For this, we chose albums that we consider to have no weak tracks at all, that is, no fillers, no tracks just to pad out the album to its full length. Naturally enough this is a little bit subjective, so if we haven’t included your favourite, I apologise, but will note that we have several albums left over in our list, enough for more shows on this theme, if you like it. And do please send us your own suggestions for this category.  Tracks were chosen as far as possible to be the less-well known and played ones from each album

The Preshow was made up from the F section of my stash, with Flanders and Swann interjecting some humour between Fairport Convention and Fleetwood Mac.

The Postshow consisted of tracks that didn’t quite make the cut for the main show, given that we restricted ourselves to two tracks from each album.  This was one way to fit those extra tracks in.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

As a result of a request from the audience, we produced a set of One-Hit Wonders, always a risky category as you can end up mired in novelty songs, which are generally uninspiring out of their context.  However, not only did we manage to assemble a good set of tracks, we had a large audience as well, with up to fifteen in the cavern and a top number of 33 listeners – the first time I can recall where we had more listeners outside the cavern than on the plaza.  We also had a new recruit to the team, Root Beer, who shared announcements with us.

The preshow was all Mal’s doing, and a right good mixture it was too

The show itself had more tracks than usual, as one-hit wonders are generally of the 3-minute single format, so we ended up with 30 tracks.  Actually we ran over time a bit, but nobody complained, not even the neighbours.

The postshow had another Man track – I think Mal may be heading towards a Man show

Radio Free D’ni’s 60th show coincided with the 7th anniversary of MOULa’s revival, and in honour of that we had a selection inspired by playing the game – adventure games mostly, and the various Uru incarnations especially.

The preshow was selections from the end of the ‘D’ section and the start of ‘E’ from my CD stash.  The Nightfly is on later than we are and has to deal with much wierder callers.

The show reveals my like of jazz, prog and guitarists.  This should be no surprise by now.

The postshow had some of the tracks that almost made it into the show.  Rush’s Farewell to Kings is obvious, Places to Go is what we all have, the Cannonball is found in Teledahn (in the gun) and could also be the imitation stone of Sisyphus in the Path of the Shell.  Several places could be a Temple of the Winds.  Running on Three is what it feels like when you can’t quite solve a puzzle and Available Light is needed in Kadish Tolesa, in the moon room and the pyramid.

Up to 33 listeners for this show, boosted by the Anniversary events.  Do come and listen again.

This is the playlist for the show I ran on Saturday 4th February, the start of the celebrations.  It’s theme was a journey through the ages of MOUL through the eyes of a player, in musical form.

After the main event, people wanted to dance, and why not?  So, a further selection from the stash was played, selected as we went, including some Madness for Max 🙂

And a good time was had by all.  29 listeners on the Aegura server plus up to seven on Ez’s relay which I will interpret as maybe 36 in all 🙂

Our second set of Connections showing the often complex interactions in world of Rock, this time centred on Dave Edmunds. Pre- and post-show are tracks by artists we also see during the show proper. And I will post a follow-up of the track of connections we followed this time. We topped out at 25 listeners, so that was not too bad.

See you in the Cavern,
Malaclypse

Yes, 2016 was notably bad for the passing of many fine musicians who have enthralled and entertained us as we grew.  So many, in fact, that it will take several shows to mention even a few of them.

In this show we concentrated on just five: Bernie Worrell (P-Funk and Talking Heads amongst many others), Keith Gemmell (Audience and Stackridge, amongst others). Leon Russel (too many to mention), Greg Lake (ELP mostly) and Rick Parfitt (Status Quo).

Preshow was put together by Ed from earlier shows – I didn’t have time to do it myself, for reasons that are clear to those who listened to the show.

Postshow

I put the Heavy Metal tracks into the preshow, only to find that my colleagues disagreed with the labelling of Danish group Pretty Maids as Heavy. Apparently they are Hair Metal, despite what their website and Wikipedia (I know…) says. I think we can compromise on Glam Metal. I never knew there were so many different Metals out there.

Apart from them, we had two tracks from We Wish You a Metal X-Mas and a Headbanging New Year, on which each track is played by a combination of metallic musicians. I simply could not resist including Silent Night.

Also in the preshow was The Kings and Shepherds Arise from The Home Service’s soundtrack to the Royal National Theatre’s 1985 cycle of Mystery Plays, with John Tams and Linda Thompson providing memorable vocals.

The postshow contained a proper French language version of Patapan and Herderkenslied, the Shepherds Song from Flemish group ‘t Kliekske, keeping our international credentials intact. The Death or Glory Wassail from Sid Kipper could almost have been another language, heavy Norfolk accent laid on thick. Some Early English music from The Sixteen and Polyphony followed and we closed with the Wintersmith from Steeleye Span, in memory of Terry Pratchett. Steeleye Span were one of his favourite groups, and he was thrilled to bits that they had take his book and set it to music, as well as asking him to provide some spoken word parts.

The final show for 2016 went down well, even though the hosts all forgot their Santa Hats. We had 27 listeners at one stage and over 20 for nearly the whole show.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

Difficult Times had 26 listeners at one point, and 20 for most of the show.

Here’s the playlist, and a link to the lyrics for Rush’s Losing It, as requested (click on the track title)

Preshow

Unsquare Dance is possibly the second most famous Dave Brubeck track after Take Five. Klaus Doldinger’s Timesignature is the sleeper here – it is in common time, but has the relevant title…

The Show

Postshow

Aretha’s version of Say A Little Prayer is the second best, after the Dionne Warwick original.

Vix 9 is by Bela Fleck and the Wooten brothers, Victor on bass and Roy “Futureman” Wooten on drumitar, his own drum controller made in roughly the shape of a guitar.   Bela Fleck is playing an electric banjo and synth pedals, and the live video of them playing this on Youtube is very impressive to watch.

We had a great show with a very appreciative audience for our first Covered Up set, where we played well-known songs and their covers – in some cases the covers being more well known than the originals.

Edison put the preshow together and I didn’t make a note of what was played – it was taken from earlier shows though. I put the postshow together so I can give you the extra info for those tracks below – beginning with a rather impressive cover of The Sounds of Silence from heavy-metallers Disturbed.

An internet outage caused me to go offline and lose the channel for several minutes, which caused an unexpected and unannounced end to the show.  Apologies – Technical Issues Beyond our Control.

Postshow

After missing one show slot, we returned to a great audience who stayed with us for a long show.  As it was the DST shift for Europe, we started an hour later than usual for the US listeners, but I was able to get into the cavern early and let folks know what was going on, and also have some music playing during what would have been the preshow period.  There was also an extended postshow, as there was so much material and I wanted to chat about that too.  A long list below…   A peak of 24 listeners, which is at the top end of what we usually have, and even better as we were competing with an event in SL that drew the refugee crowd away.

Total time on air – about 5 hours

Pre-preshow   With a sub-theme of ‘time’ as it was to fill up time due to the late DST announcement by me.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow