Because of electiony things and my trip down South this weekend I am writing this after an evening out drinking gin, and a night spent watching the election and drinking wine whilst Mrs. Toad snoozes on the couch.

Voting for the fucking Tories, honestly what a bunch of idiots this country has turned out to be (see graphic).  If you’re minted, you can afford to vote with your conscience.  If you’re less than wealthy then voting Conservative is basically just voting for aggressive, hostile rhetoric over self-interest, which is just weird.

I am getting sick of this ‘voting for change’ pish which is being dropped into chat all over the place.  Change?  Change?  Seriously?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Change would have meant the Lib Dems becoming a serious third party, which I actually think would have been good news.  Multiple parties implies something closer to proportional representation, and it happens and works across Europe.

Adversarial two-party politics is a weird concept, when you look at it.  You end up with Celtic v Rangers, United v City, God Bless America vs Evil Communist Russia – it’s just such a simplistic and superficial narrative to apply to a question which is actually quite nuanced and complex I am not sure how we ended up here.

Anyway, delurking, that’s the message for today.  Delurk, unlurk, exlurk and say hello.  That’s what these Friday posts are for, and I will be on a train all afternoon and eager for some sort of entertainment so please come out with some bollocks.  Any old bollocks will do!

1. Name your independent political party.
2. Make a spurious election promise.
3. Suitable insult for your opponent.
4. Something vs what?  Name a new deathmatch!
5. What the fucking fuck happened to the fucking Lib Dems?  Eh?  Fucksake.

Blur – Death of a Party

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Supergrass – In it for the Money

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Pulp – Pencil Skirt

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Belly – Gepeto

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The Bluetones – The Fountainhead

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Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years.  That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident.  Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).

At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all.  Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.

I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point.  Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.

I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent.  I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.

So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website.  Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever.  Pick your madness.

1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*.  Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head

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Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes

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The Flatlanders – Going Away

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Supergrass – Moving

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*

You may point and laugh, people, but I am currently lying in my bed, a mere sneeze, twitch or yawn away from unspeakable agony. I fucked my back playing football on Monday and at the moment any kind of movement is like a wild gamble. Do it wrong, and my lower back spasms to extent that it can take me ten minutes to focus on the individual muscles one by one and try and relax them. It’s bloody crap.

On the plus side, my doctor has prescribed me Diazepam which, according to the Daily Mail, will turn me into a jobless, benefit-scrounging, teenage single mother by the evening.  I was offered opiates as well, but turned them down on the basis that I would snigger about it too much.  Also, I am not fond of painkillers to begin with: I prefer to actually know what’s going on if I can.  I want to be able to know how much it hurts and consequently have a reasonable idea when it’s all getting better.

The other annoying thing is that I literally cannot do anything.  When you’ve got other illnesses you can at least potter in the garden for an hour here or make some phonecalls there or do some video editing or whatever the hell else, but I can’t even sit at a desk for more than twenty minutes before everything starts clenching up, so I am quite literally confined to lying either on the bed or the living room floor, or hobbling about the house to try and loosen up.  I have watched every shitty movie known to man in the last three days.

You know what was a real disappointment though?  Neighbours.  And Home and Away to an extent, but mostly Neighbours.  Even seven or eight years after leaving uni I could still comfortably slip back into Neighbours – face it, the plot moves at an absolutely glacial pace – but this week I haven’t had the patience.  It’s a bit gutting – like I’ve finally lost touch with an old childhood friend.  Maybe the pain in my back has eroded my patience for this kind of thing.

Anyway, while you’re off gallivanting, spare a thought for me, watching American Pie: the Wedding or some other such total horse manure, and unable to even drag myself out for a bloody pint – anaesthetic beer, mmmmm!  And what better way to kick off your Friday fun than by mocking the cripple.  You heartless bastards.

1. Most pain you’ve ever experienced.
2. Coolest sounding drug you’ve been prescribed.
3. Worst thing you’ve ever watched whilst off work sick.
4. Most innocuous injury you’ve ever had a ton of sympathy for.
5. Most painful affliction you’ve ever had which seems too lame for sympathy.

This Friday I have some mid-90s acoustic versions of stuff to share with you.

