Radiohead: The Band Who Stole the World

Doug Levy
C.M.J.
06.03

Panic attacks, terror alerts, a looming darkness on the horizon, and everything you thought you knew about life slowly fracturing and coming undone - this could quite possibly be the end of the world. Or it could just mean that Radiohead is finally back.

Thankfully, the latter scenario provides a lot more reason to shout than shiver, and with the arrival of Hail To The Thief, the sixth album from Oxford, England’s favorite sons, it’s also an actuality. Taking the claustrophobic electronic experimentation of the band’s last two releases, Kid A and Amnesiac, and re-appropriating it into the full band dynamic that made Radiohead such a fiercely interdependent unit to begin with, the album is in many ways a culmination of everything the group has done to date.

Of course, with Thief arguably being the most eagerly-awaited album of the year, expectations have risen to a rather intense level, and, as with the last release, talk has been circulating wildly that the disc would see a return to the more guitar-based rock of earlier Radiohead releases. Surprisingly, the album’s opening track, “2 + 2 = 5,” a darkly melodic haunted-house-soundtrack that rapidly devolves into a guitar-and-vocal freakout, seems to support that idea. But as the immensely diverse instrumentation, both organic and electronic, of the following tracks reveals, this record is far from a regression. Which raises the question: Why would anyone get the idea that one of the most forward-thinking bands in history would ever take a step backward?

“I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking or what,” ponders drummer Phil Selway, the man responsible for providing the rhythmic backbone of the ever-evolving Radiohead sound. Along with frontman Thom Yorke, guitarists Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood and bassist Colin Greenwood, he’s currently in Ireland, where mere minutes ago, the band wrapped the final production rehearsal for its first U.K. tour in support of the new disc. The album’s completion is still a very new thing, and more big things are about to happen. Reflection and anticipation co-exist in equal measure.

“We made no bones about the fact that this disc, from the outset, was going to be based more around band performances,” emphasizes Selway. “The shows that we did as part of the preparation for recording last summer, they were all up on the Web, so I think people got quite a fixed idea from the recordings of the new material then. But the thought that we’d returned completely to how we worked around The Bends, or OK Computer - that would be quite limiting, really; because that whole process felt quite limiting to us at the time.

“But at the same time, this record has been a time where we have actually taken elements from all our other records. Because we’re a different band now; because we play better together; we’ve got our heads around getting the more technological aspects of music working alongside - or within, actually - the framework of a band playing. I actually have a personal take on that, as well: I think that ability allows you then to take elements of things that you’ve worked on before and shed new light on them. And I think that’s what we’ve done. We have drawn from all our experiences really, as a band.”

And not only has Radiohead drawn from those experiences; it has also learned from them. The recording process during the sessions that would go on to comprise Kid A and Amnesiac has been infamously documented as a painstaking, soul-numbing affair. The degree of pressure that settled on the band in the aftermath of the overwhelming success of OK Computer was almost too much to cope with. The group kept a low public profile, but by all reports, Thom Yorke was seriously cracking up, and the future of the band began to become shrouded in serious doubt. With all of the intense expectation from fans across the globe, the weight of the world seemed to be quite literally resting on all of the band members’ shoulders. But in getting through that difficult time, they were also able to learn a valuable lesson: difficult as it may be, to function properly and to make music for the sheer sake of making music, other people’s expectations have to be ignored.

“I think that contributed a lot to the slowness of the Kid A sessions, really,” admits Selway. “We were just startled a little bit at the beginning of those sessions. But I think because we worked through that anxiety when we were recording that record, it wasn’t there this time. It really wasn’t. Kid A definitely ground to a halt on quite a regular basis. But we overhauled the engine and it’s ticking over very smoothly now.” A brief pause, before he chuckles and adds, “Well, it was for the course of this album, anyway.”

In fact, the band’s approach to making Hail To The Thief was so drastically different from those last sessions in the studio that it was able to record the album much faster this time, with the added relief of no longer having to worry about being excessively meticulous. And at the heart of it, the reason for the change is really quite simple: “We’ve got our enthusiasm and our excitement about playing as a band back,” confesses Selway. “That was the main inspiration at the beginning of it. What you hear on the live album, the I Might Be Wrong recordings - the kind of energy that was in the performances there - that was where we found our inspiration.”

