Hiss in the signal: revisiting Chris Petit's Radio On

"Driving is a movie inside my head" is one of the Godardian on-screen slogans during Radio On (Remix), the 1998 mini-film from Chris Petit, his spooked-out return to the scene of the crash: to his amazing 1979 existential road movie Radio On. It's a phrase that fits the original film very nicely, as well as the "remix". Another slogan you see in this 24-minute mash-up short is "image virus", which again feels right. Radio On (Remix) is a sort of dubby fever dream version of the original. If you watch it immediately after viewing Radio On, it totally works, not least because of its intricate collage of murky audio - car sounds, arcade videogame bleeps, slowed-down dialogue, snatches of music. Bruce Gilbert ("sound design") evidently put it together; check out the audio here. Which is all to say  - convolutedly - that this is a blog about the music in Radio On, probably one of only a handful of films ever to use popular (or semi-popular) music this well. Or so I reckon. Naturally, if you don't know the film what follows here isn't going to make much sense. Your problem, man! But, anyway, this gloomy, downbeat slice of late-70s British noir is awash with strong music that sort of seeps into the overall atmosphere of the film. (Or it is the atmosphere of the film). First you get David Bowie's Heroes/Helden, bursting in right at the beginning when the credits are just getting going (along with Foley sounds of a typewriter punching out the credits). Unlike most films with their bitty appropriation of music, Radio On gives us the full Bowie treatment here: all six minutes of the combined English/German version blaring out as a camera takes us around a crepescular flat with, it seeems, a dead body in the bath. It's night-time, the film is shot in inky black-and-white (by Wim Wenders' assistant cameraman Martin Schäfer) and, much as I usually dislike Bowie, the extended use of Heroes is a powerful start to the film. There's no apparent connection between the music and the mysterious opening, but somehow there is. Or might be. Next up, we're inside a car, with a besuited bloke turning off an old-fashioned radio (click, off goes Bowie) before we see said bloke opening - slowly, deliberately, in almost trance-like fashion - a Jiffy bag in which he finds a "Happy birthday, brother" note alongside three Kraftwerk tapes: The Man-Machine, Trans-Europe Express and Radio-Activity. These are rather lovely looking things, almost stately. Solid, reliable, nice (I want them). Our man slips one of the tapes into the car cassette player and then we get about 30 seconds of Kraftwerk's creepy Uranium, not the jolliest in-car entertainment ever devised. Almost ten minutes in and we've still not heard a word of dialogue. Later on there'll be conversations - subdued arguments, really - which alternate between English and German, with, Natürlich, the German parts left unsubtitled. Yes, the radio is often on in Radio On, but the meaning - the signal - is elusive, unclear. 

Petit's hands-on use of music in his film

OK, so this is not going to be a regular film. But the music is clearly going to be a big presence. We've already been told in the credits - right upfront, almost as if it's the most important thing about the film - that there'll be music from Bowie, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovich, The Rumour and Devo, and the songs themselves are named. But still, there are uses and uses. Here we're into a sort of uncanny dreamworld where the songs creep in from every angle. Before long the film's hero/anti-hero Robert is hitting the road in his old Rover, cruising along the A40 Westway through west London (I know it well) and heading for the A4, destination Bristol, ostensibly to find out how his brother died (the body in the bath). The road signs glide by and the camera lovingly soaks up the passing factories, office blocks and houses. Then, with the open road (the A4) now in sight, Kraftwerk's perky Radioactivity comes on, a song brilliantly used in Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette (did Petit know this film; presumably, yes). Anyway, we're now in hyper-German mode, cruising along the (English) Autobahn. Anything could happen. Or not happen ... In fact, the film's very definitely about things not happening. Robert doesn't find out what happened to his dead brother. Was it some suicide/porn scandal thing? Unclear. Robert hooks up with a German woman, Ingrid, played by Wenders' wife, Lisa Kreuzer, but the faint spark of sexual frisson between them dies out almost immediately, another victim of Robert's - or the film's - overwhelming sense of ennui and disconnect. Similarly, Robert doesn't get to go to a nightclub in Bristol - he's turned away at the door apparently on account of his mildly punk-ish appearance: a biker jacket, a fluffy-spiky haircut. (Post-punk as mood and style. Petit has said that "Radio On is about what we wore and how we looked and what we listened to.") And so it goes on. A slow drift of things not really achieved, while music keeps cropping up in the background. Or is it the foreground? When Robert stops for a drink (plus some human contact?) in a roadside pub he puts Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World on the jukebox. You get to see the actual record drop into place, the Stiff Records label very clearly visible. Great! It's a pub rock/new wave classic. Except, no, the atmosphere in the boozer is miserable. And after leaving this gloomy - all-too-British - pub, Robert finds himself saddled with a hitchhiker who turns out to be a deserting British Army soldier suffering from PTSD after two tours of Northern Ireland. The guy's unbalanced. Possibly violent. Oh dear. But no, this isn't Rutger Hauer territory and again nothing especially dramatic happens. On we go, with more music cropping up - Devo's Satisfaction heard in a car wash, Lene Lovich's Lucky Number heard in another pub (this time with hostile pool players). Is the music mocking the film's fruitless road trip and its enervated protagonist? Maybe, but maybe not. Robert is a late-night DJ so these songs might be showing you part of his "character". Or again, maybe not. Robert spends an aimless couple of days in Bristol and then he's forced to leave his hulking Rover stranded on the edge of a bleak quarry. What does he then do? He reaches into the glove compartment, grabs one of his dead brother's tapes and puts on Kraftwerk again. We hear the plaintive tones of Ohm Sweet Ohm (is this er, irony?). Then, in long shot, we see the marooned car - both front doors left wide open - at the quarry edge, with a bank of dark clouds overhead. Perfect bleakness.