Evan Dando & Juliana Hatfield – My Drug Buddy (Acoustic)

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Pulp – Joyriders (Acoustic)

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Supergrass – Caught by the Fuzz (Acoustic)

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Fun Lovin’ Criminals – Scooby Snacks (Acoustic)

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Pearl Jam – Black (Live Acoustic)

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It’s been a longish week, but believe me this weekend is going to be worse.  I am offering up my poor old Volvo for sale, which breaks my embittered little alcoholic heart, so it does.  I am going to miss that car, we’ve had some wonderful times pottering about in her and I am going to miss the silly old girl, really I am.

This is a joint podcast, seeing as how I was in the pub with Dylan and the poor whelp seemed to have nowhere else to go, I invited him back to the house to add his own particular brand of incoherent nonsense to this week’s podcast.  Because lazy racial stereotyping is something of a stock in trade around here, I find myself making several lame attempts to bring up Welshness and national identity and all that pish, but ultimately this is just two drunk people chattering about music.

More or less the usual, then.

Toadcast #64 – The Welshcast

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01. Billy Bragg & Kirsty MacColl – A New England (05.12)
02. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Miniature Kingdoms (14.54)
03. Manic Street Preachers – From Despair to Where (18.53)
04. M.J. Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight for History (27.46)
05. Broken Records – And They All Fell Into the Sea (35.50)
06. Drunk Country – The Rain That Almost Drove the Windows In (44.44)
07. Meursault – William Henry Miller (49.34)
08. Super Furry Animals – Into the Night (57.24)
09. Supergrass – Moving (65.15)

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)

[Disclaimer: this post has been written with no academic authority whatsoever and, perhaps more importantly, no real psychological or sociological training or background, so if you really, seriously know about this stuff I would appreciate you enlightening me.  This is just a 'best guess as I see it' sort of a post, so please don't think I'm setting myself up as an authority.]

There has been some chat going on in the comments section of the Gaza Appeal post which I thought worth elevating to a post all of its own.  When I rant about religions and anti-Darwinism and mysticism and so on one of the things I inevitably end up shouting at everyone is that as a species and as individuals we have a lot of misplaced vanity.  We think we are special, and we aren’t.  I don’t mean it in a mean, pompous way, but I firmly believe that human beings have no real conception of how mechanical, how average, how just like everyone else we all really are.

One of the key comments on the Gaza post was about fundamentalists and fundamentalism and it betrays an important and very dangerous mistake almost all of us make when faced with this sort of behaviour.  It is the ‘they just aren’t like us, they can’t be reasoned with and ‘we’ are nothing like them’ mistake.  There are people who are mentally ill, and there are psychopaths and so on, I am not denying that, but for all these people may also be fundamentalists (of whatever stripe), the characteristic of fundamentalism is not an illness.  It is simply a human behaviour to which we are all prone and which can be relatively easily induced by certain social conditions.  We all like to think that we’re special, that we’re immune, but the vast, vast majority of us would simply be wrong in making that assumption.

Did anyone read about the teen suicide epidemic in the South Pacfic which was described in the Tipping Point?  Lots of otherwise normal teenagers started committing suicide for no obvious reason, until the phenomenon reached something akin to epidemic proportions.  How about the high school experiment The Third Wave, where the behaviours of Nazi Germany were so easily recreated, in order to demonstrate just how easy it is to get human beings to do insane and awful things.

Given that the whole discussion was brought about by discussion of Israeli and Islamic terrorism, it is interesting to note that MI5 has recently concluded that, in terms of domestic Islamic terrorism, there is no simple ‘they’ category.  In fact, the one defining characteristic of domestic Islamic terrorists is that they have no defining characteristics.  They are simply normal people, and in fact are often not all that religious.  It would appear, then, that we are not discussing a kind of person at all, but more accurately a set of circumstances which would make extraordinary behaviour seem perfectly rational to a normal person.

Apart from simply being wrong, I think this blanket ‘they can’t be reasoned with’ approach is also very dangerous.  This is a phenomenon to which we are all prone, and yet is nevertheless reassuringly rare, so to dismiss it in this way is to deny ourselves the opportunity to prevent it.  It’s not something that is going to magically go away as a generation of people with a particularly antiquated mindset die out, it is a social phenomenon which is caused by a set of circumstances, and if we want to solve this issue then we have to identify those circumstances.  And by that I don’t mean the Easy Liberal Answer of jobs and prosperity, because that ignores the fact that a lot of people who you would consider to be dangerous fundamentalists are prosperous, well-educated and middle class.

But turning fundamentalism of any sort into something ‘they’ do is simply to deny the real problem in order to focus on a patently false caricature, which is dangerous for everyone.

