Having been sick all week it is a bloody miracle there’s been anything written on this blog at all, never mind the fountain of insightful commentary we have seen since Monday. Pulitzers, here we come!
“And the Nobel Prize for Gin and Swearing goes to…”
Anyhow, I am having one of those ‘what the fuck kind of a world do we fucking live in?’ weeks, which I generally dismiss as the indulgence of old people who forget how shit things actually were in their youth.
But this week we have seen the forcible suppression of peaceful protesters in the States, the criminalisation of the equally peaceful Fortnum & Mason’s protesters in the UK, the classification of pizza as ‘a portion of vegetables’ in the guidelines for providing balanced meals in US schools, Sepp Blatter suggesting that racist abuse can be laughed off with a handshake (to howls of outrage from the English press, whose own national football captain was caught on film recently calling someone a ‘fucking black cunt’) and our government subsidising the private sector by sending them slave labour in the form of the jobless, whose benefits will be withheld if they don’t obey.
My taxes may well be spent on some dubious projects, but damned if they should be spent paying the wages of fucking Tesco employees, thank you very fucking much.
So, swearing over with. As I will be on the radio later I needed to get that out of my system now, lest I sully the ears of Edinburgh’s sensitive student population with naughty words. I will be joined, of course, by El Parks and Brian Pokora on Fresh Air radio at 3:30pm, and for those of you who are out and about on Saturdays when our pals from Live From the Latin Quarter are broadcasting, then you can always listen to them again on Mixcloud here.
And in the meantime, here are five silly questions for those of you with an afternoon to waste. Friday is of course de-lurking amnesty on Song, by Toad, so if you’ve been reading for a while but never quite been arsed to chip in and say hello, why not do it today. Let’s face it, nothing you say can possibly be as inane as what the rest of us will be coming out with for most of the afternoon.
1. What would you set the jobless to do, if you had them at your disposal?
2. Most spurious ‘portion of fruit or veg’ claim you can imagine.
3. Most hateful athlete.
4. Worst old people moan.
5. Worst old people moan you find yourself letting slip occasionally.
And the playlist for the radio show will appear live below from half three.
1. Yo La Tengo – Tom Courtenay
2. Adam Stafford – Shot Down You Summer Wannabes
3. P.S. I Love You – Facelove
4. The Twilight Sad – That Summer at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy
5. Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand
6. Phoenix – Fences (Friendly Fires Remix)
7. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon
8. The Pixies – Where is My Mind (Bass Nectar Remix)
9. Wounded Knee – Hares on the Mountain
10. Sugar Baby – Dock Boggs
11. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird
12. The Black Keys – The Only One
 When you start a business, certain things which stamp you with the mark of legitimacy are basically just a nuisance. Completing your accounts for the year is very much one of these: an awful chore, which never at any point makes you feel like your are a proper business-owning muthafucka and don’t you forget it, more like a twelve-year-old staring resentfully at their homework.
Being a blogger doesn’t help. If I called myself a writer or the owner of one of the UK’s most upwardly mobile record labels then I would feel like… I dunno, like I wasn’t just making shit up as I go along and hoping to get away with it. But the very term ‘blogger’, no matter how many of the world’s most respected writers now write blogs too, still reeks of a misunderstood teenager complaining into the vast, indifferent wastelands of the internet, whilst sitting in his parents’ basement at three in the morning with his hand down his pants and a half-eaten jumbo pack of Cheesy Wotsits spilling over the keyboard.
Recently, though, I have started to have to do things which actually make you feel awkwardly legitimate. Not legitimate specifically because you have to do them, but because the very act of doing them makes you finally realise that actually it is legitimate and right for you to be doing them, which is actually a bit of a shock when it finally dawns on you.
I have written, for example, a couple of employment references for people in our bands, and over the last couple of years, a couple of employer references for people renting flats. And actually, given the nature of the music industry, I am probably just about the right person to be doing it, which is an odd sensation.
And, seeing as I am now defining pissing about on the internet as being a proper job, how do I define skiving? When you fill in your Friday Fives and then bugger about talking pish for the rest of the afternoon you are genuinely skiving, but when I do it am I executing business strategy? I liked it better when it was just outright skiving, frankly.
1. Thing you do which makes you feel most like a proper grown-up (n.b. you don’t have to actually be a grown-up to answer this).
2. Thing which still makes you feel like a child – not past-time, we all have those, more a chore of some description.
3. Thing you thought would make you feel grown-up but didn’t.
4. Something you have entirely grown out of enjoying.
5. Thing which, despite growing up, hasn’t lost its appeal.
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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.
