This is so fucking cool. I need even the people who are not massively into Daniel Kitson to look at this website, because if nothing else, this level of dedication to archiving should be appreciated. All files are hosted on the Internet Archive as well, so they can actually be preserved.
It is a collection of all the things Daniel Kitson has done on the radio, from 2003 to 2023, that we could possibly find. I think it’s a definitive collection of all the radio things he’s done in England in the last ten years – is missing some older stuff and Australian stuff that may get added as they’re found, but it’s pretty comprehensive given that Daniel Kitson refuses to appear on anything that’s easy to track down. That’s pretty much what this site does – it takes things that listeners throughout the years had to work to find because they were on obscure stations at obscure hours with insufficient announcements or easy ways to download after they’d finished playing live, and it catalogues them in one spot so the rest of us don’t have to do that work. I find it genuinely cool – in a way that might be me reaching a Kitson-esque level of romanticizing things like this – how many different people in different years had to be involved in putting the effort of recording and sharing these files, and still more people preserving them in their own collections for years, until they could all end up in one place. Preserving the files and various amounts of metadata, and sometimes no data at all, so that people years later had to dig that back up and retrace everyone’s steps to work out where it all came from.
But that work has been done. This archive contains dates, names of collaborators, the official blurbs that explain what is going on in the show and what ridiculous time it aired, and the radio station involved. For each episode, it also contains both a full version that shows how it originally aired, and an edited version that removes the songs, ads, and bits of the show where Daniel Kitson wasn’t there. And there are tracklists, of all the songs he played. And Spotify playlists so you can listen to those tracklists.
That is so much work, and someone did all of it, manually cutting up the tracks and making lists of songs and then creating playlists and then designing and creating an entire website to host them, for no reason except love of the art. I mean, multiple people did some work on it, and credit goes to some people I don’t even know about who recorded those older episodes in the first place, but one person did the majority of the work, just because it seemed worth doing, and that is really fucking cool (again, I’m going a bit 2006-era Kitson here, thinking of the crux of his Weltanschauung show that said one of the best things in the world is people who do something just because they think it’ll be good).
Normally when I post things like this and get excited about them, it’s because I just happened to come across them on the internet. But this one’s a bit different because I had a bit of a hand in it. This archive was made by a guy I met some months ago, when I tried messaging someone on a comedy forum on the off chance that they’d know where to find a couple of things I was looking for, and by pure luck, I happened to stumble upon the best person I possibly could have. He shared his Kitson radio collection with me and I sorted through it to organize the files, excavate some metadata, stuff like that. In that process I listened to the files, and I made a bunch of posts at the time about how I know no one on here has any way to hear these radio episodes so there’s no point in me going on about them because you won’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m enjoying them so much that I need to write down thoughts about them anyway. Well that’s fixed now! You can go listen to them! They’re all on this website!
As this site was getting made, I helped with creating tracklists and edited versions for some of the older episodes for which that hadn’t already been done, and I was happy to do that as it was an excuse to listen to them all again. Because seriously, aside from admiring the archiving efforts here, they are worth listening to. They’re a lot of fun, in a variety of ways. And the edited versions and tracklists make it so much easier. That you can hear the edited version to just appreciate the comedy (because sometimes, even if you like the songs, you just want to hear the comedians), but also, if it’s from an era when you liked the music they were playing, you can find it all at once in the list.
Okay, here’s a rundown of what’s there. 2006-2007 Listening Club: Daniel Kitson sitting in a room in England in the middle of the night, talking for about three hours, every week for a few weeks at a time. Usually by himself, though Gavin Osborn joined him once. The music he played got described as “fey indie” by one person on one message board, and Kitson jumped on that and continued to defensively refer to his own music as “fey indie” for the next seven weeks. But that’s pretty much what it is – if you want to hear indie music from the early-to-mid-2000s that was mainly from England, Australia, and America, look through the playlists from these episodes. If you want to hear 2006-2007-era Daniel Kitson, at the height of his “romantic pretentious indie” era (I mean none of those words as a pejorative, it was a strong era), listen to those episodes. Chock full of comedian gossip stories from the height of the Chocolate Milk Gang era (by which I mean, mainly stories about who scored in the football game on Tuesday).
He didn’t have guests on, but David O’Doherty did a song over the phone once, and I think Gavin Osborn did too. He also read out texts and emails from listeners sometimes.
Triple R stuff: The graveyard episodes are Daniel Kitson from 2-6 AM, recording at a studio in Melbourne, mostly when he was there for the comedy festival but sometimes he’d do it if he was just on tour there. These always had a guest, one or two other comedians, usually from England but sometimes from Australia. Guests include: Steve Hall (x3), Claudia O’Doherty (x2), Gavin Osborn (sometimes as an in-studio guest, sometimes calling in to sing a song), David O’Doherty, Matthew Crosby, and an Australian I haven’t otherwise heard of named Daniel Moore. There were also phone calls from comedians Phil Nichol and Kristen Schaal, which were both very entertaining. And they took calls from listeners.
