Speaker 1: Oh you is Boots.
Speaker 2: It's show Die.
Speaker 3: People pay good money to see this movie.
Speaker 2: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 4: They want cold sodas, plot, popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 1: In the Projection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring?
Speaker 2: A what are you looking at? Hik We gotta do
Speaker 2: around here? Nothing will want you on speak postmaster an ascid.
Speaker 5: Please do la No, I don't want drugs?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: What about gilkay step one?
Speaker 6: Funny girl you love?
Speaker 2: How about? Uh?
Speaker 7: Somebody gets some music?
Speaker 8: Do conty speech?
Speaker 7: Didn't he chose?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 4: Dope too?
Speaker 2: A month gets finish? Ain't a shawn sir?
Speaker 3: The curt mess of Donna?
Speaker 5: There?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 2: Yes, I I have a Yeah, I know god.
Speaker 5: SuDS the sun time.
Speaker 8: The formula is really very simple. Just follow the rules
Speaker 8: and you will see.
Speaker 9: And as life travels on and things do go wrong,
Speaker 9: just follow steps one, two, and three.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Speaker 3: Joined me is mister Ben Slater.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hello, hello, hello again.
Speaker 3: Also back in the booth is mister Mark Begley.
Speaker 7: Hello, and thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3: We continue Art House August with a look at Christopher
Speaker 3: Pettitt's Radio On, released in nineteen seventy nine. In the
Speaker 3: film is a road movie about a London man investigating
Speaker 3: the death of his brother in Bristol. A deliberately paced
Speaker 3: black and white film, it became famous for its use
Speaker 3: of modern music on its soundtrack. We'll be talking about
Speaker 3: that and spoiling the movie as much as we can
Speaker 3: as we go ahead and discuss this. So if you
Speaker 3: don't want anything ruined, please go ahead and track down
Speaker 3: the wonderful blu ray from Fun City Editions. We will
Speaker 3: still be here when you get back. So Ben, I
Speaker 3: know you've got a history with this one. When was
Speaker 3: the first time you saw Radio On?
Speaker 1: And what did you think?
Speaker 10: Sir?
Speaker 1: We'll stop in Guys, it's a long story and I'll
Speaker 1: try to make it.
Speaker 3: I'm really sure you don't have there's no time litbit
Speaker 3: on this, bad guest.
Speaker 11: Long stories are good.
Speaker 1: I'm it's late and night here. I would love to
Speaker 1: spend ages on it, but I won't. I'll give you
Speaker 1: the broad Stokes, which is basically I went to Bristol University.
Speaker 1: So that's the first connection because in Radio one they
Speaker 1: end up in Bristol, or he ends up in Bristol.
Speaker 1: After I graduated. Me and a really good friend called
Speaker 1: Gareth Evans, who is a wonderful producer and curator based
Speaker 1: in London. Now we started a magazine which was called Entropy,
Speaker 1: which was a fanzine basically a kind of well produced fanzine.
Speaker 1: This is about nineteen ninety six nineteen ninety seven, and
Speaker 1: we were interested in looking at experimental culture and we
Speaker 1: were feeling a kind of end of the millennium vibe
Speaker 1: and trying to put that into our magazine. And Gareth
Speaker 1: was really the one who identified Chris Pettitt is somebody
Speaker 1: that was interesting to talk to. And it really came
Speaker 1: about because Chris Pettitt was doing this collaborate with this
Speaker 1: other British writer called Ian Sinclair, and they made a
Speaker 1: film called The Falconer, which is about a very interesting
Speaker 1: guy called Peter Whitehead and Peter Whitehead maybe proposal for
Speaker 1: a future podcast, all right, And we interviewed Peter Whitehead
Speaker 1: for the first issue of our magazine and then Garrett said,
Speaker 1: we've got to talk to Ian and Chris because they're
Speaker 1: making this film about Peter. So we went ahead and
Speaker 1: our second big interview was a double heather with Ian
Speaker 1: and Chris. I knew about Radio On because my bible
Speaker 1: as a young film fan was the Timeout Film Guide,
Speaker 1: which was the London listings magazine Time Out, which Chris
Speaker 1: worked for as he was the film editor for a
Speaker 1: number of years, and they had these really good, sharp
Speaker 1: capsule reviews, and the capsule review of Radio On was
Speaker 1: very intriguing, this idea of a British road movie, black
Speaker 1: and white, cool music. Vin Vendors was involved, and I
Speaker 1: was always very intrigued by that. And then I had
Speaker 1: this opportunity to actually meet Chris and interview him. But
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen Radio On, and it was a really
Speaker 1: difficult film to track down at that time. It wasn't
Speaker 1: on VHS, it was never played on television, and I
Speaker 1: didn't live anywhere where there was a cinema playing it.
Speaker 1: So in the end we did get Keith Griffith, who
Speaker 1: was the producer of Radio On and was still working
Speaker 1: with Chris. He got someone in the office to make
Speaker 1: copies of Radio One for us to watch, along with
Speaker 1: a couple of other Chris's films Chinese Boxes, i think,
Speaker 1: and so we got this second generation VHS copy of
Speaker 1: Radio One and we watched it in a little flat
Speaker 1: in Bristol, which is appropriate on a small television, not
Speaker 1: unlike the TVs in Radio On, and really had this
Speaker 1: very high expectation for it, and actually it did more
Speaker 1: or less live up to our expectation, more or less
Speaker 1: even in this sort of very low grade format. And
Speaker 1: then of course we went to meet Chris and interview him,
Speaker 1: and then we got the opportunity to invite him to
Speaker 1: Bristol where of course he'd been to university and show
Speaker 1: a thirty five mel print of Radio On. So in
Speaker 1: a sense, that was really when I got a chance
Speaker 1: to see it on a cinema screen. And I've actually
Speaker 1: seen it on a cinema screen three times over the years,
Speaker 1: which is quite rare to get to see the same
Speaker 1: film that many times in the cinema, and it grows
Speaker 1: in my mind each time. So that's the beginning of
Speaker 1: my connection with Radio One.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I definitely want to explore more of your connection,
Speaker 3: especially Radio On remix and what you've done with the
Speaker 3: film since then. Mark, I know that your story is
Speaker 3: as equally intriguing, So please the four hours.
Speaker 11: It's not even close.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 11: This is one of those I've never heard of, this
Speaker 11: movie that Fun City has put Out, and you and
Speaker 11: I have talked about this off podcast, and it seemed
Speaker 11: like for a while there just about everything they were
Speaker 11: releasing was something I had no knowledge of and be
Speaker 11: sounded really interesting, and they just had this streak. And
Speaker 11: now they're releasing more things that I'm familiar with, not
Speaker 11: that their streak is any less interesting, but it was like,
Speaker 11: why have I not heard of this film Road Movie,
Speaker 11: Love Road Movies nineteen seventy nine. The pictures that I
Speaker 11: had seen made me think of new wave and the
Speaker 11: mod culture at the time, in the late seventies, and
Speaker 11: I thought.
Speaker 9: Why not.
Speaker 11: I wonder if I had a chance to see this
Speaker 11: at some point. I took a semester of school in
Speaker 11: London in nineteen ninety and discover the repertory cinemas there,
Speaker 11: one of which mister Pettitt mentioned in his interview with you,
Speaker 11: the Electric Cinema, and I thought, I still have all
Speaker 11: my old programs. Maybe this is something that I did
Speaker 11: see in those or in time Out, which was my
Speaker 11: bible while I was there. I don't think it is
Speaker 11: audition in America. There might be a time out in
Speaker 11: New York, there might be a time out LA or
Speaker 11: it used to be. But yeah, when we got there,
Speaker 11: I discovered that and saw those repertory cinema listings, it
Speaker 11: became a big deal. But so I looked through my
Speaker 11: programs and Nope, it never played. I was only there
Speaker 11: for three or four months. They showed so many wonderful movies,
Speaker 11: and I thought it must have been one of those
Speaker 11: that slipped through the cracks and just wasn't put out
Speaker 11: there a lot. I wasn't intrigued enough to buy the
Speaker 11: Blu ray. But when I saw it, because I'm a cheapskate,
Speaker 11: which everybody listens to my show knows. But when I
Speaker 11: saw that on your list and that there was an opening,
Speaker 11: I thought, this is a perfect chance to finally see
Speaker 11: it and hopefully enjoy it and then get to talk
Speaker 11: about it. So yeah, first time watch for me.
Speaker 3: Ben has brought a lot of great titles to the show,
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff I've never seen. If I may
Speaker 3: not have even heard of. I'd heard of Radio On.
Speaker 3: I hadn't heard of Saint Jack at the time when
Speaker 3: we talked about it. Obviously I had at least a
Speaker 3: few weeks prior to us talking about it, but yeah,
Speaker 3: I hadn't heard of that one. This one I know
Speaker 3: I've read about it. It's one of those that just
Speaker 3: pervaded my brain. I knew it was there, but I
Speaker 3: don't think i'd ever seen it. And then I think
Speaker 3: you mentioned last year or maybe in a year before, Hey,
Speaker 3: let's do this episode, and I'm like, all right, good,
Speaker 3: Ben hasn't led me astray yet, and the record still holts.
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed this one, had a great time with it.
Speaker 3: Like you, Mark, I was very intrigued because it was
Speaker 3: a British road movie. It's funny because when I was
Speaker 3: watching it again the other night and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: there's really a lot of Get Carter in this, as
Speaker 3: far as this mysterious death and the guy who has
Speaker 3: to travel from London, but this time he's traveling west
Speaker 3: instead of going north. A little bit shorter of a
Speaker 3: road trip, I believe. But back in the late seventies,
Speaker 3: I don't know how we were with your Guys's Rose
Speaker 3: or whatever, but it's going to take i'm a little
Speaker 3: bit to get over to Bristol, and then it's all
Speaker 3: of the adventures along the way and on the way back.
Speaker 3: So I was really happy with this one. And I
Speaker 3: feel a little bad because We haven't talked about early
Speaker 3: Vendors very much on the show at all. We've mostly,
Speaker 3: I think we did Wings of Desire. We've talked about
Speaker 3: that period of VIM Vendors' career, but we haven't talked
Speaker 3: about those early days. Because this does really fit into
Speaker 3: that you associate produced this one, and it really has
Speaker 3: a lot of feel of those earlier Vendors movies, especially
Speaker 3: Alison Cities and the penalties.
Speaker 1: The goal keep is fear of the penalty. It can
Speaker 1: be translated in.
Speaker 3: Even reminded me a little bit of loneliness of the
Speaker 3: Long Distance Runner, just that kind of it's a little
Speaker 3: kitchen sinky, angry young man, but our character is such
Speaker 3: a cipher that it's tough to get into him. We're
Speaker 3: more of an observer than I would say, like really
Speaker 3: in his shoes. At least that's the way that I
Speaker 3: felt about it. What did you think, Ben?
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about the influencers as you were
Speaker 1: talking there, and I think probably Chris will talk about
Speaker 1: those in the interview. American Road Movies obviously is a
Speaker 1: big one. It's funny because when we read that little
Speaker 1: review in Time Out about Radio one, the idea of
Speaker 1: a British Road movie is an oxymoron really in the
Speaker 1: sense that we know that the longest journey you can
Speaker 1: do in the UK is from the South coast up
Speaker 1: to Scotland, and that's about seven or eight hours in
Speaker 1: the car. These aren't epic journeys across the desert, so
Speaker 1: there's already a slight absurdity in it. But then in
Speaker 1: terms of other influences, there would have been things like
Speaker 1: two Lane Blacktop? Have you done that on the podcast?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 3: Fortunately mister Helmer was still with us at the time,
Speaker 3: so we were able to do that. I wish that
Speaker 3: book Bumpy Roads. I believe it's called the really definitive
Speaker 3: right up of two Lane blacktapp that hadn't that yet
Speaker 3: come out? I would love to read that and speak
Speaker 3: with the Arthur one.
Speaker 2: At least.
Speaker 1: There is a very clear reference to two Lane Blacktop
Speaker 1: in Ready On, which is the bit when because.
Speaker 3: Way to the projector no, not quite.
Speaker 1: It's the bit when he goes into the pub quite
Speaker 1: early on in the journey and the guy sitting in
Speaker 1: the corner, and then when he goes back to the car,
Speaker 1: he's already got into his car, which is really similar
Speaker 1: to the bit in the diner in two Lane Blacktop
Speaker 1: where James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are in the diner
Speaker 1: and then the girl gets out of one car and
Speaker 1: she gets into their car, so when they get in it,
Speaker 1: she's already there. And I think that's pretty much a
Speaker 1: straight lift from two Lane Blacktop and in the way
Speaker 1: that scene, this may be jumping into the film a
Speaker 1: bit quickly, that scene with the squaddy is a little
Speaker 1: it's very two Lane Blacktop in combining some of those
Speaker 1: unwonted hitchhikers that Warren Oates keeps picking up, plus the
Speaker 1: girl who gets in the car early. But yes, the
Speaker 1: characters are that. I think Chris really didn't want to
Speaker 1: take on the sort of psychological reality of the Kitchen
Speaker 1: Sink films, it feels to me, and he's talked about
Speaker 1: this quite a bit the radio. One's reacting against various
Speaker 1: traditions in British theater and British cinema, and he really
Speaker 1: was quite radical in the idea that he said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to make a film. I'm not really interested
Speaker 1: in characters in this traditional sense. They're going to be
Speaker 1: almost like avatars or figures on a landscape, and I'm
Speaker 1: much more interested in the landscape, but I'm also interested
Speaker 1: in what Mark thought. Did you enjoy the film?
Speaker 11: Yes, I did, And Mike, you brought up a really
Speaker 11: interesting point that I hadn't thought of that sort of
Speaker 11: broadens it for me. Is and same point that you're
Speaker 11: making him just being a cipher or an avatar, and
Speaker 11: I felt that disconnect from I don't really know what
Speaker 11: this guy's deal is other than he's not portrayed necessarily
Speaker 11: as a loser, but he's disconnected as well from his surroundings.
Speaker 11: From his girlfriend. I'm assuming that takes Off is watching
Speaker 11: the three TVs and he's not really connecting with her.
Speaker 11: His chop, his DJ job, And I loved reading this
Speaker 11: bit of trivia because I'm like, what is this all about?
Speaker 11: And this may be a British thing that just you know,
Speaker 11: but apparently there's the United Biscuit Network and so a
Speaker 11: DJ for a radio station that only plays in factories
Speaker 11: that make biscuits. What he's not even a DJ for
Speaker 11: like Radio Free Europe or something like that. He's a
Speaker 11: DJ for a biscuit factory, but anyway, and he doesn't
Speaker 11: seem very involved in that obviously, he appreciates music.
Speaker 1: You get that idea, but it's just a job.
Speaker 11: And he never really connects with anybody in the film,
Speaker 11: even the German gal later on. There's a distance there,
Speaker 11: or there's something there that's keeping them from any romance.
Speaker 11: And I'm glad there's no force romance in this with her,
Speaker 11: but that disconnect was bothering me throughout the film. And
Speaker 11: realize whether it's on purpose or not, maybe doesn't really matter,
Speaker 11: but I can appreciate it now looking back and saying, oh,
Speaker 11: that makes sense. We're not sitting in the passenger seat
Speaker 11: with him, really watching the home movies of this as
Speaker 11: an audience, which I don't mind because I love road movies.
Speaker 11: And part of the reason I love road movies is
Speaker 11: the traveling is the moving camera attached to a car.
Speaker 11: It really boils down to that mechanical aspect of the movie.
Speaker 11: I don't really care where the people are going. They're
Speaker 11: going to encounter strange people on their trip. Usually that's
Speaker 11: what makes it interesting. Their journey is either going to
Speaker 11: have some kind of fulfilling ending or nothing at all,
Speaker 11: and I'm fine with either way. On that it's really
Speaker 11: part of the journey. There's nothing better than driving in
Speaker 11: a car by yourself listening to the radio. I love
Speaker 11: being able to take trips myself, even if it's a
Speaker 11: couple hours, and play whatever music I want to play.
