Maximum RocknRoll Radio in the Lost Network

Forty episodes of Maximum RocknRoll Radio survive in this archive, and every single one still has its playlist attached. That is 894 track lines and something close to 790 distinct artists, logged between 23 June 2016 and 15 April 2019. No other programme we have recovered comes near that.

We hold no audio, and we make no claim about where any of it sits today. What we do have is a better paper record than most radio shows ever get.

The numbers are in the 1500s

The first thing you notice on these pages is the episode numbering. The earliest we hold is #1510, from June 2016. The last is #1657, from April 2019. That is 148 numbered slots across not quite three years, which works out at roughly one a week.

Run the same rate backwards from #1510 and you land somewhere in the late 1980s. We are not going to dress that arithmetic up as a broadcast history, because shows skip weeks, renumber themselves and go on hiatus, and we hold no continuous record. But the order of magnitude fits what Maximum Rocknroll was: an American punk fanzine out of San Francisco, founded in the early 1980s, which began life as a radio programme before it became a magazine. By the time it appears on this network the show is older than most of the bands in its own playlists.

The numbering also tells you what is missing. Ten pages survive from 2016, twelve from 2017, thirteen from 2018, five from 2019. Those are capture counts, not broadcast counts. They record how often a crawler happened to be pointed at the site. Where the sequence jumps, #1517 straight to #1523, or #1547 all the way to #1567, the episodes almost certainly went out. We simply do not hold the page.

What 894 tracks say about the show

Counted across every recovered playlist, the top of the pile looks like this. DICKS, six plays. LIQUIDS, four. Then a cluster at three: THE FALL, G.L.O.S.S., RIÑA, ULTRA, LIMP WRIST, NAKED RAYGUN. Then a long tail at two, including ANGRY ANGLES, TERRY, KALEIDOSCOPE, IN SCHOOL, SIC BOY FEDERATION, KRIMEWATCH, DARK THOUGHTS, NEON PISS, ANNIE AND CANDY KLUTZ, FEEDERZ, CRIMPSHRINE, WIRE, SUPERCHUNK, BIG BOYS, EXPLODING HEARTS, MACHO BOYS, MOLAR, SWELL MAPS, URANIUM CLUB and FRIED EGG.

Two things fall out of that. The first is how little the show repeated itself. Nearly 900 slots, and close to 790 different names filling them. The most-played artist across three years of programming managed six spins. Most radio has a rotation; this reads like a stack of new records and a determination to get through them.

The second is the shape of the taste. DICKS, BIG BOYS, NAKED RAYGUN, CRIMPSHRINE, LIMP WRIST, G.L.O.S.S., KRIMEWATCH, FEEDERZ — that is a hardcore lineage running from early-80s Texas to the present, and it sits right in the middle of these playlists. Arranged around it is the punk and post-punk the same listener buys: WIRE, SWELL MAPS, THE FALL, LIQUIDS, DARK THOUGHTS, URANIUM CLUB, EXPLODING HEARTS.

That makes MRR Radio the odd one out in here. The other shows we have pieced back together, It’s Trash! and the Record Roulette Club, work the garage and trash end of the record box. This one is a hardcore show that happens to be filed next to them, and the count is what proves it rather than anything anybody claimed at the time. Set that leaderboard beside what garage punk is and the overlap is thinner than a shared network would suggest. Same shops, different records.

Two nights, four days apart

The two earliest playlists we hold make the range obvious. #1510, broadcast 23 June 2016:

ALMOST 21, “Drowning In The Rug” · QUANGO, “Fatality” · THE FALL, “It’s the New Thing” · ANGRY ANGLES, “Blockhead” · TERRY, “8 Girls” · TWINKEYZ, “Tonight” · COUNTER INTUITS, “Dementia/Dementia” · CAL & THE CALORIES, “My Calorie” · ANDY HUMAN, “Sarcastic” · EFIALTIS, “Efialtis” · KALEIDOSCOPE, “Elephant” · MYSTIC INANE, “We Tell Ourselves Stories” · IN SCHOOL, “Awakening” · ALICJA POP, “Calm World” · THE WORLD, “Lullaby” · SUICIDE, “Dream Baby Dream” · CURLEE WURLEE, “I Wanna Know” · CRAIG BELL, “America Now”.

Then #1511, four days later:

DAMNED, “Love Song” · ZYANOSE, “Love Song” · DANSE MACABRE, “Think About Death” · BAWS, “Like Let’s Have a Ball” · IRON CROSS, “Crucified for Your Sins” · MUTANT ITCH, “Spider” · CHAOS TRIBE, “Muerte Súbita” · BRIARD, “I Really Hate Ya” · TOŽIBABE, “Bog” · GASH, “God is Dead” · THE NIXE, “Happens” · LIP CREAM, “Born to Loose” · STALIN, “Niku” · LAUGHIN’ NOSE, “Hell Home” · OUTO, “I Like Cola” · CLAY, “Future Terror” · PLASMATICS, “Butcher Baby” · SIC BOY FEDERATION, “Exploding Baby”.

Same show, ninety-six hours apart, and the centre of gravity has moved completely. The first is DIY pop and garage-punk with SUICIDE dropped in near the end. The second is international hardcore, heavy on Japan (LIP CREAM, STALIN, LAUGHIN’ NOSE, OUTO, CLAY) with TOŽIBABE from Slovenia and CHAOS TRIBE alongside. It opens with two consecutive tracks called “Love Song”, one by the DAMNED and one by ZYANOSE. We choose to believe that was deliberate.

Whose show this is

The pages carry a byline: Køpper Kopp, posting as kopper. That name belongs to the account that put these episodes onto the Radio Mutation network. It is a posting credit and nothing more.

Maximum Rocknroll made the show. We do not know the arrangement under which it appeared here, who selected the records week to week, or who spoke between them, and we are not going to guess at any of it. If you know, the contact page is open.

Where the audio came from

The original site never hosted the files. Thirty-nine of the forty pages we hold send you to Blubrry, a podcast host and download-measurement service that sits in front of the real file rather than being it. Behind Blubrry is Maximum Rocknroll’s own radio server. One page names nothing at all.

So the network stored none of this and served none of it. Maximum Rocknroll put the episodes on its own podcast host, and the Radio Mutation page pointed a link at them. That is worth reading next to the byline question above: the plumbing says the network was carrying somebody else’s programme rather than making one, which is an inference from how the delivery worked and not something anybody wrote down at the time.

We are describing the mechanism, not reprinting addresses. We did not check whether any of those files still resolve, so we will not tell you they are up and we will not tell you they are lost. We hold no audio and we will not be hosting any.

What this page is

This is documentation, reconstructed from dated public captures of a site that no longer runs. The present Radio Mutation is independently owned and is not affiliated with the original network, its operators or hosts, with Maximum Rocknroll, or with whoever made this show. Nothing here is licensed, endorsed or continued from any of them. Artist and track names are reproduced because they are facts; nobody’s written show notes are, so we have described them instead of copying them.

The rest of the recovered shows are indexed in the Lost Network, and the story of how the network worked and what happened to it is in our history of Radio Mutation. If you want to know who is running this site now, about covers it. Corrections and takedown requests go through the contact page linked above, and we act on them.

And if any of the above sent you looking for what your own band is doing in 2026, send us the record.