Amnesiac is the more accessible set - but don't tell Thom Yorke.

By Tom Moon
Philly Inquirer
03.06.01

The work of self-indulgent artistes. Pretentious claptrap. Navel-gazing anti-music copped from Pink Floyd. Experimentation that leads nowhere. And that's just the start.

Radiohead, which garnered near-universal praise for 1997's OK Computer, had never before encountered the kind of invective it received last fall for its dense, polarizing Kid A.

Many hailed the CD as visionary, but not a few were bewildered. As it tested unusual electronic collages and fractured song forms, burying the voice and trimming back hooks, the musicians once hailed as rock's last original thinkers became an oddity, purveyors of garbled, intentionally impenetrable music. No longer renegades, the five Englishmen from Oxford were accused of being self-absorbed dilettantes.

"People were sort of exasperated with [Kid A]," Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien, 33, acknowledges with a wry laugh. He is doing interviews to talk about another set of songs Radiohead recorded during the Kid A sessions - Amnesiac, in stores Tuesday - and sounds happy to refer to Kid A in the past tense. "We got lots of, 'Where's the form gone?' Now to us, we'd lived with the songs a long time, there was a form... [But] here in the UK, people thought it was us just being willfully perverse."

Singer and lyricist Thom Yorke, 32, is more acidic as he contemplates the reasons some fans and the media were reluctant to accompany Radiohead on its artistic quest. In an e-mail interview - he doesn't like to talk much - he citees the band's decision not to do interviews and videos: "It had to do with us not giving our usual pound of flesh to the appropriate taste police."

Without a charm offensive to explain the band's motives, the music of Kid A didn't have a chance, he says. To many reviewers, Yorke says mockingly, "There weren't many guitars, therefore it had no soul."

Radiohead had done what very few rock bands in this post-rock age even attempt: It had taken up a new sonic palette and entirely rethought its writing approach. Not all of its investigations, which relied on a radical set of electronic tools, reached artistic peaks. But at the very least, Kid A - which sold 847,000 copies in the United States - was bold.

"It makes us laugh when people say we're being self-indulgent simply because we aren't interested in repeating ourselves," Yorke writes. "That somehow following your creative instincts is something to be suspicious of."

The catalyst for the artistic shake-up captured on Kid A and the more disciplined Amnesiac was a simple one. Yorke had grown weary of his voice, tired of the way it and his thoughts had become the default center of Radiohead's songs.

"I changed the way I sang because I was sick of the sound of my voice and the emotional hyperbolics that I couldn't break free from," Yorke explains. In the studio, he and his bandmates would start with nothing, just a scrap of rhythm or a texture. He would write a few lines, erase them, then start again. Yorke's intent was to present his voice as just one element in a rich array.

"Sometimes my voice is just an instrument like the others, and that frees me up. I'm just underpinning what else is going on. Maybe this is something I got from electronica, and Can [the German art-rock group of the '70s] possibly... The way the voice was situated became part of the song."

He mentions Amnesiac's "Like Spinning Plates," which utilizes backward-tape effects. "It sounded uncomfortable and blunt if I sung it normally. The words were too brutal and upsetting. But back-forwards it was coming from exactly the right place."

It took Yorke some time to arrive at lyrics. He would pull words randomly from a hat, pick up scraps of things he'd photocopied. Writing in the studio, while the instrumental tracks were under construction around him, he revised constantly, working to evoke otherworldly moods rather than tell conventional stories.

"I had difficulty expressing what I needed to express for a million different reasons," Yorke writes. "It hardly ever happens that I sit down and write in one go. It's more I catch a melody like a cold and words get attached to it, building it up... And there were times when I would reach a dead stop, because I was constantly hearing all the other things that could be said." During one stretch, he simply refused to commit to anything: "That was probably because I'd lost all confidence."

Eventually, the musicians of Radiohead convinced Yorke that his lyrical approach was provocative and profoundly fresh. O'Brien: "Everything we'd done previously had really classic structures. With this, we majorly deconstructed what we were doing. I think all of us had our doubts, and, because we were so concerned with the sounds, it was important that the words didn't crowd out too much. That was Thom's challenge."

Yorke, who cites the elliptical words of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe as an influence, adds that he had grown weary of the endless analysis visited upon the lyrics of OK Computer, and was particularly chagrined that listeners and critics assumed his grandiose songs of technological alienation were autobiographical: "I was heavily neurotic about the words being projected back on to me." That interpretation "[ticks] me off, it's extremely lazy and dull."

The sessions ended in April 2000 - Radiohead had completed 26 songs and iintended to release two discs at the same time. Why that didn't happen still puzzles Yorke.

"Nobody has really explained to me properly why we couldn't [release Kid A and Amnesiac simultaneously or closer together]... I think it's maybe because the [record label's] cogs are just too large now."

That meant Radiohead had to divide the material into two distinct collections, a task Yorke and O'Brien describe as arduous. "It was clear that there were different tones," O'Brien says. "And the more we looked at [the songs that became Amnesiac] the more they stuck together. It's pretty diverse, and a completely different album from Kid A... a balance of the more obscure textural stuff, like 'Push/Pull Revolving Doors,' and songs with verses and choruses."

Ask him if the albums were divided to make a statement - with Kid A as the "experimental" set, and Amnesiac as the more accessible collection - and Yorke bristles. "There was none of that art/pop [stuff] in the discussion," he writes. "We're getting a reputation about that which I think is embarrassing and daft."

As for the future, Yorke and O'Brien say that when Radiohead next enters the studio, the band will be more prepared. One problem in working with electronic sound manipulation, O'Brien says, is that it's not interactive: "Somebody's on a computer coming up with something, then everybody reacts to it. The next time we've got to come up with ways of working so that we're all firing off samplers and drum machines and whatever at once."

He promises that the band's tour - expected to arrive in the Northeast inn August - will contain some surprises (the covers Radiohead is working up include Neil Young's classic "Cinnamon Girl") and hints that the next effort may veer in an entirely different direction.

"Personally speaking," O'Brien says, "I'd love it if we did the vaguely unexpected thing, something really up front, way in-your-face. We're well aware of the effects of age. It's not like we're old, but you have to make the most of your energy. I'd love to hear us make a record of roaring uptempo stuff."