Speaker 11: And a lot of times when I'm in the car,
Speaker 11: I imagine I'm in a movie. It's the way to
Speaker 11: pass the time. So I felt that way while watching this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Chris talks quite a bit about how being inside
Speaker 1: the car and looking through the window it's a widescreen basically, right,
Speaker 1: there is something profoundly cinematic about being in a car,
Speaker 1: and then the invention of having a radio or a
Speaker 1: tape recorder and now of course a CD or it'll
Speaker 1: connect to your Spotify, of being able to actually curate
Speaker 1: your own soundtrack and play your own music. And in
Speaker 1: a sense, if rady On does nothing else, it does
Speaker 1: evoke that experience of just being on a journey and
Speaker 1: time passing as music plays. And it's all about the contrasts,
Speaker 1: the contrast between what's going on outside, what's going on inside,
Speaker 1: and the music and the way the music relates to
Speaker 1: the landscape. I'm sure we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: music in a little bit more detail later, but it
Speaker 1: is one of the things that makes Radio on such
Speaker 1: a striking film is the contrast between the different kinds
Speaker 1: of music, particularly the craft work and everything else that
Speaker 1: he listens to. And then yeah, the contrast between him
Speaker 1: and the biscuit factory is also another amazing thing. And
Speaker 1: by the way, that's not a common thing. The jaying
Speaker 1: in factories is not a common thing in the UK,
Speaker 1: and I think it was unique to that one company.
Speaker 1: I don't know how long it lasted for. The only
Speaker 1: equivalent I can think of is hospital radio. I don't
Speaker 1: know whether you have that in the US, where you
Speaker 1: get poor volunteers djaying in hospitals and hoping somebody's listening.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's usually just music pipeing end of arfice buildings
Speaker 11: and stuff. So I thought this is does each factory
Speaker 11: have their own network? That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Well, I love that he gets a request but decides no,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to play that, I'm going to play
Speaker 3: this other thing for you. And you think that he's
Speaker 3: this hot shot DJ coming in for his midnight shift
Speaker 3: or something. He's Jack Nicholson and the King of Marvin Gardens.
Speaker 3: But no he's not. He's just he puts on this
Speaker 3: record and then you get to see the audience and
Speaker 3: it's just these poor guys making these biscuits. And I
Speaker 3: love this idea of the closed circuit versus open circuit
Speaker 3: kind of idea, this whole thing of him in the
Speaker 3: car with the music and you get that play of
Speaker 3: when we cut outside of the car and you don't
Speaker 3: hear the music that we cut back in. It's that scene.
Speaker 3: I think it's with Devo doing their version of Satisfaction
Speaker 3: earlier than the Are We Not Men We Are Devo album.
Speaker 3: You probably know very well about that, Mark, because I
Speaker 3: know you're big.
Speaker 11: Yeah, the Stiff Records version that's mentioned in the interview,
Speaker 11: I believe your interview with him where they got the
Speaker 11: rights to a lot of the music that ended up
Speaker 11: and there was via Stiff Records, and Stiff Records approached
Speaker 11: Divo early on before that album came out and put
Speaker 11: out a couple singles of their music, and I'm I'm
Speaker 11: pretty sure that's the version that's in the film. It's
Speaker 11: definitely not the version on the album, like you mentioned.
Speaker 3: So, I heard an interesting story about Divo once, which
Speaker 3: is that if you can get a hold of them,
Speaker 3: or at least Mark, I don't know about Jerry, but
Speaker 3: for sure with Mark, if you get a hold of
Speaker 3: them and you say I want to use your music
Speaker 3: in my movie. Apparently they really dislike Warner Brothers, so
Speaker 3: they'll be like, yeah, no problem, go ahead, use it
Speaker 3: writes free. Just if somebody questions, you say it's a
Speaker 3: live version of the song, that's great. So he's got Devo,
Speaker 3: He's got a version of Mongoloid in this movie. I
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, okay, interesting.
Speaker 11: They hate Warner Brothers.
Speaker 1: That is true in a way that what Chris did
Speaker 1: with all of the music, and with Keith Griffins as well,
Speaker 1: helping with the David Bowie. They knew they could never
Speaker 1: afford any of this music if they went to big
Speaker 1: record companies, so they did the deal with Stiff because
Speaker 1: Chris really wanted the Reckless Eric track. But then that
Speaker 1: opened up the possibility of using other songs in the
Speaker 1: Stiff Back catalog, which of course includes the Devo track,
Speaker 1: because obviously they saw an opportunity to potentially promote their
Speaker 1: records through the film. And then you've got the David boeing,
Speaker 1: which would have been difficult things to get. These were
Speaker 1: big groups at that time, but it was all personal favors,
Speaker 1: and Chris talks about how he went to interviewed and
Speaker 1: created an assignment with Melody Maker in the UK just
Speaker 1: so that he could give them the script and try
Speaker 1: to get them on board. So it was all about
Speaker 1: reading the script or getting to know Chris, so there
Speaker 1: wasn't really a financial aspect of it. It was more about, Okay,
Speaker 1: I think this is going to be a really cool project,
Speaker 1: so we'll let you have our music for a song effectively,
Speaker 1: and that really worked really well. But that may have
Speaker 1: been the reason why the film was difficult to see
Speaker 1: for a long time, because it was the theatrical that
Speaker 1: they had given permission for and signed off on, but
Speaker 1: nothing to do with television, nothing to do with home video,
Speaker 1: and so that all of those deals had to be
Speaker 1: renegotiated much later, and of course I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: more money was involved much later too. But just going
Speaker 1: back to that point, you were talking about close circuit,
Speaker 1: open circuit, like there is a real rigor in the
Speaker 1: film that Chris seems to be deploying, which is about
Speaker 1: the diegetic use of music that we really strictly, although
Speaker 1: he fudges it at various points towards the the beginning
Speaker 1: and at the end that we're only really hearing the
Speaker 1: music that's in the space that the characters are hearing,
Speaker 1: and so that means that when you cut outside the car,
Speaker 1: you can't have the music that's in the car, which
Speaker 1: really is a pu verse way of going against the
Speaker 1: tradition of road movies of scenes in cars where the
Speaker 1: music would then rise up at that point and it
Speaker 1: would be like this really cool epiphany moment as the
Speaker 1: cars driving through the landscape. He said, it's like silence.
Speaker 1: There's that element of deliberately going against the pleasure. There
Speaker 1: is pleasure in the music, but then it stops, and
Speaker 1: were reminded, actually, we're in a reality, a very strange,
Speaker 1: dislocated reality, but we are in a reality.
Speaker 3: There's no way that Dennis Happer and Peter Finder heard Steppenwolf,
Speaker 3: especially there around those motorcycles. It's not like they had
Speaker 3: some sort of Wi Fi speakers blaring that at him
Speaker 3: or something. So that was amazing to me. Now, when
Speaker 3: I see people on motorcycles just blaring their music so much,
Speaker 3: I'm like, Okay, I guess you really can't hear that otherwise,
Speaker 3: but I wish that just pumped into your helmet instead,
Speaker 3: but it seems a little dangerous to me even that way.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, he breaks the circuit in a way with the
Speaker 3: very end to the movie when he leaves the car
Speaker 3: doors open and leaves everything open and you hear the
Speaker 3: music bouncing around this quarry that he's at. I just
Speaker 3: really love that he that's one of the later, if
Speaker 3: not one of the last, scenes in the film, and
Speaker 3: that he breaks that circuit with that. This whole idea
Speaker 3: too of his brother as far as I know, and
Speaker 3: please correct me if I'm wrong, if I get any
Speaker 3: of the details of the movie wrong, but it feels
Speaker 3: like his brother is the one that sends him the
Speaker 3: package at the beginning, with the cassette tape, So it's
Speaker 3: almost like his brother is the one programming the playlist.
Speaker 3: Here's this music and it's going to put you in
Speaker 3: the headspace of me and something has happened to me.
Speaker 3: It is interesting to think of that. Get carterists because
Speaker 3: it's like, yeah, he's going to investigate and quotes his
Speaker 3: brother's death, but he really doesn't. He just goes there,
Speaker 3: it's not what happened to my brother, And just like
Speaker 3: questioning people and getting on this tale of revenge. No,
Speaker 3: it just goes and sees what's going on. And yeah,
Speaker 3: it's very laid back with all of this and just
Speaker 3: all the people that he meets, and yeah, he goes
Speaker 3: into a bar. You hear the music in the bar,
Speaker 3: he meets things playing the guitar. Every single stop seems
Speaker 3: to have music playing in a different way, and I
Speaker 3: really like what he's doing with that. And yet it's
Speaker 3: so important this music and just such great music as well,
Speaker 3: Like it is a really I don't know if there
Speaker 3: was ever a soundtrack album put out, but this is
Speaker 3: a solid soundtrack of music. Every single song seems to
Speaker 3: add to the ambiance of the film, and especially that
Speaker 3: kraft work is just so good and just it plays
Speaker 3: with being on the road. Listening to craft Work in
Speaker 3: a car is a real treat if people haven't done that.
Speaker 3: The other one I would recommend, and it's related to Bowie,
Speaker 3: is listening to Brian Eno in the car. Especially Third Uncle,
Speaker 3: I feel is like one of the best driving songs
Speaker 3: that has ever been put out. There really a great moment.
Speaker 3: If you can get that Third Uncle going and get
Speaker 3: on a lonely highway, please do it.
Speaker 11: I've got a new task to put on my check first.
Speaker 1: Here he does actually solve the mystery, though, doesn't he
Speaker 1: because he goes through the slides and he does basically
Speaker 1: put that together with the radio news about the pornography
Speaker 1: ring in the West Country in Bristol. We basically do
Speaker 1: understand that his brother was in trouble because he was
Speaker 1: somehow connected to this porn ring, because we do see
Speaker 1: that really pretty graphically unpleasant hardcore porn at.
Speaker 3: The end, probably another reason it didn't play on TV.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was as surprised that, and that's why it's
Speaker 1: an eighteen sert. Yeah, yes, exactly. It would have had
Speaker 1: real problems being played on the UK TV at that
Speaker 1: time for sure, And so we have to assume that
Speaker 1: the suicide is probably related to being caught as a
Speaker 1: pornographer in some way. But yes, he's not exactly missed
Speaker 1: a detective. Although another trivia note is watching the Detectives
Speaker 1: was on Stiff Records and Elvis Costello did not give
Speaker 1: permission to use it in radio one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the two songs I think that he
Speaker 3: was trying to get that he wasn't able to and
Speaker 3: I can't remember what the other one was. That reckless
Speaker 3: Eric song. I was very unfamiliar with that, but that
Speaker 3: was great.
Speaker 1: It was by Nick Lowe, who produced Reckless Eric. I think, yeah, that.
Speaker 11: Was one of my favorites from the film and I
Speaker 11: was like, who is that? I had to shazam it
Speaker 11: as I was watching the movie. I didn't want to stop,
Speaker 11: and I was like, oh, this is great, So now
Speaker 11: I know who it is and I can load it
Speaker 11: up on my phone. I totally missed the connection. I'm
Speaker 11: going to admit here the plumb Ring and I just
Speaker 11: kept I was listening to the news bites and the
Speaker 11: sound bites and hearing there. It just seemed like we're
Speaker 11: getting this image of Britain at the time. There was
Speaker 11: something about a bank hostage scenario and of course the
Speaker 11: fighting in Northern Ireland and all, and I'm like, again,
Speaker 11: though he's still so disaffected.
Speaker 3: It's just news that you're hearing.
Speaker 11: And I get that, especially these days in our country,
Speaker 11: it's just a NonStop barrage of bad news and it's what.
Speaker 1: Do you do?
Speaker 3: You keep going on?
Speaker 11: And yeah, so the porn ring and the slide show,
Speaker 11: I completely miss that. But we haven't even mentioned We're
Speaker 11: talking about the music, but we haven't mentioned that great
Speaker 11: title sequence at the beginning the opening titles, and how
Speaker 11: I believe I again, correct me if I'm wrong. That's
Speaker 11: the first thing that comes up in the titles is
Speaker 11: the music and spelt typed out by song, by artists
Speaker 11: and by song. And I had never seen that in
Speaker 11: a movie before from the get go, that the music
Speaker 11: is very important to this film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a very bitter choice.
Speaker 11: Yeah, because music is almost always the last thing you
Speaker 11: might see music in some teen eighties movies because they
Speaker 11: want to sell it to the kids with music by
Speaker 11: Duran Duran or whatever. But you're right, Mike, it's the
Speaker 11: last thing in the credits, and then you finally get
Speaker 11: to see who the artists and song titles are here.
Speaker 11: It's right up front. And then in the same vein
Speaker 11: the title of the film, on the Marquee going by.
Speaker 11: I loved that little touch.
Speaker 1: That's Bristol by the way. Yeah, so of course the
Speaker 1: opening sequence takes place in Bristol, so that's where we're
Speaker 1: going to go. And then it cuts to the Hippodrome,
Speaker 1: which is a big theater in Bristol, and they obviously
Speaker 1: managed to persuade them to put radio on there instead
Speaker 1: of Godspell, which is actually you can see downstairs below.
Speaker 1: Godspell is the musical that happened to be on at
Speaker 1: the Hippodrome. I saw Annie there in the early eighties
Speaker 1: because I was brought up quite near there. I lived
Speaker 1: quite near Bristol as a little kid, so in a
Speaker 1: way that prem all the Bristol of it all. But
Speaker 1: then yes, you get that incredible steady cam shot through
Speaker 1: the very very cramped Bristol house that then reveals the
Speaker 1: body in the bathtub. But the body, as many people
Speaker 1: have commented, it's almost like the body in the other there,
Speaker 1: but it's not that big a deal. And then it
Speaker 1: goes past it, and then it comes back. And then
Speaker 1: of course the music is supposed to be playing on
Speaker 1: the radio, and it is this version of Heroes by
Speaker 1: Bowie recorded in Berlin, as Heroes was. But then it's
Speaker 1: this bilingual version of Heroes, which is quite a rare
Speaker 1: track and anyhow, which I had never heard. And it's
Speaker 1: almost like you start with the Bang. You start with
Speaker 1: the most well known song of all, the greatest hit
Speaker 1: in a way, the song that normally would be saved
Speaker 1: for the end of the film. Again, it's a bit
Speaker 1: like the reversal of putting the music at the beginning
Speaker 1: rather than at the end. There's this kind of flipping
Speaker 1: of expectations. You begin with the most incredible pop song
Speaker 1: and the one that most people would save, but you
Speaker 1: just get it out of the way. And actually, if
Speaker 1: you follow those musical credits, you'll realize, oh, they're in order. Actually,
Speaker 1: so we've got Bowie, he's got two tracks, he's got
Speaker 1: Heroes and always Crushing in the same car, a much
Speaker 1: more obscure album track. And then you, oh, we're not
Speaker 1: that's it. We've heard Heroes, we're not coming back to it.
Speaker 1: And now we've got these other songs that you may
Speaker 1: or may not have heard of that are all to come.
Speaker 1: And of course, if you do keep your eyes open
Speaker 1: during that opening sequence, you'll know what's coming. You'll know
Speaker 1: what tracks are coming up, and you'll also know which
Speaker 1: ones haven't played yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that use of heroes as the end theme, that's
Speaker 3: something I've seen. I want to say, Perks of Being
Speaker 3: a Wallflower might have that at the end, and almost
Speaker 3: positive that Jojo Rabbit has that at the end, including
Speaker 3: that same German version. So yeah, it's like the thing
Speaker 3: that you play at the end, We are done with this.
Speaker 3: We are heroes forever and ever, and just yeah, it's
Speaker 3: like such a big clib, but no, it's the beginning.
Speaker 3: And it's this very I don't want to say non
Speaker 3: descript shot, because we all talk about it and it's
Speaker 3: definitely something that's written about quite a bit, but this
Speaker 3: very that's a low key shot going into the apartment
Speaker 3: and going around coming across that. We are the children
Speaker 3: of Vernon from Britz lanynd Or von Brown and Fritz Lang.
