Toddla T - 'Rice and Peas'

Hey it’s not all fey indie that harks back to that golden year 1986, time of anoraks and bowl haircuts, around here you know…

I am a great loser of objects. First I lost my leading brand of MP3 player. Then in short order I lost my mobile phone. Now, as a result of an expensive need to replace lost items, they are neatly combined into one, even easier and less convenient to lose package.

For the first time, I have taken out insurance.

Getting to grips with the new technology this presents, sort of akin to going straight from steam power to nuclear fusion, without any of the intervening stages, turns out to be fun. I’m no technophobe, me, I just don’t believe in upgrading for upgrade’s sake. But even in these ominous years where I totter towards the first digit of my age clicking over in a fairly significant way, I am finding new things I can do. For example, I’ve reactivated a dormant Twitter account, because now I can update it from the pub, which surely seems the point, and there in case you did not notice was the gentle invitation for you to sign up and ‘follow’, dreadful verb though that is. You may find the quality of your life improved by one or even two per cent by access to low-grade random observation if you do so.

One of things I’ve found fun is that on this new phone-cum-music-player thing I can play tunes direct, through tinny but quite loud speakers, unmediated by headphones. For someone who prefers his music from mostly ambient sources rather than pumped straight into his brain – I enjoy the interaction with found sound – this has been an intriguing development. Of course, it works with some music better than others. Fortunately I’ve never really been a symphonies kind of person. And there are limits. This stays in my kitchen. I’m not about to become a feral, blade-wielding 14 year-old deliberately annoying people with a shuffled playlist at a bus stop. I caught a train the other day and there was almost a whole blissful hour before someone saw fit to generously share with us all the dubious contents of his MP3 folder. Unprecedented.

Of course there are some things that work better out of tinny phone speakers than others. I was intrigued to hear that Wavves, who I adore, who is as important to me as anything else in music right now, deliberately encompasses and has fun with the distortion and degradation you get from MP3 compression. I’ve always loved lo-fi, never understood audio snobbery. (I download these massive flac files of Fall live bootlegs and instantly do the thing I’m not supposed to do and convert them into MP3s. It’s The Fall, for god’s sake.) Wavves sounds magnificent coming out of my phone speaker, by the way. And Toddla T sounds great, and this tune Rice and Peas has insistently burrowed its way into my brain.

I seem to recall this coming out last year in multiple versions on a couple of 7”s, which I bought and felt pretty cool about myself for, as the next person at the Sister Ray counter was asking after them but I had the last copies. They’ll be somewhere in the pile that has successfully mounted a campaign of occupation against my living room, and if I had a spare day and a student archeologist to hand I could probably unearth them. Now it resurfaces as obviously the best thing on a CD that’s been out for ages that I forgot I wanted and only found when I was looking through the racks for something else they didn’t have, and I decided just to buy everything I wanted beginning with T. Tinariwen it was I was looking for. Such is life.

Haven’t listened to the whole LP yet, to be honest, and find the linking bits of dialogue, presumably aimed at establishing Toddla’s street geezerness, annoying to say the least (I edit them out for the version of this that will underwhelm people on imminent CDs) but this paean to the urgent need to consume bad for you street food is just silly, uncomplicated fun of the sort that simply needs to be encouraged.

Even in the midst of a currently largely theoretical diet, I vibrate around the kitchen to this, phone in hand, immensely irritating my partner.

God Help The Girl - 'Funny Little Frog'

In the main, I feel I speak for the great swathe of humanity when I say, saints preserve us from side projects. These are usually pronounced, in the Half Man Half Biscuit manner, with an emphasis on the ‘o’. I yield to no man, for example, in my disdain for David Albarn, and his many dilettante excursions, and one day, dammit, I will be proved right and the rest of you turn out to have been misguided all along. And you will say sorry, and I will be gracious about it.

So it was that I approached God Help The Girl with some trepidation. Over time, and conquering some early misgivings, I have come to love Belle and Sebastian, albeit I remain slightly less enamoured of their more recent diversion into 70s pastiche. They occupy a special place in many of our hearts. This could clearly only be a unsatisfying digression.

And yet, and yet... this LP, and this tune in particular, is what I find myself wanting to listen to on my latest portable music player that replaced the most recently lost portable music player, on my longer than customary walks to work as I make that late, vain gesture towards fitness, as apparently people do when they reach this age... where was I?

Right now London is mostly sun-kissed, and as I tread its eastern and northern reaches early mornings thinking sweet thoughts, this cute, breezy, mostly female sequence seems to offer the perfect soundtrack.

Soundtrack it is, of course, in its chin-stroking way, to a still unmade film. You can see that, or rather hear it. You invent the pictures, can imagine your own film, as you listen. And maybe that’s better. Perhaps that part of the fun. You can, possibly should, invent your own film to go with this. And in this relativist age, they will all be right.

We don’t actually have to see the eventual film, do we? We can spare ourselves that particular disappointment. Surely when it comes to making films about impossibly cute girls pairing with men who deserve rather less, in which people sit around smoking and talking too much, that is what the French are for anyway?

Slightly more than half of this LP really does it for me right now, and that, as you three regulars may recall, is somewhat more than contemporary average. True, it goes on too long, as most things do, and tails off near the end, ditto, where it veers dangerously close to easy listening. It’s perhaps a white wine spritzer sort of record, but then it’s been so hot lately I’ve been drinking mostly white wine (so much more interesting than the vastly overrated water the authorities continually advise us to carry a bottle of). There’ll be time yet for those other essential flavours: for the mead, blood and spunk of honest rock and roll, the cider of folk, the vodka of anything electronic and the sticky cocktail of ‘world music’.

Chief gem here, for me – the white Bordeaux in a sea of chardonnay, if we must keep flogging this metaphor – is 'Funny Little Frog'. It probably helps that this is a cover of one of the least lovely Belle and Sebastian tunes, and done exactly how I want it to be – lush, laden with synthetic soul, and heaped with artificial sweeteners, which will turn out to be bad for you. I want, and I'm not ashamed to say it, some strings in my life just now. Somehow too its tale of an imaginary love works better with the gender switched. Perhaps it makes it less creepy. Of course, I may just be saying that because I’m a man.

Proper LP soon though, hmm?