The Toadcast - The Weekly Podcast From Song, By Toad

DO NOT WORRY!  This is not a podcast stuffed full of tedious moralising and empty pontificating and generally depressing garbage about a subject far too weighty and philosophical for this sort of half-arsed internet enterprise.  In fact, towards the end it really gets quite chipper. Basically, there are so many extraordinarily good murder ballads that that particular aspect could so easily have entirely overtaken a podcast ostensibly about prison, crime and criminal justice. This week, however, I have still managed to marginalise the role of the murder ballad, because the concept of death incorporates so many disparate emotions and aspects that simply doing a whole podcast about murderous folk tales and their musical counterparts seemed unnecessarily narrow.  So you get this.  Which starts out a little heavy but becomes positively gleeful by the end, I promise you. Toadcast #86 - The Deathcast 01. Willard Grant Conspiracy - Painter Blue (03.01) 02. Samamidon - O Death (12.33) 03. Eels - Going to Your F

Hello, welcome to the Ruthcast.  Why the Ruthcast?  Because my friend Ruth who runs the Bowery with Jane came round to the house last week to thoroughly upstage me on my own podcast. Last yearRuth was a guest on my Fresh Air radio show and completely and utterly upstaged me, and in this podcast we agreed that she would come on every week this year.  And that, frankly, sounds like a bloody good idea to me. I mentioned on the Friday Five a couple of weeks ago that Ellie Greenwich had died, and as this is something which upset Ruth rather a lot, so the podcast is absolutely chock-full of Ellie Greenwich songs Toadcast #85 - The Ruthcast 01. The Ronettes - Baby I Love You (05.51) 02. Golden Ghost - If You Are in Love Then Why Are You Asleep? (13.36) 03. The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me (16.07) 04. Parenthetical Girls - A Song for Ellie Greenwich (23.25) 05. The Shangri-Las - Leader of the Pack (34.25) 06. Jeremy Jay - Beautiful Rebel (37.10) 07. The Blank Tapes - Listen to the One (41.41) 08. Dusty Springfield -

Playing With the Past is an annual (we hope) event at the Edinburgh Film Festival where contemporary bands are invited to write new soundtracks for old films.  Last year was the first of these, when the superb British Sea Power wrote a brilliant score for Man of Aran, a (slightly fake) documentary about the lives of the inhabitants of a remote island off the West Coast of Ireland (extract here). This was such a success that the band have been performing it all over the place ever since.  This year David Drummond, who put the event together, decided to invite three different bands to work with roughly half an hour or so of footage each, and he started off by inviting eagleowl, who suggested a number of other bands, from which David chose FOUND and Meursault. We decided not to include more than a few excerpts of the music in this because the bands were a little uncomfortable about listening to too much of their stuff in the absence of the film to which it belongs.  So a big thank you to Tommy, Bart and Neil fo

Would you believe that this podcast is finished and ready and done and I am ready to go to bed by 10pm.  This is a fucking scarily strange occurrence.  I've only had about four beers too, which is also a little unsual. The only organisational task at which I have abjectly failed is keeping the length of this podcast down to an hour.  Basically, having different people co-present is really nice, and I think it makes the podcasts miles better, but I am still coming to terms with the discipline of keeping the talky talky down to a manageable level and sticking to that hour which has made these weekly swear-morsels so digestible in the last few months. At the Wickerman Festival Callum from Meursault made the highly contentious statement that not all funk music was buttock-clenchingly awful and, whilst I mocked him, I decided that someone with that kind of crazy recklessness must be brave enough to bring a Toadcast full of funky classics to an audience of sulky, morose indie kids with art school fringes.  So good

The most enormous difficulty with recording this podcast was that it was monumentally, wonderfully, amazingly sunny and hot outside.  So there we were, stuck in our house, trying to play songs and conduct an interview while we were all secretly (and not so secretly) longing to just be out in the back garden.  Mrs. Toad was making burgers, you know.  Gaaaaah! I remember when FOUND recorded a show with Marc Riley recently and I got plenty of emails saying that they really weren’t very talkative.  Which is odd really, because I didn’t entirely get that kind of impression as we recorded this session or about them in general, but then I listen back to it again and the first few interviewy segments really do take a while to get going.  I guess it took a while for Ziggy (who I’d never met before) and myself to figure out exactly how to talk to one another and whether or not we really got on.  So that whole dynamic makes for a really good podcast, which gets more and more interesting, from my point of view anyway, a

