Fast because I need to squeeze eleven songs into an hour because I just didn’t want to trim the playlist, fast because I want to get out into the back garden asap to enjoy the sun, and fast because um… well, just because. I dunno. Fuck you, anyway, this is the one-hundred-and-eighty-first stupid name for one of these damn things I’ve had to come up with. The names were bound to get worse over time really, weren’t they.
Anyhow, once this is done, I expect to get a couple of hours out in the garden before buggering off to Henry’s for the Edinburgh School for the Deaf, Zed Penguin and Spook School gig. These things have to happen on bloody glorious days, don’t they. Ah well, at least it wasn’t a Toad Session this time, like it usually is the moment we get a sunny day.
01. Yo La Tengo – Outsmartener (00.25)
02. Enfant Bastard – Demo Scene (06.40)
03. Lambchop – Came Home Late (12.34)
04. Smog – Teenage Spaceship (16.35)
05. Castor – Watcher Buckles (21.56)
06. Boring Girls – Tin Foliage (27.57)
07. Mitchell Museum – What They Built (32.15)
08. Plastic Animals – It Fell Apart (35.27)
09. Seafieldroad – Cramond Island Causeway (40.56)
10. Sun Glitters – Things Are… (47.11)
11. Little Deadman – Post Helado Madness (52.31)
No, not really. My standard excuse for not doing drugs, and I think it’s a good one, is that I struggle enough to contain the one in which I do partake, which is alcohol. Adding another self-destructive pharmaceutical to the list would just be plain fucking silly. And so I have never partaken of anything more horrifying than marijuana. I think this would make me a shit parent.
“Don’t do drugs”
“Why, Dad?”
“Umm, I dunno, but mostly because they’re a pointless waste of everyone’s time.”
“Oh right, so they’re not evil or anything?”
“Well no, but they’re kind of like sugar and salt – mostly fun but best avoided in general.”
It’s not exactly a chilling message of horror, is it. Don’t do drugs because, more than anything, if you get caught doing them bad things might happen. Otherwise, who fucking cares? But some of them are quite ropey. Dammit, I want to write a brochure for teh Gubmint.
Anyhow, it’s Friday, so time to snort coke off a teenage Hungarian hooker’s backside and get so drunk you fall asleep in a gutter in a town you’ve never been to before. Like Livingstone. And please don’t go to Livingstone, because no disrespect, but it really is fucking shit.
Umm… so yes, the Friday Fives. Sorry ’bout that!
1. If you were to buy a teenager off eBay for sexual tasks, where would you buy them from?
2. If you were to be king or queen of some kingdom or other, which would it be?
3. Christen your dragon protector.
4. If someone had to set Nick Hornby on fire for being one of the worst authors in living memory, to which part would you put the taper first?
5. If you owned a record shop, which album that no-one would ever buy would take pride of place in your window display?
This week’s five songs were taken from the High Fidelity soundtrack.
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It’s not going to surprise anyone at all that I am being an absolute slob today, is it? Mrs. Toad got back from Australia around lunchtime, and after a few hours of pottering about she crashed out with jetlag, so I snuck off to record the podcast. I am sure that soon enough she will wake and start demanding attention and general servitude soon enough, so I better get this over with quickly.
After that I am going straight back to bed to watch stupid films while my sweetheart dozes by my side, awaking occasionally to tell me off for not being comfortable enough, or to send me to fetch her things, or to just swear at me for taking all the covers or some other such sweet nothings of the kind she is wont to come out with from time to time.
01. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo (00.21)
02. Elvis Costello – Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No.4 (06.24)
03. Billie Holiday – Good Morning Heartache (13.17)
04. Smog – In the Pines (16.22)
05. My Tiny Robots – Ballad of the Mapmaker’s Daughter (23.17)
06. Randolph’s Leap – Going Home (32.19)
07. The Japanese War Effort – Face Like a Lemon (Ivor Cutler cover, live on Fresh Air Radio) (36.50)
08. Grass House – Lazy Bones (43.01)
09. Bob Dylan – I’ll Keep it With Mine (49.23)
10. Bettye Swann – Don’t Look Back (54.47)
I genuinely love the cold. Maybe my father’s Dutch-Canadian heritage has something to do with it, maybe my Austrian upbringing, maybe because my parents didn’t beat me as hard as they should have as a child, but if there’s a part of me which is perpetually disappointed by living in Britain it’s not the lack of a decent Summer, it’s the lack of a decent Winter.
