The Savage Kick

We got this page wrong the first time. An earlier version said the archive held no episode titles for The Savage Kick and no name for whoever made it. Both were false. Correcting them turned up something better than either fact on its own: The Savage Kick and Shock Therapy are one show.

How we know

The original site ran on WordPress, and WordPress leaves fingerprints. Every episode of both runs sat under a single category — the 2006 to 2009 Savage Kick broadcasts and the 2017 Shock Therapy ones, filed together by whoever published them. The byline settled it. The name printed on the Savage Kick pages is the name printed on the Shock Therapy pages.

So the shape of it is a show that started in late 2006, stopped in spring 2009, stayed stopped for eight years, and came back in 2017 with a new title. Not a successor programme, not a tribute, not someone picking up an old idea. The same one.

We keep two pages because both sets of addresses were linked from outside, and a dead link is worse than a duplicate. Read them as one show documented under two names.

The run

Forty-seven episode pages survive in dated Internet Archive captures. First: 26 October 2006. Last: 10 April 2009.

Every one is numbered, and the numbering is the single most useful thing on these pages. The earliest capture is Savage Kick #19 and the last is #69. That is 51 possible numbers, of which we hold 47. Missing: #20, #21, #43, #62. Everything before #19 never got captured at all, which is close to a year of broadcasts if the cadence held steady.

The per-year counts are three from 2006, twenty-two from 2007, eighteen from 2008, four from 2009. For a show going out roughly every two to three weeks, the 2007 and 2008 numbers are near enough to complete. The 2009 number is not a gap in the archive. Four episodes into the year the show simply stopped, and #69 on 10 April 2009 is the end of the first life.

The byline

The pages print the host as Køpper Kopp, kopper. One recovered playlist gives a variant, crediting the 24 December 2006 episode to Slackmaster Kopper.

That is the entirety of what we have. No location, no biography, no way of knowing whether the name covered one person or several. We have not gone looking and we are not going to guess. What matters for this page is that the identical byline turns up on the 2017 revival, eight years and one silence later.

What it played

Here the record thins badly, and we would rather say so than pad it out. Of 47 surviving pages, two carried a recoverable playlist. Between them: 23 track lines and 21 distinct artists, every artist appearing exactly once. That is a sample, not a pattern. Anyone telling you what this show favoured on the strength of two hours is making it up.

What the recovered lines do show is reach. Savage Kick #24, from 5 January 2007, opens with The Things and runs into Coachwhips, Jawbone, Casey Reid, Corvinas, The Jabbers, Jeff Dahl, The Cripplers, The Revelators and The Terminals. Spanish-language garage sitting next to Jeff Dahl. Manganzoides and Lords of Altamont in the same hour, with The Radio Knives, The Dammit Boys, The Hydeouts, The Gentleman Callers and The Goldstars still to come. The other recovered lines add The Beatdowns, The Downbeat 5, Thee Minks and Long John Thomas & The Duffs.

Nothing in there is a big name, and that is the interesting part. Whoever was picking these records was working the small-label end of the scene while it was still current, not curating a canon. That is the working end of garage punk: short pressings, bands nobody had got round to writing about, and no canon in sight. If you want a fuller picture of the same taste, Shock Therapy is the better page. More of its playlists survived.

Where the audio was kept

The original site never hosted the MP3s. Every episode page linked out, and all 47 of them point at the same place: kopper65.com, the host’s own website, with filenames as plain as savagekick19.mp3. One page also carries a link to a second site elsewhere. Not a podcast host, not the Internet Archive. His own domain, run by him.

We had this the wrong way round when we first wrote this page, and the correction matters because it cuts against the show rather than for it. A personal domain survives exactly as long as somebody keeps paying for it. There is no institution behind it, no mirror, no obligation to keep anything. Audio hosted off-site is not the same as audio hosted somewhere safe, and in this case it was close to the opposite.

We have not checked whether that domain still resolves, and we are not going to say either way. What the captures give us is the address the files sat at in the late 2000s and the name each file was given. Whether anything is still on the other end is a different question, and answering it properly is work we have not done.

So the difference between this and the rest of our archive is smaller than it first looked. MRR Radio comes down to a run of dates and a hole where the sound used to be. Here we have the dates, 47 filenames and a forwarding address — more than nothing, and a long way short of a guarantee. We hold no audio, we host none, and we never will. What we hold is documentation.

Where the record runs out

Everything on this page is reconstructed from dated public captures of a site that no longer exists. We interviewed nobody and we have no private material. Still unknown: what the show sounded like before #19, what filled the other 45 episodes we cannot see a playlist for, why it ended in April 2009, and what happened in the eight years before the revival.

This site is independently owned. It is not affiliated with the original Radio Mutation network, its operators, or the people who made this show, and nothing here should be read as continuity with any of them. The broader story of how these pages came to be reconstructed is in our history of the network.

If you hosted, appeared on or recorded any of this, or you can fill one of the gaps above, corrections and takedown requests go through our contact page and we act on them. If you make the kind of records this show played, send us music.