“A man dies in his bath, perhaps of natural causes, perhaps not, while David Bowie sings ‘Heroes/Heiden' on the radio. His younger brother, Robert, a D.J. for the night shift of a factory radio network, drives from London to Bristol, to investigate. On the motorway, he encounters various marginal characters: an army deserter who refuses to return to Northern Ireland, and a man who thinks he's Eddie Cochran.
“In Bristol, Robert tries to piece together elements from his brother's past, but the pieces, including the discovery of some pornographic slides, won't fit. This search, like the relationships with two women he meets in Bristol, proves inconclusive. The only certainty in the film derives from the landscape, shot in startling black and white clarity, and from the score. As befits the first real British road movie, the score, consisting of music by David Bowie, (Ian Dury), Kraftwerk, Eddie Cochran, and Stiff Records, and the landscape, are integral parts of the whole. The traditional English landscape is transformed into an alien, futuristic environment, whose strangeness is intensified by the anti-humanist music of Kraftwerk.
“In its play on cultural contradictions, in its insistence on showing rather than saying, and in its skilful integration of elements of the thriller and the road movie, Radio On marks a major new development in British cinema.” --Edinburgh Film Festival, 1979