Track Listing

1. Radio waves
2. Who needs information
3. Me or him
4. Powers that be
5. Sunset strip
6. Home
7. Four minutes
8. Tide is turning

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9006 in Music
• Released on: 2003-01-13
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Customer Reviews

Just keep coming back to this one...
This is one of those CD's that seems to find its way into my CD player at least once a month - and I've owned it for many many years.

This is a concept album in that all of the songs within contribute to a single unified vision: that of a late-80's anti-Thatcher, ludditic, and apocolyptic tale stemming from an actual 1984 news story in which a Welsh taxi driver was killed by a concrete block dropped from an overpass by striking coal miners.

In Radio Kaos, this story is told from the perspective of Billy, a wheelchair bound young adult whose twin brother, Benny, is mistakenly arrested and sent to jail for the concrete block incident. Billy, however, has an astounding ability - he can hear radio waves in his head. He is subsequently sent to live with his uncle and learns to communicate using his radio-wave enabled mind and a cellphone. Using his new-found "voice" he befriends an LA based DJ and they converse. It's these converstations that lead to Billies final oeuvre: a faked nuclear apocolypse (a la "War Games"). When the hour of destruction passes and the world realises that there was no nuclear war, a new "tide" of understanding turns in which - we are left to presume - the great nations lay down arms, learn to harness the power of technology, stop hunting whales, and so on and so on...

Listening to this CD in 2004, the story seems far less relevant. We have seemingly escaped The Bomb, the miners strike is over, Thatcher-Reagan are now distant memories, and Britain is a wealthier place. However, for a thirtysomething like myself, this album survives as a snapshot of the world that was mid-late 1980s Britain. Indeed, listening to the first half of the album, I am transported back to my teenage years; flashbacks of the miners strike, Margaret Thatcher, and concrete blocks come easily.

The album sounds late-80's without being Pop-ish. You can hear the immense experience that is brought to bear in the production; vocals are haunting, the rhythm section is tight, and - as we would expect - all of the Floydish voiceovers and special effects are there.

I suspect that the modern young listener may not connect with this album as the themes and style may seem outdated and irrelevant. However, to those of us who lived through the late 80's this is a piece of work that, thanks to some good writing and great production, remains eminently listenable.

Travesty
I had to review this given the other comments. 5 stars? You've got to be joking. I bought this the day it was released, and tried really hard to ignore the fact that it was an utter stinker (it consumed a lot of pocket money). Rog, what happened mate? Pros & Cons and the Final Cut were jaw droppingly good (female backing vocals on the former notwithstanding). This is the sort of thing that gives tripe a bad name.

Kaos is a very silly, and once you've heard it, annoying and patronising story about some poor Welsh disabled kid in a vegetative state and his ability to receive radio waves from some bloke with a not very convincing American accent. Between them, they work out that Thatch is bad, the striking miners are good, and the tide is turning after Live Aid. The tide changed its mind after listening to this, and Thatch won a landslide election victory shortly thereafter.

Musically, it's pretty clear that Rog stopped listening to anything contemporary around the time he stopped wearing flares. I really think that if he'd kept on top of the music scene in the way that Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel were at the time, instead of nursing his Gilmour grievances while listening to Bob Seger and Chicago, he'd have been capable of an 80s Dark Side of the Moon or Animals. The instrumentation is modern - coldly so, but the underlying tracks are tired clichés. Difficult to pick any standout, they're all terrible, although I have a particular loathing of 'The Powers that Be' - possibly for the godawful female backing vocals.

I don't expect the majority of readers to find this review helpful - you've probably already made up your mind before clicking here, but if this album deserves 5 stars, I would give 70s Floyd and Pros and Cons 50. You have been warned.

Views of the Thatcher decade
'Radio KAOS' sits squarely in the 1980s, late enough to summarise the decade and offer hope for the future, not late enough to avoid the production values that blight much of the rock music released in that era. Its Floydian concept is bizarre, but gives Waters the opportunity to lay into Thatcher, Reagan, monetarism and politicians generally for giving us the Cold War. The liberal doses of speech that lie between and during tracks are a reminder of the devices that Waters used on 'Dark Side Of The Moon'. In terms of sound, however, this is a markedly different album from the high quality, cutting edge Floyd productions. Here, the bass, drums and guitar lack any feeling or vibrancy. Like many albums of the 1980s, 'Radio KAOS' suffers from an awful, cold, plastic sound. The music itself finds Waters in buoyant mood, though his vocals are only adequate. The content is decent and builds to quite a dramatic climax, but the album is more impressive as a whole than as separate songs. A good album, then, but spoiled by the production values of the era.