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)
Let’s get one thing straight, no matter how fucking busy I am today I will be out in that damned garden by four o’clock this afternoon with a beer in my hand or there will be hell to pay!
I am currently working on the Scottish Enlightenment Toad Session, due to go up tomorrow, and it’s going to be tight, but dammit the weather in Scotland is this nice so fucking rarely that days like this must be seized, with some determination.
Actually, if we can get it to stay this nice for a couple of days we are likely to have a barbecue before the Alex Cornish and Avital Raz House Gig tomorrow. If it’s sunny come by from about five or six and we will be out the back relaxing! If not, then just turn up whenever, of course.
I am really looking forward to this one, as well as being a little nervous. Apparently Alex is bringing a full bloody string quartet with him, which is a slightly terrifying (if rather cool) prospect. As ever, please let me know if you’re coming down so we can be prepared!
Anyhow, better get this posted, or I’ll never meet my four o’clock deadline!
1. Favourite barbecue food.
2. Shorts – yes or no?
3. Can you manage to not look a tool in shades?
4. Do you burn quickly in the sun?
5. Are you passive or active when barbecues are being lit, and then cooked with?
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Do you remember shuttle runs? They were the single most unpleasant fitness exercise I ever remember being forced to do, and I was quite fit as a young ‘un.
Anyhow, today I am charging back and forth from Carluke, where we are getting some mastering done for the label, to the house, to the printers to collect some promo material, to the house to get them couriered down to London and then back to Carluke once more. I don’t know if I’ll need a pint or a nap more desperately by the time all this shit is done.
I am also bracing myself for a little bit of trouble with the fearsome Mrs. Toad. Â I may have queried Record Store Day a fair bit this week, but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to it, and I am most certainly going to be out of bed sharpish to trundle into town on Saturday and see what’s what.
Where this may prove to be a controversial decision is that Mrs. Toad has been away in God Bless America for the last week and only gets back on Saturday morning, and I would guess that she might anticipate a little more love and attention than ‘Hello darling, nice to have you back, but I’m off to the shops and I’ll see you in a few hours’. Â Ah well, some people are football widows, and Mrs. Toad is a music widow. Them’s the breaks.
Anyhow, in the meantime, I should stop wasting time and get on with wasting time.
1. Your favourite form of exercise.
2. Your least favourite form of exercise.
3. Which hobby always takes up just a little more of your time than any partner might reasonably be expected to understand?
4. We were too disorganised this year, but what should Song, by Toad Records do for Record Store Day in 2012?
5. How many pairs of shoes do you own?
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I may sound like I work for the BBC, but if anyone asks me, I do tend to tell them that I am not really all that English. My mum was born and raised in Moss Side though, which is one of the scummier parts of Manchester, and I lived in the city myself for a year apiece at the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, so if I am actually from anywhere in England in any meaningful sense, then it is probably Manchester.
I’ve always harboured a sort of simmering resentment for the place though, in that unfair way you do when your life is shit for all sorts of reasons and it ends up rather unreasonable reflecting on where you are living at the time. I’ve been through this all before on the Manchester Podcast, but I’ll rehash it here quickly, just to explain myself a little.
The first time around was my first year of university. Compared to everyone around me in Vienna and Singapore, where I was raised, I was really quite English. I liked English and American music, I supported Manchester United and I visited England quite regularly to see my family in Manchester. When I actually moved to England for the first time, however, I found it didn’t really work like that, that I wasn’t very English at all, and promptly endured a year of pretty severe culture shock.
The second time around I had been distracted for a year after graduation by accidentally becoming a restaurant manager, had been offered a design internship in Milan, only for that to fall through and for me to find myself stranded in Manchester again, flat broke, working in a pub and having a very hard time of getting the job for which my degree had allegedly prepared me. This led to a few too many conversation which went roughly like this:
“What do you do for a job then?” [I look around myself in a confused manner, as if the fact that I am standing behind a bar, pouring drinks and then demanding money in exchange for those drinks should make the answer to that question somewhat obvious.] “I’m a barman.” “No, I mean as a real job.” “I am a bar man.” “But surely you’re far too well-spoken and intelligent to be just a barman!” “Well, you’d think.”
It was shit, but I did listen to some fine music while I was there. Here are a couple of songs, one from the first spell and one from the second:
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Anyhow, after my shite experiences living there have tainted my memories of Manchester for the last seventeen years, things have slowly started to change. A few years ago I discovered Red Deer Club and Humble Soul, two of my favourite independent record labels in the UK. Why, I am not sure, but for the last year or two I have just been bumping into one cool Manchester music enterprise after another, and suddenly I find my negative associations with the place starting to evaporate.