Free Astrid Proll: Baader-Meinhof haunt your dreams

Ohm Sweet Ohm: London through the rear-view mirror

No escape from 1979: the future begins on the A4

So yeah, these are a few music bits and pieces from Petit's excellent Radio On (for another take, see this decent review from Cine Outsider's Slarek). Having just revisited the film after what must be 20 years, I was surprised at its non-stilted nature. I'd remembered it being clunky and slightly awkward to watch, especially Sting's petrol station cameo -which, on the contrary, is actually gentle and rather charming. No, it's a completely riveting watch (and listen). The film's memorable mix of drift (a stalled road trip, a sauntering aimlessness, torpid slowness), its gloom (cold/hostile weather, emptiness, lack of speech) and its mystery/subliminal threat (terrorism, pornography, outbursts of violence, something possibly uncanny or inexplicable) would probably have made it quite effective had Radio On used no music whatsoever. But surely much less so. Aside from the music, when there's a radio on in Radio On it's usually relaying something grim: an IRA killing, hostage-taking in Germany, a pornography ring uncovered in Bristol, forecasts of very cold weather, and even (drably enough) the football results. As Robert arrives in Bristol we hear on the car radio: "... Bristol City nil. Birmingham nil, Coventry nil ...". Zero, zero, zero. Welcome to 1979. It's bleak in post-punk Britain. It's always dark - noirer than noir, in fact - and there ain't nowhere to go dancing. No, it's just poor old Robert, alone again and glumy prodding the tape machine in his broken-down car (car trouble). As any self-respecting film buff would tell you, this existential British road movie is thoroughly Germanic, with Wenders' New German Cinema/road movie trilogy fingerprints all over it (check out his Alice In The Cities for a sort of "sunnier" version of Radio On). But it's also gloomily, unmistakably British. London and Bristol by night - and the A40/A4 by (wintry) day - have never looked so mesmerising as they do in Radio On, though mesmerising in a cold, noir-ish, "Ballardian" way. In this road trip film which ends at a cliff's edge where there's literally nowhere left to go (it's the film's anti-cliff-hanger ending), the music in Radio On seems to carry a sort of thwarted energy. This is definitely not the pleasurable foot-down release of Roadrunner. Yes, it's possible that Robert (or more probably Petit) would also profess a love of the highway when it's late at night, but Radio On is still very much the hiss in the signal. It's concerned with interference, with psychic static. In Petit's film we're miles away from Massachusetts and the sounds tell us this repeatedly: one minute it's ominous news of internments in Northern Ireland, the next the bleeps of an arcade videogame, the next the Saturday football results, the next ... Ian Dury doing Sweet Gene Vincent. In the film's mysterious first scene, when Bowie's Heroes is still in full flow, the camera's glide through Robert's dead brother's flat takes us past a handwritten note which says this:

"We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner von Braun. We are the link between the 20's and the 80's. All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesisers and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality."

Was this Robert's brother's suicide note?