Roadrunner: Radio On, Road Movies and the A4

By Nick Gilbert

Roadrunner is a book about a film about a road. The film in question, Radio On, was made in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power in the UK, and from its initial marginal status (“a genre of one, a cul-de-sac in British film history”) it has become an oft-cited cult movie, due in no small part to its celebrated soundtrack (Bowie, Kraftwerk, Ian Dury, Devo etc) and its echoes of J.G Ballard and New German Cinema. Much of Radio On takes places on the road, and the road in this case is the A4 between London and Bristol. So the subject of the book is also that road, its history, its cultural and psycho-geographical associations, a large part of which is connected to the film. But Roadrunner is about much more than one film or one road: it’s about all road movies (American, British, French, German etc) and all roads. It's about car culture and its free-loading cousin, hitch-hiking. It’s about Britain’s cultural relationship with Germany, as expressed through film and popular music. It’s about modernity versus antiquity. It’s about 180 pages long. Ultimately, it's about the interconnectedness of everything: J.G. Ballard and Hawkwind, Banksy and Bowie, Nick Drake and Werner Herzog, Nagisa Oshima and the Wurzels. By combining an accessible approach to film criticism with a fan’s enthusiasm, a social perspective with droll humour, Roadrunner can be said to exist, like its subject, in a genre of one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Gilbert
• Release date: Jan 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215905647

Nick Gilbert

I was born in Bristol in 1964. I have been, at various times, a film student (Polytechnic of Central London, Bristol University and National Film School) actor, DJ, journalist, book reviewer, assistant editor on countless documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 and, since the turn of the millennium, a lecturer and teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages in London (Morley College and Westminster University).

Book preview

ROADRUNNER

RADIO ON, ROAD MOVIES & THE A4

by Nick Gilbert

Part One: The Body in the Bath

Type-written credits appear on a black screen: A film produced by the British Film Institute and Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH.¹ After a second or two of a radio tuning, David Bowie’s Heroes bursts onto the soundtrack. The typing continues: with David Beames, Sandy Ratcliff. Guest appearance Lisa Kreuzer. Music by David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovich, The Rumour and Devo.

INT. FLAT. NIGHT. The camera seems to float up a narrow, twisting flight of wooden stairs, the boards painted in a way to show there once had been a runner,² a way that ended, along with so much else that was good about Britain, in the year 1979. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was elected. Something called the Mod Revival took place. There was a below-par (okay, piss-poor) live album from Hawkwind (Live 79) which was actually released the following year. Bristol staged its first balloon festival. Thank God then – thank Chris Petit - for Radio On.

The cramped top floor flat of a house in Clifton, Bristol. The camera moves through the flat, though its indifference to anything, its refusal to linger on the meaningful, suggests this is not the point of view of a living, breathing character, but the unseeing eye of a machine, a camera. A Steadicam, to be precise, one of the first, operated by a German, Martin Schäfer. Germans are driven by a sense of the machine, Chris Petit wrote. Look at their cars. Listen to Kraftwerk. Watch their football.³

We pass the bathroom, where a body is glimpsed in the bath, then the kitchen, and the miniscule bedroom/study, with a single mattress on the floor serving as a bed.

Hang on a minute. Was that a BODY in the bath? A dead body? The camera seems unconcerned, more interested in the contents of the desk, the books, the notes and quotes pinned to the wall: We are the children of Fritz Lang and Werner Von Braun. We are the link between the ’20s and ‘80s. All change in society passes through a sympathetic collaboration with tape recorders, synthesizers and telephones. Our reality is an electronic reality.

Thus begins Radio On, a relatively unknown black and white British movie, a road movie, made in 1979, at the tail end of the ‘70s, post-punk, on the cusp of a decade plus of Thatcherism. And yes, this is a book about that film, which is set in part on the A4, formerly the main road from London to Bristol and known in some sections as the Great West Road. That implies a journey away from London, east to west, the journey which the protagonist of Radio On, Robert, undertakes, rather than a journey into London, from west to east.

