The Toadcast - The Weekly Podcast From Song, By Toad

Okay, not so much a podcast this week, more my effort to recreate a mix tape sent to me by my Mum's cousin when I was far too young to appreciate its brilliance.  On the plus side though, despite my failure to really understand how lucky I was, they leaked more indelibly into my consciousness because I was so young that it all went beyond 'music I remember' and became something more fundamental than that. I played this tape quite literally to death.  I think it finally gave up the ghost some time when I was about thirteen or fourteen - about 1988 or 1989.  I forgot about it for some time after that, and it was only some ten years later, about the time of Napster, that it occurred to me to finally try and reassemble all these brilliant songs together again. Well, I tried but I failed.  The biggest problem was remembering what was on the thing.  I mean, a tape I last listened to ten years ago, whatare the chances?  Still, aided by perseverance and some good fortune I prety much managed to as best I could.  Some

It's teh next Great Depreshun oh noes!  Or maybe we're just moaning like a bunch of fucking girls.  After the doom and gloom in the papers it seems time to actually compare the current financial tantrum to the Great Depression and tell anyone who makes that comparison to fuck right off and stop being so self-indulgent. Even compared to the rough times in the fucking eighties when Margaret Thatcher eviscerated everywhere in England outside the M25.  She destroyed the country.  Annihilating nationalised industries which were no longer economic makes sense, but completely destroying the industries that keep a town alive at the same time as you destroy the support networks provided by the state and also refusing to do anything to encourage industries to grow that might replace the thousands of jobs you have just made vanish is just slash and burn social policy. There may be a little too much opinionated political opinion and general drunken rambling between myself and my darling girl Mrs. Toad, but erm, well, f

The Fightcast?  Yes, the fucking Fightcast.  Why?  Well because mp3 bloggers have been taking it in the arse with some force over the last week.  Posts are being deleted left right and centre, so presumably the major labels have decided to declare all-out war on blogs.  This is because they are scabby old unwashed cheesy penises.  This is not slander, I can prove it with charts and graphs. Ultimately this is about corporate control of culture.  I don't want to sound like a ranting conspiracy theorist, but put simply, this is how it works.  People pay for things they feel passionate about.  People feel passionate about art, the creation thereof and the participation therein.  Consequently any company vaguely engaged in cultural endeavours desperately wants to own the loyalty and devotion of as many people as possible, and anyone participating in this arena is a threat.  Because grassroots art has more emotional resonance with people it is an ever bigger threat and must be exterminated. They want blogs to exist

Oh deary me.  A somewhat slurred podcast this week.  I recorded this on Friday night after coming home from sharing about seven pints with my boss at Proper Job, who is a thoroughly decent chap and doesn't get out for beers as often as he used to due to an unfortunate breeding accident in which his wife had a baby, thus confining him to the house.  The lesson - gentlemen, for the love of god, don't let them breed! So I came back to the house and wanted to play some loud music.  I popped a bottle of beer, bought some munchies and mumbled my way through a pile of loud, rambunctious songs that I played far too loud as I sorted out the playlist, and great fun it all was too. I asked about modern rowdy music this week, and Bart kindly recommended some bands, a couple of whom I assume I may have been a little quick to dismiss in the past, so I am going to have another go at them. Looking through the playlist, I find one thing sticking out more than anything else: how the hell can you tell a Sex Pistols demo from a

This week's Toadcast has no theme at all because, erm... well, frankly they're difficult to come up with and therefore seem just a tiny little bit like hard work.  So given I'm podcasting once a week now, I am not going to be arsed coming up with some immaculately scripted (ah ha haaa!) arrangement once every seven days, so this week it's really just a brief tour of inbox fodder. This weekend there are loads of good things happening, not least a performance by Mumford & Sons at the Voodoo Rooms, and a first look for me at what could potentially become an excellent new venue in Edinburgh.  That's a secret though, so no more details than that. So, for now enjoy the Soulcast, so named for no better reason than that the first couple of songs have the word soul in the title.  Piss-poor excuse really, isn't it. Toadcast #41 - The Soulcast 01. Nat Johnson - Dirty Rotten Soul (02.39) 02. Maxwell Panther - Lost Soul on a Roll (06.21) 03. Deerhoof - Chandelier Searchlight (11.40) 04. Aberfeldy - Claire (15.01)