Speaker 3: That's a great quote. And then yeah, like moving away
Speaker 3: from the body, like you said, then coming back to
Speaker 3: the body, Oh, there's this thing over here, but I'm
Speaker 3: more interested in this to the right, and I'll come
Speaker 3: back to the left eventually and find this body in
Speaker 3: the bathtub. Yeah. I think that's just brilliant the way
Speaker 3: that they do that. And again it's okay, I guess
Speaker 3: this is the radio and again more of a broadcast
Speaker 3: medium and the whole thing that you're talking about with
Speaker 3: all of the news stories definitely being broadcast across there,
Speaker 3: and yeah, really setting the tone of what England was
Speaker 3: like in nineteen seventy nine. And we haven't talked about
Speaker 3: shooting this in black and white was a great idea, yeah,
Speaker 3: and just making everything even more stark than it normally would.
Speaker 3: But those shots of the apartment blocks, just going across
Speaker 3: those they seem like silent giants looking down on the
Speaker 3: freeway or something.
Speaker 13: They are just.
Speaker 3: Filled with life, but it doesn't look like it. It
Speaker 3: almost looks post apocalyptic at times going through this landscape,
Speaker 3: and just to see those blocks, that reminds me of
Speaker 3: High Rise by Ballard, and there's definitely a Ballard feel
Speaker 3: to this. It reminds me a little bit of dread
Speaker 3: with the Peachtree apartments and those mega blocks that they
Speaker 3: have as these tall apartment buildings. Then it even takes
Speaker 3: me to that horrific fire that happened in one of
Speaker 3: those a few years ago. Grenfolds, Yeah, yeah, and it
Speaker 3: was just like, oh, this is a horrible situation, but
Speaker 3: we're really not going to change anything, so fuck you guys,
Speaker 3: good luck. And yeah, with this being nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 3: Maggie's in charge, and well she will be soon just
Speaker 3: about to have this. Oh that's right, she comes in
Speaker 3: right around the time Reagan comes in for us.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is when they were filming and I
Speaker 1: had to check this, because of course I was just
Speaker 1: a small boy when they were making Radio On. It
Speaker 1: was during March, so I think they were filming January
Speaker 1: to March seventy nine. So the film was made very quickly.
Speaker 1: It was released by the end of the year. So
Speaker 1: when it began filming, it was still a Labor government.
Speaker 1: By the time the film came out, Actua had become
Speaker 1: Prime Minister, and it was during March that there was
Speaker 1: the vote of no confidence in the Labor government, where
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister at that time with James Callahan, and
Speaker 1: they'd been all of these strikes and the unions had
Speaker 1: been causing the Labor government a lot of trouble and
Speaker 1: the country was really being felt to be falling apart,
Speaker 1: not dissimilar to how it is now, but this time
Speaker 1: it was the other way around. It was the Tories
Speaker 1: coming in against Labor. And then of course so many
Speaker 1: things changed after that. And that is really a key
Speaker 1: point about Radio On for US Brits, which is that
Speaker 1: it is a film that occurs in this thisliminal moment
Speaker 1: at the end of the Labor government and the beginning
Speaker 1: of a really monumental time the Conservatives would be in
Speaker 1: power for eighteen years and the country would change phenomenally
Speaker 1: during that time, and there's a sense in radio on
Speaker 1: almost looking to the future and thinking, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about this. Robert, the character by David Beams, he says
Speaker 1: that at one point we're all afraid, don't really know
Speaker 1: what of But there is a sense of fear, a
Speaker 1: sense of we don't know what the future is. And
Speaker 1: the future is represented by things like technology, it's represented
Speaker 1: by architecture, but there's an ambiguity about that. Clearly the
Speaker 1: film is in love with architecture, in love with technology,
Speaker 1: but it's also slightly afraid of it as well, and
Speaker 1: it's always looking back. There's a feeling of kind of
Speaker 1: retro futurism about the film, even in the music. The
Speaker 1: music might seem futuristic, but there's a looking back at
Speaker 1: the past element. Even craftwork has a very sort of
Speaker 1: human feel to it with the vocals. It's not purely
Speaker 1: about the future. It's also about trying to find out
Speaker 1: where is the humanity in this which is quite strange
Speaker 1: because it is a very alienated film. But there is
Speaker 1: a feeling of looking trying to search for some kind
Speaker 1: of humanity, even though everybody seems very alienated and dislocated
Speaker 1: from where they're supposed to be or where they're going.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's about capturing that particular moment, and I
Speaker 1: think that's why the film has a lot of potency
Speaker 1: for Us Brits, because it does seem to speak to
Speaker 1: this moment but at the end of the seventies and
Speaker 1: into the eighties, which reflects something that you guys experienced too,
Speaker 1: as Reagan took over around the same time.
Speaker 11: Yeah, which you don't really feel until much later. If
Speaker 11: you're like Mike, it looks like we're roughly on around
Speaker 11: the same age. So I was eleven and nineteen eighty
Speaker 11: and Reagan becoming president had no real meaning and it
Speaker 11: didn't really affect me until years later.
Speaker 1: It's still affecting us.
Speaker 11: And so now at fifty five, it's okay, now I
Speaker 11: get what was going on, and all the punk music
Speaker 11: that was coming out, and these movies that were speaking
Speaker 11: to this and repo man.
Speaker 7: And this, that and the other thing, and.
Speaker 11: Man made by Britt of course maybe Brett, Yeah, you're
Speaker 11: not thinking of that when you're in the midst of
Speaker 11: it as a kid. I have to admit to missing
Speaker 11: another key important thing about the movie. I thought that
Speaker 11: was him and his bathtub at the opening.
Speaker 3: I the first time I watched it, I thought, okay, yeah.
Speaker 11: I missed it both times apparently, and I part of that,
Speaker 11: I think was their apartments were very similar, small little
Speaker 11: cramped procass and one was a bit had a bit
Speaker 11: more space.
Speaker 1: In it as a lot of maybe brother's girlfriend. Right,
Speaker 1: there is a difference in the art direction.
Speaker 11: You know, now that I'm thinking of it. His appointment
Speaker 11: was more open, but it seemed like it was set
Speaker 11: up the same way that their bathtubs look exactly the same.
Speaker 11: Because he is in the bath at some point.
Speaker 1: I believe that when he gets the phone call and
Speaker 1: we don't really know who calls him, we assume it
Speaker 1: could be his mother, he says something like in the bath,
Speaker 1: which is a sort of key bit of exposition, and
Speaker 1: that phone call is one of the most conventional moments
Speaker 1: in the film in terms of here is some information
Speaker 1: that is now going to push the storyline forward. Chris
Speaker 1: actually has talked in interviews about how that relates to
Speaker 1: the scene in Performance, which was the last film I
Speaker 1: talked about on the Projection Book with Mike where James
Speaker 1: Fox overhears the address of the house when he's in
Speaker 1: the train station, which is a very kind of clunky
Speaker 1: scene but almost played up for maximum clunkiness by Nick
Speaker 1: Rogan Donald Cammell. It's a bit like that here where
Speaker 1: here is the bit of info, and I think it
Speaker 1: keys us into the bath idea because then he goes
Speaker 1: in a bath. After that, he takes a bath after
Speaker 1: he finds out that his brother committed suicide in a bath.
Speaker 1: Later on, when he's in Bristol, he touches the bath
Speaker 1: and he looks at the bath. I realized as I
Speaker 1: was thinking about the film recently that actually they didn't
Speaker 1: need to film that scene in Bristol, the bath tub
Speaker 1: and all the stuff in the apartment. They could have
Speaker 1: easily filmed that in London. So again there's being true
Speaker 1: to the journey. They really went for it. They're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this takes place in Bristol, so we're going to film
Speaker 1: it in Bristol. But we never see the exterior of
Speaker 1: that apartment, so we never really can locate it. And
Speaker 1: it's actually part of a really beautiful row of Georgian
Speaker 1: terraced houses in Clifton and Bristol, which are stunningly beautiful,
Speaker 1: but obviously Pettit didn't want anything that looked that beautiful.
Speaker 1: I think he just wanted to films it from the inside.
Speaker 3: And the way that Robert b and I love. Somebody
Speaker 3: pointed out, like Robert is very similar to Joseph KA
Speaker 3: and I was trying to count the letters. It's not
Speaker 3: exactly the exact same number like IBM and hol like
Speaker 3: you go up one down one up one kind of thing.
Speaker 3: It's that like you go up eight for Robert and
Speaker 3: down four for Joseph or whatever.
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you, guys, what's your sense of Bristol?
Speaker 1: Do you know anything about Bristol? What context do you
Speaker 1: have for Bristol? Oh?
Speaker 11: Boy, that's not where part of Quadrophenia takes place, is it.
Speaker 1: No, that's brighton right nothing.
Speaker 14: There is.
Speaker 1: The link with Quadrophenia is through Sting. Of course. Actually
Speaker 1: Sting is in Quadraphenia playing like the really cool mode
Speaker 1: and it was the beginning of his career in a sense,
Speaker 1: because police hadn't really made it through and that comes out.
Speaker 1: Quadrophenia comes out around the same time as Radio One,
Speaker 1: which would be towards the end of seventy nine, and
Speaker 1: then message in a bottle comes out, and so that
Speaker 1: really blasts sting into the stratosphere at that. But Bristol
Speaker 1: is not Brighton. Bristol is kind of an interesting city
Speaker 1: in terms of culture. It's famous for music, and that
Speaker 1: would be mostly a little bit later, things like Massive
Speaker 1: Attack and Porter's Head, so the whole nineties trip hop
Speaker 1: sound comes out of Bristol. It's a really great city,
Speaker 1: it's all there's a lot of hills in Bristol. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of diversity, it's very laid back. It's a
Speaker 1: kind of city where people go to chill. So there
Speaker 1: are really creative people there, but they're not necessarily massively productive.
Speaker 1: So anyone who really wants to have a career usually
Speaker 1: leaves Bristol and goes to London, which is basically what
Speaker 1: Chris did. He went to university there, he got out,
Speaker 1: So going back to Bristol might be seen as a
Speaker 1: bit of a retro step, but it does also have
Speaker 1: a kind of long history of protests and dissent. There's
Speaker 1: also a new age equality around Bristol too, because it's
Speaker 1: near Glastonbury, where the Glastonbury Festival is near there too,
Speaker 1: so there's a countercultural thing going on in Bristol. That's
Speaker 1: really the key point for BRIT's watching Radio On. It
Speaker 1: is a big contrast to London. But the other thing
Speaker 1: is that Bristol is not often represented in film. Somehow.
Speaker 1: There aren't that many classic films made in Bristol. There's
Speaker 1: been quite a bit of television shot in Bristol, but
Speaker 1: very few movies. So that's another reason why Radio On
Speaker 1: has a bit of a cult around it, because it
Speaker 1: is one of the few really cinematic films to depict Bristol.
Speaker 1: In the second half, and then it goes off into
Speaker 1: this town called Western super Mare, which is on the coast,
Speaker 1: about half an hour from Bristol, which again is usually
Speaker 1: seen as not a very cool place, but somehow Chris
Speaker 1: makes the best of it. And in fact the house
Speaker 1: that they visit where the German lady lives, isn't in
Speaker 1: Western that's back in Bristol, So there is a bit
Speaker 1: of fudging of the geography. Even the way he drives
Speaker 1: into Bristol is not correct because he goes over that
Speaker 1: bridge past the hotel, which is very important because later
Speaker 1: on there'll be in the hotel and the camera will
Speaker 1: be in a car driving across the bridge the other way,
Speaker 1: seeing them through the windows, which is one of the
Speaker 1: most iconic shots in the film. It's an amazing shot,
Speaker 1: isn't it. But actually, if you were coming from London,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't go over that bridge. There is a bit
Speaker 1: of fudging of geography in it, but it's still wonderful
Speaker 1: for us Brits, especially those of us who've lived in Bristol,
Speaker 1: to get to see Bristol being depicted in that way.
Speaker 1: And we should mention the name of the cinematographer, which
Speaker 1: is Martin Schaefer, who died tragically young, and he had
Speaker 1: been Robbie Muller's assistant cameraman on a number of those
Speaker 1: Vin Vendor's films, but by the time they made Ready
Speaker 1: On he'd already started to venture off and become a
Speaker 1: fully fledged cinematographer of his own. And I know that
Speaker 1: because it connects with Saint Jack, which is the film
Speaker 1: I've written about, because Robbi Muller did the cinematography for
Speaker 1: Saint Jack with his team. He had a very close
Speaker 1: knit team and Martin had been part of that team,
Speaker 1: but he had gone his own way and become his
Speaker 1: own cinematographer and part of that was going to work
Speaker 1: with Chris on radio on and that was the beginning
Speaker 1: of that and they actually worked together a number of times.
Speaker 1: But the cinematography is really extraordinary. It is amazing seeing it.
Speaker 1: I've seen in the cinema a couple of times watching
Speaker 1: the Blu Ray. I'm watching a different Blu Ray to
Speaker 1: you guys, but I'm sure it's basically the same file.
Speaker 1: I'm watching the British Blue Ray. It just is unbelievable
Speaker 1: that black and white photography.
Speaker 3: With Robert b his apartment, that those TV sets. I
Speaker 3: don't know if this was a reference or that, but
Speaker 3: still reminded me that at a much smaller scale. It
Speaker 3: reminded me of The Man who Fell to Earth when
Speaker 3: David Bowie is there and he's got all those TVs
Speaker 3: that he's watching, but she's got what three.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a steal. It's totally a steal from the
Speaker 1: matter of Feldwe Yeah, okay, I'm sure.
Speaker 3: It is good. I'm glad it wasn't just me, all right.
Speaker 11: I love that though.
Speaker 3: I always love to see it.
Speaker 11: That kind of stuff tickles me when I see it
Speaker 11: pop up in movies, those odd things that it's like,
Speaker 11: why do they do this every once in a while
Speaker 11: you catch something like that. Who has three or four
Speaker 11: TVs in their house?
Speaker 3: Usually conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 11: Yeah, the vendors connection, which I didn't really know about
Speaker 11: it prior to watching it, but when you sent over
Speaker 11: the material, I was like, oh, okay, this kind of
Speaker 11: makes sense. And then I as it's playing with the
Speaker 11: music being so important black and white vendors connection, I
Speaker 11: immediately thought of Stranger than Paradise, one of my all
Speaker 11: time favorite road movies, where not a lot happens, it's
Speaker 11: inconsequential the things that do happen. They go on a
Speaker 11: trip for really no good reason and it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 11: pan out the way they want it to. So that
Speaker 11: came to mind immediately. When he encounters the German ladies
Speaker 11: and she starts talking about her daughter, and then she
Speaker 11: says the name Alice, and I was like, if that's
Speaker 11: not a reference to Alice in the Cities, I don't
Speaker 11: know what. And then I looked her up and I'm like, shit,
Speaker 11: she's in Alice.
Speaker 3: In the City.
Speaker 11: She's Alice's mom, And I'm like okay, And I don't
Speaker 11: even think I really grasped the full connection with having
Speaker 11: Vendors Dop or assistant Dop and the sound guy. I
Speaker 11: got that from your inaul to. I was like, okay,
Speaker 11: it's all over the film. Then I'm not crazy. But
Speaker 11: the Alice in the Cities thing I thought was interesting.
Speaker 11: It's obviously not a direct reference to the film because
Speaker 11: the story is a little bit different in the Cities,
Speaker 11: but I found it interesting that it was the same
Speaker 11: actress and her characters in both films have a daughter
Speaker 11: named Alice.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can't help but think Chris plugged into that he
Speaker 1: needed supposedly, and he probably talks about this in the
Speaker 1: interview with you, Mike. He needed to include a German
Speaker 1: element and he needed German actors. Partly it came from
Speaker 1: the cinematography and Martin Miller doing sound, but he also
Speaker 1: needed an actor as well, so he got Lisa Kreutzer,
Speaker 1: who had been married to Vin Vendors. I think they'd
Speaker 1: recently split up when they made Radio On, and she
Speaker 1: had been in those films, including The American Friend as well.