Helloooo people.  This morning the Toadcast comes to you from Leith.  There were beers and there was a fuckload of incoherent rambling, and it ran way over time but, erm, who really cares? This week I went to visit my crippled friend Steven (v? ph?) Kearney in Leith and we recorded a podcast in his house prattling on about all the usual nonsense.  He got all jumpy about sound quality, omitting to mention the fact that the Toadcasts are the most incredibly badly recorded show on the interwaves.  Honestly, why would this week be the one single week it suddenly didn't sound like shit? Still, Steven has recently started his own podcast, leading on from his Fresh Air show Dylan and the Mule.  It's only one episode down, but it sounds very promising indeed, so with a bit of luck there could be very good things coming from that part of the world this year.  Me, I just desperately need a sleep.  Night night Toadlings. I will probably be gawping at the wonderful Cybraphon by the time you read this.  With a hangover

When we were out in Italy on our holidays Mrs. Toad and I had very few CDs with us but one of them was an Uncut compilation of prison blues and murder ballads which, amazingly, given the very promising subject matter, really wasn't very good.  In fact, it was rotten, so I've made a podcast based on the self same concept, but with what I personally think are vastly better songs. Most  obviously, to my mind, there were very few contemporary songs in there, and I thought that was a little weird.  Now, I actually think that the level of political commentary in popular music is just a little weak at the moment, but there are nevertheless some amazingly good prison and criminal justice-related songs to be had, and certainly some exceptional murder ballads, although I must confess that the most recent bit of genuine social commentary here pre-dates the 1990s by a couple of years.  There was probably more recent material I could have used, it just didn't spring to mind at the time I'm afraid. So here we have the Ja

This is our first attempt at a stunt podcast, live from a festival.  We go to festivals and I am trying to figure out how much work I can make for myself without taking the fun out of the festival for myself, or just generally trying too hard. I didn't really set up any interviews this time around - no, not even Billy Bragg - but I did manage to grab Mark from emerging Glasgow band The Seventeenth Century for a chat.  The audio is terrible, I'm afraid, but it should be just about audible.  If I'd been able to locate the keys for the Toad van at that point we'd have gone in there, just for a respite from the wind noises on the recording and the colossal amount of bleed from the main stage. In any case, it should be entertaining enough, I hope, and with a bit of luck subsequent attempts at the same thing will be a lot better. Toadcast #79 - The Wickerman 01. The Cave Singers - Beach House (04.04) 02. Julian Plenti - The Fun That We Had (07.31) 03. The Second Hand Marching Band - Mad Sense (15.37) 04. The S

Uncut Magazine and I had a pretty amazing relationship between the turn of the millennium and about 2004 or 2005.  Basically, I would buy it every month and turn straight to the reviews section and the cover mount CD of what they considered to be the best of new music released that month, and devour both simultaneously, taking notes about what I wanted to spend that monthís meagre wages on. Those cover mount CDs were amazing, at the time, and almost invariably related to that monthís new releases, but in the last few years they have become way, way more concepty, and I have started to enjoy them less and less.  For some reason, Uncutís relationship with contemporary music seems to have come adrift even faster than my own, even as I approach my mid-thirties. Even if I am exaggerating that particular claim - maybe blogging is keeping my tastes young(ish), you never know - it seems a shame that I have drifted away from what was one of my major sources of new music for years, so this podcast is something of a

Sorry, I know this is going up late, but I have been working on the promotional material for the Jesus H. Foxx EP release.  There's a fair bit still to be done, but for the time being I am cautiously optimistic that it is going to look fucking brilliant.  There will be a lot of painting to be done though, so putting the final touches on the thing is going to take bloody ages, but I think it is going to be easily worth it. In other news, this week's podcast is a prolonged chat with Euan (of Kays Lavelle, Trampoline, Steinberg Principle and Woodenbox fame) as a way of rounding up the excellent fortnight he spent feeding and changing Song, by Toad whilst Mrs. Toad and I were off gallivanting.  So, rather than make his usual grouchy, joyless comments on posts I thought I might invite him to make his grouchy joyless comments on a podcast.  So he came round and complained and complained and generally sulked his way through the whole thing, which was nice. Oh alright, of course he didn't. But it just wouldn't be fun