Hello people, more podcastenfun once again.  Having done the Deathcast recently, I thought it might be nice to do the polar opposite - the Birthcast.  This week's podcast is all about the birth of Song, by Toad.  I'll tell you about how I started writing about music, how I discovered blogs, how I discovered that what I was writing was in fact a blog and how I ultimately ended up on Wordpress writing what you are now reading.  r casually skimming over, depending on your bent. It has also ended up being something of a 2004 retrospective, because that's when this all started, however slowly, and that side of it has been nice.  I had met Mrs. Toad by this point, and I was all excited, and despite the fact that my job was bollocks, living in London was great fun.  I was on a narrowboat at Nine Elms Pier at this point, which was an amazingly brilliant place to live, and I used to cook myself kettle noodles because I couldn't be arsed firing up the stove.  I'd boil some water, throw it over some noodles and som

This podcast contains a large number of songs from albums which I didn't really enjoy enough to want to review, but which nevertheless contained some excellent songs.  I never want to give a small or emerging band a shitty review because it just feels mean.  For me there's a certain threshold to be reached, after which you are fair game for anything I feel like saying because, frankly, why would you care, but smaller bands are never going to get a really hard time on this site.  Unless they behave like dicks of course, but I digress. A lot of these albums contain songs I really like, but only one or two, and I really wanted them to be heard.  Also, give that your music taste and mine probably only partially overlap anyway (otherwise it would just be creepy) I think it's quite possible you might disagree and want to explore further.  It always amazes me how seriously people can take even my opinion, as some sort of self-appointed arbiter of musical worthiness, when neither I nor any other critic is any better

Yes, another podcast dedicated entirely to the End of the Road Festival.  I did the very same last year because I do rather love this festival, and the sheer quality of the lineup easily merits a podcast to itself. Unlike last year, Mrs. Toad actually came with me this time around.  We drove this stupid old 1960s VW camper van down there, and Christ knows how we didn't die in the process.  The fucking thing steered like a bathtub full of water, there were no brakes at all and the only crumple zone was us.  The other disconcerting thing is the fact that VW campers are something of a community, so everyone who passed us in one would flash their lights and wave with the sort of sincere enthusiasm that made us mortally ashamed to be mere renters - mere passengers in a club full of such obviously devoted members, Christ we felt like charlatans. Anyway, ignore our guilt and enjoy the podcast.  There's some fucking great music on this one.  And why is it called the Deathcast?  Because that blasted camper van we dr

Bill Oddie, for those of you who don't know, is a legendary British television birdwatcher - twitcher as they're known.  He is also the subject of one of the most famous of all mondegreens: Madonna's "Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie, put your hands all over my body".  Anyhow, as a legendary feather flutterer it seemed only appropriate that his name should adorn a podcast entirely made up of bands with ornithological names.  We have everything here, from the albatross to the gull to the guillemot to the owl to the sparrow to the pigeon.  Honestly, this podcast could have been twice the length that it is, there were just so many appropriate bands - no Flock of Seagulls, for example, no Sparrow & the Workshop, no Sheryl Crow. So I hope you enjoy it.  While you're listening to this, Mrs. Toad and I will be enjoying the End of the Road Festival, and hopefully getting a few interesting interviews in for you all.  It'll be my first ever attendance as a legitimate press person, so I am feeling very full of myself at the

Well, no gin, no misbehaviour (except the mandatory foul language), Christ you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd sold out on you and actually grown up at last.  No fear of that actually, just a bit of liver protection.  We're trying to guzzle just that little bit less midweek, and save the beer tokens for when we really need them, so it's tea and slippers this time around.  In fact I thought I was being exceptionally tame until such time as I realised that I hadn't reigned in the swearing one little bit.  Fuck, I thought to myself. Thematically, erm, you're on your own I'm afraid.  I've no real idea if you can think of anything that holds all these songs together as a coherent whole, but damned if I can.  There's quite a bit of new stuff and quite a few stray songs that I didn't know how to cover because I didn't want to review the whole album, but there was a song or two that I liked.  You know what I mean.  And thirteen songs in just under an hour - fucking hell that's efficient. Toadcast #36 - The Domesticas

