Radio Free D'ni

A new idea this time, a show concentrating on just live tracks, with the stipulation that they must be outstanding, better than the studio versions.  It turns out that quite a lot of tracks qualified, with the assistance of Hugh and Mal, and we can do this again, probably more than once, without repeating tracks or albums.

Hugh and Root Beer were both away, so it was back to the old days of the three original members.

The title was a challenge from me to you to identify what short-lived TV SF show it came from.  Korovev and Hayley Mosteller got it right – it was Max Headroom, that dystopian “20 minutes into the future” show featuring Matt Frewer playing two roles, one in heavy prosthetic makeup, as CGI weren’t that good yet.  It was a good series, very critical of TV advertising, the quest for “ratings” and an elite living in a moral vacuum.  It’s no wonder then that it got canned after 14 episodes.  By an unfortunate coincidence, that’s the same number of episodes that Firefly ran for.

Enough of that.  Again, we had more than 20 listeners, which is encouraging for us – do keep coming back.

Preshow – like the postshow, tracks that didn’t make the cut for the main show but still met the criteria.

The Show

Postshow

Something a little different (a bit of a trademark of ours) as we took a look at the songs of Tom Waits. Hugh put this one together, and I was as interested as anyone else, having not followed the man at all, and being only sort of aware of him, largely because of his very recognisable voice.
It was a great show, and I came away more impressed than I’d expected. Many thanks to those who joined us on the plaza, and those who just listened in.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

Part 2 of our Dave Pegg coverage contained a goodly number of side trips into collaborative work as well as some great stuff from his later Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention appearances.  I filled in some of the gaps left in part 1 by getting hold of two or three missing albums – Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter among them.  I was very pleased with the final playlist, and we had a good audience too – many thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Tom, “A Little Light Music” is thoroughly recommended 🙂

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

Happy New Year to all our listeners 🙂

Our first show of 2020 began just as the cavern was recovering from a problem, and people had trouble getting in and staying in once there.  Nevertheless, we had a larger audience than expected, 25 for much of the time.

2019 ended up as a very crowded year, with a lot of people we wanted to pay tribute to.  One, surf guitarist Dick Dale, appeared only in the pre-show.  In contrast, Hal Blaine, the drummer who was part of the Wrecking Crew, appeared in five tracks all three sections, befitting his extensive career.

I seem to have mangled the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciations of João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s names.  Apologies to our Portuguese and South American listeners, I’ve been away and looked them up.

João Gilberto should be jzohao(n) DZheel-BAER-to.  The J is soft, close to the French J in Jean, and the ão should end with a faint nasal (n).  The G in Gilberto is soft, and the emphasis is on the second syllable.

Jobim – Jzo-BEEM  also has the softer J and emphasis on the second syllable.  I bet I’ll forget this the next time I have to pronounce their names…

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

The show as such went well, but the Cavern was down, so the events scheduled after the show could not go as planned. We decided to add more post-show music for as long as people would listen. In the end, we played the complete albums Colors of a New Dawn and Lotus Land by Gandalf before the MOULa login server came back up.

Preshow

The Show

An excellent show put together by Hugh that had us re-thinking our concept of Elton John.  Some great cover versions by other artists too.

We had an internet connection failure partway through, and had to reconnect.  And in that connection I should mention that, should we suddenly disappear in mid-broadcast, it may well be an Internet connection issue, which we have to resolve by restarting something. That will break your connection to the broadcast, so you should try to restart or reconnect your browser or music player, since we always continue the broadcast one way or another – and we have many ways.

Preshow.

The Show

Postshow

Possibly suffering from being too close to Thanksgiving, part 1 of our look at the career of bassist Dave Pegg was a little more sparsely attended than usual. However, we enjoyed it, as did everyone who listened in, so it turned out well.  We covered the period up to the beginnings of his tenure in Jethro Tull, and will finish the work sometime next year.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow