Now In New Nostalgia Flavour by Toasted Heretic

In perhaps the band's best-known song Galway Bay, Gough sings:

The sun goes down on Galway Bay

The daughter goes down on me

Her dad's not due till one or maybe two

And I'm as happy as I'll ever be."

THE ALBUM:

Well, after fifteen years of constant, unrelenting effort, Toasted Heretic have finally released Now In New Nostalgia Flavour. Long-awaited is too small a word for it...

Now In New Nostalgia Flavour contains both of Toasted Heretic's impossible-to-get, legendary lost cassette albums, "Songs for Swinging Celibates" and "Charm and Arrogance", each on their own delicious disc.

This is their first time EVER on CD, and bonfires will burn on the hill-tops from Spiddal to Seattle in celebration.

Or, as Ireland's leading newspaper, The Irish Times, said recently:

"Once again, we can swing to the sounds of "Sodom Tonight", "Very Naughty Party", "LSD (isn't what it used to be)", and "Love Theme from 'Yeats: The Movie'"... Let's face it, if - like Julian Gough - you'd written such timeless lyrics as "The sun goes down on Galway Bay / The daughter goes down on me", then why would you bother writing any new songs?"

-Irish Times, 2005

All the early classics are here in their original form, as recorded in Neil's living-room...

There's also a 48-page booklet, containing a full-colour illustrated history of the band, with lyrics, rare photos (many of them extremely embarassing) and behind-the-scenes stories by the band members themselves. (We've reprinted some of those reminisces further down this very long page...) Neil tells of how he recorded the albums, using a toy drum machine made by the people who make Barbie dolls...Aengus shares his photographic secrets (they involve bubblegum)... Julian tells you how to record and release an album for £400...And the mysterious Declan puts down his guitar and speaks, at last! What about? Why of course: guitars. It also contains a Nude Centrefold, for the ladies. And for some of the gentlemen.

The beautifully remastered CDs use Sony's new, retro-look black vinyl finish. You will want to lick (and possibly eat) them, they are so yummy.

We have spent so much money on this splendid reissue that we may well go bust and be put in prison and die there like dogs, but it is worth it because we love you and want you to be happy.

Buy it now! Indeed, buy two, and give one to the next lovely, broken-hearted person you meet, it will cheer them up and save them from despair and possibly death. Oh, yes and tell your friends as well.

(Our principle on "piracy" and copying stuff remains the same as it always was: copy this album for your poorer friends, and make the rich ones buy it.)

"Much beloved of the NME, the Heretics would, in a parallel universe, have been as big as the Smiths... This CD reissue of the Toasties' Songs for Swinging Celibates and Charm & Arrogance cassette albums demonstrates that Gough was capable of Morrissey-esque moments of genius."

-Hot Press magazine, selecting Now In New Nostalgia Flavour

for the Hotlist, September 2005

TOASTED HERETIC : A HISTORY

(This is extracted from the 48-page illustrated booklet that comes with Now In New Nostalgia Flavour. So are the personal reminisces from the band members which follow.)

Once upon a time, in Galway city, in the West of Ireland, there were two little boys called Neil and Declan. They liked Pop Music, and so they began to write Pop Songs together. To their surprise, they found it was as easy as falling off a log. (There is a nice photo in the booklet of Neil and Declan, age 10, falling off a log...)

Their friends Aengus and Breffni soon joined them. Now they were almost a Band. But they still didn't have an egotistical buffoon to stand at the front "singing" and making an awful fool of himself. "Wait a minute," said Neil one day. "What about Julian?" Everyone cheered, and their friend Julian joined the band. (Julian later became an Internationally Acclaimed Literary Novelist, but was at this point a teenaged egotistical buffoon.)

The band practiced in Neil's livingroom, and wrote more songs. Soon they were good.

They played their first Gig on the back of a lorry in the Salthill Festival Band Competition, sponsored by Harp Lager. Toasted Heretic did not hold with alcoholic liquors. Julian drank a nice pint of milk during the gig, and lectured on its many health-giving properties. They did not win the competition, but they were VERY, VERY GOOD, and exciting, and came off stage intoxicated with adrenalin and vowing to do this for the rest of their lives.

And so they set out to record an album... and another album... and another... and another... and they travelled to such places as London, and Paris, and New York... and they knew the love of beautiful women, and the manly companionship of strong, silent men... and they had many adventures, some of which are in this little booklet.

