Song, by Toad

Sometimes your taste just stops progressing.  You can see it happen with clothes, too – there is no way in hell I am ever going to wear skinny jeans, for example.  Oddly, I think they look can quite cool on cool people, but they always seem to be monumentally physically unflattering, no matter who’s wearing them.  My taste in trousers basically stopped moving forward around the time the hipsters of the world started to leave the bootcut on the shelf a few years ago.  A good few years ago now, actually.

This happens to people with music all the time.  Here at Proper Job one of my bosses’ musical taste pretty much ceased to have a particularly close relationship with the cutting edge at the tail end of the nineties – about the time he and I both lived around Byres Road in Glasgow, shopping in all the same record shops, unbeknownst to one another.

JC over at the Vinyl Villain has said on numerous occasions (usually when praising Frightened Rabbit for being the exception) that he just doesn’t connect with current music – he finds it difficult not to sigh the weary, jaded sigh of someone who has heard it all before*.

I remember the moment my cousin Steve said how much he liked the new Neneh Cherry song when it came on the car radio one afternoon many years ago.  It was spongy, soft, banal R ‘n’ B and I was quite shocked – this is the man who introduced me to the Dead Kennedys, The Piranhas, The Specials, The Clash, The Smiths, Billy Bragg, REM, John Cooper Clark, Madness and Adam & the Ants when I was no more than a nipper.

It’s particularly obvious with radio presenters and magazine editors whose taste clearly and publically starts to stagnate – failing to ever really move forward from the sound they were into when their fascinations and those of the hip and the cool truly coincided for a while.  I presume the same will happen to me and this site.  Hopefully not yet, but I suppose it’s probably inevitable, notwithstanding the fact that it was never all that hip to begin with.

I always wonder why this happens.  Do you just stop caring?  That’s what happened with my boss – he says it just stopped being all that important to him.  Do you slowly but surely stop surrounding yourself with people who are going to play you the new and the weird stuff until you get over the initial disomfort and get to like it?  Do you just get to the point where you fill up?  People seem to have the ability to get excited about new television series much later in their lives, although I suppose we all seem to lapse into Midsomer Murders eventually, but why does the musical interest seem to tail off so much earlier?  I guess people just watch a fuck of a lot more telly, so they are probably kept closer to the cutting edge just by default, but why do fifty year olds seem so much more likely to get excited about the new series of The Wire than the new album by Animal Collective or someone like that?  Or is that not really true, am I missing my guess on that one?

Whatever, it doesn’t really matter, I’m just idly speculating.  I think I’ve managed to keep my parents’ taste relatively young, actually, by constantly sending them new stuff.  Not NME haircut young, but a respectably alternative kind of young**.  They struggle a bit with some of the electronic stuff though, and I didn’t send them the Meursault album, for example; except Small Stretch of Land, all parents love that one.  But I hope someone does the same for me.  At thirty-three I reckon I have a couple more years of  youthful enthusiasm in me before the will to live slowly dies and I begin the long, slow, depressing slide into that awful form of dementia that leads you to believe that Noah and the Whale are any sort of a band at all.  When that happens, someone please just give me a massive overdose of Coldplay and put me out of my misery as quickly as possible.

R.E.M. – Radio free Europe

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Billy Bragg – World Turned Upside Down

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The Beat – Whine & Grine/Stand Down Margaret

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*That’s just because he’s so incredibly fucking old, by the way, not because he’s a snob.
**I never liked mainstream music when I was young, so I’m not likely to aspire to it in old age.  I just mean stuff that’s still current and innovative.

It’s another solid week of gigs this week, with a couple of lesser-known groups popping up and the chance for me to see new discovery The Byrons play at the ARK, which promises to be good.  Mrs. Toad’s away this week, so I have free reign to go out as many nights as I please – whee!  Have fun, Toadlings.

Wed 5th March: The Byrons & Foxgang at The ARK.
So, a couple of days after I write about them , here are The Byrons, playing their Blur-y brand of, um, what, post-rock? They’re joined by Foxgang who are also pretty good – beatier and a bit more upbeat – so it should be a good night.
The Byrons – Anglais
Foxgang – Cheesewire

Thursday 6th March: The Occasional Flickers at The Bongo Club.
When I first heard their music I thought ‘gosh this twee pop sounds right up Cloudberry Records‘ street’ and lo and behold who has a Cloudberry single to their name? Yup, you guessed it. Well they’re playing with The Afterglow and Exit Music at the Bongo Club on Thursday.

The Occasional Flickers – Rucksack

Friday 7th March: Meursault at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
This is their album release actually.  I’m not sure if there’s a label involved but if not, fuck it.  Who needs labels these days.  So I am set for plenty of beers and some rather dark banjo-meets-electronica goodness.
Meursault – Salt Pt.2

Sunday 9th March: The Beat at the Liquid Room.
The Beat! The fucking Beat! I won’t be going, because reunion tours for ageing ska legends tend to be overpriced and a poor compensation for being too young to have caught it the first time round. But The Beat, people!
The Beat – Stand Down Margaret (Whine & Grine)
The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom

Well you know how I said I wasn’t so convinced by Toadcast #17?  Well it proved somewhat prophetic, although that prophesy may have been somewhat self-fulfilling of course.  It’s one of my least downloaded podcasts for ages, but this one should sort that out.  There’s some genuinely excellent music on here, although most of it is pretty obscure.  There’s no Arcade Fire or anything to pull in the punters, bar a bit of The Magnetic Fields, but a really good selection of new and emerging music nevertheless.