Speaker 1: And then Chris basically just took the storyline from Alison
Speaker 1: Alis in the Cities because I don't get the feeling
Speaker 1: Chris was too worried about story. It wasn't a big
Speaker 1: preoccupation for him, so he more or less just plugged
Speaker 1: in this sort of off stage drama about a father
Speaker 1: taking a daughter away. And again it adds to the
Speaker 1: dislocation because we never see the kid, we never see
Speaker 1: the guy. Instead we see this aunt character, and so
Speaker 1: we never really we're a bit like Robert. We're about
Speaker 1: as unengaged in that storyline as Robert is, and yet
Speaker 1: we have to be engaged because we want to see
Speaker 1: where things go with this woman. And I really love
Speaker 1: Lisa Kreutz's performance. She is so soulful and there's such
Speaker 1: a real sense of a real person in her performance.
Speaker 1: And she's almost, in a way, almost on a different
Speaker 1: level to the British actors in terms of being able
Speaker 1: to act within this sort of art movie sensibility. I
Speaker 1: feel like some of the British actors struggle with it,
Speaker 1: particularly the two girlfriends, the one at the beginning in
Speaker 1: the flat and Sandy Ratcliffe in the Bristol Flat. They
Speaker 1: don't quite hit the right tone, and also they don't
Speaker 1: have much to do, to be honest, Lisa Kreutz has
Speaker 1: a much better role because she's doing the stuff with
Speaker 1: the two languages, and she gets to deliver that really
Speaker 1: brilliant bit where she says, last night, I thought I
Speaker 1: was going to sleep with you, but now I know
Speaker 1: I won't, which is one of the most devastating lines
Speaker 1: in all of cinema.
Speaker 11: It makes a lot of sense, though, and you get that.
Speaker 11: I think she gets that dislocation that everybody else is
Speaker 11: feeling about Robert, And yeah, she's definitely the most human
Speaker 11: character that he encounters, including himself.
Speaker 3: Really yeah, and I believe Ben you mentioned earlier the
Speaker 3: whole idea of being on the outside too, when it
Speaker 3: comes to them speaking German and there's no subtitles, which
Speaker 3: is nice. We're supposed to be more and Robert shoes
Speaker 3: and not understand what they're saying and just being that
Speaker 3: dislocated they speak their own thing and I'm on the outside.
Speaker 3: I do have to say too, there's a little irony
Speaker 3: here of us talking about this whole idea of broadcast
Speaker 3: narrow cast all this as we're on a podcast, and
Speaker 3: it's just this does not go out to the world.
Speaker 3: This goes to you, the listener. One person who gets
Speaker 3: this file and then listens to it, probably in the car,
Speaker 3: maybe you're on a job right now, who knows what.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're in a biscuit factory.
Speaker 3: You could be in a biscuit factory. There could be
Speaker 3: some mad podcast DJA working in a biscuit factory right now,
Speaker 3: subjecting all of those poor employees to us talking about
Speaker 3: radio on But just that idea of how broadcast and
Speaker 3: narrowcast changes over the years, yeah to be especially for England,
Speaker 3: I think you guys had what two channels, three channels
Speaker 3: or something. We had a few channels over here as
Speaker 3: far as video goes, as far as television, but you
Speaker 3: were limited very much by a few channels on FM,
Speaker 3: and then each one of those had their specialty to it,
Speaker 3: so you probably didn't flip around the channels too many times.
Speaker 3: Maybe there's four or five channels that you would maybe
Speaker 3: want to listen to, and the rest of its garbage.
Speaker 3: So being able to control what you listen to, being
Speaker 3: able to have that cassette player in your car suddenly
Speaker 3: gives you that power of being able to control the
Speaker 3: medium and just I want to listen to this. I
Speaker 3: don't want to listen to what's being fit to me.
Speaker 3: I want to hear this other thing. And I think
Speaker 3: also that speaks to the punk rockness of this type
Speaker 3: of movie, where it's I don't want to listen to
Speaker 3: the local bands. I don't want to listen to the
Speaker 3: corporate rock that's coming out on BBC one or whatever.
Speaker 3: I want to listen to this German band. I want
Speaker 3: to listen to these punk bands. I don't want to
Speaker 3: engage with what everybody else is doing and I just
Speaker 3: want to live my own life and just have my
Speaker 3: own music.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which speaks to this notion of the individual versus
Speaker 1: the community or the larger society, because this really is
Speaker 1: a film about individuals who are strange from each other
Speaker 1: bumping into each other. I realized there's so much in
Speaker 1: the film where characters run out on each other, they abandoned,
Speaker 1: They're always abandoning each other. At the beginning, his girlfriend
Speaker 1: basically leaves him, and he was going to leave her anyway.
Speaker 1: He was obviously going to jump in the car and
Speaker 1: go to Bristol, and then of course he abandons the
Speaker 1: squadye who's gone for a piss and that is a
Speaker 1: really I think that sequence from the pub onwards to
Speaker 1: him driving away at that really striking hill which is
Speaker 1: called Silbury Hill, which is a prehistoric man made hill.
Speaker 1: Is really quite a brilliant sequence, and actually it's the
Speaker 1: first time anyone's really spoken in the film properly, because
Speaker 1: up to now there's been that very stilted dialogue in
Speaker 1: the phone call. But that squady, when he does that monologue,
Speaker 1: it brings everything to life there. And then later when
Speaker 1: it's battery runs out, he tries to get help from
Speaker 1: that guy, and that guy doesn't want to help him.
Speaker 1: He drives off, and then there's more kind of abandoning
Speaker 1: and people walking out on each other when we get
Speaker 1: to Bristol as well. So it becomes a real motif.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because the film seems very loosely assembled,
Speaker 1: you know, it seems like one damn thing after another.
Speaker 1: But as you realize there's all kinds of mirroring and
Speaker 1: doubling going on. Back to the televisions, watching the three
Speaker 1: TVs with the sound off. Later on in Bristol, the
Speaker 1: girlfriend of the brother will start watching TV with the
Speaker 1: sound off as well. It's almost like it's a virus,
Speaker 1: and you cut back to her. In a month she'll
Speaker 1: have three televisions going as well. So there's this kind
Speaker 1: of constant rhyming of different elements and different motifs that
Speaker 1: goes on throughout. Even though it does appear to be
Speaker 1: thrown together in a way and very episodic, but there
Speaker 1: is a real design to it. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why the film really holds up and
Speaker 1: doesn't just fall apart is because there is a sense
Speaker 1: even from the very beginning of that design of confidence.
Speaker 1: That opening shot of course with the steady cam, and
Speaker 1: then that sequence from then on when he's in the
Speaker 1: car with the cassettes, Like how confident that is just
Speaker 1: to hold that shot and just have him being in
Speaker 1: the car for that long. There's a real sense of
Speaker 1: Chris's confidence as a filmmaker. He's nearly thirty, he's never
Speaker 1: made a film before, he's never been on a film
Speaker 1: set before, and yet he really knows what he's doing,
Speaker 1: or at least knows what he wants to communicate through
Speaker 1: the film, and that I think that does transmit to
Speaker 1: the viewer as well. This filmmaker has an intention that
Speaker 1: they're not just slapping this thing together.
Speaker 3: I'm so curious about the Eddie Cochran connection with this movie.
Speaker 3: I'm not that familiar with Eddie Cochrane. But oddly I
Speaker 3: didn't say it was nineteen eighty. The Great rock and
Speaker 3: Roll Swindle comes out and there's a cover of something
Speaker 3: else on the soundtrack for that, so it's like right
Speaker 3: around the same time, same country. He died in England,
Speaker 3: right there. Yeah, like they talk about his death.
Speaker 1: So he did a gig at the Hippodrome, which is
Speaker 1: what we see at the beginning of the film with
Speaker 1: the radio on thing coming round, and then he died
Speaker 1: in a car accident on the way out of Bristol.
Speaker 3: Oh is that it's a car It's even more interesting. Okay,
Speaker 3: for some reason I thought it was a plane. I
Speaker 3: might be getting him and Buddy Holly and that whole
Speaker 3: death of rock and roll thing because he was from
Speaker 3: that same era.
Speaker 1: Right now, it was a car accident. Yeah, So that
Speaker 1: story is told by Sting, right, he relates that story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then Sting there playing that song just constantly,
Speaker 3: and then even having that reprise after Robert leaves the
Speaker 3: movie at that point, abandons the movie to your point
Speaker 3: from earlier, and we're just left with Sting by those
Speaker 3: gas pumps doing a reprise of that Eddie Cachran song,
Speaker 3: which is an interesting choice, and I don't know how
Speaker 3: Chris feels about that today. It sounds like Singer's difficult
Speaker 3: to work with.
Speaker 1: The story about the song being reprised at the end.
Speaker 1: I think was that Martin Shaeffer really liked that idea.
Speaker 1: So Martin Schaeffer essentially pitched that to Chris and said,
Speaker 1: let's set up a tracking shot where the camera pulls
Speaker 1: back and Sting is playing, and will have him do
Speaker 1: the song again. And Chris said, no, that sounds terrible
Speaker 1: because Chris's instincts would of course be I don't want
Speaker 1: anything fun and nice in this film at all. And
Speaker 1: then so they shot it, with Chris going, this is
Speaker 1: just to please the crew. I've got no intention of
Speaker 1: putting it in the film. This is according to Chris.
Speaker 1: And then he saw and thought, actually, yeah, this could work,
Speaker 1: and it becomes a kind of pivot because actually that
Speaker 1: is the end of the first half of the film,
Speaker 1: and it very much the Game of two are of
Speaker 1: that film. Once they get to Bristol, everything sort of
Speaker 1: changes and it becomes a bit less of a road
Speaker 1: movie even though they are driving around. And he felt
Speaker 1: like that Sting song gives the audience a bit of
Speaker 1: pleasure that will propel them through the misery to come
Speaker 1: in prison.
Speaker 3: I'd like to that at least. In one of the interviews,
Speaker 3: Chris mentions Bitter Tears of Petro varon Khant and this
Speaker 3: whole idea of the way that Fastpender plays an entire
Speaker 3: song through the movie just using the Walker Brothers. Just
Speaker 3: movie stops almost and we just played the song and
Speaker 3: then we are there with it. It's almost like proto
Speaker 3: music videotype of stuff that was seventy two when Fastbender
Speaker 3: made that one. And again, nice German influence on this movie,
Speaker 3: because we cannot stress the germanness of this film.
Speaker 1: And Fastbender also was the first person to use craftwork
Speaker 1: in a film. Yeah, Chinese Roulette as a sequence were
Speaker 1: and it's also digetic. It's on a radio or a
Speaker 1: tape machine. There's a woman on crutches who dances to
Speaker 1: craftwork and it's radioactivity. It's the same track. Actually, I
Speaker 1: was thinking craft work. Their relationship with cinema is interesting
Speaker 1: because you'd think in a parallel universe they would have
Speaker 1: done loads of film scores, and they must have been
Speaker 1: offered film scores like Tangerine Dream did that whole run
Speaker 1: of scores, right, but they never did. And actually their
Speaker 1: music has not been used that often in film to
Speaker 1: this day. And I don't know whether that's by design
Speaker 1: or simply because they're very sensitive about who gets to
Speaker 1: use their music or not, because Ralph Fuoteur is obviously
Speaker 1: very protective over the legacy of craft work. But this
Speaker 1: is one of the rare films that has multiple craft
Speaker 1: work tracks in it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they all work so well. Just the idea
Speaker 3: of the radioactivity. Hearing that song as we're going across
Speaker 3: these empty Ish landscapes, it's really, like I said, post apocalyptic.
Speaker 3: It feels like we are going through the wreckage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is a sci fi quality to it, and
Speaker 1: I think one of the influences again is Alphaville, god
Speaker 1: Os Alphaville, where you film what's there, You film the
Speaker 1: kind of hide of modernity in the city in Paris
Speaker 1: or in London or moving outside of London, and you
Speaker 1: almost treat it as the future, especially when you start
Speaker 1: putting the music on like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you find a good piece of brutalist architecture, I
Speaker 3: should say, And that's half the job right there. That's
Speaker 3: so much of a total recall when Quetas on Earth
Speaker 3: and seeing those oppressive buildings, or even Gadica with the
Speaker 3: way that the office building that Ethan Hark works at,
Speaker 3: how that's very oppressive. And these apartment blocks just look
Speaker 3: like these sentinels just looking over everything, and they're just like,
Speaker 3: I want to get out of here. I'm not comfortable
Speaker 3: with these buildings.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have talked about the film in
Speaker 1: relation to JG. Ballard because of that post apocalyptic feel
Speaker 1: the architecture, and of course they're driving, and that relates
Speaker 1: back to the an Akran story because Ballard was obsessed
Speaker 1: with celebrity car crashes and that fed into the sort
Speaker 1: of whole eroticism of crashes in Crash. But Chris says
Speaker 1: he hadn't read Crash when he came up with rady Ones.
Speaker 1: It really was like osmosis that the sort of Balladian
Speaker 1: atmosphere was so powerful it leaked into Radio On without
Speaker 1: him necessarily having gone out and researched it and brought
Speaker 1: it in. Although, of course later on he becomes like
Speaker 1: a massive Ballard fan.
Speaker 3: I mean even more than High Rise or Crash. I
Speaker 3: always love Concrete Island, just this whole idea, this guy
Speaker 3: being stuck the freeway going all around this little area
Speaker 3: that he crashes in and he just basically forms his
Speaker 3: own civilization and this traffic.
Speaker 1: Robert, the character of Robert, basically drives through that landscape.
Speaker 1: That the landscape that Ballard set Concrete Island in is
Speaker 1: pretty much featured in the film more or less. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the other thing I was going to say is like
Speaker 1: where this lies in terms of the history British cinema
Speaker 1: as well, because that's another reason why the film slipped
Speaker 1: down the back of the sofa, because it's more or
Speaker 1: less unclassifiable in terms of British cinema. We've talked about
Speaker 1: it in relation to European cinema and a little bit
Speaker 1: with American road movies, particularly Monty Hellman, and that we
Speaker 1: should mention Rudy Wurlitzer, who wrote the script for Two
Speaker 1: Lane Blacktop as well, who I think Chris had an
Speaker 1: affinity with particularly. But this film doesn't really fit into
Speaker 1: any particular British tradition either, and it does come out again.
Speaker 1: I talked about the politics of the late seventies, but
Speaker 1: also the filmmaking of the late seventies. This was really,
Speaker 1: frankly a dismal time for British cinema the late seventies.
Speaker 1: If you look at what was being released in seventy
Speaker 1: eight seventy nine, it's pretty dreadful. Hammer movies are over.
Speaker 1: There's not that much interesting horror being made. The most
Speaker 1: burgeoning genre is the British sex comedy. That was like
Speaker 1: the backdrop of where Radio On was coming from. But
Speaker 1: within a few years that would change, and by the
Speaker 1: early eighties you would get like the rise of merchant
Speaker 1: Ivory and that kind of heritage cinema, and then you'd
Speaker 1: get the rise of like really interesting auteurs who were
Speaker 1: being funded by Channel four, which was the fourth channel
Speaker 1: that finally showed up after years of only three channels
Speaker 1: and the whole narrow casting thing, and you get people
Speaker 1: like Stephen Frears, and you get Derek Jarman, Peter green Away,
Speaker 1: Alan Clark, varying different degrees of like high stylization and realism.
Speaker 1: And Radio one kind of gets lost. And Chris did
Speaker 1: make more films, although they weren't really that successful, kind
Speaker 1: of gets lost because he doesn't really stay in the
Speaker 1: game in the same way that those other filmmakers did,
Speaker 1: and so Radio One did get forgotten. As well as
Speaker 1: the other issue about the fact that it was really
Speaker 1: hard to see partly because of the music. So it
Speaker 1: was cursed by its own success in terms of you
Speaker 1: got the music, but then that created this limit to
Speaker 1: the availability of the film.
Speaker 3: So let's go ahead and we're going to take a
Speaker 3: break and we're going to play an interview with the
Speaker 3: director of Radio On, Christopher Pettitt right after these brief messages.