On these two albums, Toasted Heretic are:

LEAD GUITAR: Declan Collins

DRUMS: Neil Farrell

SINGING: Julian Gough

BASS GUITAR: Aengus McMahon

RHYTHM GUITAR: Breffni O'Rourke

Later, when Breffni left, Aengus took up rhythm guitar and Barry Wallace joined on bass.

HOW TO DO AN ALBUM FOR £400

by Julian Gough, singer and novelist.

We were all on the dole. Ireland was banjaxed.

I worked, that summer, in an old Jesuit seminary in Spain, teaching English to the children of the rich. I returned with £400, and opened the Toasted Heretic bank account. We would record and release an album. For £400... We recorded it in Neil's living room, on cassette. Neil's mum made us tea whenever we stopped. Gareth did the sleeve, for £20. (He offered to do it for nothing, but that didn't seem fair.) We printed a few thousand inlays for £240. Just the red and blue, to save £40. We drew in the yellow by hand.

We hadn't enough money left to mix the album onto a 1/4" master tape. So I found the RTE studio in Galway, walked in, and asked could we use their mixing desk, to mix our album onto 1/4" tape. Their tape. Amused, they rang Dublin and asked Ian Wilson, the producer of the Dave Fanning Show, to officially book us in as a Dave Fanning session. We mixed the album to 1/4", they made another 1/4" copy for Dave Fanning, and gave us our precious reel... We had a master, and Dave could play us on the radio. Now we just had to make a lot of albums. But we only had a hundred quid left...

As the bank account emptied and we still had no album, I would lie awake at night, pouring cold sweat. Vinyl was far too expensive (you had to pay for metal pressing plates), CD even more expensive. Cassette, then. So we had a hundred cassettes made, for a hundred quid. But we had no distribution...

So I asked would they take some in Gateway Books on Quay Street. Face out, strikingly sleeved, they sold well. Then Star Records took them... Then, to Dublin by bus, and Comet Records in Temple Bar took fifteen... We sold the first hundred, paid for two hundred more, sold them, paid for 400... Dave Fanning was playing us, and reading out Neil's address! Five pound notes came through the post! We'd send them a cassette and a free packet of Tayto. Soon, we had enough money saved to record another album. Back into Neil's livingroom... His mum put on the kettle. The room was full of love. And Toasted Heretic began to record Charm & Arrogance...

-Julian Gough

WARNING - THESE ALBUMS ARE EXTREMELY LOW-FI

by Neil Farrell, drummer and producer.

These two albums were originally recorded onto good old fashioned Cassette Tape, the People's Tape, not your fancy reel to reel or inch wide multitrack tape. So this means that although now it is on CD, there are a lot of expensive frequencies missing. But never mind, what they lack in frequency, detail and transparency they more than make up for in attitude. And hiss.

The albums were recorded in 1988 and 1989 in the "Burnt Stakehouse", my front room, on a wonky 4 track cassette based portastudio ( a Tascam 244) which affectionately became known as "twitcher", due to the servos getting shorted, causing the play/record head to twitch in and out of position randomly. We think this was caused by tiny little mites which we would see occasionally running around the controls. One minute you are playing a song, the next a track is being wiped clean of a lovingly crafted guitar or vocal recording. Or drum track...

Aah, the patented Heretic drum sound, how to describe it? Rain against my window? A Tayto bag being whipped gently by a shoe lace?

It was in fact a "Synsonic", a toy drum machine with bashable pads, made by Mattel (famous for their Barbie dolls). The Synsonic was quite nasty but really cheap like everything else on the album (£55 new). The icing on this sonic cake was plugging it into an old record player with a tiny built-in speaker. Dec had ripped the needle out and replaced it with a 1/4 " jack for input. The result was distortion-tastic, as long as you didn't mind regularly having to "pretend" to put on a record after it switched itself off, thinking it had finished playing a record.

The whole recording process had the feel of a "Make & Do" children's TV program.

Julian's xylophone (£7.99) came in a shiny happy blue plastic case, and had the advantage of being able to remove the keys you didn't plan to use, so you couldn't hit them by mistake. Our rubberband sounding bass guitar for Celibates was an ordinary guitar tuned down.

And Julian's microphone... well, he took a job in Supermacs in Eyre Square for a week so he could buy a proper, £60, microphone, but was traumatised after the first day. He went back the second day just to see was it really that bad, and it was, so he left, and bought a horrible red microphone with no brandname for £30 instead.

Thus was Celibates slowly chiseled, with unpromising tools, into the living granite in 1988. And then, in 1989, on Charm & Arrogance, we did it all again, but better. And, somehow, produced what is almost certainly the cheapest classic album in the long history of pop...

