Radio Free D’ni

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

The preshow included Santana’s Samba Pa Ti from Abraxas, Jethro Tull’s Broadsword (I always think of it as one of his Scottish Songs), Status Quo’s elderly but still hale Caroline and Supertramp and It’s A Long Road.

We overran for a change, and Martin Barre’s ‘A Blues For All Reasons’ got bumped into the postshow.  What we might have said about it is

“He was a late starter, but it seems he needed an outlet for the creativity that was curbed in by being a member of Jethro Tull. His first three solo albums spaced out over a full decade, Barre has come back in force after Anderson declared J-Tull to be a thing of the past: he has put out three new albums in as many years since 2013.”

As is often the case, I went on for a bit after the post-show and we all had some fun dancing when I didn’t get in the way with chat.

Preshow

The Show

Postshow

Post Postshow