I nearly typed ‘Lice in Edinburgh This Week’ in that post title, which actually rather amused me. Just in case you wondered.
Anyhow, wildly entertaining typo anecdotes aside, I have some exciting stuff to tell you about this week, although most of it is Toad stuff, honestly. The awesomeness of The Leg’s album launch could only be outdone by something pretty fucking special, to be honest, and although Neu Reekie will probably have a good go, I still back The Leg. This is going to be bloody brilliant.
And if you want to earn some karmic brownie points this week, you will also have the opportunity to do that as well: Mrs. Toad is organising the annual collection for the lifeboats on Saturday and we are looking for volunteers to come down to Stockbridge and help us between about 10am and 5pm. There will be cake and booze offered as an inducement, and you’ll only be expected to do an hour or so (depending, of course, on how many people actually turn up) and I promise we’ll be suitably grateful.
Anyhow, for those of you who don’t care about helping out for charity (note extreme disapproving face) there are some more conventional entertainments on offer this week as well:
This is another Communion night. Welsh singer Cate leBon has a new album out nowish, I believe, and she is joined on the bill by Glasgow’s Three Blind Wolves, along with Saul Ashby and Sam Airey.
Friday 27th April: Neu Reekie at the Edinburgh Book Trust.
Neu Reekie is a combination of music, spoken word, poetry, art and all sorts. It sounds like an excellent night, and I have rather shamefully yet to make it along to one, so I am hoping that this week will be the lucky charm.
I only really know the first band on this bill, and that was from one of Vic Galloway’s lineups at the Electric Circus earlier this year: they’re kinda epic, proggy and hypnotic, and they’re nice and loud too, so I reckon this should be worth a bash on Friday night.
We’ll be meeting at The Wash bar on the Mound, between 6-8pm, and then walking up to the venue from there. There will be a glass or two of wine for everyone, a string quartet because that’s how fucking sophisticated we all are, and then The Leg will play. Anyone who comes along to this and wants to go to Papi Falso afterwards will get a pound off both gigs too, because we’re that nice.
Saturday 28th April: Papi Falso 1st Birthday Party at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
With special guests, no less, this show will start a little earlier in the night with a secret band playing (on stage late enough that you can go from The Leg launch to this without missing anything), and then unusual boogie late into the night.
Well I was really looking forward to seeing Julie Doiron’s new project Daniel, Fred & Julie this week, but it turns out the fucker’s cancelled, leaving us with little else but a gigantic, all-venue clusterfuck to disentangle on Saturday evening.
I generally don’t feel like the poor relation in musical bun-fights in Edinburgh, but on Saturday Yusuf’s album launch at the St. Stephen’s Centre is going toe to toe with the Leith Tape Club all-day special and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the three-venue, all day extravaganza which is Sneaky Fest.
I feel a bit like a comically feeble Disney character, armed with little more than a dinner fork, with a fire-breathing dragon on one side and an army of homicidally angry vikings on the other, desperately wondering if we can’t all just get along. But these coincidences, annoying as they are, do just happen in the world of promotion, so only one thing to do: stop whining and just deal with it.
Actually, the Song, by Toad Records Commercial Strategy Department suggested that I just quietly neglect to mention either Sneaky Fest or the Leith Tape Club this week, but the grizzled, indomitable editorial team at Song, by Toad held out for journalistic integrity in the face of insidious commercial pressure – brave chaps, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Oh, and apart from those gigs listed below, Wounded Knee and Remember Remember are listed as playing the Electric Circus this week, but whilst it seems clear enough that Remember Remember are on Thursday 25th, the Electric Circus website is an utter nightmare to get any kind of useful information from, and although Wounded Knee are clearly written down there in the live music bit, it is not next to anything so useful as an actual date. So erm, good luck.
Oh, and Laura Marling’s at the Liquid Room on Sunday too, but it’s already sold out and she’s incredibly fucking boring anyway, so no skin off anyone’s nose there. Although a few of you perverts do actually like her stuff, don’t you? I will never understand the internets.
