Welcome to the fifth pilot episode of The Theme Show. That’s a very long title, isn’t it? This episode was the first Theme Show episode to break away from the one-worded title
The original setlist for the episode, entitled “Death, Destruction, Armageddon, Nuclear Meltdown, and the Y2K Connection,” aired on Winamp on December 30, 1999.
This episode was posted on the verge of New Years Eve 1999, when some people were convinced the world and all it’s machines would come screeching to a halt due to the millennium change (and possibly the Prince song) and that the resulting outage would cause nuclear weapons to launch, and that we were all going to die! Though I didn’t really subscribe to this theory (and hey it’s 2018 as I’m updating this entry, so I guess we survived). I figured if we were all going to disappear into a fiery Armageddon, the least we could do is laugh on the way out, so the entire episode is apocalyptic songs.
The original demos comprised of three main components:
- **Theme Show Warm-Up**: At the start of each show, I played five songs with an upbeat tempo. After the fourth song, I would check my Yahoo! Messenger, and the first person to guess the theme correctly won a prize, usually a Pez dispenser.
- **Requests**: I made most of the playlists ahead of time, but I liked to hear suggestions from listeners. If someone had a fun idea for the theme, they could share it with me via messenger and I would insert it into the live stream.
- **Obligatory Polka**: I think Polka music is fun, and I’m a fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic. So each show ended with a Polka song. Sometimes, it didn’t match the theme, but that was fine.
Most of these concepts were dropped to simplify the process for podcast pre-recording. Ocassionally you will still hear the “warm-up” concept in the newer Spotify & YT Music playlists, as I typically do some organization by BPM/Energy.
Setlist
Theme Show Workout
- 1999 – Xorcist
- Red Alert – Basement Jaxx
- Radioactivity – Kraftwerk
- Oblivion/Humans – Meat Beat Manifesto
- Here Comes the Comedown – Love & Rockets
Standard Playlist
- No Ozone – Loud Sugar
- Time The End of Time – The Chameleons (UK)
- Scatter January – Love Spirals Downward
- These Fleeting Moments – Loveliescrushing
- Last Farewell – Kula Shaker
- Judgement Hour – The Tear Garden
- Dead Heaven – Gary Numan
- It’s the End of the World as We Know It – R.E.M.
- Plutonium – Bizarre Alliance
- Battle Ground (KBG Slam Edit) – Leæther Strip
- Destruction – Ministry
- Ranch Apocalypse – Skatenigs
- Anomaly (Calling Your Name) – Libra presents Taylor
- Atomic Moog 2000 (Post-Nuclear Afterlife Lounge Mix) – Coldcut
- Zero Signal – Fear Factory
- Electronic Warfare – Apoptygma Berzerk
- The Downtrodden Song – Denis Leary
- You, Me and World War III – Gavin Friday
- Destroy 2000 Years of Culture – Atari Teenage Riot
- Napalm in Bohemia – Boy Eats Girl
- Judgement Day – Army of Lovers
- Radioactive – Grumpyhead
- Atomic – Blondie
- Atom Bomb – Fluke
- R.I.P. 20C (Millenium Mix) – Love & Rockets
Obligatory Polka
- Champagne Polka – Lawrence Welk