Q Magazine
[12-08-02]
Thom Yorke loves to skank
New songs are 'music you can imagine shagging to' says Thom Yorke.
Radiohead recently spent two weeks in Spain and Portugal unveiling a batch of powerful new songs intended for their 6th studio album.
Following their recent electronic experiments there have been whispers of Radiohead's 'return to rock'. But how does a group famed for never repeating themselves 'return' to anything? The new material's unstrained dynamism goes a long way in answering this question.
Kicking off the tour in Lisbon's beautiful Coliseu dos Recreios on 22 July, the group opened a two and a half hour set with a first section consisting solely of 8 unreleased numbers, all based around guitars and/or piano. To open the show, guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien each walked on carrying a large pair of beaters and pounded out the driving tribal rhythm of ThereThere from tom-toms at either side of the stage. Meanwhile, Thom Yorke scratched out a psych - rock riff on a semi-acoustic guitar.
The songs that followed took in surreal soul ballads, Bob Dylanish ranting, funky rock riffing and what Thom Yorke describes as 'music you can imagine shagging to': a claim rarely made for Kid A.
Far from reviving the monumental anthems of OK Comuter, this nimble brazenly emotional music suggests a more sensual, groove based progression from recent guitar based tracks such as Optimistic and Knives Out. Yorke's vocals are full-blooded and often unashamedly lovely.
After a short intermission, the audience were treated to a marathon selection of older material until well after midnight. The following night, after deciding that this first set was too long, the band repeated the block of new material but dispensed with the intermission. Returning for a second encore,the volume of the audience's roar forced Yorke to clasp his hands to his ears.
When a faulty sample halted proceedings, he advised the audience: 'Just go and cop off with somebody.' After a volley of screams, he replied 'I'm afraid I'm busy'.
Returning to their hotel bar, Yorke absent-mindedly picked out chords on a white grand piano while unwinding from the show. 'Thats two and a half hours plus two hours soundcheck. Four hours onstage !' he mused ' My throat's going to be shot tomorrow.'
The new tracks, he explained, were picked from 16 songs worked up over 9 weeks of rehearsals. In marked contrast to the improvisational techniques employed for Kid A and Amnesiac, Yorke sent some bare ideas he'd prepared earlier to each band member. There were no ground rules for the sessions, but he said, ' We've got this idea that we dont want to use computers'.
Last year's live mini-album, I Might Be Wrong, presented recent Radiohead material in a different light, and in the same experimental spirit these 14 Iberian shows were partly planned to expose the nascent songs to public scrutiny. However, given that the band have still to enter a studio, the songs appeared well developed.
'They still might be half formed, we dont know yet', said Ed O'Brien. 'That's why its so important playing them to an audience. Apart from Kid A, its the way we've always done it. You find out Paranoid Android's not good at 14 minutes. That 4 minute organ solo at the end doesnt work.'
Given their apparently relaxed state, is this 'Radiohead in laidback album sessions shocker '? 'those 9 weeks in rehearsal weren't easy at all,' countered Yorke.
Recording begins in September with a fortnight booked in Los Angeles. According to Parlophone boss Keith Wozencroft, producer Nigel Godrich hopes to complete the recording in that time. Yorke remained more cautious; much could still change in the studio, particularly as his current listening tastes switch between glitch techno and Bob Marley. He even expressed a longing to attempt Jamaican dancehall. 'I'd love to be able to do that, I'd love to skank',he exclaims, before approximating some ragga toasting.
Indication, perhaps, of both singer and band in rude good health.By Steve Lowe
New Musical Express
[03-08-02]
Subterranean Homesick Aliens
How five bookish Middle Englanders became the world's most vital band.They are the world's most unlikely rock megastars, small-town bookworms with a squirming revulsion for the mechanics of fame and the complacent careerism of their say-nothing peers. And yet, ten years after their first singles were slated and celebrated in the pages of NME, Radiohead remain one of the world’s most provocative, passionate and progressive bands. No other British group inspires such violent extremes of love and hatred, from NMEmail to the caustic comments of platinum-selling rivals.
Last week the Oxford quintet returned to the road in Europe, airing top-secret new songs from their sixth studio album. Until the band took the stage, nobody knew how they would sound. Would Radiohead 2002 be space jazz or avant-noise opera? Would Thom Yorke slash his wrists or launch a poisonous attack on the media, Tony Blair and global capitalism? Would Jonny Greenwood torch his guitar in a grand final ritual of post-rock subversion?