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Speaker 15: in film.
Speaker 3: I would love to know more about you and your career,
Speaker 3: in especially how you got into writing about film and filmmaking.
Speaker 16: The short answer is, I think I used up most
Speaker 16: of my professional luck when I was in my twenties.
Speaker 16: I managed to get into the Timeout film department through
Speaker 16: the back door because the first job I had in
Speaker 16: London was selling advertising space over the telephone for Josephine Hart,
Speaker 16: who went on to write Damage and various other books.
Speaker 16: And she was a strange woman who wore purple tracksuits
Speaker 16: in those days, although laters she dressed entirely in black,
Speaker 16: and she recruited a completely unsuitable bunch of people to
Speaker 16: sell advertising space over the telephone. We were all quite artistic,
Speaker 16: and through that I managed to get a job in
Speaker 16: time Out selling advertising, which was not a job that
Speaker 16: was particularly sought after. And in those days Time Out,
Speaker 16: which was a kind of eight a Z guide of
Speaker 16: what to do in London.
Speaker 7: It was a good magazine.
Speaker 16: I mean it was really good, and the film department
Speaker 16: was very good and I managed to get the job
Speaker 16: when Verena, who was the first editor, left, and so
Speaker 16: I was very lucky. Then about four years later, towards
Speaker 16: the end of the seventies, I decided that I was
Speaker 16: not a vocational film critic, although I enjoyed the job
Speaker 16: in a way taught me how to write because Timeout
Speaker 16: was always very tight for space. Someone very smart invented
Speaker 16: something called the caption review, which is basically a review
Speaker 16: of the film under a photograph of the film. You
Speaker 16: were limited to one hundred and fifty words, so you
Speaker 16: had to learn to organize your material pretty quickly, and
Speaker 16: I always try to do it without giving away. Most
Speaker 16: film criticism they tell the story that the story of
Speaker 16: a man or a woman who dardi dar and they
Speaker 16: still do it. And I thought, especially after reading Manny Farber,
Speaker 16: I thought, there are more interesting ways of doing this.
Speaker 16: I learned quite a lot from that. And then at
Speaker 16: the end of the seventies, as I said, I wasn't
Speaker 16: really a vocational film critic. There weren't many opportunities to
Speaker 16: carry on unless you joined something like the British Film
Speaker 16: Institute or got a job in Fleet Street, which was unlikely.
Speaker 16: So I turned my attention to thinking is it possible
Speaker 16: to make movies not necessarily direct them? So I wrote
Speaker 16: Radio On as a script, which I hoped would lead
Speaker 16: to more work as a screenwriter. But talking about luck
Speaker 16: in one's twenties, I fell into the position where the
Speaker 16: film was taken seriously.
Speaker 7: The project was.
Speaker 16: Taken seriously by the British Film Institute Production Board, which
Speaker 16: existed to fund novice filmmakers for small amounts of money,
Speaker 16: but they were looking for co productions and I thought,
Speaker 16: if I can bring something to the table, then they're
Speaker 16: going to take it more seriously.
Speaker 12: Away.
Speaker 16: Vin Vendors was the obvious choice because he made these
Speaker 16: early films I thought were very interesting as almost documentary
Speaker 16: itineries of locations and landscape. I was interviewing him for
Speaker 16: time Out and got to the point where I could say, oh, look,
Speaker 16: I've written this script Dardi dar. He said do you
Speaker 16: have a title? And I said we're like, yes, radio
Speaker 16: on and he said, oh, that's a good title.
Speaker 3: So I thought, here we go.
Speaker 16: And then much later there was a conversation between Peter
Speaker 16: Sainsbury and about who should direct the film. Because I
Speaker 16: was not putting myself forward in the end, they came
Speaker 16: to me and said we think you should direct it,
Speaker 16: and I said, I don't know.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 16: But then I thought, or it'll probably be a huge mess,
Speaker 16: but one's got to put one's head on the block sometimes, So.
Speaker 13: That was that.
Speaker 7: That's how it happened.
Speaker 3: Before you got the jab a time out, you hadn't
Speaker 3: written about film at all.
Speaker 16: A little bit there there was a Bristol magazine called Event,
Speaker 16: which is a little bit like Time Out, and I'd
Speaker 16: done a few reviews for them.
Speaker 7: I'd grown up with films, but.
Speaker 16: When I left university I had no idea what I
Speaker 16: would do. There was no plan, no conventional ambition, and
Speaker 16: I thought, it's a matter of drifting through life up
Speaker 16: to a point where you can see whether or not
Speaker 16: there are various options, and I think drift has been
Speaker 16: a kind of characteristic feature ever since. It's not a
Speaker 16: career that makes any sense.
Speaker 3: I look back at films of the late sixties and
Speaker 3: seventies with great admiration. How was it for you to
Speaker 3: be looking at and writing about all these films?
Speaker 7: We took it for granted.
Speaker 16: They were there, and London was a very good city
Speaker 16: for watching movies. There were conventional art houses like the Academy,
Speaker 16: which showed mainly East European films of a certain kind.
Speaker 16: And then David and Barbara Stone, two Americans, turned up
Speaker 16: and opened the Gates Cinema, and their first programming was
Speaker 16: basically a job lot of new German cinema which arrived
Speaker 16: in London Inner Lump. So we got Fastender hertzeb vendors
Speaker 16: and all the rest. Within a very sort of concentrated
Speaker 16: period of time, there were good B movies being shown,
Speaker 16: exploitation picks, and then there was the electric cinema, which
Speaker 16: was a very good repertory cinema. We were spoiled for choice,
Speaker 16: and as you say, it was a period of new
Speaker 16: Hollywood as well, so you had what a conventionally called
Speaker 16: the movie brats coming through. And so, for instance, Scorsese,
Speaker 16: when he was first in London, burned us up because
Speaker 16: Verena had given him the first good review he'd.
Speaker 7: Ever had for Boxcar Bertha.
Speaker 16: And in fact, then later on showed us Mean Streets,
Speaker 16: which was an obscure film in those days, it had
Speaker 16: no following at all, and he said, he asked me
Speaker 16: what I thought of it after that, Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 16: It's not as good as Boxcar Bertha.
Speaker 7: So he had the grace to laugh.
Speaker 16: And Mean Streets there was a guy called Mike Kaplan
Speaker 16: who was an American who had the rights to it,
Speaker 16: and he was always showing it and we were always
Speaker 16: plugging it. But it didn't It barely registered on any
Speaker 16: kind of cult level. And in fact, the last time
Speaker 16: I saw Scorsese he very briefly. I was able to
Speaker 16: say to him, did he know that the then British
Speaker 16: Prime Minister David Cameron had apparently proposed to his wife
Speaker 16: while mean streets? And Marty and I laughed and we said, yeah,
Speaker 16: but which scene. It's not an obvious film to choose
Speaker 16: to propose marriage during anyway, So yes it was. And
Speaker 16: the other thing about reviewing films is that I was
Speaker 16: running a section with a team of reviewers, so I
Speaker 16: could pick and choose. I didn't have to cover the
Speaker 16: whole waterfront as they do today, and we did it
Speaker 16: on the principle of we were quite generous in that
Speaker 16: on the whole the person who liked the film most
Speaker 16: got to review it.
Speaker 7: So there was a sense of enthusiasm.
Speaker 16: And I do remember struggling at one point to try
Speaker 16: and find somebody to review an Alan Rudolph film.
Speaker 3: But so, where did the idea of paraibioan come from?
Speaker 7: The question?
Speaker 16: I think I was starting to think about what you
Speaker 16: could do and how you could make a film, especially
Speaker 16: if you hadn't written one and didn't have any real
Speaker 16: interest in a conventional script. I wasn't interested in relationships,
Speaker 16: I wasn't interested in the British tradition of realism. I
Speaker 16: think I took quite a lot of inspiration from vendors
Speaker 16: and the idea of the journey. I was impressed by
Speaker 16: get Carter, which went from London to Newcastle, so I
Speaker 16: started thinking of a line A to B. And I'd
Speaker 16: also worked out, because I used to drive around a
Speaker 16: lot and play music in the car, that the cinema
Speaker 16: windscreen was a form of forward projection in the way
Speaker 16: that cinema is. So I thought, you've got a self
Speaker 16: contained space, you don't have that many options in terms
Speaker 16: of how you can film it, and you're not sitting
Speaker 16: filming a dinner party for eighteen with eye line going in.
Speaker 16: I thought it's technically not difficult. So I worked out
Speaker 16: what my parameters were. And the other thing was I thought,
Speaker 16: no one really does music contemporary music well in films.
Speaker 7: I like Fassbender.
Speaker 16: I think it was The Bitter Tears of petrovon Kant
Speaker 16: where he plays the Walker Brothers singing in my room
Speaker 16: and he's got a secretary in the background chattering away
Speaker 16: on a typewriter and people talking, and the record is
Speaker 16: actually on a record player being played, And I thought,
Speaker 16: that's how it should be done, and then Vendors was
Speaker 16: certainly he would stop the movie to play something on
Speaker 16: a jukebox, which I think he did in Goalkeeper fear
Speaker 16: of the Penalty. But I thought the music ought to
Speaker 16: be always traced a source rather than laid over. And
Speaker 16: in those days, as I said, there was very little
Speaker 16: use of the kind of music that we were listening
Speaker 16: to turning up in films, partly because the reproduction are
Speaker 16: incredibly expensive and you had to deal with something called
Speaker 16: the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and you ended up paying
Speaker 16: through the nose. So I eventually I got an idea
Speaker 16: for a soundtrack. It was the Bowie version of Heroes,
Speaker 16: where he sings part of it in this rather strange
Speaker 16: German accent. I thought that's obvious given that the film
Speaker 16: was by then an Anglo.
Speaker 7: German co production.
Speaker 16: Craftwork was obvious because I thought their music was incredibly cinematic.
Speaker 16: And for the rest, we did a deal with Stiff
Speaker 16: Records because I wanted Reckless Eric's Whole Wide World, and
Speaker 16: we went and saw I think it was Dave Robinson,
Speaker 16: and he said, do you want to look through the catalog?
Speaker 16: Because it was obviously a good promotion for him, and
Speaker 16: he said, I quite like it if you took Lena Lovitch,
Speaker 16: because I think she was breaking at the time. So
Speaker 16: the soundtrack really assemble itself, and there was only the
Speaker 16: problem of not having the money to buy it. It's
Speaker 16: an old story, but I I had left time out
Speaker 16: by then, and I became the world's worst music journalist
Speaker 16: writing for Melody Maker simply in order to meet craft Work.
Speaker 7: So I met craft Work.
Speaker 16: I interviewed them, and then at the end I said, oh,
Speaker 16: by the way, and I had the script by then
Speaker 16: in a Manila folder. Ralph Hutter took the folder and said, oh,
Speaker 16: is it called the Digby Wallet, which was the name
Speaker 16: of the actual folder, So thereafter it was always referred
Speaker 16: to as the Digby Wallet. They were approachable and you
Speaker 16: could more or less say to them, can you give
Speaker 16: us each track for fifty quid?
Speaker 7: And they did and Bowie. It turned out that the.
Speaker 16: Producer of Radio and Keith Griffiths, had started off doing
Speaker 16: light shows for Hendrix and even for a while managed
Speaker 16: one of Bowie's groups when he was still David Jones.
Speaker 16: We were able to contact these people if you go
Speaker 16: back twelve years when we were making a film called Content.
Speaker 16: I tried to get in touch with Craftwork again, thinking
Speaker 16: perhaps we can do a similar deal. You can't even
Speaker 16: get close, ring fenced by lawyers and you just give up.
Speaker 16: And the same now with the film that we're doing. Now,
Speaker 16: we wanted to use Dylan's Titanic.
Speaker 7: And in the past, what you.
Speaker 16: Did was you went to Anthony Wall, who ran BBC
Speaker 16: Arena for years and years, and Anthony knows that Jeff
Speaker 16: Rosen anyway, he knows Dylan's manager. And what you did
Speaker 16: was you went via him and then word would come
Speaker 16: back or not come back. Several months later, Bob says
Speaker 16: it's okay. Now, unfortunately Bob can't say it's okay anymore.
Speaker 7: Because he sold his music rights to I think it's Sony.
Speaker 16: You're dealing with Sony, and Sony come back. He said,
Speaker 16: it's going to cost you twenty.
Speaker 7: Five brand at least, and you think can't do it anyway,
Speaker 7: that's the music.
Speaker 3: Then once you're on the hook for directing radio or
Speaker 3: an how do you put together your crew?
Speaker 16: Well, Radion was dead easy because sayings at the BFI
Speaker 16: and VIM decided I needed decent support and so originally
Speaker 16: Robbie Muller was Vendor's main dop. I wanted him to
Speaker 16: do it, but he couldn't. I said to Vim, who's
Speaker 16: Robby's assistant, not necessarily knowing that assistants didn't always make
Speaker 16: great dops. Vendor said, it's Martin Schaeffer, and he also
Speaker 16: threw in Martin Muller, who was the sound recorders.
Speaker 7: So I was pretty well set up.
Speaker 16: And because Radio On was exempt from union regulations, it
Speaker 16: was a crew of twelve. You didn't need walkie talkie,
Speaker 16: so you knew everyone, and I thought it was always
Speaker 16: going to be like that, But then when I got
Speaker 16: too unsuitable job for a woman, I turned up a
Speaker 16: one location and there were seventy cars, and then you thought,
Speaker 16: what are half these people doing. It was a film
Speaker 16: with a complicated pre production, so it ended up with
Speaker 16: five producers, and we all know there are only four
Speaker 16: corners in the room, and there'd be one producer standing
Speaker 16: in each corner, and then there'd be another one left
Speaker 16: in the middle. And was a shock after the simplicity
Speaker 16: of Radioil and Radio was one of those films which
Speaker 16: had its own momentum.
Speaker 7: Some people say it was ignored.
Speaker 3: At the time.
Speaker 16: It wasn't really you could argue that it was not
Speaker 16: a big enough hit, but it traveled very well to
Speaker 16: film festivals around the world.
Speaker 7: It showed a can and there was.
Speaker 16: A certain amount of heat around it, but in the
Speaker 16: context the climate in the UK cinema at the time,
Speaker 16: it didn't really open any doors. Nobody was showing much
Speaker 16: interest In the second I went back to the BFI
Speaker 16: to do another road movie, which in fact would have
Speaker 16: been in color and about two women making a journey
Speaker 16: from London to Scotland, and I didn't get anywhere with them.
Speaker 16: They more or less said that you've had your chance,
Speaker 16: so there wasn't really anywhere else to go. At the time,
Speaker 16: I wouldn't have minded, but it was slightly past the.
Speaker 7: Cell by date.
Speaker 16: I would have been quite happy with a career directing
Speaker 16: hommer horror films, but they weren't available. So in the
Speaker 16: end I managed, through Don Boyd, a producer who is
Speaker 16: running about the only setup that would contemplate people like
Speaker 16: me and Derek Jarman, we managed to get unsuitable job
Speaker 16: eventually off the ground.
Speaker 3: How do you balance writing novels and making films?
Speaker 7: I see them as part of the same process.
Speaker 16: I wrote My first one, Robinson, was published in nineteen
Speaker 16: ninety three, and I wrote it simply because I wasn't
Speaker 16: in a position where anyone would finance any of my
Speaker 16: film projects.
Speaker 7: I've never written a novel before.
Speaker 3: I don't know how to do this.
Speaker 16: There's a lot of no I didn't feel any kind
Speaker 16: of connection to English literature. I'd read a lot of
Speaker 16: thrillers when I was growing up from a very early age,
Speaker 16: and I like genre. And I thought with Robinson, I
Speaker 16: don't know enough about writing novels, but if I can
Speaker 16: write it as a prose film, then I don't have
Speaker 16: to pretend to myself that I'm being a novelist.
Speaker 7: So I did that, and as things went on, the
Speaker 7: books changed.