-Neil Farrell

It's exactly 20 years since cult Galway band Toasted Heretic played their first gig, on a truck in Salthill, and were denounced in the local papers for blasphemy. Fronted by internationally successful novelist Julian Gough, they went on to release four albums of the most literate, witty and intelligent songs in the history of pop, from early classics like Sodom Tonight to their top ten hit, Galway and Los Angeles, and played their lunatic literary rock to acclaim and bemusement (and shouts of "Libel!") in London, Paris and New York...

They hadn't been sighted since the early 1990s, when their rhythm guitarist Aengus McMahon disappeared from a train en route to a gig in Austin, Texas. (He met a woman, they hopped off the train at her stop in Dallas, got married, and had four children).

Now, Toasted Heretic return, to finally bring out the lushly packaged double CD, Now In New Nostalgia Flavour, which contains their first two legendary, impossible-to-find albums Songs For Swinging Celibates and Charm & Arrogance. Both were originally recorded in drummer Neil Farrell's living-room. Well, his parents' living room...

Hugely acclaimed and hugely influential, but only ever available on cassette, distributed by post and through bookshops, Toasted Heretic's early albums pioneered an Irish, home-recorded, anti-industry aesthetic which has since gone mainstream with the success of such bedroom masterpieces as Damien Rice's O.

Guitarist Breffni O'Rourke has since become a professor of Linguistics in Trinity, Aengus McMahon an award-winning photographer, and singer and lyricist Julian Gough an internationally successful novelist, published from Sweden to Japan. "One reason we took a decade off was so I could revolutionise the novel," says Julian. "I've spent the past seven years writing my masterpiece, it's just finished, and I think I've done it. But it's very lonely work, and it's brilliant to get back on stage with Toasted Heretic. Pop music will always have this advantage over novel-writing: no matter how well you're writing your novel, excited women never throw their underwear at you."

SO MANY PHOTOGRAPHS...

by Aengus McMahon, guitarist and photographer.

Ah, the photographs. So many photographs. Where did it all start?

Well, it was the bubble-gum. Bazooka Joe bubble-gum, to be precise. It was 1979.

I bought the gum, saved the wrappers (ten of them, I think), and sent them off with a postal order for 50p (to England). Back in the post, nine weeks or so later, came my very first camera.

It was a thing of beauty. Well, it was a thing of plastic, but I treasured it as if it were gold.

Finding myself in the music business sometime later (after university took a dim view of my non-attendance at lectures, failures at exam-time, and the less than believable accounts presented to them by the Photographic Society), it was only natural for me to record the events of the band on camera.

It was easy enough to take photos of the other guys: in the van, at rehearsals, during sound-checks, or just asleep in their beds (Neil...) ...but there came a time when we needed 'band shots'. What to do? I couldn't fathom any other photographer doing the job, so I just did it myself. Lots of long cable-releases, lots of setting up the shot and running around to get in myself before the 10 second timer took the picture. Lots of cut-off heads and lots of blurry Aengus.

What started out as fun eventually became my business and the photos I take now feed the kids and pay the mortgage.

But I still get the greatest buzz out of looking at the photos that I never got paid to take.

Yours in bubble-gum,

Aengus

(Bass player, guitar player, photographer & father of four.)

www.mcmphoto.com

A RANT ABOUT ALBUM LENGTHS

Each of these short albums is on its own disc. Why?

Because human beings can only concentrate for a maximum of 45 minutes. Ideally, thirty-something minutes. And when people concentrate, artists have to raise their game.

Vinyl albums could fit a maximum of 45 minutes of music into their grooves. Result? Golden age of albums. CDs can fit 74 minutes. Result? Shit albums, decline and fall of the music industry, and the rise of global terror.

But let us not end this page on such a stern and negative note. Let us end with some lovely lyrics...

Some lyrics from the album Charm and Arrogance...

(Disc 2 of Now In New Nostalgia Flavour)

YOU MAKE GIRLS UNHAPPY

She looked at you, walked past, and asked the next stranger directions

Contrary to your belief girls don't just want erections

You make girls unhappy

You've got all the girls money can buy

It's fewer than you expected, why?

