The House of Wild Delights

Ten calendar years, and not one of them busy. The House of Wild Delights first appeared on the original Radio Mutation network in March 2009 and was still appearing in October 2018, at a pace no station manager would have signed off on. Most internet radio shows die inside two years. This one outlasted nearly everything around it by refusing to hurry.

Forty-three of its episode pages survive in dated public captures, and the shape they make is the point. Nine episodes in 2009. Four in 2010. One in 2011. Two in 2012. Then seven in 2013, six in 2014, four in 2015, three in 2016, five in 2017, and two more before the record stops on 15 October 2018. Every year present, no year full. That is somebody making a radio show when they had one to make, which turns out to be more durable than a schedule.

The numbering tells you what is missing

The pages number themselves, and the numbers run to #54. We hold forty of those, plus three specials, which is where the count of 43 comes from. Fourteen numbered episodes are simply not in our captures: #12, #14, #16 through #20, #22 through #27, and #29.

That gap matters for reading the year-by-year list above. Episode #21 is dated 19 August 2011 and #28 is dated 25 November 2012, so the six missing shows in between belong to the fifteen months that look emptiest in our tally. The lean stretch of 2011 and 2012 is at least partly a hole in the capture record rather than a hole in the broadcast record. We can say the show existed in every one of those ten years. We cannot say how often.

Episode #1 survives, dated 31 March 2009. That is rarer than it sounds. First episodes are the ones nobody thinks to save.

The host

The byline printed on the pages is thescreaminsoulpreacher. We are reporting that and nothing else, because that is all the archive holds. No location, no name behind the handle, no history before or after the show.

The pages were not bare tracklists either. Each carried a written introduction in the host’s own voice, setting up the episode before the songs started. Those introductions are the host’s work, not ours, so we describe them rather than reprint them.

What it actually played

Two of the nineteen recovered playlists can be read straight through, and they do more to explain the show than any summary would.

Episode #3, from 22 May 2009, is a death record from end to end. It opens on Townes Van Zandt, “Waitin’ around to die”, and never lets the theme go: Jody Reynolds’ “Endless sleep”, Bob Fryfogle’s “Six feet under”, Black Time doing “Six feet below”, The Gories doing “Six cold feet”, Pussy Galore’s “Just wanna die”, The Graveyard 5 on “The Marble Orchard”. Haunted George turns up twice. The Iguanas arrive in a black suit around the two-thirds mark. Twenty-nine entries in all, twenty-three played records and six beds under the talk, and not one wink at the listener. It signs off on Evelyn Freeman, “Fare thee well”, which is the only exit that running order had left.

Episode #6, from 3 September 2009, is the opposite approach and shows the show’s real range. The Revelators into Cheater Slicks into Le Face into Teengenerate, then a hard left into 60s punk with Caretakers of Deception and The Drones, then rhythm and blues and rockabilly: Googie Rene, Eddie Cash, Junior Thompson, Robert Smith with Bailey’s Nervous Kats. The Bangers turn up past the halfway mark with “Baby let me bang your box”, and the last of the thirty entries is Jimmy Day & the Knights with the Jesters, “What’s so good about Goodbye”. One entry is credited simply to an unknown band, which we like a great deal. The host had the record and did not pretend to know more than that. Teengenerate into the Drones into Googie Rene inside one hour is not a host showing off his range. It is what garage punk is laid out end to end: the 60s records, the punk speed and the R&B underneath, played as one thing.

Both playlists mark certain tracks with the prefix “Bed”, meaning music running under the host’s talk rather than played as a record. The Atlantics’ “Stompede” does bed duty in #6; an excerpt from the Satan’s Sadists soundtrack does it in #3. Eleven of the fifty-nine entries across the two shows are beds. Somebody picked the records, then picked what would be playing underneath while they were introduced. Most shows do not bother.

Specials, and one long thread

Three episodes step outside the numbering. “The Norton Jukebox of Wild Delights” ran on 14 December 2012. “Monkey Time” took two parts across February 2013. And in November 2017 the show gave itself two nights running under the title “Songs the Cheater Slicks Taught Us”, which reads as a nod to the Songs the Cramps Taught Us bootlegs.

Follow that back and you get the nicest thing in the whole record. Cheater Slicks’ “Motherlode” plays in episode #6, in September 2009. Eight years later the show hands the band two whole episodes. Whatever this programme was, it was not chasing anything.

Where the audio is

Forty-two of the forty-three pages name an Internet Archive item id where the episode’s audio was uploaded. The original site never hosted MP3s of its own. Hosts put the files on archive.org and the site pointed at them, which is why the audio outlived the site that announced it and sits today at the same public address it always had.

We hold no audio from this show, host none, and will not. We are documenting that the episodes exist and where they were published. Finding a specific item is a matter of searching the Internet Archive for the show and episode number.

What we are not printing

We ran the same automated read over this show’s playlists that we ran over the rest of the archive, and for this one it came out badly. The pages interleave prose, quoted song titles and track listings in a way the parser could not reliably separate, so the aggregate artist counts it produced are full of artefacts. We are not publishing them. Everything above about the music comes from the two playlists we can verify by eye.

That is the honest state of it: the shape of the show is solid, the survival of the audio is solid, and the fine detail of what got played across ten years is mostly still locked up in pages we can read but not yet trust a machine to summarise.

Elsewhere in the Lost Network

For how the network fitted together and when the pieces of it went dark, start with our history of Radio Mutation. For other long-running shows documented the same way, see The Mal Thursday Show and Savage Kick. The full set of recovered programmes lives in the Lost Network.

This page is documentation reconstructed from dated public captures of a site that no longer exists. The present Radio Mutation is independently owned and is not affiliated with the original network, its operators, or the people who made this show. If you hosted it, appeared on it, or can fill a gap in the record, we would like to hear from you through our contact page, and the same address handles corrections and takedown requests. If you make this kind of music now, send it to us.