I’ve talked about the three Scottish launch dates in much more detail here, so suffice to say that I think the St. Stephens Centre looks like a fantastic venue, now that we’ve finally found one, and I would be deeply grateful to anyone forsaking our more glamorous competition to potter on down there on Saturday and enjoy some fine tunes and a glass of wine (it’s BYOB, incidentally, but there are plenty of places nearby).
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From Withered Hand to eagleowl, and from FOUND to Over the Wall, taking in a special mystery guest on the way, I have to confess that this looks like a brilliant evening. And apart from sitting on the top deck in the blazing sunshine, it may be the first recorded instance of actual Fun taking place at Cruz since the days when it was the Guinness family yacht, and presumably saw parties that would turn even Lindsay Lohan’s hair white.
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Saturday 27th November 2010: Sneaky Fest three-venue, all-day bonanza.
This takes place in the Electric Circus, Cabaret Voltaire and Sneaky Pete’s, with one ticket covering all shows in all venues all day. The full lineup is to be found by following the Sneaky’s link above, and includes the likes of Kid Canaveral, Washington Irving, My Tiny Robots, Kid Canaveral and Three Blind Wolves.
Before we get onto the tedious ritual of me listing good gigs every week and you ungrateful fuckers not going to any of them, I felt the need to share something quite special with you. I spent my entire weekend going through lists of blogs who might be interested in the music we release and building mailing lists of people who have bought things from the label in the past and so on and so forth, so it’s not been the most exciting weekend of our lives, I have to confess.
Consequently, by bedtime last night, having spent most of the previous forty-eight hours staring at a computer screen all I was really intellectually capable of was a bit of empty-headed cinema and an early night. Mrs. Toad tends to specialise in intellectually dormant movies, but I think it’s fair to say that this time she has pretty much excelled herself. I really don’t know how she can ever top this one: The Saint, starring (so to speak) Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue.
Anyone who has read the Simon Templar books, or even seen Roger Moore’s series as that character back before his Bond days, will know that this is light, genuinely entertaining fluff. There’s not much to it, but it has a certain style and is eminently enjoyable. By contrast, the movie was so bad it veered from train wreck to masterpiece and back every thirty seconds or so.
Elizabeth Shue takes, rather predictably, the Christmas Jones role of Nucular Physicist who has, it seems, invented Cold Fusion. She even hosts a presentation at Oxford where an undergrad (in a white coat, so you know she’s sciencey) asks what fusion actually is, presumably not having had to complete GCSE Physics in order to gain a place at university, unless of course she was a vet student or something who happened to be in the wrong lecture. Shue then holds aloft some sort of pickle jar with a glass coil inside it and explains that she just feels Cold Fusion to be possible, and that’s all the justification for this lecture we are given.
Apparently she has ‘a formula’. Because that’s what it takes to create a stable fusion reaction, a pickle jar and a formula, not a gigantic installation of state of the art engineering, apparently. She’s just got two hours of ‘figgerin’ left to do to figure out which order to put the bits of her equations in. Now, I may not know much about Nucular Physics but…
But in all honesty Shue is the least of your worries when watching this – she’ll look back on the script and cringe, but not particularly on her own performance. I suppose that’s the benefit of these one-dimensional, utterly implausible, hot-babe twenty-something lady scientist characters – they’re such ironclad stereotypes that you can’t really do much with them good or bad (assuming, Miss Richards, that you can at least pronounce the name of your allotted discipline correctly).
Anyhow, the real highlight of this two hour festival of toe-curling agony, was Val fucking Kilmer. The man is a legend. His character’s superpower was having no actual identity and being good at disguises, something which was accomplished so cartoonishly badly that every new persona made us cackle with horrified glee. The character in that clip above (don’t watch it all, I really don’t think you could take it) was pretty much the piece de resistance however.
He discovered that Shue’s character loved Byron (or something like that, I can’t remember) so decided that in order to seduce her he would need a character with an artistic soul. I can only imagine the howls of woe from all the charming, well-mannered Oxford scientists who had been trying to slip her the salami for the previous few years, when it turned out that all it took was one of the worst haircuts in cinematic history, a pair of hilarious leather pantaloons and a completely baffling choice of accents to get into the old dear’s knickers.
