Thomas Almqvist has been played on NTS over 30 times, featured on 36 episodes and was first played on 16 July 2013.

Between the late 70s and early 90s, Thomas Almqvist released a series of folk LPs that tended towards the psychedelic, the experimental and the aleatoric. Almqvist was also known internationally for a series of art installations in which household appliances (televisions, washing machines etc) were reconstructed so as to, through their everyday functioning, slowly destroy themselves. Rarely appearing in public, Almqvist was the subject of several articles in academic journals, all of which suggested that he was, in fact, the alias of one or more artists. The names mooted included Stockhausen, some, or all of the Baader-Meinhof group, Bob Cobbing, Otto Muehl and, more recently, the comedian John Bishop. But it wasn't until Almqvist's 1993 entry in the Venice Biennale that his true identity could was discovered. Almqvist's installation consisted of eight huge blocks of ice, inside each of which were several balled up pieces of paper. As the muggy Venice heat worked away at the ice, covering the gallery floor with cold water, the first piece of paper was dislodged, floating its way towards a young Tim Jonze, who risked ruining his artfully ripped stonewashed denims to kneel in the water and pick it up. What he read changed him, and launched the career of one of the most successful Mick Jagger scholars of our times, for Jonze, already an avid Jagger fan, could not help but recognise that the quotation from Chairman Mao which he held was written in Mick Jagger's handwriting.

Eighteen months later, Manchester University Press released Jonze's book 'Qvizzical', which began with a scholarly account of all the previous names attributed to Almqvist, and a thorough debunking of each one. The book then revealed that the Almqvist records and installations had all been created by Mick Jagger. Jonze's argument, which has proven contentious in some quarters, was that Almqvist represented Jagger's engagement with a particular facet of the avant-garde - the 'found' or 'readymade' object. While the installations lent themselves well to this type of analysis, Jonze also posited that each of the songs on Almqvist's records was, in fact, a cover version of a Rolling Stones number, though often heavily disguised.

Jonze has gone on to publish heavily and extremely successfully in the field of Jagger studies, leading one critic, Alex Petridis, to suggest that in fact Almqvist is an alias of Tim Jonze, one whose artworks cleverly intersect with the concerns of Jagger, but are distinguishable by their lack of Satanico-mythic symbolism. The paper Petridis wrote making these accusations was delivered to an audience which included Jonze himself, prompting the latter to mount the stage, collect a Fender Stratocaster from behind the curtain and howl out a moving, indecent version of the solo from 'Sympathy for the Devil', a performance which later critics agreed closely resembled the title track from Thomas Almqvist's 'Nyanser'.