Defying people is easy

Radiohead went uncommercical with Kid A and had its biggest hit. What will the band do for a follow-up?

By Ken Micallef
Pulse!
07.01

Top of the Pops is a British TV program watched by trendy U.K. teens who still worship the Top 40 music charts as if it's the Holy Grail. Stretching back to Herman's Hermits and pre-war Elvis, the show has starred one-hit wonders as lager and biscuit manufacturers spent the big advertising dollars and cents. On a typical rainy London afternoon, Radiohead is about to appear on Top of the Pops performing untested, unheard material from the band's new album, Amnesiac (Capitol). Radiohead on Top of the Pops? This would seem a lunatic venue for this band of neurotic, troubled souls, who, after all, made a documentary called Meeting People Is Easy which showed Radiohead's five members climbing the walls and snarling at each other while cameras rolled, and who, like Dylan turning electric, followed the global success of their masterpiece OK Computer with the audience-polarizing electronica manifesto, Kid A. But here they are, alongside Brandy, Travis and Mel B, with new songs and shiny happy faces in place.

But does anyone care? Can Radiohead triumph again after the media disdain and public confusion post-Kid A if Amnesiac offers more of the same loops, samples and ghostly, guitar-free white noise?

After strolling through the front door of Riverside Studios in Hammersmith as unnoticed as the cleaning lady, Thom Yorke is now onstage, at the piano, with the other disheveled members of Radiohead. The worst dressed people in the studio, the band ambled on stage as Spice Girl Mel B lip-synched her latest flop. Some fans approach Yorke and bassist Colin Greenwood and engage them in conversation; the pair happily field questions. Yorke even signs autographs. Guitarist Ed O'Brien chats up the young ladies stage right, while lead guitarist Johnny Greenwood toys with his new string machine, an Analogue Systems RS Integrator. Drummer Phil Selway adjusts his tie. This Radiohead seems fitter, happier and infinitely more relaxed than its "miserable geniuses" persona. Yorke plays piano along with the bumper music and then rips off a Liberace run on the piano, ending with a flourish of notes and hands in the air as if saying, "Voila!" This is scary.

Radiohead will perform two selections from Amnesiac, "Pyramid Song" and "Knives Out." While "Knives" is a swinging return to blissful guitars all around (and a tribute to the Smiths), "Pyramid Song" is Radiohead at its most beautiful, woozy and otherworldly, an odd-metered song of ascending strings, a revolving piano sequence and Yorke's angelic vocal dust. It goes off without a hitch. Sounding spookily close to the album version, "Pyramid Song" chills in live performance, even if young girls ogling Yorke up close is rather perverse. After the song's final piano note, Yorke runs to Colin Greenwood for approval, who shouts, "That was great!" Yorke looks relieved. But "Knives Out" takes multiple takes to get right, as Yorke breaks strings, curses, mumbles and snarls at the audience. Afterward, the band drinks and chats with the fans out front at the bar, to everyone's astonishment.

"It was pretty mellow, not a problem," says Yorke a few days later at Radiohead central near Oxford. "There was no one there and that is a studio where they are very used to having bands doing that. Anyway, we wanted a drink. We were all wound up; we were going to have a bloody drink."

Thom Yorke is relaxed and personable these days, wearing a new denim coat-and- pants outfit that looks positively 1979. He will discuss anything and most everything at length, including music, politics (see Amnesiac's "You and Whose Army?"), the IMF and the World Bank (see "Dollars & Cents"), art... even his new son, Noah. But don't get too personal. "That is autobiographical, and I don't do autobiographical," he will say. The Radiohead most likely to self-destruct in Meeting People Is Easy has learned his lesson. And he has something to get off his chest.

"What really pisses me off is this idea that I am this tortured artist."

He smiles. Sort of. The songwriter who penned "How to Disappear Completely" and "Creep" and who led the charge to smear Radiohead's resplendent guitars into a mass of swirling loops, asserts he is no miserable nutter, not a simple sum of his morose, forlorn lyrics.

"That is something based on flimsy evidence which is endlessly being projected back onto us. It is just reductive and dull. In order to be creative there has to be a distance from you and the thing itself. It is only when the distance gets confused that things go wrong. If you actually start to believe that you are what you write, then you have fucking had it. You have had it and you ain't coming back. To assume that everything is about somebody's life is to assume that that person is inherently stupid and isn't capable of absorbing anything else. The whole point of creativity is that you spend your whole life absorbing things almost to where it is unbearable. The way you deal with it is get it out."

He pauses and shifts in his chair.

"Basically," he says with a laugh, "I hear all these voices and I have to put them down in order to shut the fuckers up."

So no therapy needed after the evil touring of OK Computer and confronting the demons of success?