I recently did an interview with Billy from The Scotsman's Under the Radar blog (amongst other venerable organs) which took the form of an interesting chat about the current tension between  bloggers and professional journalists.  He has played off my opinions against those of his friend Mike Diver, who is currently the online editor for (the excellent) Clash magazine.  The whole thing can be found here, along with plenty of comments from Ally and Milo, professional writers from around these parts, and myself and Tart, on the side of the bloggers.  The comments on that thread It's an interesting debate, frankly, and one which, as a blogger with aspirations, as opposed to someone who is happy to simply chat for the sake of it, I have applied a fair deal of thought to.  Ultimately, though, I think it is something of a false dichotomy: some of the best reporters keep blogs as ways of expressing themselves outwith the constraints of the editorial policy of whatever rag pays their wages and a lot of the best blog

Well, we are nearing the end of our time in Puglia.  We're spending a couple of days in or near Napoli before we fly back on Sunday, presumably troughing like total pigs, rather than paying all that much attention to culture and all that bobbins. Mrs. Toad is doing Sudoku and complaining about the 'wrong sort of paper'.  I kid you not, it's just like British fucking Rail and their 'wrong type of snow', but she insists it's just for that reason that she can't solve them, not because they're too hard.  Personally I find myself wondering if 'evil' is used to describe the comments one's spouse will inevitably make when you fail to complete it, rather than the actual difficulty of the Sudoku puzzle itself. So yes, we have done the lazing about and there are now a few days of actually doing shit in between us and a return to the damp splendour of the British Isles.  I suppose this is what you're supposed to do on holiday - pay attention to the country you're in and return, eventually - but honestly, another week

Mrs. Toad and I might be gallivanting about the Italian countryside, but we are still thinking of you, our loyal Toadlings. We may be relaxing by the pool, but we understand that life might not be quite so easy for those of you at home. Actually, fuck it, life is never this easy for us either. This is like some bizarre anomaly for us - time, peace, reading books… it’s all so fucking restful I’ve almost forgotten to swear at the locals. The place we’re staying is just plain ridiculous. We are living in what amounts to the tiniest of little comedy garden sheds imaginable, but the outside space is some great big gigantic plaza. It’s just ridiculous. Fortunately, there is something to lower the tone. Nature is basically a great big urinal, as we all know, and I have been doing my best to maintain a time-honoured male principle of ‘no place being too sacred or picturesque for having a sly piss’. So when the bladder beckons, so does the wall, and there I go to water the olive groves of Puglia. It feels

This is not so much the holiday podcast as the pre-holiday podcast, because for all we are away now, I recorded this on Thursday night before going away, as we prepare ourselves for the unspeakable burden of doing absolutely fuck all for two weeks. I am taking a pile of books and a pile of new music and we are going to do pretty much nothing at all.  My parents used to do really adventurous travelling when we were young, but honestly I don't have the energy.  I am so incredibly fucking exhausted from constant Toadery that actually, despite having a holiday inferiority complex, pretty much all I can cope with at the moment is a couple of weeks of fuck all. Even last year when we went to Portland for a couple of weeks, we took all the technology and recorded interviews and all sorts at Pickathon.  It was relaxing and nice, but I still got a hell of a lot of work done.  This time I will take along some tunes which I have been meaning to catch up with, perhaps record a podcast or two, and basically spend the rest

This is called the Slowcast because there are so many songs and, more commonly, whole albums out there which I took ages and ages to get into, and for no really obvious reason. There are several reasons, I guess: how familiar a sound is, your emotional state at the time, what your mates are listening to, how popular something is and stuff like that.  I know I've admitted plenty of times in the past that I have a habit of refusing to like things if they get too popular.  That sounds ludicrous, but it's not exactly a conscious decision, more an instinctive recoiling.  I never have liked much popular stuff, although I do certainly go through phases.  Maybe that's one of the reasons that, with the label, I am not looking to sign or work with the modern equivalent of a Top 40 band - I have never much liked Top 40 music.  Anyway, that's not really the point of the podcast.  This is dedicated to those albums which for some reason you have to hear about a million times before you eventually, out of nowhere, realise