It's been a while since the last Toad Session, but this one is a bit good and thoroughly worth waiting for. Meursault's debut album is one of my favourite of the year, and their acoustic set is easily as good. This is the first session to be held in our house too, which brought its own challenges and then some. Mrs. Toad's preposterous cat makes an appearance at one point, and the videos look very, very, erm... green? Blue? Whatever fucking stupid colour it is we've painted our living room. Anyway, the recordings have come out really nicely, and I think the videos are good too. I've posted a few here, but the whole lot can be found on the Song, by Toad YouTube page. The photos turned out rather well too, so go to the Flickr page for the ones we liked. And, without further ado, here is the Meursault Toad Session podcast (the track listing is at the bottom of the page): Toadcast #35 - Meursault Toad Session[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/songbytoad/ToadcastNo35.mp3] Here are the individual songs: Meur

This is the podcast to accompany all the Portland and Pickathon things I've been slowly but surely writing up over the course of the last couple of weeks.  With all the video to edit it may take a while to get it all sorted, but just follow this Pickathon search and you'll find it all.  My full review of the festival is here. This is a musical journey through our trip, from the Shaky Hands and The Builders & the Butchers who got us out there, to Eef Barzelay who we saw in Portland, several bands from the Pickathon Festival and even a song from Ray Rude's Gameboy pop outfit Operation Mission. It's rather shorter than usual, but that is part of a new strategy: shorter podcasts more often.  I am going to try and go for once a week, and make them a maximum of an hour long.  I can't promise anything, but I am going to try, and I think this might be a better approach for all of us, frankly. Toadcast #34 - The Portland Podcast 01. The Shaky Hands - A New Parade (2.20) 02. The Builders & the Butchers -

Fear not, this isn’t quite as horribly overbearing as it could have been. The ranting is actually fairly under control, and the self-important pontificating not quite as reckless as it could so easily have been, partly because I wasn’t quite as liberal with the gin as I have been in the past. The reason it’s called the Popecast is because of this amazing little story about Catholics in the States issuing death threats to a kid who took a communion wafer out of the church with him.  The hilarious PZ Myers then got involved, threatening to show them what real desecration would look like, and the pandemonium reached all new levels of shrillness. The thing that really got my goat about all this was not so much that Catholics took offence, but more the level of the hysteria and the language of persecution.  It was honestly described as kidnapping and as a hate crime by various loonies, and there was nothing like enough ‘Oh fucking grow up and get the fuck over it’ being said.  People seem to be seeking all sorts

Hello, more Toadcastery.  I've, erm, focussed on Dadrock for this one.  Not too much of it on the playlist, fortunately, although there's a couple of well-known names on there.  In my defence though, I couldn't bring myself to feature Coldplay, so I was forced into the compromise of playing an almighty butchering of one of their songs by the splendid Richard Cheese.  Basically I spend most of this podcast trying to justify the presence of so much bland music in the charts and how the hell that came to pass.  There's plenty of chatter about how music is used as a sort of social glue as well, in which case the quality of the stuff becomes almost secondary.  There are some really good new bands on this as well - The Velcro Quartet are particularly brilliant, as are the songs by Mumford & Son, Yoshimi! and Honeytrap.  Enjoy responsibly. Toadcast #32 - The Tribecast 01. Hercules & Love Affair - Hercules Theme (01.32) 02. The Velcro Quartet - Dead Dog's Hill (07.53) 03. Seabear - Teenage Kicks (11.17) 04

There’s not much of a unifying theme to this podcast, but there are a healthy number of breaking tracks in the playlist, so I guess calling it the Newcast will suffice for want of anything more inspired. There’s new tracks from the impending singles by Kid Canaveral and The Left Outsides, a good few new bands you’ve never heard of, a couple of JC’s selections for the Toad Records Launch Night and some of the tracks from the sampler that I gave away at the party itself. There’s also the first Recorded and Produced by Toad song in the world: Fearing Lothian by Uhersky Brod.  The band are friends of mine and we used the Toad Sessions recording equipment to put togethera demo for them.  It’s the first time I’ve ever recorded anything, so I presume there must be all sorts of issues with it but, well, you’ve got to start somewhere.  It’s a cracking song, whatever I’ve ended up doing to it. So I hope you enjoy this rather disjointed collection of songs, because for all the lack of any real coherence it’s a good c