Firstly, I came across Cloud Sounds, now my favourite podcast, and the blogs Folly of Youth, A New Band a Day and Pigeon Post. As well as being good in their own right, all of these lovely people have been incredibly supportive of what we’re up to here as well.
Secondly, Ruth from Fat Northerner kindly invited me to take part in two Unconvention events, one in Macclesfield, where my dear friend Tom Smith is from, and one in Salford, where United and stabbings are from. Around the same time I went to last year’s In the City as well, so I ended up spending a fair bit of time in Manchester last year and honestly, I had a blast.
So with my good relationship with the city almost entirely restored, I now also seem to be finding all sorts of interesting music stuff happening there too, and have ordered a pile of vinyl from small labels in Manchester recently.
The above picture is the vinyl starter pack from Sways Records, which just dropped through my letterbox this morning, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it tonight. I bought this for the debut single by The Louche FC, which can be heard below. I first heard these guys on a Cloud Sounds podcast, and am trying to get them up to Edinburgh for a live show sometime soon.
I’ve also just received Suffering Jukebox singles from Milk Maid and Manchester’s current A&R darlings Brown Brogues, and have been playing them loads recently. Brown Brogues are playing SXSW this year, and because they make a right old racket I might actually be able to persuade Mrs. Toad to go and see them.
Also, Static Caravan sent me through a whole pile of awesome 7″ aural pleasure recently as well – help yourself here. I found them by searching out the debut single by The Maladies of Bellafontaine, and ended up with a pile of other records as well.
And finally, Debt Records is the home to the likes of Red Tides (whose lead singer – I think – is absolutely lovely – I accidentally bumped into her upstairs at Fuel Cafe in Withington, while she was doing some embroidery or something, if I remember – this whole thing has been bit random) and Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six who are, of course, playing this week’s Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s. Debt Records’ ethos is to embrace live performance, focussing on good gigs in interesting places, as a way of reacting to an environment where in order to become popular recorded music is becoming more and more boring.
So apart from all these interesting projects which I have happened across in the last year or so, what I’ve found really interesting has been the self-image of Manchester’s music scene. A certain friend of mind has dismissed it as being ‘full of fucking sneering hipsters’, and given the city itself reminds me heavily of Glasgow, I think I always thought of Manchester as fashionable hipster haven.
But when I told one of my friends there that Edinburgh is good to work in because all the ambitious fashion whores tend to fuck off to Glasgow sharpish, which makes it hard to make progress here, but at least tends to mean that the people who remain are interesting and stubborn and not focussed on celebrity or stardom, their response was ‘Oh right, a bit like Manchester is with London then?’
And I suppose I’d never thought of it that way before. I’d always thought of Manchester as somewhere cool, somewhere to kind of envy, as a lot of other Edinburgh people think of Glasgow I suppose. I do forget that no matter how much you achieve, especially in something as status-orientated as the music industry, there is always someone more successful to cast envious glances towards. So next time we Edinburghers whinge about Glasgow, maybe we should just stop whining and be grateful we aren’t as isolated as Aberdeen.
I haven’t, I have to confess, used either Last.fm or Pandora for a while now, but the reason I abandoned them (yes, before Pandora was banned from the UK) in favour of podcasts and the radio is because they ended up being just a bit too good to be interesting.
Most of the radio shows and podcasts I tend to listen to play a fair few songs I think are shite, but I’ve always though this was a very good thing. I got very bored with Last.fm very quickly because it tended to play me pretty much the right kind of music all the time. If something shite comes up on Last.fm, or indeed when I hit shuffle on my whole music library, which serves more or less the same function, then I have a bad habit of just skipping it.
With radio shows and podcasts I don’t do that, partly because it’s harder than just blindly tapping F9 and carrying on with my work, so whether I like what I hear or not I tend to just let it play out.
This is a good thing though, because I get really sick of just being spoonfed stuff I pretty much know I am going to like already. It’s dull. When I first got into Yo La Tengo and The Wedding Present, my long-suffering flatmate had to put up with two years of abuse for playing them before I finally decided they were right up my street. It’s only by being open to stuff we aren’t sure about that we push our boundaries to begin with.
I know a lot of people are more naturally open than me, but I tend to need to hear new stuff quite a lot to really absorb it, and that’s just with new songs; when it comes to new genres I can be even worse. Basically I need other people’s ‘bad’ choices to stop my music taste from completely collapsing in on itself – to keep pulling it in other directions.