Only one thing is clear: Radiohead remain a hard act to top, a potent evolutionary force cleaning the scum from rock’s stagnant gene pool. And even a decade on, who among the current crop of retro-hipsters and brittle copycats has even a fraction of the guts and brains to knock Thom off his art-punk battlements? Even if you hate the ‘Head, can you actually deny that 21st century music urgently needs them? On these pages we retrace the long journey from provincial misfits to the world’s most vital band in 2002.
Oxford Blues
Oxford is not a rock’n’roll town. Leafy and literary, it is an island of history, heritage and highbrow culture. The sort of collegiate backwater that future rock gods escape from, change their accents, cover their tracks and never return. But not Radiohead – they stayed in Oxford, and used it as unlikely rocket fuel for their blowtorch anthems of small-town self-loathing, sexual nausea and cathartic rage.It is perhaps significant that Radiohead still keep their permanent homes in Oxford, a short but symbolic distance from London and its media-saturated hotspots. This sedate Middle England city remains a living map of the band’s landmark early years, right back to the music room at posh Abingdon School where they met and shared their illicit passion for Joy Division, The Smiths and The Pixies. Then came the shared semi on Ridgefield Road where the unsigned quintet conducted their shambolic early rehearsals on Fridays – hence their early name, On A Friday.
A short walk away lies the Jericho Tavern, where On A Friday’s incendiary shows over the summer of 1991 helped secure a management contract and a record deal. And it was back to Oxford that the band returned to celebrate after signing with EMI in December that year. Alas, the heavens opened and the band managed to lose each other in town. “It was a typical Radiohead day,” says Colin Greenwood.
Just outside Oxford, in the sleepy hamlet of Sutton Courtenay, is the Courtyard studio complex run by the band’s managers Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge. It was here that most of their debut album, Pablo Honey, was recorded. Most significant was ‘Creep’, a lacerating anthem of self-loathing inspired by an untouchable beauty Thom knew on Oxford’s social scene, which went on to become a Top Ten UK single and a massive global hit. On its second release, in September 1993, NME hailed a landmark tune with “clout, class and truth proudly branded on its forearm”.
‘Creep’ made Radiohead into global rock icons, but also potential one-hit wonders. In early 1994, Thom Yorke and his girlfriend Rachel moved into a detached house in the Oxford suburb of Headington. The singer christened his new home “the house that ‘Creep’ built”.
Radiohead could still have been Oxford boys made good after ‘Creep’ and Pablo Honey. In September 1994, NME wondered: “Will Radiohead ever, ever, ever do anything one tenth as insanely wonderful as ‘Creep’ again?” Meanwhile, Thom grew to despise the song which had made him a Kurt-style icon of self-hatred, rechristening it ‘Crap’. Even today, he rarely discusses or performs it.
But he made an exception for the hometown crowd at Radiohead’s South Park mega-show last summer, just a stone’s throw away from the modest house he bought seven years before, fearing his rock career was over. As ever, Oxford showered hysterical applause on their unlikely local heroes.
Martyrdom and Madness
Melancholy and gloomy intensity have long been Radiohead hallmarks, but Thom Yorke was incensed when the band’s doom-laden second album saw him held up in some quarters as a potential rock’n’roll martyr to rival Kurt Cobain and Richey Manic. As Craig Nicholls is discovering, suicide is never really an attractive long-term career option.Recorded in between bust-ups and breakdowns, with their American record label on the verge of dropping the band, The Bends was a monumental slab of modernist rock miles ahead of the gristly Brit-grunge of Pablo Honey. Released in March ’95, NME gave the album 9/10, branding it “the consummate, all-encompassing, continent-straddling ‘90s rock record”.
But, as with Cobain, Thom’s bilious lyrics became increasingly fixated on illness and nausea, and his onstage behaviour began to reflect his sickly state. Before playing London’s Astoria on May ’94, the singer told NME: “I’m fucking ill and physically fucked and mentally I’ve had enough.”
A prestigious summer tour in 1995 supporting REM showed Radiohead a more positive way to deal with fame. Meeting Michael Stipe, Yorke says, taught him that “it is possible to do more than two albums, and to like the idea of sticking around. Learning to forget how you did something and not trying to compete with yourself. It’s a cool thing, just learning to not have to fight and argue with yourself all the time.”
But, despite all of Thom’s coping mechanisms, depression continues to dog him today. “It’s not particularly destructive, it’s not particularly bad,” he told NME last year. “Lots of people are much worse – lots of people can’t leave the house. They’ve got no idea why, maybe they never will find out why. The drugs they get given don’t work, and all the therapy is completely pointless.”
Even the most recent Radiohead albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, were recorded between bouts of hallucination and paranoia. But don’t mistake Yorke for a sacrificial victim. “A lot of creative people hear voices, a lot of creative people have crazy thoughts, a lot of creative people want to jump off bridges,” he argues. “So fucking what…?”
