Welcome to a slightly different kind of entry, a blog about a song I love, “Chinese Radio,” whose lyrics read like a Call of Cthulhu adventure! Written and produced by Ralf René Maué and performed by the London Boys, its unmistakably late-80s Europop beat has lyrics tell a far darker and stranger story than the music lets on, and I wanted to take a proper look at it.

The way I read “Chinese Radio” is as the account of a Vietnam-era operative – possibly CIA, possibly something adjacent left behind on a mission deep behind enemy lines. Maybe he’s lost the plot entirely. Maybe he’s still quietly working alone. Maybe he simply can’t get out. That’s where the story, as I hear it, begins: our narrator stuck in a coastal hotel room in 1969, keeping company with local companionship and no shortage of illicit distraction. There are strong hints of drug use throughout, and of the effect it’s having on him carrying him somewhere he describes as close to heavenly. There’s also a suggestion of a job he still has to do “on the side, one involving a blade”a switch blade job on teh side” though whether that’s mean he’s being paid to go and stab someone or it’s some kind of code for something else, I can’t say.

In this hazy, drug-soaked state, he tunes into his Chinese radio, and something in him shifts. He starts thinking about the stories he could tell everything he’s seen and done and how genuinely frightening they’d sound if he ever put them to paper. Is he w writer or just has completed too many missions? He becomes convinced someone is out there, somewhere, watching him. Observing. Maybe even laughing. Wherever he goes, in the rain, in that room, he’s certain someone knows exactly what he’s caught up in he just can’t find them.

By the next verse he’s spinning, and it’s not entirely clear whether that’s the drugs or something closer to a break from reality. He describes the sensation of being somewhere lunar and cold and isolated, and I’ll admit that image screams Mi-Go to me, though I should stress, this obviously isn’t a Call of Cthulhu song, just a very evocative bit of writing that a certain kind of brain can’t help reinterpreting. He identifies himself at one point as a guy from Jersey, and there’s a moment that reads almost like an out-of-body experience, an astral or aerial projection where he eventually “Fall back into my room.”

He calls himself a stranded “tourist” at one point, and I’ve wondered whether that’s operative slang of some kind the idea that if he crossed paths with other “tourists,” they might turn out to be operatives too. I may well be reading too much into it, but a tourist who also happens to be running a switchblade job on the side feels like more than just a man on holiday. He does talk about trying to stay good, resisting the strongest drugs, wanting to make it “out of here alive”. And his route back to something like salvation is that same Chinese radio the FM dial, the glow of the display, the digits that keep him tethered to a world outside his own head. Maybe he’s not a good man. But maybe that radio is the one thing still pulling him toward escape.

There’s a middle stretch where he describes himself as a river, running and flying and simply not stopping, until there’s genuinely nowhere left to go. He ends up on his knees, praying to the radio itself, still turning over that same question: is there really someone out there? Waiting? Laughing? He doesn’t know. He can’t explain it. Will the radio ever give him a real answer? Is there someone out there who loves him, hoping he finds his way back? Or is he actually somewhere else entirely trapped in a dream, or a coma and the radio is simply the people around him, trying to reach whatever’s left of him?

This, of course, sent my brain straight to a Call of Cthulhu scenario. Imagine it: your character wakes back in reality to discover the truth was a hospital bed all along. The missions, the blade, the encounters, all of it a violent fiction playing out somewhere else, whilst your real compatriots sat beside the bed, trying every way they know to reach you and in your dreams, this was a Chinese radio.

It’s such a wonderfully strange song, and I don’t especially care whether I’ve read too much into it! I love it regardless. Cheesy, catchy, and genuinely thoughtful lyrics underneath all that Europop gloss. I’ll link to it below if WordPress allows; give it a listen, and maybe you’ll hear something in it too. And just for fun, you’ll recognise the tune repurposed in and equality cheesy song by Olya Polyakova. Thanks for reading, we’ll Roll4Sanity, and listen to our own Chinese radio, again soon.

London Boys “Chinese Radio” https://youtu.be/Dvs8fgWbbzM

Olya Polyakova “Happy New Year”- https://youtu.be/km6wwIofA90