Another delayed Radio Free Charleston happens again this week, and on The AIR that means it’s time for a new  RFC on Thursday! You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 2 PM and 8 PM, with tons of replays throughout the week.  This week we have one all-new hour loaded with greatness, and two hours of a 2017 episode of RFC International that hasn’t been heard for more than five years.

Kicking off this cool edition of our show is a newly remastered song from Mark Beckner’s Nashville band, Hitchcock Circus. Back in 1992 Mark recorded this tune with his then-new band, which included Lee Hendricks on Bass, Mark Mingrone on Keyboards, and Jeff Noland on Drums in addition to Mark on vocals, guitar and songwriting.  Mark’s been revitalizing his back catalog and archives (and the Go Van Gogh archives as well) and while we’re waiting on a new album from his current band, Nixon Black, I’m wondering if we’ll get a retrospective compilation.

I am in the mind to consider retropsective compilations because Brian Diller has just released a new collection of songs spanning his 45 years making music.  Dear Boy is available on CD and Vinyl, and I will tell you more about that tomorrow, when I interview Brian for The PopCulteer. I play a couple of tracks from Brian’s album in our first hour.

I could have just coasted with that, but because I’m recording this show later than usual, I have the honor of playing a new song by Hello June. “Honey I Promise” is out just today at Bandcamp and other streaming services, and it’s another preview track from the long -awaited new album, Artifacts. Artifacts is due out October 6 from 31 Tigers records.

We also have an advance single from Chicago’s Ron Lazzeretti.  “Count Down By Threes” will be on his album Fat Head, Sunday Paper, which is due out September 29.  He’ll be playing a record release show in Berwyn at Fitzgerald’s on September 30. That’s in Chicagoland, but if you’re a Svengoolie fan you already knew that.

Hour one is also loaded with great stuff from Buni Muni, William Matheny, Logical Fleadh, Test Subject 17, Guitarmy of One and more.

Our second and third hours bring back a legendary episode of Radio Free Charleston International from 2017 that treats listeners to a free-format playlist where every song has at least one thing in common with the song before it. It was pretty tricky making this idea work, especially with the last song leading back into the first, but it makes for some incredible listening, and you can even try to guess the connections along the way. I do spill the beans and connect the dots at the end of the show.

As I said at the time…

In a special show that took way too much time to program, your humble host and PopCulteer brings you two hours of music where every song has something to do with the song that comes after it. Your challenge is to figure out just exactly what that is. It might be that the two songs are written by the same person, or share a producer, or a member of one band produced the song by another. It might be a tenuous connection, like both musical artists appearing on the same television show, or it might be a rock-solid tie, like two groups that share members.

Some of the songs you’ll hear in Radio Free Charleston International this week are by cutting-edge underground artists, some of them are from ultra-hip cult artists, while other tunes are by high-profile artists and may have been major hit records. But every song has something in common with the next.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Where possible in the first hour, live links will take you to the artist’s pages so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 145

Hitchcock Circus “Shakespeare’s Inspiration”
Brian Diller & The Ride “Don’t Stop At Anything”
Buni Muni “Don’t Look Back”
Sgt. Splendor “Heavy Be Thy Borrowed Crown”
Dave Gahan & The Soulsavers “I Held My Baby Last Night”
William Matheny “Heartless People”
Ron Lazzeretti “Count Down By Threes”
Logical Fleadh “The Pile”
Tony Kaye “Sweetest Dreams”
Test Subject 17  “Go Mortals”
Guitarmy of One “Jack Lord of the Sea”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
Miniature Giant “Dawn”
Hello June “Honey I Promise”
Brian Diller “Dear Boy”

hour two
Nu Tra “Superhuman”
The Aquabats “The Controller”
Oingo Boingo “Change”
Strawberry Alarm Clock “Dear Joy”
Surf Punks “Welcome To California”
Size 14 “Superbabe 2000”
Pink Floyd “In The Flesh”
Paul McCartney “On The Way”
The The “This Is The Day”
Rip Rig and Panic “Sunken Love”
Madness “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”

hour three
Suggs “I’m Only Sleeping”
Alice Cooper “Eleanor Rigby”
Hollywood Vampires “Come and Get It”
Badfinger “Baby Blue”
Todd Rundgren “Terra Firma”
XTC “Dear God”
Shriekback “Nemesis”
The Veils “Lavina”
Julie Cruse “Falling”
Sparks “I Predict”
FFS “Johnny Delusional”
Franz Ferdniand “Take Me Out”
The Cardigans and Tom Jones “Burning Down The House”
The Firm “Satisfaction Guaranteed”
DEVO “Communication Break Up”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Thursday at 2 PM and 8 PM on The AIR, with replays Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. We are also going to run this episode in our normal timeslot next week so that your humble blogger/radio host can step away and write a magazine article. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.