Record Roulette Club

Six hundred and fifty-one tracks. Five hundred and fifty-two different artists. That ratio is the whole show in one number: across every playlist we recovered, Record Roulette Club almost never played the same band twice. The most-played artist in three years turns up five times. The name was not a metaphor.

Fifty episode pages survive in dated public captures, running from 30 November 2016 to 1 July 2019. The byline on them is Daniel Henry.

What the captures actually hold

Fifty pages, unevenly spread: two from 2016, eight from 2017, twenty-eight from 2018, twelve from 2019. The 2018 run is dense enough to read as a real schedule, roughly a show every ten or twelve days from 6 January through to a New Year’s Eve broadcast on 31 December.

Episode numbers run from #3 to #71, with holes. Those holes are ours, not the show’s. Nothing captured says an episode was skipped; it says nobody archived that page. The jump is widest at the end, where #62 on 8 May 2019 gives way to nothing until #71 on 1 July 2019, nine shows we have no record of.

Two episodes broke the numbering and got titles instead: “Make Ready My Grave” on 24 October 2017, and the Halloween show of 17 October 2018.

Of the fifty pages, 38 carry a playlist we could parse cleanly. Those are the ones the counts below come from.

The artists it kept coming back to

This is the part worth having. It is not a critic’s summary of a show’s taste, it is a count across every recovered playlist, and it says something a description never could.

Top of the list, alone: Gino and the Goons, five plays. Then an eight-way tie at three each — Color TV, Link Wray, Plaga & Las Pleito, Wanda Jackson, The Stops, Negative Space, The Lindas, Bad Vibes.

Look at the shape of that tie. Contemporary DIY garage punk sitting at exactly the same weight as Wanda Jackson and Link Wray. Not one 50s track as a novelty palate-cleanser among the new records, but the primitives treated as current stock. That is the whole claim of what garage punk is: one tradition still running, with nobody marking the seam between decades.

At two plays each: Radioactivity, The Figgs, April March, Howlin’ Wolf, The Fall, Black Lips, Holly Golightly, The Saints, Perez Prado, The Miracle Workers, The Replacements, The Buzzcocks, Johnny Cash, A Giant Dog, The Nerves, The Sueves, Brogues, The Joneses, Neo Neos.

Perez Prado twice. Johnny Cash twice. Howlin’ Wolf twice. Whatever the show thought it was, it was not a garage-only show.

Two nights, in full

We publish artist and track names as recovered, capitalisation and all. Here is show #3, 30 November 2016 — nineteen tracks:

• Shannon and the Clams — Rip Van Winkle
• Dottie Cambridge — He’s About a Mover
• Oblivians — Bad Man
• Sounds Incorporated — Go
• The Equals — Police on My Back
• Color TV — Meat Wagon
• Bobby Peterson Quartet — Mama Get Your Hammer
• The Zeros — Don’t Push Me Around
• Radioactivity — Other Life
• Shirley Ellis — Rubber Dolly (The Clapping Song)
• Jimmy Evans — The Joints Really Jumpin’
• Link Wray — Walking Down the Street Called Love
• X — Devil Doll
• The Spectors — That Girl Is Leaving Town
• The Embers — I Walked All Night
• The Figgs — Stood Up
• Nude Beach — Keep It Cool
• Phylums — Can’t Get Through
• Rich Kids — Ghosts of Princes in Towers

Second track in and it is already a version of the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “He’s About a Mover”. Three tracks later, The Equals. Then Shirley Ellis into Jimmy Evans into Link Wray into X, which is four decades in four songs and does not sound like a stunt.

And show #5, 30 December 2016, twenty-one tracks:

• The Jades — I’m All Right
• April March — Chick Habit
• The Monks — Drunken Maria
• Dolly Parton & Porter Wagoner — Milwaukee Here I Come
• Howlin’ Wolf — Wang Dang Doodle
• The Fall — Outs / Bury My Body
• The Liminanas — Down Underground
• Black Lips — Modern Art
• Gerry and the Pacemakers — It’s Gonna Be Alright
• Wild Man Fischer — Monkeys vs. Donkeys
• The Vibrators — Judy Says
• Nikki Lane — Gone, Gone, Gone
• Nazis From Mars — Demolicion
• The Five — There’s Time
• Tennessee Ernie Ford — Sixteen Tons 1965
• The Milkshakes — Please Don’t Tell My Baby
• Eddie & Ernie — Outcast
• Lee Moses — Bad Girl
• Biddu — Look Out Here I Come
• The Squires — I’m Going All the Way
• Holly Golightly — Want No Other

The Monks straight into Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner is the single best piece of evidence on this page. Deep soul arrives late, Eddie & Ernie into Lee Moses back to back, and the show still refuses to settle there: Biddu, then The Squires, then Holly Golightly to finish. If you want one episode to judge the show by, it is this one.

Where the audio is

The original site never hosted its own audio. The show uploaded MP3s to the Internet Archive and the episode page pointed at the item. That is why the sound outlived the site: it was never on the site.

Twenty-seven of the fifty recovered pages name an item. Most ids follow the obvious pattern of the show’s initials plus the episode number, RRC025 and RRC028 through RRC032 among them. A few do not: RRC005FINAL160, and one called LadyLazerGun2ANGLEFLAT. Search the Internet Archive for the id and you will land on the item.

We do not host any of this audio and we will not. Twenty-three pages name no item at all, so treat this as a partial map rather than a complete one.

The limits of this page

This is documentation reconstructed from dated public captures of a site that no longer exists. It is not a reissue and not a continuation. 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.

We have not heard these broadcasts. Everything above describes what the pages printed, and where our parse of a playlist was not clean, we left the tracks out rather than guess at them. Twelve episodes are in the archive as pages with no usable tracklist.

If you have captures, tracklists or item ids we are missing, or you made this show and want something removed, the contact page is the way to reach us and we act on takedown requests without argument.

For the other shows we have reconstructed, start with the Lost Network, or the original network’s story in the history of Radio Mutation. The nearest neighbours to this one are The Mal Thursday Show, It’s Trash and MRR Radio. Making records in this vein now? Send them to us.