Paranoid Androids
Right from their beginning, Radiohead have enjoyed fractious relations with the music press. This type of on-off vendetta often comes about because most big bands are surrounded by salaried sycophants whose jobs depend on keeping their paymasters happy. The frank opinions of free-thinking journalists can come as a nasty shock.In fairness, NME was sometimes mercilessly scathing of the band’s early efforts, labelling them a “pitiful, lily-livered excuse for a rock’n’roll group” in late-1992. But it was a December ’95 news report headlined “Thommy’s Temper Tantrum”, about the singer’s onstage breakdown in Munich, that finally sent Yorke over the edge. He refused to speak to the paper for over five years, protesting that “I’m sure the NME don’t give a fuck, but what they wrote in that piece hurt me more than anything else anyone has ever written about me.”
Ironically, this media freeze-out coincided with Radiohead’s most critically adored album to date, OK Computer. Recorded by Nigel Godrich over several painstaking months in various locations, this epochal work finally arrived in June 1997. Laying down a blueprint for 21st century rock, it saw the band transcend conventional pop forms to create a futuristic collage of textured breakbeats, techno-classical symphonies and pre-millennial tension.
After lauding the “ravishingly over-ambitious” six-minute single ‘Paranoid Android’, NME awarded the chart-topping OK Computer a rare-as-platinum 10/10 score, hailing “one of the greatest albums in living memory – and one that distances Radiohead from their peers by an interstellar mile”. But when the number four single ‘No Surprises’ arrived in January 1998, NME still called it the album’s “most self-pitying, miserablist low point” and printed the telephone number of the Samaritans. Cheeky.
OK Computer became a worldwide phenomenon, spawning a raft of hits and earning a Mercury Music Prize nomination. But by his own admission Thom, inundated with hysterical acclaim, became an unbearable control freak. “I created a climate of fear, the same way Stalin did,” he admitted last year. “I was very paranoid that things would get taken away from me. It was to do with being under massive amounts of pressure. I was so uptight about not getting my own way.”
But if OK Computer almost split Radiohead, it also closed their first chapter and allowed them to return to the musical drawing board. The foundations were laid for fresh sounds and more mellow, democratic working methods. By May 2001, Thom was even ready to bury the hatchet with NME. “I just got sick of holding grudges basically,” he shrugged after finally agreeing to an interview. “Enough’s enough.”
Post-rock Protest Songs
Since the new millennium dawned, Radiohead have tempered personal angst with social activism. Although some lyrics on OK Computer had a political dimension, it was not until the late-‘90s that Thom began to use his celebrity clout to help boost anti-poverty campaigns such as Drop The Debt and Jubilee 2000, picketing the G8 summit and attending May Day marches.Tapping into a new wave of youthful activism celebrated in Naomi Klein’s provocative anti-globalisation handbook No Logo, Radiohead toured in 2000 under a big tent free from advertising logos. Klein has since become friendly with the band but says: “My personal influence on Radiohead has been greatly exaggerated. The band had these political ideas long before reading my book, but until a couple of years ago there was less going on politically to tap into.”
As their political message sharpened, however, Radiohead’s music turned even more cryptic. Their fourth album, Kid A, an artfully avant-garde collage of deconstructed post-rock and electro-ambient tone poems, arrived in October 2000 with no singles and minimal promotion. In a cautiously positive 7/10 review, NME noted: “In a desire to quash the rampant air of significance suffusing their every movement and utterance, they’ve rather sold short the essence of their art.”
And yet, despite being seen in some quarters as a self-defeating climbdown from the pressures of success, Kid A topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. All of which could be dismissed as a freak act of mass brand loyalty, except that the record’s equally challenging sister album Amnesiac was launched to similar success in June 2001, incorporating jazz, machine noise and a wearily sarcastic attack on Tony Blair. Amnesiac was praised in an 8/10 NME review which for its “blinking circuitry and vocal distortions” and “bile that could burn through steel”.
Having proved that proven major label chart acts can be both politically outspoken and musically adventurous, Radiohead continue to improvise their own future. Just this year, the band donated a rare video for ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ to the Friends Of The Earth website. As Thom writes on the site: “It’s not good enough to preach about the trickle-down effect of economic growth if your house is being washed away, your child has skin cancer, you can’t get clean water and the weather is changing beyond recognition forever.” Imagine a fuzzy electronic pulse behind those cheery words and you have a fair approximation of Radiohead in the 21st century.