I want Winter to be well below zero, for there to be snow on the ground for months at a time, for it to sting the tips of my fucking ears when I leave the house, for football to be abandoned for five months, for mulled wine to be served everywhere and roast potatoes and chestnuts to be available. Given that Scotland is responsible for something as awesome as a hot toddy (see Wikipedia here, although ignore the bit about ‘usually’ including alcohol, they all have alcohol, this is Scotland) you know that it used to be proper cold here at some point.
Nevertheless, despite the generally accepted inadequacy of the British Winter (places in the very North of Scotland excused, I hear it’s fucking freezing there) and despite the fact that last year got kinda chilly, prompting Benni Hemm Hemm to quip in Glasgow that he loved the weather because we seemed to think that a couple of degrees below zero was actually cold, I am always left a little disappointed by the tepid drizzle which passes for Winter in these parts.
Just as hot weather induces a certain mindset in the people who live in it, so cold weather brings on a certain mentality. Look at Finland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Denmark, Germany and Canada and that seems to be alcoholism and a tendency towards either extreme liberalism or extreme violence, but for me it is something slightly different – probably the emotions from which the Christians parasitically appropriated Christmas.
As soon as things get really fucking freezing outside, the home becomes a massively important place. Sanctuaries of warmth and light take on a very different quality, which people from warm climates cannot possibly understand. Wherever you’re coming from, by the time you get in the house, your fingers and thumbs aren’t really working properly, you’re wrapped in ludicrously excessive layers of clothing, and it’s painfully obvious that without all this shite – the clothes, the central heating, the blankets, the warmth – you will die, really really quickly.
So being indoors on a dark evening in Winter, when you’re cosy and it’s fucking Baltic outside (one of Scotland’s best ever expressions – fuckin’ Baltic by the way!) becomes an intense treat. And of course people like me, and I assume you, listen to music. And for all it’s fun to dally with Summer fun and so on, there is no greater treat than spending a dark, cold evening inside the house with music.
And it’s a different kind of music too; I think something of the sanctuary of being indoors in the freezing cold permeates into what you choose to play. As it gets colder and darker outside, I seem to progressively lose interest in new stuff and regress to my favourite music. This, in turn, reinforces the idea of Winter time as being when you go back to your family, back to what really makes you who you are, and simply wait things out for the more carefree and laissez-faire days of Summer.
In fact, it’s a genuine mark that music will be with you forever, when you want to play it at eight at night on the eighteenth of December. This year’s graduates, I think, are probably Timber Timbre. Micah P. Hinson is there, and I think The National’s new album is probably there or thereabouts too. But in general I prefer to listen to music I’ve been listening to for years, probably much the same as we all like to watch Indiana Jones for the four hundredth time on Boxing Day every year.
So I know Scotland doesn’t really have real Winters – well, most certainly not in Edinburgh, that’s for fucking certain – but there’s a reason I really welcome the first really bitey nip on my ears when I go outside, the first frost, the first frozen puddle to crunch underfoot. It means it’s time to close up shop and spend time cosy in your home, snuggle up with someone on the couch, read books, play records you know you love, cook rich, thick food, and just enjoy being inside for a change. Coming inside from the freezing cold outdoors – no feeling like it!
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[I am off to Eigg this weekend for the Fence Away Game and, well, Egg Song... sorry.]
Do all of you buggers follow my inane rambling on Facebook as well as here? Well if so then this little tale will probably sound a little familiar, as I couldn’t resist making snide comments about it when it happened, but I reckon I am still just a little irritated by the whole thing so, well… there’s more, you know I can’t just let things drop.
Apparently some anonymous but quite impressive sounding production company in London is making a documentary about music fans and the passion they have for music. They phoned Kevin from Avalanche who rather kindly pointed them in my direction.
Anyhow, during a brief conversation with this lot it very quickly became clear that what they wanted was not passionate music fans, but music fans who jump around a lot. Now, I can see their point of view, and they were very nice about it, but there is still something pretty depressing about the whole thing. Obviously some retard flailing about at the front of the mosh pit like an electrocuted octopus is going to make for some pretty compelling viewing. I mean, let’s face it, what could be more compelling, in film terms, than some drunken douchebag barging about like a fool during someone’s show? I know, essential cinema, I was thinking the same thing.
