone who you would recommend for a live session, just get in touch in the comments or by email (see the contact page above).

This evening’s tracklisting (updated live):

1. Django Django – Storm
2. Liars – No Barrier Fun
3. Gobble Gobble – Lawn Knives
4. Robin Grey – I Love Leonard Cohen
5. Leonard Cohen – Avalanche
6. REM – First We Take Manhattan (Leonard Cohen Cover)
7. The Burns Unit – Since We’ve Fallen Out
8. The Van Allen Belt – The Way You Look
9. Trips and Falls – That is a Big Door!
10. Sarah Lowes – Night Time
11. Findo Gask – Full Five (Demo)
12. Yusuf Azak – Eastern Sun (Demo)
13. Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry

Meursault – Fresh Air Session

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Meursault – Love or Limb (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – Untitled Triptych (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – What You Don’t Have (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – Heaven Waits (Live on FreshAir)

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Erm, really sorry that this is so very, very late, but life rather caught up with me this week.  So I never quite managed to find time to get my shit together until this evening, unfortunately.

It’s surprising how much of my time these weekly podcasts seem to take up – it can be quite hard to find an evening every single week to record these things.  What I find amazing is that I don’t run out of blather.  I don’t recall ever saying anything profound or all that intelligent either, so this little collection must represent hours and hours of inconsequential rambling.

On Friday a nice young lady in the pub asked me “Has anyone ever told you that you talk loads and loads.”  I suppose, looking back at a hundred and some podcasts the miracle is that actually the answer to that question is ‘no, not really, not that I can remember’.

Oh, and yes, that is Tina Turner and Kim Carnes you see there.  Suck it up, hipsters.

Toadcast #107 – The Tardicast

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01. The Walkmen – This Job is Killing Me (03.30)
02. Grandaddy – Hey Cowboy, the Phone’s For You (09.57)
03. Comaneci – Satisfied Girl (15.51)
04. Tina Turner – Private Dancer (17.50)
05. Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – England (27.33)
06. Ruth Theodore – False Alarm (34.09)
07. The Waterboys – Sweet Thing (40.54)
08. Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes (48.04)
09. R.E.M. – Half a World Away (53.55)
10. Radiohead – Creep (Acoustic) (59.59)

I’m not sure why the end of the noughties should necessarily lead to any kind of retrospective of the nineties, but it has.  I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that I just feel it’s way too early for me to figure out what I make of the noughties.

So, given that it must be about time for the nineties revival (actually, probably best give it another year or so) and given that the nineties are now quite a long way away and given that, erm… well I dunno. Given I was poking around at that stuff recently and listening to some Pulp and Gene and Blur and stuff I figured I might as well pop the whole bloody lot into a podcast.

Toadcast #97 – The Nineties

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01. Pearl Jam – Even Flow (Unplugged) (4.16)
02. The Stone Roses – (Song For My) Sugar Spun Sister (12.23)
03. Belly – Untitled & Unsung (18.37)
04. Echobelly – Insomniac (22.13)
05. Blur – Yuko & Hiro (29.00)
06. Gene – Wasteland (36.14)
07. Ben Folds Five – Underground (38.49)
08. Blur – Country Sad Ballad Man (44.56)
09. REM – Parakeet (52.03)
10. Radiohead – Everything in its Right Place (59.30)

I am back on Fresh Air Radio this evening, although unfortunately not accompanied by the lovely Ruth, as she’s not feeling well. However, to keep the loveliness quota nice and high, the extremely lovely Diana de Carrabus from Candythief will be playing live in session for us this evening.

She may be named like a dastardly Bond villainess, but Diana’s music is theatrical pop joy.  A somewhat stripped-down set is required in the tight confines of the Fresh Air studio, however, so it will be just herself and an acoustic guitar, accompanied by violin.

On air 7pm-8.30pm GMT – listen here.

The tracklisting will be updated live below, so feel free to add your comments in as we go along.

1. Eef Barzelay – Make Another Tree
2. Elbow – Station Approach
3. Candythief – Bargains (Live in Session)
4. Son Volt – Sultana
5. Alex Ward – Sounds Like Someone We Know
6. Timber Timbre – Magic Arrow
7. Candythief – Pass It On (Live in Session)
8. Betty Harris – Mean Man
9. Seasick Steve – The Letter
10. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers (I)
11. Candythief – Amnesty (Live in Session)
12. King Charles – Beating Heart
13. REM – Disturbance at the Heron House
14. Felix Lighter – The Rational Pedestrian
15. Candythief – Junk (Live in Session)

And here, for those who missed it, is last week’s session with Thomas Western.  The sound is rather scratchy unfortunately, but I am still getting used to the desk.  To those who care, I think it’s his guitar mic which was clipping, not the vocal one, because the two were very close together:

Thomas Western – Fresh Air Session and Interview

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Thomas Western – The Worm Forgives the Plough (Live on Fresh Air)

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Thomas Western – Your Front Door (Live on Fresh Air)

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And the accompanying videos:

I admitted in a comment yesterday that I don’t really understand my general dislike of cover versions.  I don’t object to them at all, just the opposite in fact: generally I am really interested to hear them, and I like the fact that songs exist in that sort of malleable state, unfixed by any one ‘correct’ interpretation.  The problem is not in principle, just practise; I simply tend not to like them very much, and I don’t know why.

