Garage punk radio shows

Garage punk never had much use for commercial radio, and commercial radio returned the favour. For twenty years the music survived in hour-long shows made by people with a crate of singles and a microphone. Most were podcasts. A few went out on college and community FM. Plenty are gone, and the ones that are not gone are scattered across whatever hosting their makers happened to pick.

Eight of those shows we can document in detail, because they ran on the network whose lapsed domain this site now occupies. We ranked them by one test: can you still hear them.

What we hold, and what we do not

From 2005 to 2019 a loose federation of independent shows ran as GaragePunk Pirate Radio, renamed Radio Mutation in 2015. The present site is independently owned and has no connection to that network’s operators, hosts or contributors. What we have is documentation reconstructed from Internet Archive captures of the old site: episode pages, dates, bylines and, where they survived, playlists.

We hold no audio and never will. Neither did the original site. Every show linked out to wherever its host had uploaded the MP3s, and those outbound links are what decide whether a show is still audible today. The full line-up, all forty-eight names of it, is on the lost network page.

Eight shows, ranked by whether you can still hear them

The order comes from what the captured pages say about where the audio went. We have not tested every link, so read this as a map and not a promise.

1. The House of Wild Delights

Forty-three episode pages, from 31 March 2009 to 15 October 2018. Ten consecutive years at the host’s own pace, with numbering that reaches #54. Forty-two of those 43 pages name an Internet Archive item where the host, bylined thescreaminsoulpreacher, put the audio. Archive.org is where it always sat, which makes The House of Wild Delights the safest bet on this list.

2. Big Enchilada

Steve Terrell’s show, and the owner of the best episode titles on the network. We have twenty pages, all between episode 77 and episode 131, and fifteen of them name an Internet Archive item. Our automated read of its playlists failed, so we publish no counts for it. If you want to know what Terrell played, the audio is a better witness than we are.

3. Record Roulette Club

Bylined Daniel Henry, 2016 to 2019, at least 71 episodes, 50 pages recovered. Twenty-seven name an archive.org item, mostly with plain ids like RRC025. The playlists are why you should bother. Across 38 of them, current DIY seven-inches sit next to 1950s rockabilly, 60s soul, Chicago blues, mambo, country and first-wave punk. Gino and the Goons came up most, five times. Record Roulette Club is what range looks like when someone has thought about it.

4. The Mal Thursday Show

The largest playlist record we hold: 44 playlists, 1,421 track lines, 839 artists, 2013 to 2019, and the last show on the network to turn up in a capture. The Ventures top the count at 21 plays. The real tell is the current bands that keep coming back: the Embrooks, the Ugly Beats, the Blind Owls. Seventeen of the 45 pages point at a Podomatic account under the show’s name; the other twenty-eight give no audio pointer at all. If the feed still answers, the titles of The Mal Thursday Show suggest where to dig: single-subject hours on the Embrooks and the Music Machine, and two year-end countdowns in January 2019, “Mal’s 2018 Top 40” followed by “Mal’s Other 2018 Top 40”.

5. It’s Trash!

A radio show and a record label at once, out of London, Ontario, bylined Peter Dawson and Jesse Allison. Thirty-six pages from January 2016 to May 2019, every one carrying its playlist: 1,144 tracks, 618 artists, led by Neo Neos, Liquids, Flesh Rag and Sick Thoughts. On that evidence It’s Trash! played contemporary garage punk and hardcore, not 60s reissues. Only seven of the 36 pages say where the audio sat, which is why it ranks this low.

6. MRR Radio

Maximum Rocknroll’s own show, which the network carried rather than produced. Forty episodes, numbered #1510 to #1657, 2016 to 2019, each with a full playlist: 894 track lines, 790 artists. Thirty-nine of the forty pages link out through Blubrry to MRR’s own server. We have not checked what that server serves now. Forty pages across 148 episode numbers also means roughly three in four episodes from that stretch are missing here.

7. The Savage Kick, and Shock Therapy

One host, Køpper Kopp, two names. The Savage Kick left 47 episode pages from October 2006 to April 2009, the biggest survivor of the network’s early years. Its MP3s lived on the host’s personal domain, with filenames as plain as savagekick19.mp3. Nothing guarantees a personal domain still answers, and we have not looked.

The show returned in February 2017 as Shock Therapy for six episodes. All six playlists survive, 126 tracks with label and year in most lines, the fullest playlist record in the archive for a show that size. The captures name no location for its audio at all, so it comes last.

What makes a garage punk show worth an hour

A genre-agnostic show can play the same records. It usually plays them as decoration: one Sonics track between two indie singles, “garage” meaning anything with a fuzz pedal on it. The good shows work differently, and the archive shows how.

Somebody talks. The old network asked its shows for announcement breaks, soundbites and “other audio weirdness” between songs, not personality-free mixtapes. It named its lineage too: Wolfman Jack, the British pirate stations of the 1960s, Lux Interior’s Purple Knif Show. A mixtape tells you what. A host tells you why, and where to find the record.

No sorting by decade. Mal Thursday opened one show with a band that was current in 2013, dropped in a 60s garage obscurity and a soul side without comment, and ended on the Velvet Underground. That refusal to file things by year is not a quirk. It is most of what garage punk is.

Current bands in heavy rotation. A show that only plays sixties compilations is a museum. The Embrooks counted 12 plays on Mal Thursday; It’s Trash! was led by bands still putting out singles while the show aired. That is the difference between a genre and a period piece.

A playlist with label and year. Shock Therapy did it for every episode. If a show will not tell you what it played, you cannot buy the record, and buying the record is the point.

Outside the archive

Two names we know exist, without vouching for this week’s schedule. WFMU, the freeform station in Jersey City, which the old network itself cited through Dave the Spazz’s show. And Little Steven’s Underground Garage, the syndicated show and satellite channel Steven Van Zandt started in the early 2000s. We have not verified what either is airing now, or whether any particular programme on them still runs.

Beyond that, this music on FM lives on college and community stations. The only reliable way to find yours is to read the local schedule.

Our own stream

Radio Mutation FM plays around the clock: one long shuffle, with a voice turning up between records to say what the hour is. It is a plain 128 kbps MP3 stream, so VLC or a phone’s radio app will open it.

Be clear about what it is. The music is generated and the bands are inventions. There is no group behind any name in the player and no record that was ever pressed. By the standard above it is not a garage punk show, and we will not pretend otherwise. It is something to leave running.

For the real thing, start with The House of Wild Delights. Forty-two of its pages still point somewhere you can press play.