We continue the Bonus Round for the Eighties, my personal suggestions for inclusions to the 1001 Albums list.
Radio K.A.O.S. is also a concept album, but the tracks are more traditionally individual songs, mostly in a kind of Eighties blue-eyed soul that bears a certain similarity to the contemporary work of Robert Palmer, all horn section and backing singers. Mel Collins on saxophone and Katie Kissoon among the backing vocals are names that you will find in the credits of many a late-Eighties album. It’s got a very crisp, almost harsh, production to it as well; this is perhaps intentional rather than an artifact of the time as I shall explore.
The plot revolves around Billy, a disabled young Welsh man who now lives in Los Angeles with his Uncle Dave (and Uncle Dave’s Great Dane, who is irrelevant to the plot but whose barking appears, credited, at the start of Side Two). Billy used to live in South Wales with his brother Benny, until Benny, drunk and angry about the closure of the coal mines, throws a breeze block off a motorway bridge and causes a fatal accident. With Benny in prison, Billy is sent to live with his Uncle Dave, which is where we pick up the story.
Billy is locked in himself like The Who’s Tommy, although his disability is physical and not psychosomatic. He can, however, communicate through computers and has a psychic ability to hack into telecoms, his computer-synthesised voice bringing to mind similarly locked-in genius Stephen Hawking. Billy forms a friendship with Jim, phone-in DJ on local LA radio K.A.O.S.; the songs intersperse Billy’s personal backstory (Who Needs Information, Me Or Him) with songs that are supposedly played by Jim diegetically, but also fill in story information, such as Radio Waves and Sunset Strip.
Upset at the state of the world, Billy fools the world’s defence systems into believing that a nuclear strike has been launched. Everyone scrambles, and it’s suggested that (like the plot of Alan Moore's Watchmen), the threat is enough to make the world see sense and seek peace instead. The album ends on a positive note, The World Is Turning, where Waters was inspired by the use of communication technology by Live Aid for a positive purpose. How happy he must be these days...
Billy’s computerised voice and the somewhat sterile and synthetic world of LA are matched by the high production that renders it quite robotic at times - hence one of the reason that I used a CD album cover for the image above. The album ends with the warm and organic sound of a Welsh male voice choir, signalling a return of humanity in a technological world. Throughout we get the obligatory pokes at Reagan and Thatcher – Waters continues the Floyd tradition of spoken word drop-ins and grabs from TV and radio, merging a campaign advert for Reagan with dialogue from an old western and thus implicitly likening Reagan to Hopalong Cassidy. There’s some fun LA phone-in insanity too, such as the surreal “Fish Report with a Beat” and the lady who wants “to be at home with my monkey and my dog”.
I’d concede that Hitchhiking is probably the more musically sophisticated of the two, but this one is great fun. Waters himself isn’t too keen on it, and it got a lukewarm reception from critics, but for that very reason I’m putting it here – it's something of an overlooked gem in my opinion. Having gone back and listened to it for the first time in decades, it still holds up. A couple of tracks really stood out as powerful – The Powers That Be (who “like blacked-out vans, contingency plans”) and Home (“when they over-run the defences, a minor invasion, put down to expenses”) are both very strong, and disturbingly relevant. Oh, and Clare Torry, vocalist from The Great Gig In The Sky, puts in an appearance, tying the album into the Floyd era. I just hope Waters paid her properly this time.
Comments
Post a Comment