'Head Music

Album of the year: Kid A

By Brianne Jordan
Access
12.00

With the tremendous but unsurprising success of their latest record, Kid A, Oxford, England's Radiohead are at the centre of a massive media storm despite their best efforts to avoid videos, interviews and other conventional means of music marketing.

Although not the focus of the same kind of obsessive fan attention as singer Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien is no less deserving of attention. Tall and polite, he displays a deep intelligence and humour. Water bottle and bountiful education on hand, O'Brien takes everything dished out with the utmost charm - even 'fuck' sounds nice in his English accent. Access sat down with the guitarist after their recent Toronto show to discuss their distaste of corporate logos, the difficult making of Kid A, and the soul-destroying nature of media.

In terms of musical influences, Radiohead cites jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. Has anyone else influenced you?

Oh yeah. In music and stuff like that, there's a lot: we listen to Boards of Canada, Thom's been listening to a lot of Autechre. Even people like Talk Talk, Talking Heads. And on a non musical side, which is just as important, people like Naomi Klein and her book No Logo made an enormous impression on us when we were in the thick of the recording studio.

You played the Air Canada Centre's Sears Theatre last night, which is plastered with logos.

The Air Canada Centre we HAD to play. It was the only place we could get enough people into. But if you want an honest reaction to it, the place sucks. [It's] fucking everything we hate... It's a bloody sports arena, and it's not a place where bands should be playing music. It's very demoralizing for bands to see that shit, for our band it is. Everywhere you look it's a corporate logo. Money is not everything, it really isn't.

Did No Logo influence your decision not to do a lot of media?

In a very subtle way. Look at media nowadays, especially with being in the band. When you have a new album coming out, there's the emphasis on doing everything. On OK Computer we did everything: spending three hours in a room in Barcelona doing radio ID's, something like 500 of them for radio stations all around the world. It's kind of...

Soul sucking?

Yeah. I mean for one thing now it's not physically possible to do that many interviews otherwise you're going to get into bad moods. We're not willing to do that. We give two or three a day, rather [than] on OK Computer, [where we were] turning out the same old crap the whole time, doing the same old stuff. We could have those answers on our website.

From what I've read about the making Kid A, Thom basically said 'Let's go in this direction'. If anyone else in the band had made that kind of request what would have happened?

It wasn't quite as simple as that. It was more a case of we all didn't want to go over old ground. Thom was the most insistent about change: 'Now, now, now!' Thom is the lead singer, he's the primary songwriter in the band, so you've always got leaders, and he's the leader of the band.

One of the most important things, and the best thing about Radiohead, is that we are an amazing team together. We work like all the elements. Thom's part of that. He, on this album more than ever before, drove us on.

If you hadn't been able to do this, would you have broken up?

Probably, yeah. Almost certainly.

Some of the members have gotten married, had children. How have the dynamics of the band or the music changed as you've grown older?

It doesn't affect the band in any way because what we try and do is make sure that the band works around that now. That's important for it to continue. Some of the last few years have [made us] change to incorporate normality, which is relationships, children. What [happens] is those things tend to fit around the band, because the band is like the boys club.