Hello and welcome back to the Toad Sessions. I was a little drunk when I noticed that Alela Diane was playing in Edinburgh as part of the Triptych Festival, so the idea of emailing her label and inviting her to do a Toad Session didn't seem quite so preposterous. In the morning, I thought I was mad and would be laughed at, but amazingly they agreed, and now here it is. This one was also recorded by Nick at Bananarow and he's done another amazing job - the songs sound absolutely gorgeous. Dylan's pictures can be found at the Flickr page, and we have some more videos at the Song, by Toad YouTube page. Here's the interview podcast, with the tracklisting at the bottom of the page. Toadcast #30 - Alela Diane & Mariee Sioux Toad Session Here are the sessions tracks themselves. The Cuckoo is a traditional song, and Dry Grass & the Shadows is from Alela's new album which should hopefully be out later this year. Mariee's songs are Flowers & Blood from her recent album Faces in the Rocks, whereas the

The missus and I got pished and did a podcast! Huzzah! It was a lovely Summery day on Wednesday and we sat out and had a meal in the back garden and then when it got chilly we came inside and did a podcast. There's not much of a theme this week because I can get a little bored of them, and from time to time it's nice to just throw some tracks together that you like. And then get hammered and ramble on about them at interminable length. Sorry about that. Toadcast #29 - The Summercast 01. Lemonjelly - Nice Weather For Ducks (01.47) 02. Elbow - Station Approach (10.47) 03. The Eighteenth Day of May - Cold Early Morning (19.08) 04. Aberfeldy - Tom Weir (25.56) 05. Tiny Tim - Tiptoe Through the Tulips (27.48) 06. Uncle Moon - Pepper (34.41) 07. Lo-Fidelity Allstars - On the Pier (41.32) 08. The Boo Radleys - Find the Answer Within (48.18) 09. The Libertines - The Good Old Days (56.41) 10. The Undertones - Teenage Kicks (65.51) 11. The Von Bondies - C'Mon C'Mon (68.11) 12. The Builders & the Butcher

The 28th Toadcast is all about the Fence Collective. People who read this site regularly must know them, I assume, but I’ve been intending to do this post for a while as they might be my favourite label in music at the moment. After Kenny Anderson’s last band fell apart about ten years ago or more, he started releasing his own stuff on hand made CD-Rs under the name of King Creosote and between him and his brothers and some of the other local musicians he’d grown up with in Fife, a collective started to form which has grown and grown. Now, thanks to the spotlight cast their direction by Kenny’s brother Gordon’s involvement with The Beta Band and The Aliens, the success of King Creosote and James Yorkston, and the rising of KT Tunstall (also a Fence alumnus, believe it or not) Fence Records have turned into one of the most beloved record labels in the country. And actually, I think their approach of building a community rather than just pimping product might just have the potential to make them one of the su

Well, perhaps Europop isn't quite the right term. Eurindie perhaps. This podcast is stuffed full of splendid tracks from the rest of the European continent which we, as marvellously parochial and narrow-minded Brits, seem to forget exists half the time. I have no real idea how much this music actually intersects with any of the local scenes to which it might belong, but it is certainly nicely in tune with the British scene as I know it at the moment. Scandinavia is inevitably rather over-represented, but I have managed to track down a Belgian, a little Dutch and something (tangentially) Italian to throw into the mix as well. And a special secret bonus surprise for right at the end, but wait for it patiently and don't ruin it for yourselves by peeking. The big thing I can't get over is just how much I had to leave out of this podcast actually.  I'd lazily assumed that it might be a little tricky to fill an entire playlist, but I could just as easily have filled two.  So don't whinge about what's not on there,

Here we go folks: the first ever Toad Session, with local band and all-round Toad pals Broken Records. These sessions are generally going to take place in my living room, but seeing as these guys were quite keen to record one and their single release is imminent, it seemed sensible to rush things a little. So given my equipment has yet to arrive, we went down to Banana Row Studios and recorded four session tracks and had a bit of chat, and this is the result. There's a full podcast, mp3s of the individual songs, a Flickr photo gallery and couple of videos of the whole business, so there's lots and lots of stuff to play with. I think in terms of workload I can possibly manage about one of these per month, so keep an eye out in the future. Toadcast #26 - Broken Records Toad Session The mp3s include their forthcoming single If the News Makes You Sad Don't Watch It, a couple of new tracks, Wolves and They All Fell Into the Sea, and a special Toad request, the truly beautiful Out on the Water. Broken Records