Sometimes I come around and sometimes I don’t, but if all I did was listen to Last.fm and Pandora I think I’d probably end up with a really boring, narrow, self-referential taste in music. You might say that’s the case anyway, and I guess I couldn’t really argue, and it’s possible their recommendation algorithms have improved (i.e.: loosened up a little) but in general, unless I am making a specific choice, I am happier listening to more music I am not all than keen on than sticking with recommendations which might be more reliably tailored to my taste.
Having weaselled out of our Fresh Air show yesterday because I was too busy trying to get Loch Lomond sessions edited and generally ready to go away on holiday, so Ruth missed out on her weekly opportunity to take the piss out of me, which must have been a shame for the poor lass.
Anyhow, we decided to remedy this by recording a podcast for publishing while we’re away, so Ruth came round with a CD of twenty songs and we bumbled our way through an evening chattering nonsense (as per usual).
We’re a teeny-tiny bit short of cutting edge new tunes for this week, but I think we can live with that for a week, eh. Â As Ruth would insist, her choices are all better than things I would have chosen anyway…
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01. Animal Magic Tricks – Pinkening (05.04)
02. Eurythmics – Love is a Stranger (11.21)
03. Iron & Wine – Upward Over the Mountain (19.11)
04. Mountain Man – Mouthwings (25.54)
05. Yo La Tengo – Take Care (28.04)
06. Fred Astaire – Top Hat, White Tie & Tails (35.42)
07. Gomez – 78 Stone Wobble (41.43)
08. The Everley Brothers – Be Bop a-lula (49.21)
09. Edith Piaf – Non, Je ne Regrette Rien (51.37)
10. Pulp – The Boss (Demo) (58.23)
I remember when I first started writing Song, by Toad, people when they first latched onto the site would occasionally refer to the not all that infrequents bursts of rage and frustration with the music industry as ‘a breath of fresh air’ and stuff like that, for the simple reason that if I thought something was fucking shit, then I would say so.
I had noticed that sort of post becoming less frequent myself over the last couple of years, and even Mrs. Toad remarked the other day that random outbursts of rage were becoming really quite rare.
I thought about this, and I think that the reason no-one in the music industry has any balls when it comes to the simple task of telling it like it is – on the face of it, quite a simple thing to do – is the same as the reason that I tend to be quite tame these days myself: you get to know everyone, you become friends with them, and it becomes almost impossible.
If I turn around and say ‘all the venues in Edinburgh are shit’, what does that say to my friend Nick, who works his arse off to make Sneaky Pete’s one of the best. And what if I say ‘the NME is fucking rubbish’ and someone thinks, ‘oh, I might review this nice album by Inspector Tapehead, but I wonder what this Song, by Toad thing is…’ You get my point.
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01. Arcade Fire – Month of May (01.37)
02. Takeda – A Million Years (10.58)
03. Adelaide’s Cape – Anchored Down (15.55)
04. Yo La Tengo – Outsmartener (26.44)
05. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Eggshell Miles (33.49)
06. The Last Battle – Ruins (36.44)
07. The Mountains and the Trees – More and More and More (47.11)
08. Liars – The Overachievers (50.45)
09. The Recovery Club – Rest and Be Thankful (53.54)
10. Meursault – Hey Joe (Daniel Johnston Cover) (62.49)
He’s drunk in Texas at SXSW, as evidenced by this candid image supplied by our good friend and regular contributor, Campfires & Battlefields. Nevertheless the show goes on here in Edinburgh. Ruth’s at the helm with suport from Michael from Jesus H. Foxx, Dylan from Blueback Hotrod and HP from.. well.. the next show up on Fresh Air actually.
1. The Hoosier Hot Shots – I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones
2. Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers – Dodge Veg-O-Matic
3. Cold Seeds – Crank Resolutions
4. The Morning Benders – Promises
5. Beach House – Zebra
6. Teitur – Catherine The Waitress
7. Diamond Rings – All Yr Songs
8. Pavement – Gold Soundz
9. Silver Columns – Brow Beaten
10. Alex Bleeker with Mountain – Oh Boy
11. Yo La Tengo – Take Care (Alex Chilton cover)
12. Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew – TBTF
I cognize that doing of emergent essays or narrations is ponderous and valueless process wholly. I don’t require routing uncommon literature, to tackle varied quotes and definitions, guiding to these operates. It is edit for me chiefly to trace essay writing service underground. The fascinating ordered projects are educated. I am precisely amazed and principally I have prepared marks.
 Having been sick all week it is a bloody miracle there’s been anything written on this blog at all, never mind the fountain of insightful commentary we have seen since Monday. Pulitzers, here we come!