These days Radiohead are a uniquely unpredictable force. They release albums in clusters, record when the mood takes them and tour when they choose rather than chaining themselves to the mega-band treadmill. And for much of the next few weeks, they will be continuing to ‘road test’ new songs at low-key shows in Spain and Portugal. As ever, plotting their own path on their own terms. Which is why, even after a decade of making records, Radiohead probably matter more today than ever. Of all their peers, only they have consistently pushed the musical and political agenda, setting high standards for any serious young contenders.
Fellow veterans like Primal Scream may share a similar maverick spirit, while a new generation of post-‘Head rockers such as Muse and Coldplay occasionally summon up equally fiery demons. But only Radiohead seem to have developed the capacity for total, passionate, exhilarating self-reinvention. Have you the slightest idea what their next album will sound like? Us neither. Isn’t that fantastic?
Everything In Its Right Place
Ten key Radiohead gigs
1 The Venue, Oxford, February 1992
Performing as On A Friday in what would later become The Zodiac, they receive their first plaudits from NME, which declares that they display “astonishing intensity”.
Key song: ‘Stop Whispering”2 Oxford South Park, July 7, 2001
The band host a festival in their own backyard. NME describes Radiohead as “godlike” despite the thrashing rain during an encore of ‘Creep’. Beck, Sigur Ros, Supergrass and Humphrey Lyttleton are also along for the brilliant ride.
Key song: ‘Pyramid Song’3 Glastonbury, June 28, 1997
The moment that proves what NME has long suggested – that they are destined to be the biggest band in the world. Furthermore, they make 100,000 people forget they are in the most miserable, mud-sodden place on Earth.
Key song: ‘Paranoid Android’ (“rain down”, indeed)4 Roseland Ballroom, New York, October 11, 2000
Inspiring the biggest ever influx of emails to NME, as ticketless fans gnash their teeth, this show fulfils all US fans’ expectations as Thom Yorke delivers one of the performances of his life.
Key song: ‘Morning Bell’5 Riem Airport, Munich, November 25, 1995
A show which goes ahead despite Thom’s ill health; he blacks out during ‘Creep’. “I just got really fucking freaked out,” he says later. “I got tunnel vision, I threw stuff around and ended up with blood all over my face. I cried for two hours afterwards.”
Key song: ‘Creep’6 Theatre Antique, Arles, June 13, 2000
From the site of an ancient Roman amphitheatre they unveil the songs that will become Kid A and Amnesiac. NME.COM says: “The new songs suggest that the forthcoming album will be nothing short of magnificent.”
Key song: ‘Knives Out’7 Milton Keynes Bowl (supporting REM), July 30, 1995
Here, it could be argued, is where the baton of greatest rock band in the world is passed to Yorke by Stipe, who as early as 1993 had declared: “Radiohead are so good they scare me.”
Key song: ‘Just’8 T In The Park, July 13, 1996
A faultless performance at their last UK show before they disappear to record OK Computer. Hinting at the greatness to follow, ‘Lucky’ reduces grown men to tears.
Key song: ‘Lucky’9 The Astoria, London, September 3, 1997
A fan club-only show which serves to highlight the astonishing number of B-sides that should be on an album. From ‘Banana Co’ through to ‘Maquiladora’, it underlines that Radiohead are unrivalled in the quality of their single releases.
Key song: ‘Talk Show Host’10 BBC Television Centre, London, June 9, 2001
The Later With Jools Holland special that launches Amnesiac and includes (sadly, never to be broadcast) a stunning interpretation of Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’, so rocking that it underlines the new-found love of guitars.
Key song: ‘Cinnamon Girl’
Head Music
Pablo Honey (1993)
Twenty years of pre-fame existence rush-recorded into an uneven grunge-rock debut with overly polished production. Plenty of pent-up potential but few real anthems besides ‘Creep'. (6/10)The Bends (1995)
Radiohead find their voice on this slow-burning collections of doomy lullabies and heavily treated guitars, including complaint-rock classics ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. Initially shunned by America but five Top 30 hits in Britain. (8/10)OK Computer (1997)
A symphony of travel sickness and millennial nausea fusing trip-hop rhythms, Gregorian chants, processed guitar shimmers and barely a duff note. Showered with acclaim and awards, it contains shimmering cosmic beauties ‘Karma Police’ and ‘No Surprises’. (10/10)Kid A (2000)
Moves beyond the architectural majesty of OK Computer into a sci-fi netherworld of Aphex-old drones, psychedelic textures and fractal rhythms. Baffles some old-school fans, but radically reinvents Radiohead for the new millennium. (7/10)Amnesiac (2001)
A companion piece to Kid A recorded over the same period. Amnesiac adds slightly more melodic elements to the hermetically sealed alienation of its predecessor. Spectral and unsettling, but incorporating Smiths-ian guitar ballads and even a dash of Dixieland jazz. (8/10)By Stephen Dalton