Shock Therapy

Shock Therapy is The Savage Kick with a new name and an eight-year gap in the middle. The same host — the pages carry the byline Køpper Kopp — ran the earlier show from 2006 to 2009, then started over in February 2017. Nothing in the writing announces that. The old site’s own database filed both runs under a single category, and that is how we found out.

We keep them as two pages rather than one. Two names, two sets of addresses, and both sets were linked from outside; folding one into the other would break every link pointing at the older run.

Six episodes of Shock Therapy survive, from 25 February 2017 to 6 March 2018. We recovered the playlist for all six: 126 track lines, 117 distinct artists. Relative to its length that is the most complete playlist record of any show in this archive.

What it actually played

New records, mostly. The label roster reads like a 2016 distro order — Total Punk, Windian, Burger, In the Red, Third Man, Trouble in Mind, Hound Gawd!, Slovenly, 12XU, Anti Fade, Pelican Pow Wow, Custom Made Music, Ken Rock. The first episode is almost entirely current and previous-year releases: Black Panties, Dirty Fences, Suburban Homes doing “Conformity in the U.K.” on Total Punk, Giorgio Murderer, Hydeouts, Brat Farrar, Soda Boys’ “Burgers & Fries”, and two Timmy’s Organism sides back to back on In the Red and Third Man. The exceptions are a 1979 Upheaval track on Love Records and David Peel’s “The Master Race” pulled from the HoZac Archival series.

The back catalogue shows up as seasoning, not as the point. Across the run there is Thee Headcoats from 1996, Icky Boyfriends’ “Frank’s Mom” 7-inch from 1991, a 1964 Rockin’ Ramrods 45 on Bon-Bon, Hardcore Devo. Really Red arrives through the Alternative Tentacles collection rather than an original pressing. This is a show built on what came out that month, with older records used to give the new ones an argument to have.

No artist got more than two plays in the whole run. Seven managed a second: Black Panties, Suburban Homes, Timmy’s Organism, NoMeansNo, Devo, The Hunches and bAd bAd. A hundred and seventeen artists over six shows is a host who refuses to lean on a rotation.

Episode two is the one that explains the show

It opens with The Spongetones’ “Shock Therapy”, the 1984 Ripete EP track, then goes straight into the Ramones’ “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” from Leave Home. The show names itself twice and gets on with it. What follows is a short run of school-hating: The Cavemen’s “School Sucks”, then The Donnas’ “I Don’t Want to Go to School No More”. After that it stops being a theme show and just moves — Gino and the Goons, Musk’s “Wet Brain”, Bazooka on Slovenly, DD Owen, Scraper, Leather Towel, NoMeansNo’s “Body Bag”, Hardcore Devo, The Cambodian Space Project’s “Monster Fuzz”. Then five more, and they are the best stretch of it: Dwarves from the Burger reissue of the psychedelic years, Lumpy and the Dumpers’ “Numbing Agent”, Sick Thoughts’ “18 and Free” on Total Punk, John Cale’s “Chicken Shit” from 1977, and Jello Biafra and the New Orleans Raunch and Soul All-Stars doing “Land of 1,000 Dances” to close. Twenty-three tracks, no genre discipline, and it holds together. A show that ends on Biafra fronting a New Orleans soul revue is not picking a lane, and never meant to. Refusing the lane is the tradition rather than a break from it. Garage punk has always been the sound of a record collection that will not sort itself.

The shape of the run

Three episodes inside three weeks, then nine months of nothing, then two more and it stops.

• 25 February 2017 — Shock Therapy #1
• 5 March 2017 — Shock Therapy #2
• 15 March 2017 — Shock Therapy #3
• 8 December 2017 — Shock Therapy #4
• 13 February 2018 — Shock Therapy #5
• 6 March 2018 — Shock Therapy #6 – Play Ball!

Only the last one carries a subtitle. We have the title and nothing else that would tell us what “Play Ball!” was built around, so we are not going to invent one.

The link that pointed at nothing

Episode five is why a six-episode show got documented ahead of much longer ones. A garage punk site elsewhere on the web has linked to that episode’s old address for years, and for years the address had nothing behind it. We are not naming the site, and we make no claims about how many people ever followed the link. What mattered is that it was a live link into a dead page, which is the specific problem this archive exists to solve. That address resolves to something now.

That is the reason the page got written first. It is not the reason to read it — the playlists are.

The audio, and what we will not guess

We do not have it. The captures we recovered do not name an archive.org item or any other location for the recordings, and we hold no audio ourselves. That is a statement about what these pages contain, not about whether the episodes exist somewhere. If you have them, or know where they sit, we want to hear about it.

Each episode page also carried the host’s own written introduction above the playlist. Those are Køpper Kopp’s words and we have not reproduced them here. Artist names, track titles and labels are facts and we publish them; the prose around them is not ours to republish. We report the byline exactly as printed and have done no research beyond it.

About this documentation

Everything above is reconstructed from dated public captures of pages that are no longer online. This site is independently owned and is not affiliated with the original Radio Mutation network, its operators, or the people who made this show. What we are sets out the boundary; the network’s history covers how the original thing was put together. Corrections, additions and takedown requests go through our contact page, and we act on them.

Start with episode two, then go back to the 2006–2009 run under the other name. For a second show from the same network rebuilt the same way, see It’s Trash!. And if you put out records on any of the labels above, send us one.