The best ones, I think, are the three Steve Hall episodes and the two Claudia O’Doherty ones, especially the one where she’s on alongside David O’Doherty. The Steve Hall episodes were hilarious absolute messes; if you have ever seen Daniel Kitson do a beautiful sensitive theatre show and would like to know how it sounds when he’s the opposite of that, please hear him spend all night sitting in a studio in Melbourne with the 100 balls of self-loathing stacked on top of each other under a trench coat that is Steve Hall. Claudia O’Doherty may be one of the most delightful people I’ve ever heard, it is truly impressive how the episode with her and DO’D had me laughing out loud, really hard, for pretty much its entire runtime.
Music remains mostly fey indie, with maybe even more of a focus on Australian stuff. He was really, really obsessed with this Australian band called The Lucksmiths. In one episode he played an entire Lucksmiths album with no breaks between songs, and even though the audio-only recording, I could see how hard Matthew Crosby rolled his eyes about it. But to be fair, it was a pretty good album.
There are also episodes of Kitson appearing on a show called Breakfasters, a morning radio show where he was supposed to promote his shows but mainly just messed around with the Australian presenters. Made me laugh way more consistently than old recordings of Australian talk radio had any right to. And there’s Comedy Special, a thing he did in the middle of the night to a live studio audience when he was in Melbourne for the 2009 Comedy Festival, where he had a lot of live guests and things like that doing music and stand-up.
Resonance FM 2013 and 2016: Daniel Kitson for a few hours, starting at midnight, alone in a studio in England. Music still has some fey indie, but it noticeably shifts as time goes on. He’s gotten really into the Talking Heads and David Byrne, whom I thought were fine based on the few songs I knew by them, until I listened to these radio episodes and learned just how annoying they are if you hear a lot of them at once. LCD Soundsystem I did know were annoying before I got into Daniel Kitson, but I know it much more now. So his music tastes took a turn in that direction, and they’d gone further in that direction by 2016 than they had in 2013. If you like that sort of thing, you will like the playlists from those years.
I’m not even quite sure how to describe “that sort of thing”. More sort of alt-rock-type stuff, I guess would be the way to say it, except that I like lots of stuff that gets labeled alt-rock but I find a lot of this annoying. Not all of it, though. There is still some fey indie, which I like. And I do like some of the type of music he started playing more of in later years. In one 2016 episode he played one Scroobius Pip song that was so good it made up for every LCD Soundsystem track from that entire run.
Anyway, if that’s not your thing, the edited versions of those are also fun to hear. It’s Daniel Kitson in a later era, slightly more cynical than the 00s versions of him, still basically talking shit about things he dislikes in a radio studio in the middle of the night. Texts and calls from listeners or other comedians were phased out, he’s basically just talking to himself, but it’s really entertaining.
A Reason To Wake Up, 2018-2020 plus 2023: Daniel Kitson has turned 40 and does not want to stay up all night for no reason anymore, so he did these shows from 7-9 AM. He is, again, alone in a studio in England. He no longer takes calls or messages from listeners, and in fact, aggressively rails against all radio shows that do solicit listener engagement. He plays the same sort of music as he did in 2016, though it’s now taken a turn even further away from the fey indie. There is electronica and harder rock and more experimental stuff and did I mention electronica? The electronica is incredibly annoying. There are also occasionally songs from musicals, which I also find annoying, but other people presumably like them. Some of it’s still good, though. And it’s subjective – I’m sure some people like that stuff. At least one person. Daniel Kitson definitely likes that stuff.
Again, though, the main thing is Daniel Kitson talking to himself in a studio. In these years, he’s taken to complaining a lot about other radio stations and how they do things like talk to listeners and have standards of professionalism. It’s way more entertaining than it sounds, I swear. I may not be into LCD Soundsystem, but I am into anyone who complains about standards of professionalism. Fuck those things.
Trifle, 2020: That’s its own thing. I guess I won’t spoil it, though I did make a lot of posts about it when I first listened to it last year that entirely spoiled it. All the other radio episodes can stand alone, you can jump in anywhere you like and hear any bits and pieces you like, but I will say, if you are for some reason interested in this and have the time, it’s worth listening to all of Trifle in order. It’s it’s own thing that I found very, very good.
Misc: Most of these others things have been shows that are hosted by Daniel Kitson; the misc. folder is mainly him appearing on other people’s shows. Mostly in Australia, where he was slightly more willing to do publicity stuff than he is in England (he once mentioned that this is because the Melbourne Festival pays for him to fly over there, and as part of the deal he has to do things to promote his show). But there is one thing where he went on Stewart Lee’s radio show in 2003 and did an interview that I find fascinating, just for the way they both laid out their career plans.
Okay, that’s what’s in there. It really is worth listening to some of it, if you like that sort of thing. Even if you’re not interested in Daniel Kitson, some of the earlier playlists are good (in my opinion), and some of the later playlists are good too (in some other people’s opinions, probably). And even if you’re not interested in that, it is just satisfying to look through archiving this meticulous.
You know that episode of Catsdown where Miles Jupp brought in a cutlery tray with forks, knives, and spoons all jumbled together, and said Jon Richardson can just sort them out if needs to calm down during the episode, because he finds organization soothing? When I was helping (in my small way, most of the credit goes to the person who actually created this website) to put stuff together for this project, I felt like Jon Richardson sorting a cutlery tray. And I am now looking through it like Jon Richardson looking at a perfectly organized cutlery tray: it’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful.