Supergrass – What Went Wrong (In Your Head)

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Day One – Ordinary Man

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As you read this I will be in a meeting.  I will be in a meeting all fucking day.  I will tired and cranky in that meeting and trying desperately hard to both stay awake and feign even the tiniest little bit of interest.  I’ve been up until three in the morning every night this week working on the Sparrow & the Workshop Toad Session, which will definitely be posted tomorrow, and I am fucking shattered.  You know how you get so tired that the day becomes slightly surreal?  Well like that.

Nevertheless I am feeling pleased.  Despite an almighty disaster in which the fucking bastarding shitty piss arse video camera chewed half the tapes and left me with almost zero footage of two of the songs and the tail end of the interviews, I think it’s turning out very well.  The tracks themselves sound fucking amazing, honestly, and given how nervous I was about recording live drums for the first time I am both brimming with pride and enormously relieved.

This weekend, therefore, is one for peace and quiet and not doing anything strenuous.  Above all it is one for sleeeeping.  I shall sleep the sleep of the recently deceased, I should think.

So, without further ado, here’s some stuff to faff around with and generally to waste Friday by buggering about on the internet.  De-lurk, if you haven’t commented before, and participate in this glorious Friday ritual shamelessly pinched from the boards of Guardian Talk.  And if you want to suggest the next Friday Five then bung me an email at the usual place.

1. Usual number of hours sleep.
2. Ideal number of hours sleep.
3. At what point on Friday do you usually stop even pretending to work?
4. Meeting etiquette bugbear.
5. Name a record for a sunny Sunday, best played in the early afternoon.

Some oldies this week:
Lambchop – Up With People
Barenaked Ladies – If I Had $1000000
Gomez – Here Comes the Breeze
The Trashcan Sinatras – To Sir, With Love
Supergrass – Shotover Hill

No, that doesn’t mean anything, don’t ask. I just think German is a language that excels when you start to insert random nonsense into it, especially if you start saying it all in a really loud, strident voice. “Jawohl! Der is some Schnitzeknodel in mein Uberschittengraben.” Just as an example.

On the subject of German, I remember two conversations with ladies about the German language which make me laugh, and I thought I might share them.

Firstly, when I was in my first year at Glasgow School of Art I remember seducing a girl at a party with my ability to speak German. Honestly. German. It was exactly in the style of Otto from A Fish Called Wanda – I could say more or less anything – niederhopfengruber, for example – and she’d act like I’d just said the sexiest thing in the world. Hilarious, slightly surreal, and so very, very first year of uni, too.

Secondly, the opposite. I was at a party with a girl up here a couple of years ago who actually is (ancestrally) German, and I mentioned the fact that, given I speak English, German and a little Dutch, I seem to speak only the ugly-sounding languages in Europe, apart from a little bit of piss-poor French. Anyhow, it appears I offended her sense of national pride because we embarked on this hour long ding-dong about whether or not German was a beautiful-sounding language, which culminated in her telling me that I just didn’t understand the German language like she did. Needless to say, I let forth I tirade of abuse at this, demanding how she had the right to tell me she understood a language better than I did when she didn’t even speak it – all in German of course – at which point things went a little quiet. Ah, I’m really popular at parties, me.

So, I think the Sarah Palin post may have tempted a great many lurkers out of the woodwork, but as per usual the Five on Friday post (as pinched from GUT) is the best and easiest way for new commenters to say hello. You don’t have to be witty or verbose, just play along with everyone else if you fancy.

1. Good example of a group singing in a language other than their native tongue.
2. Really crap example of the above.
3. Favourite foreign band who write in their own language – i.e. not English.
4. Favourite foreign word you just like the sound of.
5. Favourite country name.

Luna – Slow Song
The Wedding Present – Pourquoi Est Tu Devenue Si Raisonnable
Supergrass – She’s So Loose
Talking Heads – Radio Head
Wilco – She’s a Jar

I was reading Marcy’s excellent Lost in Your Inbox today and happened across a post of hers that gave me pause for thought, and just a little wistful remembering.

The last few years of my life have been relatively stable. I have been in Edinburgh for about three years, and was in London for three and a half before that, but I haven’t always been so sedentary. In the years preceding London, in reverse order, I managed the following: Cambridge – 18 months, Manchester – 6 months, Montreal – three months, Cape Cod – a year, Glasgow – ten months, Cape Cod – four months, Grongingen – ten months, Glasgow – three years, Manchester – one year, Vienna – three years, Singapore – three years. In other words, over the course of about fifteen years I upped sticks and vanished about fifteen times.

