Well, as you all know I try and avoid spamming you with label stuff during the week – generally leaving that to Sunday if at all possible – but this week you are going to get spammed off your tits, sorry.  I blame the fact that we have just been on holiday for a fortnight, so I am horribly behind with pretty much everything as a result.

Meursault Waiting Room Session.  So, first up, whilst on their recent tour with Sparrow & the Workshop, Meursault dropped in to see DC from The Waiting Room.

They recorded an interview and recorded something like six songs for the show, all with the tour lineup of two electric guitars, bass and drums – basically, the garage rock version of Meursault.  Both the interview and the recordings themselves have turned out amazing well, and the lads said they had a great time in Cardiff and were incredibly well looked after by DC and The Woman of the House, so we owe them both a very big thank you.

You can listen to the session below, and to The Waiting Room’s archive shows here.

Me on the BBC. If you have a Twitter or Facebook account then there is absolutely hee-haw chance you aren’t sick of hearing about this by now, but yesterday on BBC2 Scotland there was a one-hour documentary about the Scottish bands at this year’s SXSW festival.

As you know, Mrs. Toad and I were along as well, and on the Sunday after the madness subsided I recorded a podcast with Vic Galloway, Peej from Dear Scotland and Stuart from Creative Scotland.  The BBC crew happened to film this, and that footage pretty much filled up most of the last ten minutes of the documentary.  That may not sound like much, but believe me, ten minutes of screen time is actually fucking ages.

Anyone who missed it can see it again on the BBC iPlayer here, and I absolutely promise you that the strong language warning on that page is NOTHING TO DO WITH ME WHATSOEVER!

The highlights of the final Sunday of SXSW were Chicken Shit Bingo (no really, I’m serious), a night of bowling and margaritas at The Highball, and the somewhat surreal experience of recording the annual Song, by Toad SXSW review podcast with Vic Galloway, Peej from Dear Scotland and Stuart from Creative Scotland whilst surrounded by a BBC camera crew.

I’ll be honest, the cameras were a little unnerving to begin with, but it’s funny how quickly you learn to ignore them. There’s even an outside chance the recording of our podcast will make the final cut for the documentary itself, which is initially being made for BBC2 Scotland and BBC3, with the hopes of expanding to BBC2 nationwide, the SXSW film festival next year, and I am not sure what else.

I am going to try and get all the rest of the SXSW stuff out of the way before Friday, so that those of you with absolutely zero interest in the festival don’t get too bored.  Also, to be entirely honest, I have an awful lot of other shit to be getting on with this week, so there is only so long I can afford to devote to this myself.

On Saturday, despite Campfires & Battlefields favourite The Luyas playing, as well as the awesome Cambodian Space Project, we ended up spending our evening in the fantastic Donn’s Depot, listening to the swinging sounds of the Nash Hernandez Orchestra instead.  This was after a day spent doing a lot of walking – mainly out along South Congress and on to End of an Ear Records – so we were tired and opted for the awesome instead of the hip.

The highlight of today was undoubtedly the Muzzle of Bees Backyard BBQ, which took something of a walk to find, but was nevertheless a very, very pleasant and absolutely wonderfully relaxing way to spend the day.  Then we had a shitload of seafood, got completely smashed and watched a lot of loud music!  WIN!

Well I can only apologise for how long this has taken to post. It’s been edited and ready to go for a couple of days now, but our hotel’s internet is fucking useless and I have had three failed attempts to upload it. The problem is that the upload takes so long that you can’t sit and babysit it, so I have to set it to run overnight, or while we’re out during the day, only to return and find that the intermittent signal has caused it to fail after three hours of upload.

This has finally worked though, so enjoy.

Well I’ve been here for a day or so now, and the music is about to properly kick off.  Yesterday was a bit of a hiatus between the interactive conference (which Mrs. Toad oh so professionally attended) and the music, which starts properly today.