Speaker 16: Robinson wasn't enough of the success, rather like Radio On
Speaker 16: to encourage Radio On two or Robinson too, so I
Speaker 16: was left in the same kind of position, thinking what
Speaker 16: are my options? And I thought with the second book,
Speaker 16: I have to be more commercial. So I wrote The
Speaker 16: Psalm Killer, which was about serial murder in Northern Ireland,
Speaker 16: and looking back, I'm amazed at the breadth and quality
Speaker 16: of research, given that there was no Internet, so you know,
Speaker 16: where on earth did I get it from?
Speaker 7: But I did.
Speaker 16: The book surprised me because I didn't think I had
Speaker 16: it in me. And it is a complex sort of
Speaker 16: beyond noir, which has been praised by the likes of
Speaker 16: David Peace and Alan Moore, so its reputation is quite good.
Speaker 16: But I think when it came to novels, apart from
Speaker 16: Robinson and another one called The Hard Shoulder which was
Speaker 16: from a London film script, which are both very simple stories,
Speaker 16: the novels tend to be attracted to the other half
Speaker 16: of me, which is the kind of the conspiratorial world.
Speaker 16: In the last novels I've written, I've normally been trying
Speaker 16: to solve a problem that interests me, and I think
Speaker 16: it's worth researching for the human pool. I think I
Speaker 16: was staying at a hotel in Switzerland and I looked
Speaker 16: out of the window and I thought money in World
Speaker 16: War two in Switzerland, and I thought, okay, that whole
Speaker 16: the ambiguity of neutrality, that whole kind of Eric Hambler
Speaker 16: geopolitical world.
Speaker 7: So that was how that came about.
Speaker 16: And I've had to write books really now for the
Speaker 16: last ten twelve twelve years because the films are pretty
Speaker 16: much dried up and I'm lucky in that I'm still
Speaker 16: published because no one reads the books.
Speaker 7: They're hardly reviewed. I think, why do they carry on
Speaker 7: paying me? But they do modestly.
Speaker 1: But I don't know why.
Speaker 16: Apart from going back to right at the beginning, I
Speaker 16: think any career is conditioned by a huge amount of luck.
Speaker 16: My position in terms of my publishing hasn't had much luck,
Speaker 16: whereas if you look at I don't know, with Human America,
Speaker 16: somebody like Mick Heron.
Speaker 7: Who wrote Slow Horses.
Speaker 16: When that book was first published, it did nothing. And
Speaker 16: it wasn't until somebody who made a habit of picking
Speaker 16: up books that hadn't done anything which he thought he
Speaker 16: could make something of and republish, that he started to
Speaker 16: take off. And now, of course you can't move for
Speaker 16: Mick Heron.
Speaker 3: What was it like for you the first time we
Speaker 3: had to interact with actors and director people.
Speaker 16: I was always very embarrassed by things like rehearsal or
Speaker 16: actors saying lines or yellow I was never particularly comfortable
Speaker 16: around actor until I got to Will Patten in Chinese Boxes,
Speaker 16: who is quite methodic, quite method like, and very physical,
Speaker 16: and I got him and I thought actually know how
Speaker 16: to direct him and Gottfried Yan, who'd been in Fastment
Speaker 16: of films.
Speaker 7: I was also in Chinese Boxes and he.
Speaker 16: I enjoyed working with him, partly because he got the
Speaker 16: job without really speaking English. And when I went to
Speaker 16: interview him, because my first choice for his part was
Speaker 16: actually Klaus Leovich, who had been in Fastment of films
Speaker 16: and that Boguard Nabokov film in which he played Bogard's double. Anyway,
Speaker 16: Lewitch turned it down after having accepted it, and then
Speaker 16: my producer said that as Gottfried. I wasn't sure, but
Speaker 16: I went to meet him and very nice, very good face,
Speaker 16: but he doesn't say much. His wife did all the talking,
Speaker 16: I discovered afterwards, because it was because he didn't speak English,
Speaker 16: so he learned his which I thought was heroic. He
Speaker 16: learned his role phonetically. I kind of didn't really know
Speaker 16: what I wanted for the leading man. I wanted a
Speaker 16: blankness and also Beams is very funny, and I met
Speaker 16: him and I thought it's too funny for this. I
Speaker 16: did it, and Dad and eventually casting directors said, I
Speaker 16: do think it's very good, and I think I showed
Speaker 16: him a Robert Mitchell film and I said, just do that,
Speaker 16: and I said, the thing he noticed about Mitcham as
Speaker 16: he listens the acting is less to do with recital
Speaker 16: and more to do with listening.
Speaker 7: And Beams watched it and he did it.
Speaker 16: And it wasn't really until years later when I looked
Speaker 16: at the film again that I thought his performance was
Speaker 16: really good, almost heroic in terms of being asked as
Speaker 16: an actor to kind of reduce. You know, there are
Speaker 16: other actors I could think of who were noted for
Speaker 16: doing nothing. But there's a lot of signaling going on nevertheless,
Speaker 16: and you have an interesting example when you get to
Speaker 16: Jack Nicholson in when he's working for Kubrick or ANTONIONI.
Speaker 7: He's like a man in a street jacket. You can
Speaker 7: feel that he can't. But I thought Beams was very good.
Speaker 16: But on the whole, my Forte was never really working
Speaker 16: with actors, which is why I think after making all
Speaker 16: feature films, yeah, I then drifted off into documentary and
Speaker 16: then I fell in with the English writer Ian Sinclair
Speaker 16: of Welsh Wid and we knocked off four or five
Speaker 16: films together which were far more experimental and had no
Speaker 16: There was no script, no actors, no call sheets, nothing.
Speaker 16: They were all DIY and we did it ourselves. But
Speaker 16: I don't know whether these films have ever even surfaced
Speaker 16: in the United States, rather in the way that Radio
Speaker 16: On is good. And you know, I never gave it
Speaker 16: any shelf life, but if you look at it now,
Speaker 16: I think, yeah, it's got its false but no one
Speaker 16: else was doing it, so it stands as it stands
Speaker 16: as a record, almost a documentary record at a particular time,
Speaker 16: what people look like, how they dressed, and what music
Speaker 16: they played, and the fact that England at the end
Speaker 16: of the nineteen seventies did look like that. It looked
Speaker 16: like something from the nineteen fifties. If you go back
Speaker 16: to those black and white movies from the early fifties,
Speaker 16: you think nothing had changed. And rather the same with
Speaker 16: the synclet films. They were quite wild and stylistically completely
Speaker 16: unlike the feature films, very well experimental in that we
Speaker 16: could be because we decided to abandon cruise, partly because
Speaker 16: we didn't have any money, and these sort of almost
Speaker 16: toy like cameras had come on the market. There was
Speaker 16: one called a Sharp High eight, which had a flat
Speaker 16: screen and a sort of periscope thing and you could
Speaker 16: press button. You've got a very nice, liquid, paintily image
Speaker 16: with it, and even during the shot you could fiddle
Speaker 16: around with the exposure by hitting a button so the
Speaker 16: picture would bleach out. And the fact that it had
Speaker 16: a screen rather than an eyepiece meant that I was
Speaker 16: much more comfortable shooting it because I didn't have to
Speaker 16: think of myself as a kind of dop and bother
Speaker 16: about framing and all the rest of it.
Speaker 7: And I again, I think if you go back and
Speaker 7: look at these.
Speaker 16: Films which are twenty five years old, again, no one.
Speaker 2: Was doing it.
Speaker 3: With having the Germans on your crew with Radio one.
Speaker 3: Did you have to speak German? Do you know how
Speaker 3: to speak German?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Enough to get in and out of a hotel.
Speaker 16: You know, most Germans of that kind of slightly bohemian
Speaker 16: generation spoke quite good English because they'd spend their childhoods
Speaker 16: listening to AFN and American jazz and spent all their
Speaker 16: times watching American movies. So Martin Muller had very good
Speaker 16: English and Schaeffer not so much. But we could communicate
Speaker 16: quite easily, So no, that's not a problem. And similarly
Speaker 16: here where I am now, which is Rotterdam, Dutch is
Speaker 16: a really hard language. But they all speak English, they
Speaker 16: all really and they're not resentful of you not speaking Dutch.
Speaker 16: In fact, they seem quite glad to be able to
Speaker 16: practice their English. So there's even kids in the supermarket.
Speaker 16: Are you going to saying really bad Dutch? Whereas which
Speaker 16: isle is the rice in? And they just answer in
Speaker 16: English rather Aisle six. So anyway, I digress.
Speaker 3: Did you have all the locations picked up before you
Speaker 3: started to shoot or did you find them as you're
Speaker 3: going along? I was curious how dihy this production was.
Speaker 7: No, we had the locations.
Speaker 16: I had spent quite a lot of time driving the
Speaker 16: route and looking around in Bristol, and I don't know
Speaker 16: what point I discovered the quarry, but it was certainly
Speaker 16: before we shot, and so when it came to pre
Speaker 16: production we knew pretty.
Speaker 7: Much where we were going to shoot.
Speaker 16: I think there's one hub where Beams picks up the
Speaker 16: soldier where they play reckless Eric, that is not on
Speaker 16: the road. I don't know why it wasn't, but we
Speaker 16: ended up somewhere in Essex filming that, but otherwise it
Speaker 16: was pretty much a straight line. The apartment in London
Speaker 16: belonged to the film distributor Andy Engel and it was
Speaker 16: above his cinema in Camden, so it was all very easy.
Speaker 16: I mean the first night of shooting I was in
Speaker 16: the car at night outside the launderette, and it was
Speaker 16: my local launderette. In fact, don't think it was my
Speaker 16: washing that was in the machine. At the time, I
Speaker 16: knew you might as well do two things at once.
Speaker 3: Making filming, get your laundry done at the same time, and.
Speaker 7: Which was the more important?
Speaker 3: Can you tell me about radio or remix? How did
Speaker 3: that come about?
Speaker 7: That was very strange.
Speaker 16: I was approached by Ben Slater and Gareth Evans, who
Speaker 16: were studying I think at the time in Bristol, and
Speaker 16: Gareth has gone on to become a fairly kind of
Speaker 16: senior figure in there on the London cultural scene. They
Speaker 16: came to us and said were we interested in making
Speaker 16: a film where they thought they could get some money
Speaker 16: from Harleck Television because it was about the dismantling of
Speaker 16: the flyover that appears in radio on Going Past the
Speaker 16: Hotel where David Beams and Lisa Kreutzer are. Hewah, okay,
Speaker 16: let's see the color of your money.
Speaker 1: And they did that.
Speaker 16: They got a deal out of Harlic Television for us
Speaker 16: to produce twenty five minutes. And I think I was moaning,
Speaker 16: as usual, as saying to em, and I don't know
Speaker 16: what to do really, that I don't want to just
Speaker 16: film the flyover being taken down. And she said, you
Speaker 16: get in the car and you drive, you go back
Speaker 16: to the locations and it a and we did, and
Speaker 16: I think we were still using the High eight rather
Speaker 16: than MiniDV, and so she and I just took to
Speaker 16: the road and we found I think nearly all the locations,
Speaker 16: including the garage a Chippenham where Ding appears, and we
Speaker 16: really struggled to find it, and I thought I knew
Speaker 16: the location, and we turned up and it was a
Speaker 16: housing estate and I thought we must have gone.
Speaker 7: And then we did, by.
Speaker 16: By chance, find it and the guy, I can't remember
Speaker 16: whether it was him or his son, was turning into
Speaker 16: a chandler's yard for boats, but the old petrol pumps
Speaker 16: were still there around the corner, and it was I
Speaker 16: don't know, I don't know what's there now, but so
Speaker 16: we found that, and I think he or his father
Speaker 16: was still complaining about the fact that we'd never sent
Speaker 16: him a DVD of the film, and after that the
Speaker 16: apartment was still there in Bristol.
Speaker 7: I was expecting.
Speaker 16: I thought, you know, it's going to be really shy now,
Speaker 16: and yup it up. But it was exactly the same,
Speaker 16: with the accept the tiles in the bathroom having been changed.
Speaker 16: The big shot was this twenty years later. The big
Speaker 16: shot was how much still existed unchanged, And the changes
Speaker 16: were all kind of natural ones in that there's a
Speaker 16: scene at the end in Bristol where a train passes
Speaker 16: by in the background and David Beams walks over some wasteland.
Speaker 16: When we went back, that's now a kind of planted park,
Speaker 16: quite different, and the quarry had become a security item.
Speaker 16: You couldn't get into it. In nineteen seventy nine you
Speaker 16: could just drive in, which I think what I did,
Speaker 16: But now it was all protected and we had to
Speaker 16: get permission to get in Silbury Hill, which was just
Speaker 16: a kind of big hummock when we were filming. That
Speaker 16: was all overgrown with trees when we went back, So
Speaker 16: that was the big difference, seeing sort of twenty years
Speaker 16: of undergrowth and trees, and the rest was surprisingly preserved.
Speaker 16: I don't know about now. The hotel I think is
Speaker 16: still the Bristol One very run down. I'm surprised it
Speaker 16: hasn't been demolished and the flyovers gone. But no, if
Speaker 16: Garret can get some more money out of Harleck Television,
Speaker 16: I'm quite happy to.
Speaker 7: Revisit the revisit.
Speaker 3: Did you say you're working on a new film, Yeah,
Speaker 3: sort of.
Speaker 16: Twelve years ago we made a film called Discontent, which
Speaker 16: was an essay film really about the kind of state
Speaker 16: of things in two thousand and nine. I think it
Speaker 16: was I suppose in a way it connects to radio
Speaker 16: on and radio on remix because it is a road
Speaker 16: movie ambient and it played in Europe on German and
Speaker 16: French TV, and it got shown in the UK on
Speaker 16: More four and it had a very nice review from
Speaker 16: Mark Fisher in Sight and Sound. So there was a
Speaker 16: satisfactory piece of work. But after that there was no
Speaker 16: as part of a more general problem which had been
Speaker 16: going on since the turn of the century. Before that,
Speaker 16: when Ian and I were doing films, there was still
Speaker 16: quite a wide margin that you could get money for
Speaker 16: experimental films, and you could get them I wouldn't say easily,
Speaker 16: but you'd turn up and they would give you the
Speaker 16: money if they wanted to do the project, and with
Speaker 16: that money you could make the film. By twenty twelve,
Speaker 16: you were having to look at different funding sources. You
Speaker 16: could get a bit out of Serence, so you get
Speaker 16: a bit out of Serence. It also meant that the
Speaker 16: whole funding process became much more lengthy, and you'd think,
Speaker 16: do I really want to spend six months financing this film?
Speaker 16: By when you've forgotten what it's about. And I think
Speaker 16: it explains why more and more I went back to
Speaker 16: writing books because you don't have to have any meetings.
Speaker 16: You just get Itit's a job.
Speaker 7: You get on with it.
Speaker 16: In twenty and fourteen, at the Oberhausant Film Festival, I
Speaker 16: was asked by finished filmmaker called Mika Tanila, who is
Speaker 16: doing a project which was really about post cinema, and
Speaker 16: he was asking for contributions where you could do anything,
Speaker 16: but you couldn't shore a film. And we met and
Speaker 16: we got along and we've talked about doing various projects.
Speaker 16: And one project I've had in the bottom drawer for
Speaker 16: years was a film script I wrote in two thy
Speaker 16: and twelve called The James Jesus Angleton Tapes, which was
Speaker 16: based on the career of James Jesus Angleton, who was
Speaker 16: head of CIA Country Intelligence between fifty four and nineteen
Speaker 16: seventy four. And it was a kind of jazz riff
Speaker 16: on this kind of Beckett perhaps last tape, kind of
Speaker 16: final confession. And I wrote it for Christopher Walken and
Speaker 16: I got the meeting. I got the phone meeting with
Speaker 16: Christopher Walken.
Speaker 7: After he read the script, he was up for it.
Speaker 16: And I thought of Walkom because although he's not like
Speaker 16: Angleton physically, there's always a sense when he's acting that
Speaker 16: he's talking to himself. It's not that he doesn't interact
Speaker 16: with other actors, but there's something about him which is
Speaker 16: a variation on film acting. And he was keen to
Speaker 16: do it. But as is the way of these things,
Speaker 16: nothing ever happened. And at a certain point I rewrote
Speaker 16: it as an audio play for taping a single actor,
Speaker 16: and Mika was saying, did I want to do anything?