It probably helps if you have seen the film, but if by some chance (indifference, ignorance) you haven’t, I hope you will want to watch it by the end of this book/essay, although it doesn’t matter because this is a book (essay) about so much else besides: about road movies in general (British, American, German); about cars and car culture and perpetual motion; about the rise and fall of hitch-hiking as an alternative, albeit car-dependent form of transport; about the history and (that much-derided term) psycho-geography of the A4; about the tenuous links between the writer J.G. Ballard and self-styled space rock band Hawkwind, between Eddie Cochran and Sting, Marc Bolan and Nick Drake, stone circles and Julian Cope. It is thus a book (or long essay) about both rock music and rocks. A book that rocks, you might say, although I leave that for you to judge.

Lastly, and least importantly, it is an intensely personal journey, an acknowledgement that, like Robert in Radio On, I am inextricably drawn down the A4, towards my hometown of Bristol, over and over again; that this is not only a journey back in time, to the films and books and music of the 1970s, but a physical journey back to my roots, leaving London behind, perhaps forever, looking for something simpler, something lost, something that lies between the capital and the provinces, the past and the present. The interconnectedness of everything. If none of that appeals to you, stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you feel that some or all of the above applies to you, come on board and strap yourself in: it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

At a certain point in that opening sequence, Bowie switches from English to German, announcing Radio On’s foreignness, its otherness. This is a film about outsiders, by outsiders, and the director, Chris Petit, looking as much to his former home of Germany as England, chose Bowie’s bilingual anthem, the theme tune of his Berlin years, for that very reason. Interviewed by Uncut magazine, Bowie confessed that since his teens he had "obsessed on the angst ridden, emotional work of the expressionists, and Berlin had been their spiritual home. This was the nub of Die Brucke movement, Max Rheinhardt, Brecht and where Metropolis and Caligari had originated. It was an art form that mirrored life not by event but by mood. This was where I felt my work was going." To the Berlin trilogy of Heroes, Low and Lodger, in other words, from the first of which Heroes/Helden came.

A friend of mine, Stuart de Jong, worked on the post-production of Radio On. He tells me that Petit wanted the opening scene to be as loud as technically possible and that "a few months after working on it, I went back to Amsterdam to see friends and - since Radio On was on in one of my favourite cinemas - I dragged a bunch of friends along to see it. As soon as Heroes started (i.e. as soon as the film started) I realised the sound for the rest of the film was going to be way too quiet, so I went up to the projection box and said that I had worked on the film and it had to be much louder."⁴ This seems to be confirmed by the customer review on Amazon of the 2021 Blu-Ray release, which gives the film a mere one star out of five, and complains that s/he (tawnygreek) didn’t know that the opening credits would be a world louder than the ensuing dialogue WHICH IF (sic) COURSE there was not much of any way cos its (sic) an ART NOIR FILM…. what it misses in dialogue it maybe makes up for in loaded gazes in monochrome and perhaps neoclassical DERELICTE art nouveau 20's urban arhtechture mixded (sic) with his 50's car and the films somewhat apprently (sic) rockabiliy tendency. One person found this review helpful, despite it apparently being written by tawnygreek while s/he was drunk. Like Bowie, we could switch to German here, to a German review of the film from 2014, also on Amazon, which gives the film three out of five stars (sehr besonders) and describes it as a Britischer Kunstfilm der besonderen klasse. Zeit nehmen und in Ruhe geniessen. Auf jeden fall was für Freunde des Post-Punk und von London. Three people found this review helpful.

But let’s go back to that quote. Fritz Lang didn’t have any kids, and Wernher von Braun only had four and none of them snuck into a flat in Bristol and left a cryptic note for the cops to find (This was no suicide, sarge, this was the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun….) And then you think, wasn’t that something Kraftwerk said about post-war Germany⁵ and we’re off, if not on a rollercoaster ride, then at least a slow drive to Bristol, stopping at a pub on or near the A4; at Silbury Hill, near Avebury; at a garage near Chippenham, and in Bristol, ostensibly to solve the mystery of the body in the bath, but actually to solve the perpetual puzzle of Weston-Super-Mare’s apparent popularity as a seaside resort.