It wasn’t quite as crazy as that, but it was quite hectic, and most of the time it involved abandoning pretty much my entire life and all my friends and disappearing off with no more than a couple of suitcases to my name. Because of growing up in international schools where people changed countries, and hence schools, on a regular basis, I have seen so many disrupted friendships dwindle as well-intentioned letter-writing slowly tailed off. Consequently since high school, whenever I move country I tend to just cut the cord and go.

It’s very, very rare that I stay in touch with anyone from my past actually. Once gone, I tend to just look forward and try and make a life wherever it is that I have ended up and reading Marcy’s words I was reminded of just how many people I have ended up just abandoning to the swirling mists of my past – how many good friendships have been aborted, how many shared things have been forgotten, how much human kindness has gone unremembered.

It’s sad, I suppose, but it’s not a bad thing, I don’t think. There’s little point in stringing these things out beyond their natural lifespan. Most friendships are surprisingly context-dependent and there have been quite a few times when I have known them to have an uneccessary cloud cast over them by ill-advised and utlimately fruitless attempts to keep them going once the environment in which they first grew has ceased to exist. Nowadays I tend to just wrap them up in my history as good, complete entities and let them rest there. Some day a song or a coincidence or a conversation will remind me of them and there will be one of those warm, nostalgic moments where you relive that time for a little while, before setting it carefully back in place and returning to the present.

So it is sad I suppose. Or melancholy. But there’s a warm, happy core to the sadness too, so I still think it’s a good thing in most ways. Ironic, too, that I ended up marrying a girl I knew from high school and hadn’t seen for the best part of ten years by the time we met up again.

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
Gene – I Can’t Decide If She Really Loves Me
Supergrass – Moving
Tom Waits – Shiver Me Timbers

Fuck me, I’m glad that’s over with. Did you find that as dull as I did? Four consecutive posts about major bands on major labels that you could all just as easily have read about in Q Magazine. I even liked the Elbow and REM albums, but I still felt slightly dirty writing about them, although I don’t know why.

This blog is supposed to be a record of my thoughts on music, and I was genuinely interested to hear the new Supergrass and REM, and really excited to hear The Raconteurs and Elbow so why do I feel so flat after writing about them? Why has it suddenly become so unsatisfying to write about bands of that stature?

I don’t think the answer lies in snobbery, per se. I have no shame in enjoying the really big and famous bands that I like, nor do I think anyone else should apologise for liking famous music – or fluffy, superficial pop for that matter. Music is there to be enjoyed, and really doesn’t need to be dissected much more than that*.

Maybe it’s the club-ism; the exclusivity. We share something that They don’t have their hands on yet so it feels more special, like a secret or something. There’s also the issue of making a contribution, I suppose. Me bigging up the new REM album is utterly irrelevant to the band whereas when I write about really small groups I might just double their sales if a few of you go and buy something. And they are much more delighted to see a positive review of their music of course, and that always makes this a more satisfying thing to do.

Ultimately, I think it’s about ownership, really. Pop culture is not something most of us get to participate in in any meaningful way whatsoever, so by writing about smaller bands it almost forces REM and Supergrass to become Pop Culture, whereas the little unsigned acts become Our Pop Culture – more personal, more involved and, crucially I think, a smaller community to be a part of. One which may be global in reach but is not global in numbers. It’s a more comprehensible size, something you can actually feel a part of, something you feel you can come to terms with and something which gives a little back when you go and say Hi at the end of a gig. The global audience for REM is just too big for that. The global audience for Bambi Get Over It is not.

So I guess it’s no real surprise that it just feels so much better to have a tiny unsigned band to write about, or to get some friends in and post their live performances on YouTube. They are people we know, people we can be a bit more emotionally invested in, people whose fans could conceivably all get together for a big piss up in the same place. I think a lot of what is perceived as indie snobbery is not quite as much to do with snobbery and perhaps more to do with feeling part of a community whose edges are still close enough to touch, and where you actually feel like an important member rather than a single album sale amongst millions.

So I’m not going to stop writing about big famous bands, because I am genuinely interested in them, but I am finding myself more and more drawn to the grassroots of the music world – small projects where people are having a go and I feel like I really can help bring their work to a wider audience. It just feels nicer.

Bambi Get Over It – That Girl
Darla Farmer – History
Hotpipes – Born in a Bomb
It’s a Buffalo – Outlines

* I could pretty much delete this whole blog on the basis of that one comment alone!