'cause you make girls unhappy

Stockbrokers want to break your stocks

Oxfam will not feed your ox

Aunties knee you in the rocks

'cause you make girls unhappy

SOME DRUGS

Some drugs make you funky, some drugs make you twitch

Some drugs take your money and some drugs make you rich

Some drugs raise revenue, some drugs don't

Some drugs will do anything, some drugs won't

Some drugs make you better, some drugs make you worse

Some drugs lead to half completed dream-induced romantic verse

Some drugs give you pain, some drugs cure it

Some drugs give you so much pleasure you just can't endure it

Some drugs take your money, some drugs give it back

Some drugs make you so damn beautiful, some drugs turn your teeth black

Some drugs kill your cancers, some drugs give you worse ones

You can get some drugs in public houses, more drugs when the nurse comes

Some drugs make you handsome, some drugs killed your mother

People tend to have some, one way or another

Some drugs make you ugly, just look at your father

They may say they love you, but you know they'd rather some drugs

HERE COMES THE NEW YEAR

Here comes the new year

Oh no, not again

I've been playing Ziggy with my friends

Neither keen on dying nor on being bored

A year of careful hand-stands

On the high-board.

I don't want to get up

I'm tired of everything

I've watched the pornographic film

I've worn the wedding ring

The kitchen's full of food I do not want to see

Downstairs there's a letter for me.

Things to be and things to do

Nothing that I want to

Read a book or write my own

I fumble with a telephone

I wish that I was not alone

My little girl is far from home

Here comes the new year.

I talk too much, I bore my friends

I bore myself then bore my friends again

Here comes the new year.

LOST & FOUND

Got an album and a book I wanted,

Look around, everybody's haunted

By the thought that nobody will miss them,

Ah, I just want to kiss them.

Hate their jobs and hate themselves,

Little bottoms stuck to shelves

Nobody will ever love them

Oh, but I think highly of them.

Here is contrast, here is variety

Here are the necessary evils of society.

I am pride, they are shame

In their garden it shall always rain.

I am arrogance, they are mock humility

It has come to pass, their opinion of their ability.

I've been lost and I've been found

Wandering the underground...

I got on a train to get out of the rain

And I found a girl like me.

I am happy as a tree, I've found a girl like me.

We have arrogance and charm, these people cannot do us harm,

How they hate us, how they scowl

Laying it on with a trowel.

La la la la la...

Laying it out on a tea tray

How they fibrillate when we say

La la la la la la lah...

L.S.D. (isn't what it used to be)

The sun goes down like honey, like money like rain

The boy who took the credit, is the boy to blame.

On your three-figure mushroom debut

Heaven knows what got into you

Did he turn to liquid too?

I don't wanna know.

LSD isn't what it used to be

You're growing tiresome and I'm growing up

Listen sometime to the useless things you say

Why don't you listen sometime.

We have known each other

Since we were ten

I'm too tired

To begin again...

I never believed in love

I once believed in you

You called me uncool

How true.

DROWN THE BROWNS

Their mother had children and, thinking she should

She attempted to love them, but my God who could?

Kill your children, Mrs. Brown

Do your bit for Tidy Town

Remove your white trash from the gutter

Melt your sons for soap and butter

And every time I take a bath, I'll think of Malachi and laugh

And I'll recall each punch and boast, as I spread Martin on my toast.

Drown the Browns

Their father had squatters' rights in three prisons

Their mother, when conscious, could not make decisions

Imbibers of cider and pre-teen joy-riders

Sharpening screwdrivers, as I made a glider

Which they later smashed, in woodwork class

They stole all the tools but they still didn't pass.

Drown the Browns

CHARM & ARROGANCE

Very broad of shoulder, slightly less of mind

Here is the boy she left behind

His the behind she left before she met me.. honestly

And he says "Hey", and I say "What?"

And he says, "What cha got that I ain't got?"

And I say "Pardon?" and he says "Hey! What's she see in you, anyway?"

And I say

"Well, I'm sexy as hell, I'm an excellent lover and reasonable cook,

She likes my wit, and the way that I spit

And she adores the narratorial voice of my book

Her love of my lyrics is only surpassed

By her great admiration for my vocal inflections

She approves of my charity, complexional clarity

Dress sense, intelligence, all day erections

Delights in my habit of quoting from Nabokov

Can't get enough of my Old World gentility,

Thinks that my sketches of local letches,

Show an exceptional technical facility,

Found it charming that on my disarming a recent intruder

at four in the morning

I fined him his trousers, wallet and gun,

let him off with a warning, and forgot to tell anyone...

Some, if not all, of these characteristics

Lead to her lipstick's being on me."

YOU CAN ALWAYS GO HOME

Beware of your dreams, they just might come true

Oh, these are wild, wild times

As what I wanted turns to what I do

And I am King... of nursery rhymes.

You can always... go home

You can always go home.

If I'm really so bad

If I'm really so cold

You can always go home.