Radio On is the cinematic equivalent of the Docklands Light Railway in London, rattling along at a pace slightly faster than walking, creaking round corners, making gentle climbs and descents, only to finish where it began, like a fairground ride in black and white. Few films paint a picture of post-punk Britain so convincingly, or attempt the impossible - to make a British road movie - with such diffidence. The then unknown (still unknown) David Beames plays Robert, the least charismatic DJ ever, spinning Ian Dury records to an indifferent factory floor, then travelling down the A4 - the Great West Road - to Bristol, where he half-heartedly investigates his brother’s mysterious death. En route, he meets a trio of characters: a hitch-hiking army deserter with anger management issues; a petrol pump attendant who bears a curious resemblance to Sting (because it is Sting) and a German woman, played by Lisa Kreuzer, who is looking for her daughter. In the end, Robert leaves his car in a quarry and gets on a train, to where we don’t know.

This unclassifiable mixture of film noir, road movie and post-punk mood scape⁶ was shot in black and white, by the late Martin Schäfer, the sometime assistant to Wim Wenders’ camera man Robby Müller, and executive produced by Wenders. It would have been shot by Müller himself, says Petit, but a meeting between the two at Baker Street tube station in London failed to happen because Baker Street has two exits and two entrances, so we ended up waiting at opposite ends for each other and never met.⁷ Sure, Radio On is dreary. It came out the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected, and its monochrome vision of a pre-mobile, pre-video Britain is unlikely to summon any great nostalgia for the era. Cassettes and records, baths going cold, bad TV reception and unreliable cars, cities watched at night from tower blocks… - who misses THOSE, asks Philip Matthews.⁸

For Chris Petit any journey out of London at that time was a journey into the past.⁹ The period of the movie, and its making, was post-punk but you realised how much punk was metropolitan, a London-suburban experience. By the time you got down to Chippenham you could have been in the Fifties. And the motorway - I mean, where are all the cars?¹⁰ Petit’s comments are borne out by the appropriately named comedian Jimmy Carr, who grew up in Slough, also on the A4, in the 1970s. If you want to know what Slough was like in the 1970s, writes Carr, go there now.¹¹ Yes, where ARE all the Carrs?

Mind you, Petit and his art director are careful to make Radio On LOOK like something out of the fifties, and in so doing they ensured that Radio On has a timeless quality – a retro-futurism, as Petit puts it in the commentary to the Blu-Ray – and it hasn’t dated, at least not too badly. In effect, they fuck with the fabric of time as David Bowie’s friend and producer Tony Visconti said of the Eventide Harmonizer used on Low.¹²

As with Marmite, the world is divided sharply between those who loathe Radio On (the cinemagoer who demanded to know of Petit why he made such a boring film, the NME reviewer who wrote that it was moving… like, toward the exit) and those of us (me, Gareth Evans, Jason Wood) who love it. Even Chris Petit said that only a man with a sense of humour could have made a film so relentlessly unfunny. The best films about Britain have often been the product of outsiders: sometimes visitors, sometimes immigrants, sometimes the children of immigrants. One thinks of Roman Polanski’s deeply disturbing Repulsion; of Ted Kotcheff’s forensic dissection of class, race and sex in Two Gentlemen Sharing; of Jerzy Skolimowski’s so-black-it-isn’t-funny Deep End; Richard Fleischer’s beyond-grim 10 Rillington Place; Cornel Wilde’s gloriously sui generis No Blade of Grass. Petit himself likens Radio On to "a certain tradition of British film (which) I like to call ‘cul-de-sac films’ because they come at the end of a decade, and you think they will have an influence, but they don’t. Another example is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, which pretty much finished his career, (or) Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance."¹³

Petit, though born in Britain, was an army brat (who) grew up in lots of different places, which gave me a skewed eye on everything.¹⁴ At the age of three, the family moved to Hong Kong and Petit’s father dragged him to church, driving past the airfield where a big silver plane lay crumpled at the end of the runway, crashed and abandoned.¹⁵

Much has been made of the influence which the writer J.G. Ballard exerts over Radio On, and this image of the crumpled plane inevitably calls to mind, for those who know such things, Ballard’s own childhood in Japanese-occupied China. But Petit claims he "didn’t come to Ballard until after Radio On, apart from reading some of the early science fiction." Radio On was "a landscape invented in parallel to Ballard’s. I think in both our cases,