Anyhow, at the time I was phlegmatic enough and pointed the nice lady in the direction of some people I thought might jump around a bit more, seeing as that was her number one and clearly most non-negotiable criterion, and thought no more of it. But over the week it has continued to come back to fucking irritate me again and again. I think about all the musicians I know who can’t get a proper job, because they couldn’t work as hard at their music if they did, who constantly irritate their other halves with the time they dedicate to music, or who traipse to one shitty twenty-person outhouse gig after another just in case the next one is the buzzing wee venue we all hear so much about, and a fair number of whom have seriously damaged their future prospects in any other careers because they have devoted all their energy to one of the most ungrateful ones of them all, and it all just pisses me the fuck off.
Is ‘passion for music’ really manifested in jumping about like a fuckwit on a Friday night and getting so pissed off your head that you can’t remember a single thing about the actual show the next morning? Really? Or is it manifested in deciding not to go to the cinema tonight and sitting in all day and all evening with a cup of tea, watching mind-numbing telly because you’ve got a gig to play in Dundee tomorrow and you need to be able to afford the price of the fucking Megabus?
Mrs. Toad lets strangers crash in our house whenever I ask her, and she lets the living room be turned into a recording studio for weeks on end, and endless drying prints for record sleeves litter the place every month or so. That doesn’t sound like much, but every single other woman she works with and every wife of every man she works with has a nice, normal house and has dinner parties and coffee and wouldn’t for a fragment of a second entertain allowing that kind of encroachment into her personal life.
Fuck it, I myself just waved goodbye to a credible ten-year career as a design engineer – a career which meant that pretty much no matter what happened in the future, I would always be able to support myself – to do this nonsense full time. And I still work into the small hours most fucking nights.
And to think that, really, to demonstrate passion for music all I really needed to do was leap around a bit more… well fuck, I would never have invested all this time and money if I’d known that’s all it took. And I know this company don’t care what’s really going on here, and that they are making a specific film with a pre-determined narrative, and they were nice about it and all…
But I still get fucking angry as fuck, I can’t help it. Fuck all the people, including myself, who work so fucking hard at this shit but are deemed not passionate enough about music simply because we don’t act like the front three fucking rows at a Bon Jovi concert. And ironically enough, if you get pissed and hang out with even the quietest musicians around here for long you’ll find out that there actually is a fair bit of drunken jumping around, just rarely in the middle of someone’s fucking show (depending of course upon the band).
They are making the film they want of course, but any arse can tell you that you don’t start a film about passionate music fans by checking how much people flail about at gigs first. Fuck off. Fuck you. Your film isn’t going to tell anybody anything interesting or new about music, or about being a fan of music. Fuck off.
1. Most intense gig at which you didn’t dance at all.
2. Most fun you’ve had leaping around like an arse at a gig.
3. Longest you’ve held a grudge.
4. Where is your passion for music most evident?
5. Person whose intensity of feeling you most underestimated.
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Well, we are nearing the end of our time in Puglia. We’re spending a couple of days in or near Napoli before we fly back on Sunday, presumably troughing like total pigs, rather than paying all that much attention to culture and all that bobbins.
Mrs. Toad is doing Sudoku and complaining about the ‘wrong sort of paper’. I kid you not, it’s just like British fucking Rail and their ‘wrong type of snow’, but she insists it’s just for that reason that she can’t solve them, not because they’re too hard. Personally I find myself wondering if ‘evil’ is used to describe the comments one’s spouse will inevitably make when you fail to complete it, rather than the actual difficulty of the Sudoku puzzle itself.
So yes, we have done the lazing about and there are now a few days of actually doing shit in between us and a return to the damp splendour of the British Isles. I suppose this is what you’re supposed to do on holiday – pay attention to the country you’re in and return, eventually – but honestly, another week of doing bollocks-all wouldn’t hurt anyone would it?
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01. Snow Patrol – An Olive Grove Facing the Sea (04.14)
02. Beck – The Golden Age (12.33)
03. Belle & Sebastian – Simple Things (19.32)
04. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Tom Justice, the Choirboy Robber (21.00)
05. Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues (29.10)
06. Navigator – Work is Done (NOT Change, as we announced, sorry!) (34.44)
07. Lord Cut Glass – Holy Fuck! (40.19)
08. Son Volt – Sultana (46.46)
09. Smog – Drinking at the Dam (56.30)
10. Alela Diane – Age Old Blue (60.17)
Right, it’s about time we had another reader participation event. This one is a good one too, and hopefully should be a lot of fun to take part in. The assignment? As follows:
I would like you to introduce us to your local record shop. Go in, take a couple of pictures, have a chat with the staff or the manager if you can be bothered, and write it up. Email me a post to put on the site, along with a couple of mp3s from albums you have bought there. It doesn’t have to be a great big clever post, just a little bit about a record shop which you think embodies the spirit of independent music that we’re trying to encourage here. And email it, don’t just write it in the comments, because that’s pointless.
