The Mal Thursday Show: 44 Recovered Playlists

The Ventures got played 21 times. The Kinks 16. The Fleshtones 15. Then a tie at 12 between the Rolling Stones and the Embrooks, a band everybody has heard of and a London garage group most people have not, given identical weight. That is The Mal Thursday Show in one line.

Forty-five episode pages for the show survive in dated Internet Archive captures, running from August 2013 to July 2019. Forty-four of them still carry their playlist: 1,421 track lines, 839 distinct artists. Nothing else we have reconstructed from the original network comes close to that.

What 1,421 tracks add up to

Run the tally and four things are happening at once.

Instrumentals sit at the top. The Ventures at 21 are the most-played act on the show by a clear margin, with Los Straitjackets (5) a long way behind, and one whole episode, #134, is titled “Instrumental Madness!”

British records come next, and not only the obvious ones. The Kinks (16), the Rolling Stones (12), Manfred Mann (9), the Who (9), the Pretty Things (7). Manfred Mann at nine plays is the tell. That is somebody working through the singles rather than the greatest-hits shelf, and Paul Jones turns up solo on the 2013 playlist below.

Then the garage revival, treated as living music rather than a footnote. The Fleshtones (15) and Lyres (11) carry the older end; Muck & the Mires (7) and the Woggles (8) sit alongside them.

And then the bands who were current when the show aired: the Embrooks (12), the Ugly Beats (11), the Blind Owls (11), the Reverberations (9), the Satelliters (7), the Higher State (6). Episode #87 is “The Embrooks Story”, which accounts for part of that count but not the rest of it. They recur across the whole span.

The 1960s American garage side is thinner at the top than you would predict. The Cramps (10) outrank the Seeds (7), the Outsiders (7) and the Sonics (6). Neal Ford & the Fanatics also hit 7, and Texas keeps surfacing elsewhere too, in a “Texas Tyme Machine” strand with an Austin edition and a best-of. Willie Nelson at 7 plays is nobody’s idea of a garage record. The show played him anyway.

The Mal Thursday Quintet appears 7 times. The recovered pages do not spell out the relationship between that band and the byline, so neither will we.

839 artists across 1,421 lines means the typical act on this show turned up exactly once, and the single most-played artist accounts for about one and a half per cent of everything logged. It was a different set of records every week.

Six years, and where the record stops

Captures by year: one from 2013, two from 2014, three from 2015, eight from 2016, sixteen from 2018, fifteen from 2019. Nothing at all from 2017.

The show did not go quiet that year. The site’s own numbering rules it out: episode #99 is dated 29 December 2016 and #122 is dated 24 January 2018. Twenty-two episodes ran in between and no page for any of them survives in our set. The same arithmetic applies at both ends, since the earliest page we hold is #52 and the last is #160, from 27 July 2019.

The titles show a host who built recurring formats and came back to them. Halloween specials in 2014, 2015 and 2016. “Freak Out Weekend” in two parts, “Live n’ Wild” reaching Pt. 3, “Coverama 2!”, “Mass Pike Memory Lane II”, “The Ballad of Mal Thursday Pt. 9” before we have any of parts one to eight. Single-subject hours on the Embrooks (#87), Hunt Sales (#146) and the Music Machine (#156). Two consecutive year-end shows in January 2019, “Mal’s 2018 Top 40” and then “Mal’s Other 2018 Top 40”, which is a decent joke about how much a year holds.

Two nights, in full

Artists and titles are facts, so here are two of them whole. Episode #52, “The Ballad of Mal Thursday Pt. 9”, 17 August 2013:

• OBN IIIs — Damned to Obscurity
• THE RATIONALS — Feelin’ Lost
• THE OTHERS — Fallin’ Off My World
• THE LOONS — Climbin’ the Heap
• THE ACID FASCISTS — All Kinds of Twisted
• THE BREAKUP SOCIETY — So Much Unhappiness, So Little Time
• THE GAUNGA DYNS — No One Cares
• PAUL JONES — Free Me
• NEIGHBORS — Tell the Truth
• THE IMPRESSIONS — Too Slow
• THE ELECTRIC PRUNES — Are You Loving Me More (and Enjoying It Less)
• THE SWEET NUTHIN — Your Mystery is History
• THE SADIES — Another Year Again
• THE HIGHER STATE — High Life
• THE REALLY ROTTENS — High Life (bed)
• THE RAMONES — I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend
• TED TAYLOR — (Love is Like a) Ramblin’ Rose
• THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS — I Dig Your Mind
• THE JAM — I Need You (For Someone)
• THE JUNGLE ROCKERS — Cool It Out
• TANDYN ALMER — About Where Love Is
• D.B. — Love You Til Tuesday
• GRANT LEE BUFFALO — The Whole Shebang
• THE CRAMPS — All Women Are Bad
• THE BGs — Born a Man
• MAL THURSDAY AND THE CHEETAHS — That’s Your Problem
• THE BYRDS — Bad Night at the Whisky
• SCOTT WALKER — My Death
• LONELY MOANS — Lots o’ Life
• V.U. — Here She Comes Now

Thirty tracks, and the sequencing never flags which decade you are in. A band that was current in 2013 opens it. A 60s garage obscurity and a soul side turn up early without comment, and it ends on the Velvet Underground. That refusal to sort by decade is not a quirk of this host. It is the whole of what garage punk is. The Higher State’s “High Life” is followed by the Really Rottens doing the same song as a bed under the talk, which is the kind of move you only make if you have thought about it.

Two days before the 2014 Halloween show, a page under a different name entirely: “Florida Rocks Again! Halloween Special”, 12 October 2014.

• THE ROYAL GUARDSMEN — Little Red Riding Hood
• FRED NEIL — Candy Man
• THE CLASSICS IV — Spooky
• COUNT STEPHEN (STEVE ALAIMO) — Spooky
• THE CLASSICS IV — Spooky
• JACKIE MORNINGSTAR — Rockin’ in the Graveyard
• THE HATE BOMBS — Ghoul Girl
• THE ROYAL GUARDSMEN — Snoopy vs. the Red Baron
• THE SECURITY BLANKETS (THE BIRDWATCHERS) — Hey Schroeder
• ROD WILLIS — The Cat
• RANDY LUCK — I Was a Teenage Caveman
• TINSEL SWAIN — I Married A Zombie
• BEACH DAY — Dracula’s Daughter
• ELLA WASHINGTON — Nightmare
• JIM STAFFORD — Swamp Witch
• THE HEATSEEKERS — Must Be a Witch
• THE HATE BOMBS — Drag Hag
• CRITICAL MASS — Ghosts
• MUDCRUTCH — Scare Easy

Nineteen tracks, and “Spooky” comes three times in a row, two of them by the Classics IV with Count Stephen’s version wedged between them. The Halloween brief is held together with string and it works.

The audio

We hold none of it and never will. The original site did not host its own files. Seventeen of the 45 recovered pages point at a Podomatic account under the show’s own name, and four of those also carry a Blubrry address — a wrapper in front of the same file, not a second home for it. Not one of the recovered pages names an Internet Archive item. The remaining twenty-eight give no audio pointer at all.

The audio arrived with its own hosting attached, which fits a programme already at #52 when our earliest capture was taken.

Each page also carried the host’s own written introduction. That is his writing, not ours to republish, so none of it appears here.

The rest of the Lost Network

The Lost Network lists every show we have reconstructed, and how the network fitted together explains what these captures are and are not. For comparison, Record Roulette Club, The Big Enchilada and House of Wild Delights survive in different shapes. If the tally above sent you looking for current bands, our submissions page is open.

About this reconstruction

This page is documentation reconstructed from dated public captures of the original site. This site is independently owned and unaffiliated with the original Radio Mutation network, its operators, or the people who made this show. We hold no audio and reprint none of its writing. The cover at the top is the show’s own, kept here so the show is not just a list of titles. It remains its makers’.

If you have a capture, a playlist or a recording we are missing, or you want something here corrected or taken down, the cover included, the contact page is the way to reach us. No argument needed.