It's Trash!: the recovered episodes

Thirty-six episode pages of It’s Trash! survive in dated public captures, and every single one of them kept its playlist. That is 1,144 track lines and 618 different artists between January 2016 and May 2019. Most of the shows in this archive have to be reconstructed from titles and inference. This one does not: we can read what it played, week by week, and the playlists say more than any billing ever did.

The playlists are the whole story

618 artists across 1,144 lines means the great majority of bands got played once and were not heard from again. The 28 most-played names account for roughly a fifth of everything. Neo Neos lead with 23 plays. Then Liquids at 17, Flesh Rag and Sick Thoughts tied at 13, Red Mass and Soupcans at 12, Paul Jacobs and Poser at 10, Erik Nervous at 9.

Read the rest of the leaderboard and the shape of the show comes into focus. Noble Savages, Manager, Dong Vegan, Susans, Wlmrt, Plasmalab, Drains, Nervousmen, Die Group, Protruders, Eroders, Prom Nite, Cowboys, Shark Toys, Phone Jerks, Gee Tee, Get off the Cop, Acrylics. Not one of those is a name off a 1960s compilation. They are the bands that were pressing short runs and tapes at the time the show was going out — the kind of record that is sold out before anyone gets round to reviewing it.

Two complete playlists back that up. Episode #65, January 2016, runs to 43 entries. It opens OBN IIIs, Snooty Garbage Men, Pet Sun, Timmys Organism, Chloroform, Frustration, Foam, Folded Shirt, Giorgio Murderer, Quitter, Live Fast Die, Hemingers, Astral Gunk, Reatards, Black Donnellys, Syndrome, Pre Nods, Blank Its, and that is only the first eighteen. Past the middle sits a block of six Excelsior tracks, which is the whole of Excelsior’s count across the entire archive, on a night billed as live to air with them. The last stretch takes Get off the Cop twice, then Mick Futures, then Big Black Puppet, and goes out on Porcelain Forehead’s “That Number Again Folk”. Forty-three records is a lot to get through in one show. It reads less like a programme than like somebody emptying the month’s new arrivals onto the desk and working down the pile.

Episode #79, five months later, holds 40. It opens on Miscalculations, runs through Disco Lepers, Submerged Objects Band, Wolfcow and Paul Jacobs, reaches Burp!, Outdoorsmen and Exit around the middle, and finishes on Fadeaways’ ”( I wanna get some) Action”, Andy California’s “My Dying Bed” and Pretty Ghouls’ “Kill Slugs”. Outside the Excelsior set, no band on either list gets more than two in a row. Breadth was the point.

Neither list is pure new release. #65 makes room for the Reatards and the Bizarros; #79 works back through the Demics, the Revelators, the Mighty Caesers and Rockin Vickers on its way to the door. But the balance is nowhere near close, and nothing here is a reissue programme. Among the shows in this archive whose playlists we have actually recovered, It’s Trash! is the one pointing hardest at the present. It shared a network with MRR Radio and Record Roulette Club, and set beside either of those the contrast in what came out of the speakers is the interesting part.

The lists were typed fast, too. One band appears as “Miscalculations” and then as “Miscalcualtions” on consecutive lines of the same show. We have kept the spellings as captured rather than quietly correcting them, because a tidied name is a name we changed.

The show was also a record label

A label has long traded under the same name, and the show settles the question itself. Its cover art is a plain black card in white type: the name, then “GARAGE PUNK / NO WAVE / POWER POP / CANADIAN ROCK ‘N’ ROLL”, then “RADIO SHOW AND RECORD LABEL”, then “LONDON - CANADA”. One operation, radio and records, run out of London, Ontario. Garage punk leads that genre list, and the play counts bear it out: Neo Neos and Liquids are what garage punk means now, not what it meant in 1966.

It also puts a caveat under every play count above. A leaderboard built by people who ran a label is not a clean measure of what they rated best that week, and the captures do not say which of those 1,144 lines were the label’s own releases. We are not guessing at the split.

Two names on the pages

The episode pages carry two host bylines: Peter Dawson and Jesse Allison. How the work divided between them, and whether both were in the room every week, is not recorded anywhere we can see, and we are not going to invent it.

Numbers, gaps, and one date that does not fit

Our captures run from episode #65 to episode #133. That is 69 numbered slots and we hold 36 of them: seven from 2016, ten from 2017, ten from 2018, nine from 2019. The missing pages are the archive’s fault rather than the show’s. A page survives only if a crawler happened to reach it before the site went away.

The show also started well before our earliest capture. Episode #111 is billed as the “Five Year Trash-a-versary Show.” and dated 30 January 2018, which puts the first broadcast somewhere near the start of 2013. We have no pages at all from those first three years, so everything before #65 is a blank to us.

One entry refuses to sit still. “#124 – November – No Requests” carries a page date of 17 January 2019, which drops it after #125 and before #126 in the sequence. The dates we use are the dates the pages carried, and a page date is not always a broadcast date. We have left the anomaly visible instead of smoothing it out.

What the titles record

Four episodes are billed as live to air, with Excelsior (#65), Poser (#82), Nervousmen (#93) and Dong Vegan (#97). Every one of those bands also sits high in the play count — Poser at 10 plays, Dong Vegan at 8, Nervousmen at 7, Excelsior at 6. Same story for the episodes named after a band: #103 Eroders, who were played 7 times across the archive; #105 Neo Neos, 23 times; #118 Red Mass, 12. Bands got booked because they were already in rotation, and stayed in rotation afterwards.

Three episodes are interviews by their titles: Johnny Terrien (#106), Bad Mojos (#132), and Ian Graham of Nowhere Fest (#133). We have the billing and not a word of what was said.

Requests turn up twice, once as an invitation and once as a bar on the door: #130 is “Request your own Band” and #124 is “November – No Requests”. There are two Trash Trades episodes, #79 and #127. There is a “Trashmas” in December 2016 and a “Trashmas in February” in 2019. #129 is “Best of the Worst 2018”. #122 is “Killed by Meth”. #102 is called “The Show When I Talked About Stuff and Played Music”, which is either a joke about running long or an accurate description, and we cannot tell which.

Where the audio went

The original site never hosted MP3s. Episodes were uploaded to the Internet Archive and the show pages linked out to them. For It’s Trash! that link survives in only 7 of our 36 captures, a worse hit rate than other shows here. The item ids we can still read include Episode111Jan18th5YearTrashaversary_201801, Episode80June10th80thShow and Episode90Decemeber23rdTrashmas, misspelling included. Whether any of those items are still live, a capture of a linking page cannot tell us.

We hold no audio. We do not host it, mirror it or point at a copy of it. What we have is the paperwork.

About this page

This is documentation reconstructed from dated public captures of pages that no longer exist. Radio Mutation as it stands today is independently owned and has no affiliation with the original network, its operators, or the people who made this show; who runs this site sets out the position in full. We have not reproduced the written show notes. Artist and track names are facts and we publish them; the prose around them belongs to whoever wrote it. The cover at the top is the show’s own, kept here because on this page it is also a source.

If you were involved, if we have a date or a number wrong, or if you want something on this page removed, the contact page is the direct route. Corrections get made and takedown requests honoured, the cover included, without argument.

The rest of what we have recovered from the network is indexed in the Lost Network, with the background in the network history. And if you are in a band that would have fitted on one of these playlists, we would rather hear the record than read about it: send us your music.