“Er, sir, the Chateau Latour is four hundred pounds per bottle.” “Very well, we’ll take two of them.” Zing!
Anyhow, after foiling the plans of the Russian energy magnate who created an energy shortage by stashing Moscow’s entire supply of fuel oil under his fucking house and then decided that the best way to take advantage of this shortage was by providing Cold Fusion power to the people of Russia, thus presumably negating his entire basis of power in an instant, rather than, say, just jacking up the prices of fuel oil and controlling supply to make his fortune and keep a political stranglehold on the country’s government, but I digress… Yes, so after this, Shue decides to give Cold Fusion to the world so she and Val can live happily ever after – once she’s spent the two hours necessary to figure out which way round her formulae go (something presumably not covered in the preceding years of research) in a back room at the American embassy in Moscow, that is.
Anyhow, those are some of the edited highlights, but really this film has to be seen to be believed. You have to be tough though, because I really don’t think many people could take it. Particularly the bit where Val’s hiding in the river in Moscow and the baddies looking for him conveniently fuck off for ten minutes so he can stumble to the shelter of the nearest block of flats, only to return (again, for no fathomable reason beyond evil ESP) five minutes later to resume the excitement of their narrow escape.
Anyhow, I’ll stop now. Please, please watch this for yourself, it really is the worst film I think I have ever seen, and considering the woman I married that really is saying something. Absolutely all of it is bad. All of it. Every line, every plot device, every character, every single premise, absolutely everything. Cold Fusion! In a pickle jar with a glass coil! It looked more like she’d brought her cuppa soup in the fucking thing, honestly.
Oh hang on, I was supposed to be talking about something else, wasn’t I…
A couple of splendid Glasgow bands are coming through to play at the newly re-opened Liquid Rooms. The re-decorating may be complete, but the sticky floor and smell of stale beer have apparently been lovingly preserved. Still, it was always a good venue to see bands, because the stage is high enough that you can always see, and the PA is really fucking loud. Look for the Twilight Sad to give it a good workout!
This’ll be a gorgeously Americana-flecked night of acoustic pop. Dan Mangan’s new album Nice, Nice, Very Nice is really, erm, very nice indeed (sorry, had to be done).
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Honeytrap are wild fun, and this will be my first chance to see Sebastian Dangerfield, but I’ve talked enough about this gig already, so you know what to expect by now – or at least you should. Tickets here.
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This is the first glimpse of The Savings and Loan in about five years, and probably the first proper one just about ever. Their debut album is out on Song, by Toad Records in early December, and they will be supported by The Last Battle, fielding a rather minimal lineup (it is our living room after all). We’ve sold about half the tickets already, and whilst you are likely to be able to get in on the night, it might be safer to buy tickets in advance from here. It would help us out if you did, anyway.
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Well this week I shall mostly be entertaining my parents, who are taking the opportunity to inspect Toad Hall as a suitable place for the raising of yet-to-be-considered grandchildren.
There may yet be some opportunity for a spot of truancy however, as I am DJing at the Charity Baw on Saturday. I wish I actually had the right accent to say that properly, but with my accent saying things like “baws”, or the far better “yer maw’s got baws and yer da’ likes it” just sounds stupid unfortunately. It’s the biggest chore of living in a foreign country: you pick up the slang, but not the accent, and end up making a tit of yourself all the bloody time.
The only consolation is that it has happened to my brother as well, and he now uses American slang whilst sounding like he works for the BBC, which is hilarious!
The lineup’s great, but I know for a fact that at least one of the people DJing at this event is an idiot, but Kenny from King Creosote and Gav from OnTheFly will probably play some good tunes at least. I haven’t actually seen King Creosote for ages now, and the upstairs room at the Roxy is about as atmospheric a place as I can imagine to break that duck.
