We have exciting premieres, great tunes from the past and a special hour-long mixtape of weird covers on an all-new Radio Free Charleston for you today on The AIR.  To listen to The AIR, 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 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

We open this week’s show with the premiere of “Floating Chrystanthema,” the lead single from Byzantine’s upcoming album, Harbingers, which is due out June 13. You can pre-order the album now HERE, or save that link and order it on May 2, when you can get it on Bandcamp Friday, the day when Bandcamp doesn’t take a cut, and the artists get most of the money. Pre-orders get the lead single now, with the rest coming on the day of release.

We also have new tracks from Matt Berry/New Street Adventure, Nellie McKay, Julian Lennon, The Settlement, the Heavy Editors, Hawkwind and more.

Our third hour, largely based on a 2002 album called “When Pigs Fly,” is a mixtape of weird and offbeat covers. Some are masterpieces, like DEVO covering Neil Young’s “Ohio.”  Other tracks feature more questionable choices, like Lesley Gore covering AC/DC or Don Ho covering Peter Gabriel. All of them are at least interesting. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re interesting in a fun and exciting way, or if they’re interesting in a Chinese curse way. Tracks from that album are supplemented with additional oddities from my collection.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in the first two hours of this week’s show where possible…

RFC V5 222

hour one
Byzantine “Floating Chrysanthema”
Matt Berry, New Street Adventure “Silver Rings”
Massing “Waffles & Pancakes”
The Heavy Hitters Band “90 Degrees (live)”
Nellie McKay “Queen Mary”
Saycouth “Phantom Love”
Julian Lennon “Love Don’t Let Me Down (Lo-fi)”
The Settlement “Work”
The Blues Brothers “Theme from Rawhide”
Ringo Starr “Come Back”
Tim OBrien and Jan Fabricius “Lonesome Armadillo”

hour two
The Heavy Editors “Be That Way”
David Synn “Infusion”
Hawkwind “Space Continues (Lifeform)”
Avamanyar “Did You Know”
James Whitely “Reaching Out”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Sour”
Hello June“Dance (M Walker Remix)”
Siouxsie & The Banshees “This Wheel’s On Fire”
Sophie Ellis-Bextor “Relentless Love”
The Darkness “Rock and Roll Party Cowboy”

hour three covers mixtape
DEVO “Ohio”
Kon Kan “I Beg Your Pardon (I never Promised You A Rose Garden)”
The Box Tops “Call Me”
Nina Hagen “Personal Jesus”
The Fixx “These Boots Are Made For Walking”
Guided By Voices “I Think I Love You”
The Connell’s “Insane In The Brain”
Billy Preston “Girls On Film”
Andrew Gold “Ghostbusters”
The Oak Ridge Boys “Carry On My Wayward Son”
Herman’s Hermits “White Wedding”
T Rex “Sitting On The Dock of the Bay”
Lesley Gore “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”
Ani DiFranco & Jackie Chan “Unforgettable
Don Ho “Shock The Monkey”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. 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.

 

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.