The Story lyrics

Artist  : Waters Roger 
Song : The Story



 Send "The Story" Ringtone to your Cell 

 												
														   Benny is a Welsh coal miner.  He
is a radio ham.  He is 23 years old, married

 to Molly.  They have a son, young Ben, aged 4,
and a new baby.  They look after

 Benny's twin brother Billy, who is apparently a
vegetable.  The mine is closed

 by the market forces.  The Male Voice Choir
stops singing, the village is dying.

 

 One night Benny takes Billy on a pub crawl. 
Drunk in a brightly-lit shopping

 mall, Benny vents his anger on a shop window
full of multiple TV images of

 Margaret Thatcher's mocking condescension.  In
defiance, he steals a cordless

 'phone.  Later that night, Benny cavorts
dangerously on the parapet of a

 motorway footbridge, in theatrical protest at
the tabloid press.  That same

 night, a cab driver is killed by a concrete
block dropped off a similar bridge.

  The police come to question Benny; he hides the
cordless 'phone under the

 cushion of Billy's wheelchair.

 Billy is different, he can receive radio waves
directly without the aid of a

 tuner; he explores the cordless 'phone,
recognizing its radioness.

 Benny is sent to prison.  Billy feels as if half
of him has been cut off.  He

 misses Benny's nightly conversations with radio
hams in foreign parts.  Molly,

 unable to cope, sends Billy to stay with his
Great Uncle David, who had

 emigrated to the USA during the war.  Much as
Billy likes Uncle David and the

 sunshine and all the new radio in LA, he cannot
adjust to the cultural upheaval

 and the loss of Benny, who for him is 'home'.

 Uncle David, now an old man, is haunted by
having worked on the Manhattan

 project during World War II, designing the Atom
Bomb, and seeks to atone.  He

 also is a radio ham; he often talks to other
hams about the Black Hills of his

 youth, the Male Voice Choir, about home.  He is
saddened by the use of

 telecommunication to trivialise important
issues, the soap opera of state.

 However, Live Aid has decynicised him to an
extent.  Billy listens to David and

 hears the truth the old man speaks.

 Billy experiments with his cordless 'phone, he
learns to make calls.  He

 accesses computers and speech synthesizers, he
learns to speak.

 Billy makes contact with Jim a DJ at Radio KAOS,
a renegade rock station

 fighting a lone rear guard action against format
radio.  Billy and Jim become

 radio friends, Reagan and Thatcher bomb Lybia. 
Billy perceives this as an act

 of political "entertainment" fireworks to focus
attention away from problems at

 "home".

 Billy has developed his expertise with the
cordless 'phone to the point where

 he can now control the most powerful computers
in the world.  He plans an

 "entertainment" of his own.  He simulates
nuclear attack everywhere, but

 de-activates the military capability of "the
powers that be" to retaliate.

 In extremes perceptions change, Panic, comedy,
compassion.  In a SAC bunker a

 soldier in a white cravat turns a key to launch
the counter attack.  Nothing

 happens; impotently he kicks the console,
hurting his foot.  He watches the

 approaching blips on the radar screen.  As
impact approaches, he thinks of his

 wife and kids, he puts his fingers in his
ears.

 Silence.  White out.  Black out.  Lights out. 
It didn't happen, we're still

 alive.  Billy has drained the earth of power to
create his illusion.

 All over the dark side of the earth, candles are
lit.  In the pub in Billy's

 home village in Wales one man starts to sing;
the other men join in.

 The tide is turning.

 Billy is home.

 

 

 Jim: This is K.A.O.S.  You and I are listening
to KAOS in Los Angeles.  Let's

 go to the telephones now and take a request.

 Billy: Hello, I'm Billy.

 Jim: Yes?

 Billy: I hear radio waves in my head.

 Jim: You hear radio waves in your head?  Ah!  Is
there a request that you have

 tonight for KAOS?