DJ Robert gets a phone call: his brother in Bristol was found dead. And so he hits the road to find out what happened – only to discover a lot of other stuff, about himself, about England, and maybe just life, who knows, for when you end up in Weston-super-Mare with a sad German woman pining for a daughter called Alice, anything could happen…
Radio On might be a crime movie about the making and trading of illegal porn. It also might be a stoic anti-melodrama about the infinite ends of love. It definitely is a film with a lot of music in many scenes which are all about listening while looking at the landscape; David Bowie is there, and Kraftwerk, and Wreckless Eric, and lots of others, plus Sting on screen strumming away.
It’s also surely a film about England, the final stretch of James Callaghan’s Labour government, the Troubles and the Winter of Discontent – a country in ruins whose landscape seems to know no promise, only dead arrivals. And yet, Obwohl sie, unschlagbar scheinen / Werden wir Helden, für einen Tag / Wir sind dann wir, an diesem Tag, as Bowie sings.
Olaf Möller