And why not a few lyrics from Songs For Swinging Celibates too, while we're at it? (Songs For Swinging Celibates was Toasted Heretic's first album, and is therefore Disc 1 of Now In New Nostalgia Flavour. Why are we quoting lyrics from the albums in reverse order? Because we like Charm & Arrogance the best...)

SODOM TONIGHT

It's so nasty out there, it's perfectly horrid

People walk around with numbers on their forehead

All of the prophets are moving out of town

The lambs are being slaughtered as the abattoir falls down

Well we'll have to spend tomorrow in Gomorrah

But baby, Sodom tonight

Oh, all the dirty bookshops are full of revelations

They're crucifying winos in the railway stations

Mouths full of dust, they've got eyes full of mud

Deep down town they're turning whiskey into blood

A guy with holes in his hands, waving a Bible

Runs under our window, naked, screaming 'Libel!'

The whore on the corner has her red dress on

Back from a weekend with her mother in Babylon

Well the bread's turned to rock in the bread-bin

It's getting dark awful early, shall I turn on the light?

Well we're gonna have to spend tomorrow in Gomorrah,

Begorrah, but baby Sodom tonight

VERY NAUGHTY PARTY

Ah weirdos and thickos & bigots & wackos

On smack and on crack and on Balkan tobaccos

Giving hand jobs in toilets and head on the stairs

Wall to wall mattress and there aren't any chairs

They haven't any Pepsi and I've lost my comb

This is a very naughty party and I think I'll go home

Very naughty party... this is a very naughty party...

This is a very naughty party

And I wanna go home

The music is loud and dreadfully depressing

Young ladies in black are slowly undressing

Young boys mumble lines like "I've nothing to lose"

Sniff Ajax and sneeze and then puke on their shoes

I can't bear to see scenes of such degradation

So I turn my attention to the girl and alsation...

Children these days, I just don't understand

As I'm trapped by a girl who drums in a band

I merely asked quite politely for a small glass of water

She must have misheard... if she were my daughter...

What on earth is she doing, the excesses of Rome

Have nothing on this, Christ I'd better go home

How she can do that with only one hand

Is something I'll never ever ever understand

And what on earth is he doing, why he could be my double

Oh dear it's a mirror, I'm in serious trouble

The floor is unspeakable, the ceiling is scummy

I can't take any more, beam me up mummy...

GALWAY BAY

Well, I'm in the bay city and I'm sitting pretty pretty

And you're pretty pretty and you're sitting on me

And I'm pretty witty and you're itty-bitty

And isn't it a pity the city can't see

The sun goes down on Galway Bay

The daughter goes down on me

Her dad's not due till one or maybe two

And I'm as happy as I'll ever be

You're so cute in your birthday suit

And I'm so cool in mine

I could play all day with your exotic fruit

If you didn't have school at nine

I'm the kind of boy that fits into your bed

You give me everything I ever wanted

You're the kind of girl that fits into my bed

I'll give you everything you ever wanted

BLACK CONTACT LENSES

All you ever wanted was to write a song as perfect as

"Take the Skinheads Bowling" but of course you never did

Ah, you would have settled for a lifetime in that lover

Who swapped you for another and much inferior kid

You lost most of your money and your tan and your muscles

On your last trip to Brussels with your Italian pet

And you didn't get laid and you didn't get paid

And you haven't even made a good song of it yet

And all the words she wrote to you were spelt wrong or were lies

And she bought black contact lenses when you said you liked her eyes

BOUNCING OFF THE BOULDERS

She waited for me once, beneath a dead tree

To tell me by moonlight, she'd never loved me

I was surprised, though I should have suspected as much

Since she'd stolen my wheelchair, and broken my crutch

And as she dumped my body, over the cliff

I said to myself, "I wonder if..."

I said to myself, as I began to descend

"I wonder if this could perhaps be the end"

I wondered aloud, as I bounced off the boulders

"Has the burden of love been removed from my shoulders?"

I pondered aloud, as I bled on the sand

"What she's trying to say here? I don't understand"

I said to myself as my blood stained the sea

"Now what could it be that she's saying to me?"

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE MINE

The spirit is weak, so she adds a little vodka

Goes to bed, perchance to sleep

Count the men who've been there, then she counts the cost

Pretty cheap

She murmurs "Everything I touch turns to me and says

'Can I stay?'"

She says "I feel fine

The best things in life are mine"

She says "God, I'm wrecked"

She is perfectly correct

She says

"And sometimes I feel so young

And sometimes I feel like this

But the best things in life are mine

Oh yes.."

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