To make matters even less logical, I love people playing folk songs, and of course the whole folk tradition is one of repeating and reinterpreting songs and phrases, tunes and riffs which have gone before.  It’s one of the fundamental assumptions of the whole medium in fact: that each generation add their own layer to the existing ones, and in turn make their contribution to the richness of the art form.

In fact, if anything makes a mockery of the current abuse of copyright law by media corporations it is folk music.  The idea that you need to incentivise people to create is just laughable.  In fact the converse is true, as the art from every repressive regime in the world shows, no matter how much you discourage people from being creative you just can’t bloody stop them.  I’m not arguing against people making money from their art, but the copyright law at the moment is increasingly becoming a straitjacket to creativity, the need for which is proven a lie by folk, which is essentially a big long chain of mashups, samples, rehashing and reworking. Read the rest of this entry »

Woo hoo, it’s house gig day!  I am really looking forward to this.  The lineup is ace, it should be nice and busy and we can even open the windows in the lounge nowadays to air the place out, because it can get awfy toasty in our living room when it’s full of people.

Other than that, there will be recording happening in Toad Hall this weekend; lots of it. Tomorrow King Creosote and Animal Magic Tricks will be recording… er, something or other together, which sounds really promising.  And then on Sunday Neil and Pete will be recording the Meursault side of an Animal Magic Tricks and Meursault Split 10″ to be released later this year.  Actually, I don’t know if it’ll be under the name Meursault or just as Neil, because it’s only really him and Pete, the band’s new cellist, who will be involved.  I’ll have to ask about that.

Anyhew, I’m absolutely gasping for a pint.  I’ve been incredibly good at entirely cutting out midweek drinking for the last month or so, and for some reason this week I’ve come up against three or four occasions when I’ve really fancied a pint of an evening, but my resolve has held true and it won’t be until tonight that I can finally punish my liver with the wrath of a thousand scorned stalkers.

No Honeytrap Toad Session once again.  There’ll have to one more inbetweeny podcast, and then next week it will finally go up.  Then I’m down to one last one in the band – Shenandoah Davis – and the slate will finally be wiped clean.  The Honeytrap one is going to be brilliant, I think.  An editor’s nightmare, but bloody hilarious if I get it right.  There was drinking, there was comedy dancing, there were 80s singalongs.  It was an alcoholic trainwreck, basically.

So here we go with the Friday Fives, as shamelessly pinched from the Guardian Talkboards. This is the delurking amnesty, because things can seem a little cliquey in the comments here, because a lot of us know one another in real life (wait, what, like socialising but not on the internet – what madness is this?) so on Fridays all lurkers are encouraged to come out of the shadows and chip in with their five, whereafter the talking of utter pish may commence.

1. To which song do you feel compelled to do your most exaggerated and embarrassing comedy dancing?
2. Favourite movie singalong moment.
3. Worst movie singalong moment.
4. Best point-and-laugh comedy dancing moment.
5. Which song(s) do you know all or most of the lyrics to (and for the band people on this thread, no, ones you perform regularly do not count).

Here are some random things from my inbox which I am very much enjoying at the moment:

The Limes – Dead Furniture (Buy)

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Khaya – Duet (Single Version) (Buy)

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Br’er – Painted Lady (Buy)

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Charles Bukowski – The Death of an Idiot (Buy)

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R.E.M. – Radio Free Europe (Original Hib-Tone Single)

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Sometimes your taste just stops progressing.  You can see it happen with clothes, too – there is no way in hell I am ever going to wear skinny jeans, for example.  Oddly, I think they look can quite cool on cool people, but they always seem to be monumentally physically unflattering, no matter who’s wearing them.  My taste in trousers basically stopped moving forward around the time the hipsters of the world started to leave the bootcut on the shelf a few years ago.  A good few years ago now, actually.

This happens to people with music all the time.  Here at Proper Job one of my bosses’ musical taste pretty much ceased to have a particularly close relationship with the cutting edge at the tail end of the nineties – about the time he and I both lived around Byres Road in Glasgow, shopping in all the same record shops, unbeknownst to one another.

JC over at the Vinyl Villain has said on numerous occasions (usually when praising Frightened Rabbit for being the exception) that he just doesn’t connect with current music – he finds it difficult not to sigh the weary, jaded sigh of someone who has heard it all before*.

I remember the moment my cousin Steve said how much he liked the new Neneh Cherry song when it came on the car radio one afternoon many years ago.  It was spongy, soft, banal R ‘n’ B and I was quite shocked – this is the man who introduced me to the Dead Kennedys, The Piranhas, The Specials, The Clash, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, REM, John Cooper Clark, Madness and Adam & the Ants when I was no more than a nipper.