Although the record was recorded in a relatively short time compared to the last releases, however, it was hardly just thrown together. “A lot did go into it,” Selway explains. “Not necessarily all now, but it’s drawing on 17 years of experience as a band, really. And also, we did a lot of preparation before we went in to record this time. We did two-and-a-half months worth of rehearsals and pre-production, then we went out and toured all the songs, because we knew that would have a positive effect on what we did in the studio. That actually is what allowed us to go in and work very fast.

“If there was a kind of lightness to what we were doing, it’s because we were working quickly,” he continues. “Even though there’s a lot of cumulative experience in what we were doing, we weren’t overanalyzing every single note or every single word as we were working. So for a lot of the sessions, there was a kind of spontaneity in the performances, a genuine life to them.”

Most importantly, the band is finally enjoying itself again.

“I think that really comes across on the record in the performances,” says Selway. “I mean, it’s not a bright and necessarily happy record, but it’s a warm and quite passionate record, and I think that that can only really come from those elements being there in the studio.”

From the dreamy piano-based lullaby of “Sail To The Moon” to the acid-laced synth nightmare of “Myxomatosis” to the otherworldly groove of “Where I End And You Begin” and all the way through to the closing rhythmic vocals of the Grimm “A Wolf At The Door,” if there’s one thing that’s immediately clear overall, it’s that whatever clinical elements had crept into the Radiohead camp in recent years have indeed been exorcised. And with the amount of variety offered this time around, everyone is bound to have a different favorite track, band members included.

“I’m really happy with the way ‘Go To Sleep’ turned out,” says Selway, “because that was probably the track that we were having the most difficulty with arranging during pre-production, and then on the touring. I think it was a good measure of how much we’ve come on as musicians - that within the space of a day in the studio, we had actually thrown together a good arrangement.”

In retrospect, and as evidenced by Hail To The Thief, perhaps the most unusual thing about Radiohead’s long career has been the band’s uncanny ability to find success where other acts fail to be recognized; most artists who take left-of-center approaches to making music tend to be virtually ignored by mainstream radio and the general public, whereas the more Radiohead pushes the envelope through experimentation and progression, the wider the arms of the world seem to open to embrace it.

Normally, a band releasing the kinds of albums that this one has been peddling for the last few years would be relegated exclusively to the airwaves of College Radio. Which, of course, while it isn’t the case, wouldn’t be a bad thing. “In a lot of ways, College Radio is generally where you can hear the best music, really,” agrees Selway. “I suppose we like to think of our music appearing in a good context, and for us, that’s a very good context. People there, more so than in other formats, seem to be following their genuine tastes, rather than a playlist that’s very prescribed. So, actually being heard in that context, I think is great.”

However, exactly how Radiohead managed to not only rise out of that market, but to remain wholeheartedly welcomed by a population usually satisfied with more generic fare, while continually converting more and more fans even as it became less and less accessible, remains, at least in some part, a mystery - and the band will be the first to admit it.

“The idea of a record like Kid A going to No. 1 is just utterly bizarre,” laughs Selway, searching for some sort of explanation. But ultimately, the best he can come up with is support for a bit of classic advice: Follow your heart and find your true path.

“I think we’ve always done things for the right reasons, musically. There’s something very vague sounding about saying that we’re uncompromising, but there have been a lot of compromises that we have just not been prepared to make as we’ve gone along. I think that provides a good framework for actually allowing creative freedom to grow - it’s all part and parcel of doing things for what we believe to be the right reasons; we can square the decisions that we make with ourselves. I think if you let that kind of thing guide the process, then the good music follows from that. Everything does actually flow from that point.”

So, score one more for idealism and creative vision. Score one more for Radiohead with the extremely uncompromising Hail To The Thief. But don’t forget that one final, essential factor: “We’ve been very lucky,” concludes Selway. “We’ll be the first to acknowledge that. A good deal of luck is most definitely in there.”

The perfect, if irreplicable, recipe for sacrifice-free success: feel free to try it at home.