Edinburgh folks will have to take first dibs in the comments section, because there aren’t that many record shops around here, so good luck to yez. I may pick somewhere in Austria because I doubt anyone else will pick that and I actually spent a lot of money on vinyl during my Vienna years.
Anyway, get writing, and get them emailed to me by the end of next weekend (the 7th I think) and I’ll post them all over the course of the week. And to commemorate the idea of great record shops, I hated the film and I think Nick Hornby is a risibly bad writer, but High Fidelity is one of the most sincere homages (it rhymes with cabbages so pronounce the fucking ‘h’ you barbarians) to the small record shop going, so here are a couple of songs from the soundtrack.
Smog – Cold Blooded Old Times
The Velvet Underground – Oh! Sweet Nuthin’
Bob Dylan – Most of the Time
This is a truly hilarious story: Maxim have been rumbled writing a review of an album they’ve never even heard. Superb!
What happened was that they printed a review of the new Black Crowes album, and weren’t especially generous, and they did it before the actual album was sent out to anyone for review – only the single was in circulation. Maxim’s excuse? They kind of, erm, just made it up.
“Of course, we always prefer to [sic] hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.”
What a wonderfully high falutin excuse for basically being lazy, lying publicity whores. Needless to say The Black Crowes are a bit miffed, but honestly – Maxim? Is anyone even mildly surprised that a sphincter-tighteningly pretentious shandy rag has sloppy, arrogant standards of journalism? If you are surprised, have you actually ever read Maxim? I know it’s tough to take your hand out of your trousers, look beyond the over-cooked pictures of empty, desperate slappers and actually read the shit, but have you? It is unbearably facile, lazy, smug, misogynistic, borderline xenophobic, playground garbage. I’d rather be caught on dogsandteens.com than with a copy of that shit on my coffee table.
Anyhow – two possible explanations I suppose. Firstly, the limp, self-righteous one above basically masquerading a case of laziness and a total absence of integrity. No surprise there then. Secondly, perhaps they downloaded an illegally leaked copy beforehand and felt that the legal connotations of admitting to that would be too dubious so they were left with so few options that was the best they could come up with.
Either way, I couldn’t really care less. The Black Crowes really are rubbish and I reckon Maxim, lazy as they were, were probably just about on the money: another album of turgid, derivative sludge was so inevitable you could bet your sister’s virginity on it with total confidence. That said, Maxim is such an awful little rag that it really is enjoyable to see them getting a big fat slap with the wet fish of comeuppance. Everybody wins, and I go to bed sniggering and happy.
Reminds of that reporter in Glasgow who wrote and published a fairly condescending review of a Meat Loaf gig she was too pickled to attend, only to find out after the fact that the gig was cancelled.
I never really understood why Bill Callahan felt the need to discard the Smog moniker. Smog was always basically a solo project anyhow, so it’s not like he needed to strike out on his own or anything, so why the switch? Well, in much the same was as Nick Cave decided to renounce the Bad Seeds umbrella in order to go a slightly different direction with Grinderman, Callahan was apparently tired of hiding behind a pseudonym and wanted to take a slightly non-Smog direction without necessarily interfering with the legacy of Smog. Fair enough.
His new album is only vaguely different from Smog things, but it seems to be a significant difference to me. Basically, it is a subtle shift of tone. Where Smog was quite dark and even morose at times (these are good things, don’t get me wrong), there’s a jaunty cheerfulness to this record which is oddly un-Callahanlike. Imagine someone waking from a lifetime of struggle to discover that life just isn’t all that bad, a fresh gin has just been poured, with plenty of lime, the sun’s out and there’s something good on the record player. That is this album.
The pace and pitch of the album should be familiar to all Smoggies – plenty of laid-back baritone and gentle building of atmosphere – but the little touches, like the duet on Sycamore, take this a world away from the introversion of previous work. Absolutely delightful, and one you won’t get whinged at for playing in public, which is not always a given with my record collection.
Bill Callahan – Sycamore
Bill Callahan – From the Rivers to the Oceans
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Fast because I need to squeeze eleven songs into an hour because I just didn’t want to trim the playlist, fast because I want to get out into the back garden asap to enjoy the sun, and fast because um… well, just because. I dunno. Fuck you, anyway, this is the one-hundred-and-eighty-first stupid name for one of these damn things I’ve had to come up with. The names were bound to get worse over time really, weren’t they.