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Endor have a new album in the works, and Gdansk have always been good, so I recommend this. This should be a night of good, old-fashioned guitary indie music
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For those of you interested at all in even more of my inane prattling, I have recently done an interview with a certain Mr. Timothy London for his blog, which can be read here. The interview itself was about a less cynical music industry, and I am not entirely sure I really made a great case in its favour, with some really very cynical remarks indeed. Still, I tried to answer the questions themselves as honestly and intelligently as I could, so hopefully that counts for something!
This weekend I was down in Macclesfield for Unconvention, a day of seminars, workshops and general chats about the future of music and ways in which we can best try and generate awareness and success on a minimal budget using the myriad weird and wonderful tools the modern world has given us. It was a really good day, and I heard some very interesting things, and also managed to make a tit of myself at the Managers Are The New Labels panel I was on.
The Scottish habit for constant and furious self-deprecation got a little lost in translation with all the English attendees, so everyone in the workshop got the rather unfortunate impression that I was really down on myself about what we’ve achieved with Song, by Toad and how qualified I may or may not be to be in the music industry and what I do or do not bring to the bands we work with. After a particular rush of sympathy (“Noooo, it sounds like you’re doing an incredible job”) I did get close to pointing out to them that self-confidence really wasn’t an issue here, it’s just the way you learn to express yourself in Scotland and don’t worry I am well aware of how much we’ve achieved in the last couple of years just that you always have to be aware of how much there still is to achieve and honestly it just doesn’t do to sound even slightly boasty in Scotland but honestly I’m fine don’t worry. But that might have made matters worse, so I just dropped it.
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Monsieur Slim is not only great live, Sean Scolnick is a fucking lovely bloke as well. I know Monday is a shite night to go out, but honestly this will be worth it. He swings the pace from the mournful ballad to stomping Americana in the drop of a hat, and there are few better voices out there at the moment, in my opinion.
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My personal pick of the Tigerfest gigs this week would be twofold:
There Will Be Fireworks managed to sell over a thousand of their debut album pretty much on their own and without much press, which I can promise you is no mean achievement. Their Twilight-Frabbitry will be complemented by the emergence, blinking, into the light of Jesus H. Foxx who have been hiding away in some secret Foxxcave somewhere working on their debut album.
17 Seconds Records’ newest signings The Last Battle join a couple of their more established acts downstairs at the Roxy. Their debut album should be upon us very soon, so keep an eye out for that.
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You wouldn’t necessarily think that quiet acoustic stuff would work all that well at a clubby sort of place like Sneaky’s but it actually does – I’ve seen some really good acoustic stuff there in the past. This is the latest in a series of gigs marking the fourth birthday
It’s an odd lineup, this one, although in a funny sense I can actually see it working quite well. Adam Stafford will presumably be playing an acoustic set, and Dead Boy Robotics have just launched an EP of thumping, dirty disco(ish) tunes. Add that to the strange, shy, loopy experimentalism of Conquering Animal Sound and you certainly have an eclectic lineup, but one which I think will actually work quite well.
Fatcat Records, innovative composer, plays lots of piano. Those are about all the facts I have about this one, but I have to get this published before my lunchtime internet window here at Proper Job slams shut, so I am afraid I don’t have the time to find out anything more helpful for you. There’s always the links above though, and you’re not children, so I’m sure you’ll be fine.
We have a clear few days to get some work done this week, before the weekend’s flurry of giggery. There are some devious Austrians sneaking about Scotland this week, partly having a holiday, and partly shooting sessions for They Shoot Music. Apart from Mrs. Toad and I recording our annual anti-Valentine’s day festival of hate, we will record a podcast with them while they’re here, and then leave them to go off and do some stuff with Jesus H. Foxx, Meursault, Withered Hand, a trip up to Fife to see the Fence Records chaps, and then some time in Glasgow where I am not honestly certain who they are recording – hopefully some Yusuf Azak though.