And why the Homecast?  Well that’s obvious of course: we’re back in our house at long last and I recorded this from my massive old lab bench that doubles as a desk and music centre all at once.  It’s fucking brilliant – I really should take a picture and post it for you so you can see.  The bench is 2.75m long, so I have computer and stuff at one end, stereo equipment at the other and a couple of good sized speakers either side. A music anorak’s paradise!

Toadcast #18 – The Homecast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Eureka Springs (Edit) (00.00)
02. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (02.30)
03. Flashguns – St. George (07.53)
04. George Pringle – Carte Postale (13.52)
05. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (16.59)
06. Destroyer – Foam Hands (21.55)
07. Howlies – Aluminum Baseball Bat (28.44)
08. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir – Aspidestra (38.36)
09. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers (40.48)
10. Ruth Theodore – Overexpanding (49.22)
11. Akron/Family – Ed is a Portal (55.28)
12. Victor Borge – Phonetic Puncutation (63.22)
13. Josiah Wordsworth – Drive-by Media (70.23)
14. King of Prussia – Spain in the Summertime (74.44)
15. The Magnetic Fields – Threeway (83.07)
16. The Forms – Knowledge in Hand (87.44)
17. Howlies – Smoke (90.14)
18. The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom (95.38)
19. Found – When You Fall (102.09)

Ah, the embarrassment. What a fool I was, but such was the inevitability I can’t really feel all that ashamed. Basically, I bought my first record player since I was 17 about four hours before our housewarming party on Saturday, and you can imagine the rest. I’ve been so excited about this ever since I made the decision a couple of months ago, that I have accumulated a pretty decent stack of vinyl in the meantime, giving Scotland’s second hand shops a pretty good scouring, with plenty more to come.

So, having left my whole music collection on random through most of the party, due to not having enough time to throw together even the most rudimentary of playlists, I inevitably failed to resist the urge of old Stones singles, some Jam, some old Motown, something by The Beat, Elvis Costello and so on and so on. Of course, being a music nazi to begin with, and being all the more excited to play with my new toy, I was in no mood whatsoever to let anyone else play at all.

Unfortunately, most of my music is not party music, especially not my vinyl purchases, so inevitably as I got drunker and less concerned with everyone else, the music got more and more maudlin. Billy Bragg, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, James Yorkston, even Leonard Cohen may have made an appearance. It got to the point where I insisted on trying again and again to play a Bruce Springsteen record that clearly had something wrong with it.

The only saving grace was that I was so exhausted after working from 8am to 1am virtually all week to get the house ready and so drunk from quaffing at the sort of reckless pace that giddy relief brings that I passed out some time at, apparently, three or four in the morning (it may have been earlier – I was pretty wasted). This left the remaining heroes of booze a good two or three hours of uninterrupted access to my month and a half’s worth of music, and freedom was theirs at last!

What a fool. But I slept the sleep of the contented that night, I tell you!

Something I played really early on: Edith Piaf – Mon Légionnaire
Something I was asked to play but I think I forgot. Band of Horses – Is There a Ghost
Something I probably played far too often: The Beat – Tears of a Clown

We all have a musical mentor. Our parents always play a big role I think, and I’ve already given my pal James Strath quite enough praise on these pages already, so it’s time to mention someone else: my cousin Steve.

Steve is quite a bit older than me – about twelve years or so, I think – and when I was a toddler I couldn’t really pronounce Steve very well so I called him Beebie, which rather stuck. He was my hero when I was very young and when we moved away from England when I was five he would send out tapes to us in Vienna and Singapore to aid my folks in my embryonic musical education. Steve introduced me to The Smiths, Billy Bragg, The Clash, The Specials, The Dead Kennedys and all sort of other legends, so you can imagine why I am so grateful for his early influence.

Anyhow, before I hit my teens I remember he sent me one legendary mix tape that stands out above all others and was on an old, grey TDK cassette almost identical to the one pictured. This tape had all sorts on it – Bankrobber by The Clash, Ghost Town by The Specials, Antmusic by Adam & the Ants, and then some lesser known stuff like Stand Down Margaret by The Beat and Getting Beaten Up by The Piranhas.

It was such a brilliant tape that we inevitably wore it out completely and until the dawn of the digital age I never really thought about tracking down all the songs and resurrecting this legendary compilation. Well I have done now and, although it’s not quite the same as a playlist rather than a lovingly crafted cassette, it’s amazing to hear how incredibly well all the music has aged. So, Beebie, I salute you, and here are a couple of songs from that mythical mix.

The Beat – Stand Down Margaret
Adam & the Ants – Antmusic
The Piranhas – Boyfriend
The Specials – Why?