"It was just a lot of re-evaluation, really." Pause #2. "If I didn't give a shit it would have been fine, but I was so focused for so long, it was like waking up one morning and realizing you had made a wrong turn and you have to work out how to get back."

With the fuckers at bay for a while, Amnesiac is both an extension of Kid A and a minor return to the Greenwood/O'Brien guitar glory of olde. There is no "Karma Police" or "Let Down" here, but there is beauty, humor and madness. Largely inspired by Charles Mingus' "Freedom Song" as well as the music of Autechre, Aphex Twin and Alice Coltrane, Amnesiac offers Kid A-styled computer loops 'n' fun with "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "Like Spinning Plates." But unlike Kid A's frigid designs, Amnesiac is warmer and more at peace with itself. "Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box" starts with tinny loops but is soon soothed by Yorke's dreamy voice and the Martian tones of the Ondes Martinot, a primitive but astounding keyboard invented in the '20s and used by composer Olivier Messiaen. "Knives Out" rolls Moonward with intertwining guitars and Yorke's lone howl while the scary "Dollars & Cents" floats ominously like a decayed ghost on prowl for lost souls. But "You and Whose Army?," projected on a fabric of overlapping Yorke voices and pretty guitar, stuns as it climbs from bare-bones simplicity to "Hey Jude"-styled legend. The equally beautiful "Pyramid Song" was taken from a dream Yorke had about a boat full of plane crash survivors. And a remake of "Morning Bell" (from Kid A) sounds somehow like John Lennon's "Across the Universe." Bang on! Amnesiac ends with the questionable New Orleans sendup, "Life In a Glasshouse." Radiohead doesn't hand it to you on a plate, ready for sonic consumption, but Amnesiac will glue itself to your memory if you let it. Like the best jazz or blues, Amnesiac is subtle, serious music.

And Thom Yorke doesn't know what the big deal is. Kid A and Amnesiac were recorded at the same time with the same methods of computer-cutting and sampler-splicing, but the two records sound and feel quite different. But early reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin seem not to notice. Radiohead moves into the future - the old guard lives in the past.

"This is what I don't get," Yorke spouts. "I do not understand why someone would say 'They are not using melodies anymore.' Did they not hear 'Morning Bell'? How much more melodic can you get? It is in a major key, a happy, positive melody. What the fuck do they want? When we started Kid A I told my partner Rachel, 'We are damned if we do and we're damned if we don't.' It doesn't matter what we do next; there will be an element, of not resentment, but if you put someone up on that level, it is no good to anybody, really. It is not going to help your attitude to what may be next. It doesn't really matter where you go or what you do, the only way is down."

Colin Greenwood, the band's resident optimist, manages to look up and ahead. Sitting in a restaurant the day after TOTP, he rambles about his love of German electronica and fave writer Willa Cather (Greenwood "read English" at Oxford, ahem).

"We can do a record next year that has lots of guitar pop and beautiful tunes on it," he advances, "or we can do a record of sequenced computer music. We can do anything. And we want people to think we can do anything rather than think, 'Oh, they are doing what will work in front of 25,000 people in an American arena.'"

Radiohead is grabbing contemporary music by the arse and giving it a good shake. Will the guitar reign in the year 2525? Ha. Today's trendsetting young record buyers are into electronica and Radiohead, and while the electronica revolution fizzled in the U.S. in the eyes of the media, it has continued to grow underground, where it belongs. Autechre sharing radio space with boy bands and lukewarm hip-hop? Not likely. But while radio splinters and real music is made in bedrooms, not boardrooms, computers will offer the new folk music of the DIY industry. And Radiohead, more than any current popular "band," is more aware of that, and more capable to deal with the process.

"I think it is a very different atmosphere now to what it was when we started," says Yorke. "Both records are really not that radical in terms of a change. It is a transition thing and it is cool because the records work. When we put them together they felt good. Everybody understood much better then where we were aiming at."

And did you know where you were going before you got there?

"Oh yes," he laughs mockingly.

But what of those guitars? Rumor has it, and Greenwood confirms, that Radiohead is back in the studio, making big, brash slabs of guitar rock and melody. What does it sound like? Where is Radiohead headed? Is Kid Z somewhere in the future?

"Oh, hmm." Greenwood ponders his fate and the coming Oxford sound. "Band, guitars, bass and stuff. And laptop music. It should be a return to The Bends and OK Computer as well as adventuring to somewhere else. The first tape we gave our management of 12 songs in 1991, each song was influenced by Japan, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., and our manager said 'You are promising, but I don't know where you are. It is not one style.' But that disparity of taste and style and influence is something that we like. With the next album we are returning to what we sounded like before we signed to a major label. We are doing a big circle. There will always be songs like 'Knives Out' and 'Just' and 'Fake Plastic Trees.' And songs like 'Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors' as well. Always progressing, but not progressive!"