Speaker 7: And I was struggling to come up with anything.
Speaker 16: So in the and I said, maybe what if Angleton,
Speaker 16: in the last years of his life, because he was
Speaker 16: a world class fly fisherman, actually went to a kind
Speaker 16: of hut in the remote north of Finland for the
Speaker 16: fishing and the White Knights, and during that period recorded
Speaker 16: these tapes and we never really got in here with
Speaker 16: that idea. But the other thing that happened over the
Speaker 16: last ten years is that my son Louis, who appears
Speaker 16: in the film content as the kind of boy in
Speaker 16: the back of the car, simply because we went on
Speaker 16: a trip to America for a holiday. He was in
Speaker 16: the back of the car and we actually used a
Speaker 16: lot of the film footage of that trip for content.
Speaker 16: We thought a bit about putting him in the film.
Speaker 16: I thought, are we exploiting him? And I thought, no, no,
Speaker 16: he's actually very good. And in twenty sixteen, at the
Speaker 16: age of twelve, out of the blue, he developed some
Speaker 16: complex epilepsy which he had for four years. And it's
Speaker 16: an horrendous story of pharmaceutical drugs and what they do
Speaker 16: to you and you know what you should and should
Speaker 16: not be prescribed, and he had over a thousand sieges
Speaker 16: and in the end his mother took him here to
Speaker 16: Rotterdam the cannabis medication and it took another two years
Speaker 16: to wean him off all the pharmaceuticals he was on.
Speaker 16: But against all the odds, in twenty twenty he stopped
Speaker 16: having seizures, and he went on. These caesars were weird
Speaker 16: trips in a way. A lot of them, a lot
Speaker 16: of a lot of the medical withdrawal involved terrifying hallucinations
Speaker 16: like something out of Bosh really, which he turned into art.
Speaker 16: And although he's always very talented at drawing, in an
Speaker 16: odd way, this this terrible thing that happened to him,
Speaker 16: gave him this kind of vision. So he's now, you know,
Speaker 16: he's now a painter at artsicle and a very good
Speaker 16: one too. And I talked to Meeker and I thought,
Speaker 16: you know, is there a way of combining that material
Speaker 16: because Lewis had appeared in con tent, so there's a
Speaker 16: sense of And I said, I don't really want to
Speaker 16: make another road movie because even twelve years ago, getting
Speaker 16: in a car and driving thousands of miles, you never questioned, no,
Speaker 16: you have to think. So I said, we'll get the
Speaker 16: train and boat and we'll go to Finland and we
Speaker 16: will we will find this location where Angleton stayed.
Speaker 7: So there's the kind of reason for the trip.
Speaker 16: And also it's an exploration of lewis case history and
Speaker 16: how in a way his seizures are like a metaphor
Speaker 16: for the world, which is it's in a state of convulsion.
Speaker 16: So we have a bit of finished money. We're waiting
Speaker 16: for more. They're taking their time, but in the spirit
Speaker 16: of the project, which is very kind of Diy, we
Speaker 16: just have to be patient. But we have Arte and Zida,
Speaker 16: the German and French television channels have taken it. It's
Speaker 16: not an entirely obscure project. But so that's what we've
Speaker 16: been up to.
Speaker 3: Sounds like a lot, especially the way they has got
Speaker 3: to be difficult.
Speaker 7: Oh, the jobs.
Speaker 16: The whole of the last eight years has been about
Speaker 16: waiting because in dealing with you this case, you're waiting
Speaker 16: for the National Health Service, you're waiting for doctor's appointments,
Speaker 16: you're waiting for the next seeson. And I did a
Speaker 16: film years and years ago with Rudy Wurlitzer, who wrote
Speaker 16: two Lame Blacktop and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,
Speaker 16: and he was talking about waiting in Hollywood, who said,
Speaker 16: it's always about waiting. You know, you're waiting for this,
Speaker 16: you're waiting for that, And I thought, yeah, it's still
Speaker 16: the same.
Speaker 3: Mister Pettett, thank you so much for your time. I
Speaker 3: really appreciate this.
Speaker 7: That's fine. I hope you even make something of it,
Speaker 7: and I wasn't too delirious.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back and we were talking about
Speaker 3: Radio On and I mentioned this earlier, Ben, but I
Speaker 3: want to know more about Radio on Remix. How did
Speaker 3: that project come together? And can you told the audience
Speaker 3: a little bit more about it?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: Radio on Remix, which is I think twenty four minute
Speaker 1: video essay that you will find, whether you want to
Speaker 1: or not, on any Blu ray that you can get
Speaker 1: hold of. Radio On and it was in the DVD
Speaker 1: editions as well, is a piece that Chris created in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, so almost twenty years after Radio On.
Speaker 1: And this came directly out of what I was saying
Speaker 1: earlier about how we met Chris and we interviewed him
Speaker 1: and then we got him to come and screen Radio
Speaker 1: On off a thirty five mel print in Bristol, and
Speaker 1: then I don't know about six months later it occurred
Speaker 1: to me, and I will turn full credit for the idea.
Speaker 1: It occurred to me that it would be a great
Speaker 1: idea since it was coming up to twenty years and
Speaker 1: also we'd heard that fly over, the one where they
Speaker 1: get the very iconic shot of the hotel was being
Speaker 1: taken down, and it occurred to me, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: a good time for Chris to come back and make it.
Speaker 1: What I thought would be relatively conventional documentary about the
Speaker 1: time passing and coming back and retracing the steps of
Speaker 1: the film and telling stories about the making of the film.
Speaker 1: Possibly I had a very different idea about what it
Speaker 1: would be, and I told Gareth Evans, who was my
Speaker 1: partner in crime at the time, and Gareth was like, yes,
Speaker 1: that's great, we should definitely do that. So Gareth managed
Speaker 1: to get us to pitch this to the local broadcaster
Speaker 1: in the West Country, which was called HTV. It was
Speaker 1: like a regional station, and there was a really lovely
Speaker 1: lady there called Abigail Davis who was a commissioner, and
Speaker 1: I can't believe, to be honest, she let me and
Speaker 1: Gareth into her office. We showed up. We weren't students,
Speaker 1: we graduated a few years before, but we looked like students.
Speaker 1: We were just second and clothes hungover I'm sure hadn't shaved,
Speaker 1: pretty much like how I am now. And we go
Speaker 1: in and we say, okay, we know this filmmaker Chris
Speaker 1: Pettitt and he's going to come back and he's going
Speaker 1: to film things and it's going to be a documentary
Speaker 1: and will you commission it? And she said okay. At
Speaker 1: that point we pretty much handed it over to Chris
Speaker 1: and Keith Griffiths's producer, and then they put together Ready
Speaker 1: On Remix, although Gareth I have to give Gareth credit
Speaker 1: because he did quite a lot of the work finding
Speaker 1: the locations. So we'd actually bumped into a guy at
Speaker 1: a party who said, I'm staying in the Paragon and
Speaker 1: that was the row of houses where they filmed Radio
Speaker 1: on and we said, okay, what number. Somehow we had
Speaker 1: figured out what the flat was, maybe Chris had told
Speaker 1: us and he was like, yeah, it's that one, and
Speaker 1: we were like, oh, yeah, it's the Radio On Flat.
Speaker 1: So we found that Gareth managed to get access to
Speaker 1: the quarry, which is at the end of the film,
Speaker 1: which was incredible because it was a very high security
Speaker 1: area by that point with guards and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: And we tracked down the pub and the train station
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other places, and we did actually
Speaker 1: have a couple of days with Chris when he was filming,
Speaker 1: and actually you can see me in Radio Remix. There's
Speaker 1: a shot where he shows the pub from nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine with someone playing Paul, and then the pub now
Speaker 1: and now being nineteen ninety eight, and you can see
Speaker 1: me about to take a shot on the pull table.
Speaker 1: That's my claim to fame, guys, I mean a shot
Speaker 1: within a shot. And then Chris went ahead and he
Speaker 1: had this kind of prosumer camera I think it might
Speaker 1: have been a sony and he was shooting everything and
Speaker 1: now it seems like very low grade video. And Chris
Speaker 1: was very interested in the technology. He was interested in
Speaker 1: seeing what video can do and layering different images, and
Speaker 1: it became more almost like an installation video, less like
Speaker 1: a conventional documentary, and much more like a kind of
Speaker 1: gallery piece in a sense. So it's quite a challenging
Speaker 1: film to watch, but you do get within it. If
Speaker 1: you focus and look carefully, you can see he does
Speaker 1: do the old locations and the new locations, and he
Speaker 1: does put them together. But the high point of remix
Speaker 1: is the soundtrack because he got Bruce Gilbert from Wire
Speaker 1: proper post punk band who could have been in the
Speaker 1: soundtrack for.
Speaker 3: The original Radio but aren't.
Speaker 1: Bruce Gilbert does this remix and it's almost just like
Speaker 1: with Radio On, the soundtrack is leading the film, and
Speaker 1: I really love what he does with the sound and
Speaker 1: the way that he fuses together loops of David Bow,
Speaker 1: the bits of the video game, samples of dialogue from
Speaker 1: the film, like particular lines pullover and refugee, and then
Speaker 1: highlights them and mixes them and creates this kind of
Speaker 1: ambient flow of the entire thing. So it's quite a
Speaker 1: strange piece, but if you're a fan of Radio On,
Speaker 1: it's pretty essential.
Speaker 3: I ran into where was it? Was it a band camp?
Speaker 3: It was a Radio one remix and it was some
Speaker 3: sort of special It was Bruce Gilbert. I'm pulling it
Speaker 3: up right now. Bruce Gilbert Radio one Remix, Limited edition cassette,
Speaker 3: made to order in maximum edition of fifty copies, available
Speaker 3: for six hundred and sixty six pounds.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is a very interesting company in London that
Speaker 1: does these kind of limited edition art projects. And actually
Speaker 1: I wrote the liner notes, I think for that cassette.
Speaker 3: I think that's how I found it was. I was
Speaker 3: googling you in then this one came up and I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a couple of years ago, and it
Speaker 1: was a brilliant idea to put out the radio remix
Speaker 1: as a soundtrack, although it was done in a way
Speaker 1: that makes it almost equally as difficult to get hold of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, but I won't be spending the six
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty six pounds for your essay. I'm sorry
Speaker 3: about that, Ben.
Speaker 1: I'll send you the word document. But while we're on
Speaker 1: the subject of plugging things, I do want to plug
Speaker 1: this book, which is free. You don't have to spend
Speaker 1: six hundred and sixty six pounds on. There is a
Speaker 1: book about radio on written by this guy that I've
Speaker 1: been in contact with called Nick Gilbert, and the book
Speaker 1: is called road Runner. I think the subtitle is a
Speaker 1: book about radio on. And you can get it at
Speaker 1: smash words, which is a sort of self publishing online
Speaker 1: publishing website. If you just register there and give them
Speaker 1: your email address, you can download Roadrunner for free as
Speaker 1: a PDR for however you want to read it. And
Speaker 1: that is one of those books in the style of
Speaker 1: Jeff dya Zoner or Jonathan Leatham's They Live, or Walter
Speaker 1: Chows's book about Miracle Marley where he watches the film,
Speaker 1: describes the film and then goes off on all sorts
Speaker 1: of digressions, some of which touches on pon things we've discussed,
Speaker 1: but also goes off on many other digressions as well.
Speaker 1: And so if you're interested in radio on listeners at
Speaker 1: whatever biscuit factory you're in right now, it's really worth
Speaker 1: a download. And Nick OnEarth some quite interesting things along
Speaker 1: the way and also interviewed Chris.
Speaker 3: I love that it's called road Runner because every time
Speaker 3: I would read the title, I would just keep thinking
Speaker 3: of the Who's Jonathan Donathan Richmond of the Modern Lovers
Speaker 3: Jonathan Richmond, Yeah, and just that whle and the radio on,
Speaker 3: and I just kept thinking of that, and then going
Speaker 3: back to the Sex Pistols. There was a version of that.
Speaker 3: They recorded a version of Roadrunner, and John Lyyden could
Speaker 3: not remember any of the lyrics except for the radio
Speaker 3: on part of it. Very rough, one of those like
Speaker 3: back in the early nineties, no more like late eighties,
Speaker 3: they were putting out all of these like bits and
Speaker 3: bobs of sessions that they had with the Sex Pistols,
Speaker 3: and it was all one producer, I can't remember who
Speaker 3: it was, but they were the rough quality a lot
Speaker 3: of it, but they did have some interesting outtakes like that,
Speaker 3: and of course I think when they did Stepping Stone
Speaker 3: that was like a potentially legit release. But yeah, that
Speaker 3: version of Roadrunner was very rough.
Speaker 1: I think Chris at one point wanted to use Roadrunner
Speaker 1: on the soundtrack but wasn't able to or chose not
Speaker 1: to in the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The funny thing is in the UK, the title might
Speaker 1: be connected to Radio One, which was the big BBC
Speaker 1: pop station, which would have been the antithesis, apart from
Speaker 1: John Peel of pretty much everything that Robert's character would
Speaker 1: be listening to. Very little of that stuff would get
Speaker 1: played on Radio One. So actually, when I first encountered
Speaker 1: the film, I thought it was a sort of play
Speaker 1: on Radio One. It was like Radio On instead of
Speaker 1: Radio One, and I knew the Jonathan Richmond song. And
Speaker 1: it was only much much later, I think, after I'd
Speaker 1: seen Radio On that I was listening to it and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, yes, this must be why Chris
Speaker 1: gave it that name, because it's so brilliant. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a fantastic track, and of course it's a
Speaker 1: classic driving track.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The name of the Nick Gilbert book, just for completion's
Speaker 3: sake is Roadrunner, Radio one, Road Movies and the A
Speaker 3: four and I will definitely put a link to where
Speaker 3: you can get it on smash Words in the show
Speaker 3: notes for this episode because it is really good and
Speaker 3: there's a few good essays written about this movie. I
Speaker 3: know that I found the was it Satan sound? I
Speaker 3: can't remember which review was. Film comment was just in
Speaker 3: valuable to see more of the plot, because, like you, Mark,
Speaker 3: I was finding this a little obscure at times. I'm
Speaker 3: sure Ben, you've seen this many more times than I have,
Speaker 3: and probably get a lot of this more than us Americans,
Speaker 3: especially even when it comes to the landscape, because all
Speaker 3: looks the same a lot of times for me, especially
Speaker 3: being in black and white.
Speaker 11: That was a difficult part, Like I didn't really get
Speaker 11: when he was in London, in Bristol, back in London,
Speaker 11: and I think a lot of it was the black
Speaker 11: and white actually, but it didn't really matter again because
Speaker 11: it's circular in a way anyway. But I don't really
Speaker 11: care what the destination is in road movies for the
Speaker 11: most part, it's the trip. And I know we're way
Speaker 11: past this, but I just had to mention that shot again.
Speaker 11: The iconic shot going on the well I'm going to
Speaker 11: say freeway here, which is the incorrect term, but past
Speaker 11: when both Robert and I forget what her name in
Speaker 11: the separate windows. Loved that shot, but it just made
Speaker 11: me think of since we're talking about road movies and
Speaker 11: I'm looking at a road movie, is it's obviously someone
Speaker 11: in a car and they're very possibly on their own
Speaker 11: road movie trip right now. They're traveling somewhere, maybe they're
Speaker 11: headed back to London or some other point. And I
Speaker 11: thought it just struck me as odd because I oftentimes
Speaker 11: when I am driving by myself, look at the people
Speaker 11: in the other cars and wonder what are they doing,
Speaker 11: what is their destination? And even sometimes think what are
Speaker 11: they thinking right now as we're passing this same scenery
Speaker 11: and stuff?
Speaker 3: What the music is on in their car?
Speaker 11: So that I think that shot was poignant in a
Speaker 11: lot of ways for me, and it just really stuck out.