Not to say there was no fun to be had yesterday, of course.  So far I have met half of the My Old Kentucky Blog team, stood for an hour waiting for The Joy Formidable before deciding that it probably wasn’t worth standing around anymore, and acquired my first and probably far from my last piece of vinyl for the next few days.  I only hope X-Ray Eyeballs and their guitar-torturing ways prove to be as awesome when I am stone-cold sober (next Tuesday is probably the first time that will be the case) as they were when I was hammered last night at the Scoot Inn, I think (YES, says Google).

Today is also the first of the official Scottish Showcases.  I have promised myself that, unlike last year when I saw Broken Records play three different times, I will try and give the Scottish bands as wide a berth as possible.  I’ll go and see my pals Kid Canaveral and Withered Hand, but I am not flying five thousand miles just to spend all my time seeing bands from two miles up the road.

There is so much on here, though, that you do have to resign yourself to missing all sorts of interesting stuff.  Having accepted that I now find myself with a highly laissez-faire attitude which means I don’t really care what I see.  This is fine though.  I have some friends to catch up with, and I think the best way to enjoy things like SXSW is not to worry about working too hard or seeing too much stuff.  Just get pished and have a good time – you can’t really avoid the music anyway, so let it come to you rather than chasing around all over the city worrying about missing this or missing that.

I have absolutely never been good at ‘meeting people’.  This seems to be because generally people think I am an arrogant arse on first impressions, and then over a year or two they either decided that they had been wrong and that I was okay really, or they didn’t.  This happened throughout my childhood – it would always take a couple of years to settle in anywhere – so when I went to university I thought I would make an effort to change, and to be more open, more approachable, more friendly and to try and really enjoy the totally new social world in which I was about to be immersed.  It was a complete disaster.

From the safe distance of half a lifetime away I think trying to be open and friendly just made me come across as insincere a lot of the time, because it didn’t really come naturally to me.  It didn’t help that I was moving from an expat to a parochial British environment, so all my social etiquette and habits were different, but my accent was sufficiently English that I didn’t benefit from the same leeway other foreigners were afforded.

Anyhow, one disastrous year in Manchester and I fucked off to Glasgow and decided not to bother trying to interact with anyone, that I would just get on with my own shit as I always had done, and that if people wanted to be friends they could fucking well come to me when they were ready.  That’s always how I’ve lived my life anyway, and so that’s what I went back to, only with the shell rather thicker than it was before my Manchester misadventures.  After a couple of years (as had always been the norm in the first place) my classmates slowly started to realise that I might be alright after all, and I made some good friends.  Quite a few people never really came around, but fuck them, they were mostly cunts in the first place.  And thus my standard path to forming friendships was pretty much cast in iron forever more: don’t expect anyone to like you, don’t fucking worry about it one way or another, but be open enough to them changing their minds when they get round to it and just get on with your own shit in the meantime.

All that probably makes me sound like the worst possible person to be giving advice on the art of schmoozing at conferences, where you tend to get about a sentence and a half to make a good impression and no more.  But actually the fact that I fucking hate meeting new people, and tend to make an arse of it anyway, might possibly mean that for most real music people, who tend to be far more awkward and far less socially confident than your average punter, maybe the stuff I’ve learned might be of some use after all.

I did eventually learn to overcome my naturally antisocial instincts actually, at least in a manner of speaking.  During the last couple of years of my university career and the first couple of my professional one I moved around a hell of a lot.  From the Summer of 1997 to the Spring of 2002 I moved from Glasgow to Groningen to Cape Cod to Glasgow to Cape Cod to Montreal to Manchester to Cambridge to Wiltshire to Kingston upon Thames, where I finally stayed put for just over three years.  So that’s ten moves in the space of five years. I can promise you I was emotionally pretty worn out by the end of it, but I had at least learned to make friends a lot faster.  More importantly, I suppose, I had learned to be a lot less bristly when speaking to new people, less afraid of being isolated in a conversation with someone I knew nothing about, without ever losing the attitude that if someone didn’t like me then I just didn’t fucking care.