It’s particularly obvious with radio presenters and magazine editors whose taste clearly and publically starts to stagnate – failing to ever really move forward from the sound they were into when their fascinations and those of the hip and the cool truly coincided for a while.  I presume the same will happen to me and this site.  Hopefully not yet, but I suppose it’s probably inevitable, notwithstanding the fact that it was never all that hip to begin with.

I always wonder why this happens.  Do you just stop caring?  That’s what happened with my boss – he says it just stopped being all that important to him.  Do you slowly but surely stop surrounding yourself with people who are going to play you the new and the weird stuff until you get over the initial disomfort and get to like it?  Do you just get to the point where you fill up?  People seem to have the ability to get excited about new television series much later in their lives, although I suppose we all seem to lapse into Midsomer Murders eventually, but why does the musical interest seem to tail off so much earlier?  I guess people just watch a fuck of a lot more telly, so they are probably kept closer to the cutting edge just by default, but why do fifty year olds seem so much more likely to get excited about the new series of The Wire than the new album by Animal Collective or someone like that?  Or is that not really true, am I missing my guess on that one?

Whatever, it doesn’t really matter, I’m just idly speculating.  I think I’ve managed to keep my parents’ taste relatively young, actually, by constantly sending them new stuff.  Not NME haircut young, but a respectably alternative kind of young**.  They struggle a bit with some of the electronic stuff though, and I didn’t send them the Meursault album, for example; except Small Stretch of Land, all parents love that one.  But I hope someone does the same for me.  At thirty-three I reckon I have a couple more years of  youthful enthusiasm in me before the will to live slowly dies and I begin the long, slow, depressing slide into that awful form of dementia that leads you to believe that Noah and the Whale are any sort of a band at all.  When that happens, someone please just give me a massive overdose of Coldplay and put me out of my misery as quickly as possible.

R.E.M. – Radio free Europe

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Billy Bragg – World Turned Upside Down

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The Beat – Whine & Grine/Stand Down Margaret

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*That’s just because he’s so incredibly fucking old, by the way, not because he’s a snob.
**I never liked mainstream music when I was young, so I’m not likely to aspire to it in old age.  I just mean stuff that’s still current and innovative.

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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Well, as DC pointed out on Five Friday Fatwas, the 90s revival is not quite upon us yet.  It’s both totally inevitable and somewhat due, so it will be here sooner rather than later, but for the time being it has yet to entirely arrive.

So in anticipation of the inevitable, I thought I might just make a podcast which partly tried to anticipate the revisionism and partly talked just a little about what I myself might remember when the 90s revival hits full swing in a couple of years.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a child of the 90s, but I think that I might be wrong in neglecting to do so.  When they started I was 15, just moved from Singapore back to Vienna and very much a kid.  By the time they ended I had finished my Master’s degree and spent a long time pouring pints waiting for a proper job, which in some ways I suppose might just make you an adult.  It was an interesting era for me personally and when the revival arrives, as it inevitably will, I am downright fascinated to know what the younger generation will make of the music with which I grew up.

Toadcast #61 – The 1990s

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01. Pearl Jam – Go (03.47)
02. R.E.M. – Oddfellows Local 151 (11.05)
03. Cocteau Twins – An Elan (18.16)
04. Gene – Sleep Well Tonight (21.46)
05. Counting Crows – Omaha (30.33)
06. Supergrass – She’s So Loose (38.37)
07. Echobelly – King of the Kerb (41.33)
08. Alice in Chains – Nutshell (47.47)
09. Pavement – Gold Soundz (53.22)
10. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Eggshell Miles (59.01)

This week I welcome you to the absolutely 100% guaranteed non-controversial podcast.  Nothing to see here. Move along.  Although, it might be slightly controversial, just possibly, around two thirds of the way through if you are excessively religious or perhaps if you have some objection to pointing and laughing as Jade Goody dies of cancer or Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse slowly expire in the full and relentless gaze of the public eye.

Has anyone seen the film Deathwatch?  It’s set in Glasgow in the 1980s and almost entirely obscure, despite an amazing cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow.  What it amounts to is that a woman discovers that she is going to die, and then a TV company ask to buy the rights to film her last weeks.  It’s a bit over the top at times, but a pretty visionary movie nevertheless.  It’s always disconcerting where something like that makes a prediction which proves to be so uncannily true.  I think the scariest thing about 1984 is how utterly determined the species seems to be to make sure that it comes true.

If you can find a copy, I’d recommend that you watch it.  It’s pretty hard to track down though – we had to get ours from Amazon France for some bizarre reason, so good luck to you.

Toadcast #60 – The Blandcast

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1. Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm (04.41)
2. Clem Snide – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience (09.00)
3. Pree – Light Falls (17.05)
4. Frivolous Laura – A Lullaby (20.22)
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Statues (27.27)
6. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin (37.18)
7. Kill It Kid – Burst its Banks (41.31)
8. Pete Doherty – The Last of the English Roses (49.03)
9. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (59.41)