Oh dear god almighty I have a hangover.  Fucking bastard music people.  Last night there was gigging and drinking and wandering the streets of a most balmy and pleasant Edinburgh with an assortment of miscreants and other ne'er-do-wells.  We saw Honeytrap and Meursault play at Sneaky Pete's - I was recording this podcast, hence late for X-Lion Tamer, sorry to both Ed and Tony - and it was fucking amazing.  And after that there was drinking.  Fuck me there was lots of drinking.  And then I came home and went into the local all night shop and purchased a couple of steaks for late-night snacking purposes, and was harassed by a bunch of young lads when I came out.  Not harassed in a bad way, but I think I was asked to buy them some fags or something like that.  Anyhow, the conversation... erm, well I'm not really sure how the conversation went, because I was fucking hammered, but at some point the van came up, which was parked just along the road.  So, ah, for some slightly bizarre reason I ended up with five hi

This week I am piling on the music snobbery.  Oh, okay, I'm not really - if anything I'm undermining it with some truly guilty pleasures.  There's not much modern fluffy pop music which I happen to enjoy despite my snobbery because... well, because I just don't think there's anything I can think of which fits that bill at the moment. I know nostalgic guilty pleasures and truly embracing low-brow music purely for the enjoyment of it aren't quite the same thing but I think I've budged about as far as I am going to go on this one.  Girls Aloud are unlikely to ever make an appearance on this podcast, but there's a spot of memory-tickling being indulged in with picks from Kylie and Guns 'n' Roses.  You can tell Mrs. Toad has been involvedin choosing a playlist when it contains Guns and fucking Roses, but she was sacked from co-presenting duties due to excessive drunkenness, so her imprint on this particular episode is in selections only, and not in the presence of her dulcet tones on the interwaves. Toadcast #7

My Homegame review is pretty brief, but it is here, and there is a wee video thingy as well for you to enjoy.  This is of course the accompanying podcast, with songs either from the bands I saw there, or from EPs and bits and pieces I acquired at the merch table up in Fife. I should really have included some interviews and shit in this podcast, shouldn't I, but then I wasn't actually as well prepared or as organised as I should have been, really.  Inasmuch as I kind of think I would prefermy video to have turned out a bit more like Milo's, I would also have preferred my podcast to turn out a little more like DC's Homegame show over at the Waiting Room.  I'm not saying that I dislike the stuff that I've done this year, just that to my eyes it lacks a little bit of fizz and personality, unfortunately.  Oh well, it's all a learning process, and by the time Wickermancomes around I reckon I should be able to produce something a lot better. Toadcast #69 - The Fifecast 01. The Phantom Band - Island (03.00) 02.

Me and the missus are rambling away together on this one.  It's largely new music, bookended by a couple of more well-known things.  We Invent a new term - a weird combination of food and sex called culiniungus.  We offend the Irish and the Scots.  In fact, we are as offensively and predictably us as you could imagine. We were out and totally smashed at the Broken Records gig at the Bowery yesterday, followed by some hot Sneaky Pete's action.  There are some disastrously embarrassing pictures here, if you want to point and laugh.  The gig was amazing.  I knew a group like Broken Records would be amazing in a small space like that, and so it proved. I had to do some very pointed Standing Up though, which was fucking annoying.  What the fuck is it with people, sitting down at fucking gigs?  If the room's empty that's one thing, but the room was full, people were on tiptoes up the back, and this shower of cunts insisted on sitting on their fucking arses down the front, protecting a meter and a half of empty

This podcast is sort of like the Clustercast should have been.  I haven't actually listened to it yet, so I don't know if it's any good, but it sort of felt better, somehow.  It isn't anything like that incoherent and garbled anyway, which is a relief. We spent the day collecting for the lifeboats, along with some excellent help from our pals Dylan from Blueback Hotrod, Neil from Meursault, Ed from 17 Seconds, Dave, Michael and the Stormettes from The Stormy Seas and Morgan from, erm, Glasgow.  I have to point out how important their help was as well.  It's easy to talk a good game and then to pussy out at the last minute, but despite the fact that both Neil and Ed had other things on today, everyone made the time to come down and help out, which is bloody good of them.  We collected a fair chunk of cash - Mrs. Toad's pretty blonde colleague collected the most, rather predictably.  Maybe we need fewer beardy alt-folkies and more hot babes next year. Enjoy the podcast, then; we've got a lot of nautically-the