Anyhow, apart from the gigs mentioned below, there’s also the rather intriguing listing at Sneaky Pete’s where a certain band called Toad appear to be playing on Friday with The Ritalin Kids and Be Like Pablo. I assure you it has nothing to do with me performing music of any sort, so feel free to attend in perfect safety.
One of Edinburgh’s most enjoyable low-key gig nights, The Leith Tape Club, has a really good lineup this month. I think eagleowl will be playing as a somewhat reduced lineup: after their recent four-piece gigs, I think they will be back to two for this gig, but for those of you who missed their Vic Galloway session on Radio Scotland last week, here’s their cover of I Am Nothing by Withered Hand from that session. It’s all about sharing out the PRS money apparently, because Dan covered one of their songs when he played the show a while back. All about the money, eh? Typical. I knew them when they used to have integrity, man.
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The Gentle Invasion have been awfully quiet of late, so without knowing anything at all about The Late Call, I’ve got to be pretty confident that they’re good, to drag them out of semi-retirement. The Last Battle’s stock is rather high at the moment, and I’ve not seen Emily Scott play since last year’s Homegame, so I think I’ll be along at this one for sure.
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FOUND are teetering on the verge of a new album (I think) and are somewhat reduced in number these days. Judging by Versus a couple of weeks ago this isn’t going to hold them back though, and I am really looking forward to hearing their new stuff.
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It’s all about the indie-pop at Trampo this month. Euan already previewed this gig extremely well in his Sunday Supplement, so no need to go on about it here again. Kid Canaveral have nearly finished work on their debut album though, which is good news.
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This week’s job is the finishing of the Honeytrap Toad Session, preparing the second Toad House Gig for Friday – brilliant brilliant brilliant! – sort of getting ready for the Toad Autumn Party at the Bowery on the 10th (Pineapple Chunky madness, woo!) and getting the Meursault singles pressed and the artwork sorted. If I am dead by the weekend, do not be surprised.
Fortunately, the start of the week is relatively light on gigs. Lightish anyway. Tonight is free, so I should get a chunk done then. I just fear the traditional upload hell which tends to accompany the finishing of these bloody videos. Vimeo is a great service in many ways, but the uploading is flaky as fuck and incredibly annoying. Still, that’s presumably a matter for Friday at 4am, if the FOUND session is anything to go by.
I really like it when people around me get all giddy about the visit of bands I’ve never heard of – it makes going to a gig that much more exciting. This is one of those gigs
These guys are just on the edge of stuff I like – some of it I absolutely love and some I find just a little bit too much. It’s camp and loose, but they write terrific pop songs nevertheless and I am really looking forward to seeing them live to get a bit more of a clue about their personality as a band.
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Three Blind Wolves are apparently Ross Clark-related, although I have to confess I know nothing about them. Washington Irving are another new one on me, but I think we all know quite enough about Meursault by now.
I don’t know why I like X Lion Tamer, exactly. All that synthy 80s pop should be way more than I can handle, but oddly I find myself really enjoying it – basically I suppose because the songs are just incredibly catchy. Night Jewel, I have to confess, I know almost nothing about.
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These house gigs look like turning into really nice things. The last one was bloody lovely, and with the lovely Animal Magic tricks and Men Diamler, whose music can be as mental as it can lovely I think this one will be a fantastic night.
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Gizeh Records’ allstar tour comes to Edinburgh, supported by local sorts The Kays Lavelle and eagleowl. I have to confess I rather feared for eagleowl, who were somewhat threatened by a recent combination of relocation and fornication, but seeing them back playing (superbly) at the Withered Hand EP launch last week has cheered me right up. They have about seven new songs recorded too, you know. I’ve no idea what they’re going to do with them, but they have them, which is tantalising, but definitely rather excellent news.
This lineup is ridiculously indie-pop-tastic, with Edinburgh’s three finest lining up in a show of defiance to all that moany indie-folk shit I insist on listening to. This stuff is all about the infectiousness of the tunes, and Kid Canaveral are perhaps the most hummable band in the city. Their new EP is out on download or, erm, tape. Yes, tape. Good fucking grief, it’ll be wax cylinders or fucking eight track next.
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