I am learning to despise hotel internet. Whether I book myself and end up staying in a fucking Travelodge or Mrs. Toad books and we end up staying on one of the larger guest suites at Buckingham fucking Palace, absolutely all of them have such risibly bad internet connections that recording a podcast leaves me tearing my fucking hair out.
I couldn’t even get the online image editor to load properly, so the image is that rather pathetic, borderline clipart stinker you see in the top right hand corner. Dreadful. My art teachers would be justifiably disappointed.
Anyhow, this is called the Plancast for one simple and far from compelling reason: the fact that Mrs. Toad and I are down in London and have had to be clinically heartless in who we do and don’t see. We don’t exactly have lots of friends down South, but still far too many to see in one weekend and at times in the past we have tried to do too much and ended up being inadvertently rude to everyone.
01. Love Inks – Blackeye (00.06)
02. Dubstar – The Day I See You Again (04.57)
03. Rev I.B. Ware with Wife and Son – I Wouldn’t Mind Dying (But I Gotta Go By Myself (12.01)
04. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Airline to Heaven (18.30)
05. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Hard Time in a Terrible Land (23.12)
06. I Break Horses – Hearts (29.39)
07. Tusk Tusk – Out of Tune and Out of Time (37.22)
08. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (41.01)
09. Girls Names – Nothing More to Say (46.02)
10. Thomas Tantrum – Hot Hot Summer (51.33)
11. Jarad Miles – Darjeeling (56.04)
I know I promised the Notcraigcast last week, but it didn’t happen I’m afraid. After last week’s amazing Craigcast Neil and I were intending to introduce Craig to all sorts of modern music which we thought continued some of the traditions of the blues music he was describing to us, but circumstances have rather conspired against us unfortunately. Neil is off on tour with Meursault playing his songs, and Craig is off on tour with his liver, taking it around the watering holes of Edinburgh and giving it a good, hard kicking in each one.
Consequently I’ve sort of cobbled together a podcast from fragments of the Pantscast and the stuff I’d intended to play for Craig. It’s largely folky, but that wasn’t wholly by design, more to do with the fact that listening to the really early blues stuff Craig played for us sent me back to listening to old Smithsonian Folkways stuff and so there are a couple of songs from there, as well as a couple of modern things which those recordings brought to mind.
Smithsonian Folkways, incidentally, is a non-profit record label run by the Smithsonian Institute to preserve and support a truly epic amount of our musical heritage. Just go and have a browse through their archives – it’s amazing how much incredible stuff these guys are looking after on everyone else’s behalf.
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1. Micah P. Hinson – She Don’t Own Me (02.57)
2. Hem – The Cuckoo (11.13)
3. Saint Etienne – Like a Motorway (16.52)
4. White Antelope – Silver Dagger (22.15)
5. The Boggs – Plant Me a Rose (28.00)
6. Willard Grant Conspiracy – River in the Pines (31.47)
7. Berzilla Wallin – Conversation With Death (Oh Death) (39.22)
8. Samamidon – O Death (44.26.)
9. Dock Boggs – Sugar Baby (49.21)
10. Alela Diane – White as Diamonds (Daytrotter Session) (54.09)
11. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (59.07)
As noted in my End of the Road podcast, Yo La Tengo finished their Friday night headline slot at the festival with this, which has always been one of my favourite of their tunes. Thing is, at the festival they announced it as a Sandy Denny song, which was the first I had ever heard of it.
I know most of you likely to be reading this are music obsessives the same as me, and need no introduction to Sandy Denny, but I thought I might as well explain who she is in the off chance you don’t know. She worked briefly with Strawbs, before joining Fairport Convention in 1968. She sung the lead on their legendary Liege & Lief album, but ultimately buggered off to do her own thing, until her considerable appetite for drugs and alcohol destroyed her relationships with pretty much every musician she worked with. In ’78 she died of a brain haemorrhage.
So a sad little story really, but she had a truly glorious voice and By the Time it Gets Dark is just a gorgeous song. If ever there was a short, poignant definition of what being in a family is all about it is this: the weariness with the outside world, and the desire to spend some time together doing not very much; the simple happiness of being with people you care about. Fair brings a tear to my eye, so it does.
Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark
Yo La Tengo – By the Time it Gets Dark
