Song, by Toad

Oh Christ I’m fucking tired.  The videos from the Broken Records gig at the Bedlam Theatre ended up just kind of  hijacking my attention and I couldn’t bring myself to stop tinkering until some time around four o’clock this morning.  Consequently wit and entertainment will be in very short supply indeed on Toad today, and if you want to be entertained then you will have to do so yourselves.  I will try my best to be funny, but the chances of it working would appear to be slim, to say the least.

We got onto the topic of food snobbery a little while back, so this is what I would like to make the subject of this week’s five – except backwards.  None of your shaved truffles marinaded in larks’ tears this time, me hearties.  It’s all about the shite.  Yup, junk food, shit food, dismal food, boring food, all to be celebrated and enjoyed and written down in lists.  Because for all I can certainly come across as a food snob, in many ways quite rightly, I am also as prone as everyone else to hangover munchies where pretty much anything goes, and sitting around the house watching movies eating a bizarre assortment of supermarket oddities simply because they all for various reasons struck my fancy at the time.

Last week’s five was a superlative success, with all sorts of black belt de-lurking going on and lots of new victims people joining in the fun, so lets see more of that please, that was splendid.  And as soon as I get a picture of a mouse foetus brain spoon there will be a new t-shirt available, that I promise!

1. Most bizarre hangover item/combo you’ve ever enjoyed.
2. Favourite pickled thing (‘me’ – ha ha, yes, very funny).
3. Nastiest junk food for which you just fucking love anyway.
4. Oddest junk food you’ve spotted in exotic parts.
5. Really bland, unimaginative meal you find kind of satisfying.

Sparklehorse – Little Fat Baby

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James Yorkston – Midnight Feast

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Ben Folds – All U Can Eat

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Morcheeba – Women Lose Weight

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Rich Amino – Chicken ‘n’ Chips

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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.

Well the best man’s speech at my brother’s wedding went off okay.  No fuck ups, no swearing, no colossal faux-pas and mercifully short. Well, two swears actually, but no-one seemed to mind. In fact I was so relieved to get the bloody thing over with without ballsing it all up for everyone I went straight to the gin, poured a couple of extremely generous ones and proceeded to spend the rest of the wedding getting utterly smashed.

I have some culinary points to make about America, two good and two bad, so if you’re a Yank-basher you may be disappointed, but if you’re one of those flag-waving twits who thinks the sun shines out of the arse of all things Yankee-Doodle-etc.. then you may get vaguely irritated as well. Yippee – a post that’ll offend everyone!

Coffee – Unspeakably, undrinkably bad: piss-weak, flavourless, aromaless, lifeless, characterless, spineless fucking dishwater. It’s not that you can’t get decent coffee, but you have to really, really search for it. My brother found us an excellent place in the Italian part of Boston, but virtually every single cup you get everywhere else, even in the coffee houses and decent restaurants, is so thin and weak and grey it is actually impossible to drink. The reason? Well Americans seem to drink gallons of the awful stuff so I suppose if it actually was even vaguely related to actual coffee they’d all be whizzed off their tits on caffeine by elevenses.

Bob Dylan – One More Cup of Coffee (Live 1974)

Beer – You’d expect me to have the same to say about American beer really, wouldn’t you, given the ‘fucking close to water joke’* and the abominations they foist on the rest of the world in the form of Miller and Bud and their flavourless, frat-boy ilk. Well the reason American beer abroad is so utterly dismal is because they won’t bloody well let any of the decent stuff out of the country. While the EU tries to batter the shit out of British micro-breweries with their blanket standardisation laws, America have gloried in their smaller brewers. Most of the local beers in America are an absolute treat – well, in New England anyway – not as heavy as British ones, but good flavour and character, complete with evocative names and natty artwork. Bloody marvellous, no wonder they don’t want to share.

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals – A Kiss Before I Go

Food - Bleuch. The East Coast seafood is excellent in the sense that they do nothing to it whatsoever, and then slap it on a plate with plenty of butter. Sandwiches, for the most part, knock anything you’d get in Europe (outside of France of course) into a cocked hat. And I’m sure the very expensive stuff is just as good as you’d get for lots of money anywhere else. But honestly, absolutely everything in-between is utterly unvarying, served in stupidly enormous quantities and, most importantly, utterly devoid of vegetables. Fuck me, people, they’re not poisonous and no, ‘Freedom Fries’ do not fucking count. Salads, also, do not have to contain bits of fruit to be considered cuisine. Fucking awful. If you want a good meal, go to Australia.

Rich Amino – Chicken ‘n’ Chips
Jeff Foxworthy – Supersize Them Fries

Gin - last and, let’s face it, most importantly by some distance, is gin. Let’s face it, a nation could live in pools of their own faeces and fuck dogs for sport, but as far as I’m concerned if they served a good gin they would represent the pinnacle of civillisation. And do Americans serve a good gin? Ooh, Mummy! Americans pour gin, and indeed every other spirit, with the sort of reckless abandon that makes me fall to my knees and kiss the turf in gratitude. Three quarters gin, a big fat squeeze of lime and if there’s any space left then perhaps some tonic. Fucking marvellous. We may have invented the stuff, but it appears it took our bible-bothering cousins across the pond to figure out what to really do with it. A juniper-laced, lime-kissed alcoholic delight!

Tom Waits – Gin-Soaked Boy

*Q: Why is American beer rather like making love in a canoe?