Speaker 11: I pause it and rewound it a couple of times
Speaker 11: just to watch over again, and I don't know, I
Speaker 11: can't really explain why, but it just it felt like
Speaker 11: an important moment in the film.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Partly it's because there's again it's that alienation. They're
Speaker 1: both in separate windows, and actually it occurs to me
Speaker 1: that in order to get that shot, I actually think
Speaker 1: they're in separate rooms. So within the story they're meant
Speaker 1: to be in the same room. I think that hotel
Speaker 1: has got very small rooms and there's one window per room,
Speaker 1: and actually they must have positioned them into separate rooms.
Speaker 1: I might be wrong about that, but there is that
Speaker 1: feeling of there together, but they're not together. And then
Speaker 1: we're in the point of view, this mysterious point of
Speaker 1: view of somebody in a car driving the route that
Speaker 1: they've previously taken, so there's the sort of ghosting of
Speaker 1: their route at the same time. The other shot that
Speaker 1: I think is really iconic is the white when Robert's
Speaker 1: still in London, and you get that long of the landscape,
Speaker 1: the car goes through it, then you get the long
Speaker 1: shot of the landscape and I think it's Bowie on
Speaker 1: the soundtrack at that point, and then the train comes
Speaker 1: in from the side of the frame, and then it
Speaker 1: wipes and then we see the plane coming in towards
Speaker 1: he Throw airport and we're back on the road again.
Speaker 1: And that is in the cinema. That is a breathtaking shot.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to remember who it was. I was talking
Speaker 3: about the whole idea of Aerosynthanatos when it comes to
Speaker 3: this movie, and the idea that we start with the
Speaker 3: death of his brother, and it feels like that death
Speaker 3: drive no pun intended, the death drive in Robert Bee
Speaker 3: might be there as well, because it feels like he's
Speaker 3: going to commit suicide at the end of this movie,
Speaker 3: at least for me. When he pulls up to the
Speaker 3: edge of the quarry, he's so close to the edge
Speaker 3: and he's got the music blaring, and he just is
Speaker 3: he just going to drive right off of here? Is
Speaker 3: he going to put And then when he gets out
Speaker 3: of the car, is he going to push the car over?
Speaker 3: But instead he just abandons the car and we don't
Speaker 3: get the journey home. We just get him waiting for
Speaker 3: a train. I don't necessarily see like him back in London. Hey,
Speaker 3: everything's great.
Speaker 1: We're just checking in back at the biscuit Factory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I'm back boys, And here's a special request
Speaker 3: for you. Yeah, here's some more Ian durry in the blockheads. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I love. That's always the thing when it comes to
Speaker 3: road movies like how do we end? Do we end
Speaker 3: with them still on the road, Do they get to
Speaker 3: their destination? Doesn't matter if they get to their destination.
Speaker 3: Do they fail completely? Mark? You and I just talked
Speaker 3: about a classic road movie recently, Vacation, and just how
Speaker 3: that turns to absolute shit at the end with him
Speaker 3: almost getting arrested. We end that kind of the same
Speaker 3: way with just them on the plane. We don't get
Speaker 3: them back in Chicago, and here he's waiting for that train,
Speaker 3: and he's going to take that train back, which might
Speaker 3: have been the smart way of traveling anyway. And you
Speaker 3: guys have such great public transportation in them, why would
Speaker 3: you really?
Speaker 12: No?
Speaker 3: No, is it all gone.
Speaker 1: One of the things that would happen when that check
Speaker 1: came into power, of course, is the privatization of the
Speaker 1: rail network, and it's gone down ill ever since. But yes, no,
Speaker 1: it is significant that he chooses the change of mode
Speaker 1: of transport at that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I've only been in England twice and at least
Speaker 3: one of those times there was a rail strike, so
Speaker 3: everything was delayed.
Speaker 1: That happens frequently. Yes, Well another thing, Yeah, you were
Speaker 1: pointing out about the suicide and almost the sense that
Speaker 1: he's going to kill himself in the quarry, is going
Speaker 1: to get drunk. There's a lot of drink driving in
Speaker 1: the film. We should also mention it has a pine
Speaker 1: and then takes the hitchhiker, etc.
Speaker 3: But I think he cracks open a beer in the
Speaker 3: car itself right.
Speaker 1: In this one, he's throwing back the beers. Earlier in
Speaker 1: Western super Mare, he's drinking from a bottler spirits. At
Speaker 1: least he gets her to drive him back to Bristol.
Speaker 1: But yes, the narrative construction again, Chris is saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not that interesting story in narrative, but he really
Speaker 1: does set it up quite neatly, that notion of not
Speaker 1: being able to start the car, that once he's driven
Speaker 1: to the edge, he can't go round the front to
Speaker 1: crank it up with that tool anymore, and he even
Speaker 1: tries to pull it back. He tries to release the
Speaker 1: brakes and pull it back and it goes forward even more,
Speaker 1: which weirdly reminds me now of the Italian Job. The
Speaker 1: end of the Italian Job with the bus on that
Speaker 1: when it keeps going forward, it keeps creeping forward. And
Speaker 1: so it's set up really smartly that this is the
Speaker 1: end of the road for him, and there's no way
Speaker 1: he can start that car anymore, so he has to
Speaker 1: abandon it. And again more construction. It refers back to
Speaker 1: the first time we see him. He's in the car.
Speaker 1: He puts on the craft Work tape and he stops,
Speaker 1: thinks for a bit, puts it back on, and then
Speaker 1: leaves it playing as he goes out to the laundromat.
Speaker 1: Here he leaves it playing and abandons it forever, right,
Speaker 1: And then we get the music playing, and actually the
Speaker 1: music that craft Work track builds and builds. It gets
Speaker 1: faster and faster, and it's actually a hopeful song. There's
Speaker 1: a real feeling of joy and excitement at the end
Speaker 1: of the film. Weirdly enough, even though nothing narratively seems
Speaker 1: to have been resolved, there is a sense of a
Speaker 1: weird sense of hope at the end of the film.
Speaker 11: I did want to mention the radio on remix. I
Speaker 11: found quite enjoyable because I think the oh, we're back
Speaker 11: at this spot where Ben gets knocked off the stool
Speaker 11: in the bar and here we are at the GT
Speaker 11: gas station where Sting plays the guitar would have been
Speaker 11: really boring. I enjoyed that, and it actually again reminded
Speaker 11: me of things that I watched when I was in
Speaker 11: London and saw pieces like that in art installations and
Speaker 11: other stuff that was on TV, and going to the
Speaker 11: wonderful repertory cinemas there and seeing all kinds of crazy movies.
Speaker 11: So I enjoyed it quite a bit. Oh, excellent, that's
Speaker 11: good to hear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought it was very well done, and yeah,
Speaker 3: it does feel very much like an installation piece. That's
Speaker 3: a perfect way to put it, just with the way
Speaker 3: that it's put together. There's one moment where it's just like,
Speaker 3: how was this shot? What was the actual means of
Speaker 3: putting this together? There was one shot where I was
Speaker 3: reminded of do you remember the old Fisher Price pixel
Speaker 3: cams that were recorded on cassettes, which is an interesting
Speaker 3: going back to the cassette thing too, So I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: I know that things have been shot in that, and
Speaker 3: I was almost curious if that was being used, but
Speaker 3: of course it wasn't.
Speaker 1: No, But there's a lot of refilming. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of playing things back on a TV and then refilming
Speaker 1: them on the sony camera and then refilming them again.
Speaker 1: So that they lose generations and they get more and
Speaker 1: more distorted.
Speaker 11: It was hypnotic, the whole thing, with the music and
Speaker 11: the oh yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 3: All right, guys, let's go ahead and take another break,
Speaker 3: and I want to play preview for next week's show
Speaker 3: right after these brief mess.
Speaker 10: It was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, winning
Speaker 10: Best Actor and Best Director awards. At the Toronto Film Festival,
Speaker 10: it won the Critics Prize from acclaimed director Mike Lee,
Speaker 10: the creator of High Hopes and Life Is Sweet.
Speaker 7: A different kind of movie.
Speaker 1: That is a proper relationship.
Speaker 3: Living with someone who talks to you after they've bunked you.
Speaker 3: Are they both the same size or as one bigger
Speaker 3: than the other?
Speaker 7: You look like my mother?
Speaker 6: Was you?
Speaker 2: Or too payful?
Speaker 3: It's good.
Speaker 1: Naked a new film by Mike Lee.
Speaker 3: That's right. We'll be back next week with another British film.
Speaker 3: We're talking about Mike Lee's Naked. Until then, I want
Speaker 3: to thank my co hosts Ben and Mark. So, Mark,
Speaker 3: what's been going on with you, sir?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 11: I've got two monthly shows right now. My nostalgia show
Speaker 11: Cambrid Jim Mashawn comes out every first Tuesday of the month,
Speaker 11: and you Chris and I have our Chasing Chevy Chase
Speaker 11: podcast that comes out I believe the last Wednesday of
Speaker 11: earvery month, and Wake Up Heavy is on another hiatus
Speaker 11: currently until I figure out something to record. But you
Speaker 11: can find all of those shows over on where you
Speaker 11: Media dot com.
Speaker 3: And Ben, how about you?
Speaker 1: What if you're bending up to Well, I thought I
Speaker 1: had absolutely nothing to say as usual, apart from you
Speaker 1: could still probably try and buy my book about Saint Jack,
Speaker 1: which is called kind of Hot, and you can email me,
Speaker 1: although I am running low on copies, so if anyone
Speaker 1: wants to republish it, please let me know. But I
Speaker 1: actually do have a plug, which is that since I
Speaker 1: last spoke to you, Mike, I wrote our co Wrote
Speaker 1: Rather a TV series that was put out in Singapore
Speaker 1: for Singapore Television and you can watch it on YouTube.
Speaker 1: This company, the local company that broadcasts it. They put
Speaker 1: it out on any platform they could put it out on,
Speaker 1: including YouTube. So if you are curious, it's a murder
Speaker 1: mystery and it's called Come Closer. So if you go
Speaker 1: into YouTube and you look up Come Closer Singapore TV,
Speaker 1: you should find it. There's five episodes, they're all up
Speaker 1: on YouTube. Now here's the fun part. There is a
Speaker 1: reference to Radio One in one of the episodes. There's
Speaker 1: a piece of dialogue that refers to something that Chris
Speaker 1: has talked about many times in relation to Radio On.
Speaker 1: So anyone who knows Radio On, who's listened to this
Speaker 1: podcast will pick up on the reference. So if anybody
Speaker 1: can find it, email me that you've spotted the Radio
Speaker 1: On reference in one episode of Come Closer. I will
Speaker 1: send you something. So it's a little competition. Oh and
Speaker 1: try to inspire people to watch it.
Speaker 11: One more thing, Mike, I believe Radio On is also
Speaker 11: on the Criterion Channel currently, so people maybe can't afford
Speaker 11: the Blu ray or something, you have a way to
Speaker 11: watch it.
Speaker 1: I believe it's there.
Speaker 3: Ben, What are we talking about next year?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Well, I think you haven't done anything to do with
Speaker 1: Peter Whitehead.
Speaker 3: Have you mind that yet? Now?
Speaker 1: Well, let's have a conversation about Peter Whitehead, because I
Speaker 1: think he would be an interesting subject for a Projection
Speaker 1: Booth episode.
Speaker 3: I am pretty sure I know some of his work.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to remember what because he worked with Nicky
Speaker 3: Descent Fall, correct, didn't he have something to do with Daddy.
Speaker 3: He directed Daddy.
Speaker 1: Although I don't think I want to spend it into
Speaker 1: my podcast on Daddy.
Speaker 3: Oh that would be fun boy. Would we feel bad
Speaker 3: after that?
Speaker 7: Wouldn't we?
Speaker 1: There we'll email, We'll talk about some ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds good. Thank you so much guys for being
Speaker 3: on the show. Thanks everybody for listening. If you want
Speaker 3: to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check
Speaker 3: out some of the other shows that I work on.
Speaker 3: Just like Mark said, they're all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Speaker 3: Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
Speaker 3: join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 3: Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 17: One girl in the wild boy, ye, but she probably
Speaker 17: lives since I hate it, I call the whole one well,
Speaker 17: I call the whole one man just a mine. Well,
Speaker 17: maybe she's in about homes where.
Speaker 8: The carabeans is true.
Speaker 2: We've been in a trumping.
Speaker 17: To come on lady night because nobody's told about you.
Speaker 14: I call the will I follow wild world.
Speaker 5: I thought the whole world.
Speaker 14: We thought the whole world was fine.
Speaker 2: Not where they hide.
Speaker 4: I thought the whole wild well, I thought, the whole world.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a fine.
Speaker 4: Am I in around in the rain.
Speaker 14: Trying to fake up a gill fore my eyes swelling
Speaker 14: up with this horn tails with.
Speaker 5: This girl w the world.
Speaker 14: I should ian on a trumping the bit somewhel on
Speaker 14: the name.
Speaker 4: The trumping the sun.
Speaker 14: Finding a way in a hayway fan open.
Speaker 17: But I woman a.
Speaker 4: As youre been. I am on my sons, bitch when.
Speaker 14: Dressing the whole brid scanda in a year holiday.
Speaker 4: Even I'm quite will be sharing the same mist.
Speaker 14: Fan, I'm gonna, oh, I don't know line well.
Speaker 5: Well well.
Speaker 4: Little yeah.
Speaker 2: One churns right from five zer.
Speaker 12: R d brother, go fast about an hour, go and
Speaker 12: try faster, stop and shop with the radio on droppings
Speaker 12: over with Massachusets have to be on what it's called outside.
Speaker 5: That's the highway to late night. That the radio.
Speaker 13: I'm like, all right, happen love with about a good
Speaker 13: line on what he ate when it's starting out time.
Speaker 2: I'm in love with Massachusetts. I'm in love with the
Speaker 2: radio that helped me from.
Speaker 18: Being alone late at night, helped me from being lonely
Speaker 18: lay night. I don't feel so bad now in the car.
Speaker 18: Don't feel so long that the radio like that spirit
Speaker 18: of Zee.
Speaker 13: Just six picture the bushes, Nick, the fifty seven, your highways,
Speaker 13: your good for next week, go back way.
Speaker 2: It's the burbon trees urban speed at it.
Speaker 8: So that's like when I say road, blood, road, or twice.
Speaker 1: I'm in love with.
Speaker 2: Rock and roll, that I'll be out on that role.
Speaker 9: That's why.
Speaker 2: Oh well, now that's the boss it all.
Speaker 12: Gotta dropt the stop shop with the radio on a
Speaker 12: die and be in love with mon.
Speaker 13: Be in love with WoT a rock and roll bot
Speaker 13: nose a bott a rock and roll, no deels alone, Get.
Speaker 2: The radio off the roller.
Speaker 4: Okay, how you say botto loveday?
Speaker 2: I got.
Speaker 19: That's got cut the rock bart, I got the cop
Speaker 19: Massachusetts got up.
Speaker 2: I got the powder, Massachusetts waters lay a.
Speaker 5: Night of it.
Speaker 19: I got what sounds about the Massachusetts I s I
Speaker 19: got the ball, got the chuck I got I got
Speaker 19: the ball, not the.
Speaker 9: Little while roll and I look back to the other side,
Speaker 9: the cut on the town.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 6: By why by spare nothing.
Speaker 16: You take you nine.
Speaker 7: Go fe Nte too.
Speaker 8: Gets in Spain and shan sir.
Speaker 4: Doctors he gun forever and us in that heaven.
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean time.
Speaker 4: I'm not better.
Speaker 2: To do uh.
Speaker 5: Do coding a side side out in time, I'm do you.
Speaker 20: Sometimes nothing joying by to joy by Jemmy. Welcome back
Speaker 20: out so good, said Sid.
Speaker 4: Why some day write something in old time, cos that's
Speaker 4: I be saved?
Speaker 5: Dishes s O the coon s.
Speaker 4: Sun, donci donc M. Dons have that doncent you gotta
Speaker 4: some time sometime, said they have done.
Speaker 14: H