So I am getting better.  But I still curl up with embarrassment on the inside whenever I decide to screw up some courage and just blunder up to someone and introduce myself.  So anyway, here are the things which work for me when it comes to going to music industry events and hoping to bump into folk who might be interesting to work with in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Found are off to play at SXSW at the moment (support them by buying this) and one of the gigs they’ll be playing there is the Hype Machine Radio launch party.  Hype Machine Radio heavily involves a friend of mine called Dev Sherlock from Blogfresh Radio, who has been about as supportive as humanly possible of  Toad Records, of the blog itself, and of pretty much all of the bands who I’ve sent his way.

Pairing up with the Hype Machine is great news for Dev, I assume, partly because Hype are becoming a pretty heavy hitters in the world of internet music and partly because they seem to be genuinely nice people.  He has also been kind enough to extend that warm, cosy cyber-hug to Found, both by inviting them to play and by including them, and my good self, on the Hype Radio show episode on this page, to go with the launch party event itself (abridged version on Blogfresh Daily).

All of this, in terms of exposure, is great news for Found, who have agreed to record a Toad Session on their return from SXSW.  In amongst all this excitement, however, they have slipped out an EP which is really rather good and has been really rather criminally overlooked, as far as I can tell.

Seven songs seems a bit long for an EP, but there are a couple of fairly short numbers – almost interludes – on there, and the whole thing clocks in at a very efficient twenty-two-and-a-bit minutes.  I have to confess that I really, really do not like Now We’ll Never Make the Playlist, but the rest of it is terrific.  The opener, Enough About Human Rights, is one of my favourite songs for ages.  The rest of the record jumps about a bit, but it’s still a very coherent piece of work.  There’s Let Fidelity Break, which could have been lifted straight from the This Mess We Keep Reshaping sessions, and the excellent, down-tempo Freaky Freaky Raving.  This Way By Design reminds be of their earlier work, actually, and its these little shifts of gear which make this an interesting EP, for me.

They don’t seem like they’ve quite decided on how they want to move beyond their previous album, and The Fidelities seems almost like they’re trying on a few things for size before they take the plunge into their next project*.  But, having said that, it’s still a beautifully packed and highly enjoyable piece of work in its own right.

Found – Enough About Human Rights

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*Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is true or not, of course.

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

God that was a dreadful headline, I’m really sorry about that.  For those of you whose sense of humour has just filed for divorce and fucked off to Barbados in your new Porsche with the pool boy, you have my sincerest apologies.

What is all this about then?  Well, seeing as on the recent Aberfeldy thread we ended up talking about supporting the Edinburgh music scene, it seemed like the perfect time to mention this.  Found are one of a few Scottish bands playing SXSW this year, and are trying to raise the money to make the trip.

SXSW, for those of you who don’t know, is short for South by Southwest and is pretty much the world’s biggest, most prestigious and most influential indie music festival.  It is held once a year in March and takes place in Austin, Texas, which is a tiny little island of literacy in the middle of the Southern states of America.  So not cheap to attend, especially not for a five-piece flying in from Scotland.

In order to help fund this little excursion, they are releasing a fundraising compilation via their website, which you can buy for a variety of prices, ranging from Skint Friend (£2.50) all the way up to Mysterious Benefactor (£50).  Seeing as a/ Found are superb, b/ Found are really nice guys, and c/ we were just talking about success for anyone in the Edinburgh music scene being good for everyone in the Edinburgh music scene, I ask you to do two things: firstly, go and buy a copy, obviously, and secondly pass this on to as many people as you can think to pass it on to.

Here are a couple of songs from earlier albums, just to remind you that they are a very good band indeed.  And lovely blokes, did I mention that they are lovely blokes?

Found – Admission Number Two

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Found – Synth Like Minds

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