post-punk: radio on

Music feels sometimes like a gateway, or a catalyst for magic, particularly when you're young. I suspect there are few from any generation since vinyl came readily available that have not had at least a spell of their teenaged lives that was outlined, defined and painted into deep and velvet colors by the music of are what I was looking for, unless it was Adventure or God.

Radio On (1980. dir: Chris Petit) is a film that rises up out of that sensibility. Robert (David Beames) is a DJ so alienated from the world we not only never see him touch anyone, including the girlfriend who is leaving him and the German girl he picks up on the road ("Last night I thought we would have sex," she tells him, "but today I know that we won't,") he never manages to have a fully engaged conversation. This is the story--if you can call it that--of his road-trip through the bleak countryside of England as the snarling '70s were turning into the MTV '80s. Looking like a fellow that Paul Weller might hire to play keyboard for the Jam, he lives a nocturnal existence working at a tiny radio station, one of those DJs who so cares about music that he does annoying things like playing Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene Vincent" when someone has requested "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", because it's "better". (Hogwash. Not only is "Sweet Gene Vincent" not better than the simple but invigorating Lennon song, it's not even the best track on New Boots and Panties! Rant over; carry on.) His brother is dead under strange circumstances and he drives down to Bristol, ostensibly to check into it, but he never really does, not much. The death apparently had something to do with a rash of murders among a ring of pornographers, but those ends are left dangling, as are all others. This film is not about its story but about a sort of equal-parts bleak and joyous post-punk nihilism, and it survives across the years better than some of its more outre counterparts like Derek Jarman's ridiculous and cringe-worthy Jubilee from 1977, and probably better than my then-favorite, a little Susan Seidelman film called Smithereens which I haven't seen since it opened in 1982 but which I loved very sincerely at the time.

It is almost 1980 and the ferocious and fleeting moment of punk has flattened out into the electronic drone-pop of Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, that sort of nowhere music which seemed interesting and odd at the time but was never designed to rouse one into greater life or passion. In fact, in one of the two spirited moments in the movie, Robert meets a petrol station attendant (played by Sting) who speaks with enthusiasm about his idol, Duane Eddy, but whose exuberance turns into a grimace when he hears the Kraftwerk on Robert's tapedeck.

It's an aimless and existential black-and-white ramble, less pretentious than most which answer to that description, and it captures a moment in time rather well. It evoked in me a nostalgia for that very alien and now lost England, before there was a Starbucks on every corner and the Millennium Bloody Eye scarred the landscape, back when you could no more find a well-made coffee than you could veg or decent condiments for your burger, but you could find a culture so different from the American that it was like, well, a foreign country.

The film's best bit is the opening, before we've met Robert, when the camera takes a leisurely look on its own around the dead brother's flat, focusing on a view out a window here, a photo and a bit of paper here, just a glimpse of the bathtub and its inhabitant there, and all the while David Bowie is singing the English/German version of "Heroes" in its entirety, a perfect song, one of the most buoyant songs ever recorded, joyful and tragic all in the same moment. And, as in the rest of life, it all flattens out a bit from there, because who can sustain perfection like that? Not even Bowie.