Radiohead calling
Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood phones Kevin Courtney to tell him about
recording their new album OK Computer, tipped to push the band into the big
league
Friends usually phone you out of the blue, but rock star calls tend to be
wellplanned affairs, arranged in advance through the record company, and
requiring a fax roll or two, a couple of signed affidavits and even a
secret password before a single word can be spoken. So it was a pleasant
surprise to get a phone message early one afternoon informing me that Jonny
Greenwood from Radiohead was going to call in 10 minutes and talk about his
band's new album, OK Computer, and their upcoming gig at Dublin's RDS
Showgrounds.
That gave me exactly 600 seconds to do a quick recap: let's see now,
Radiohead . . . Formed in Oxfordshire in 1991; name taken from the title of
a Talking Heads song; band led by diminutive, misanthropic songwriter Thom
Yorke; band initially dismissed by the critics; single Creep becomes
surprise US hit; début album, Pablo Honey, sells two million copies
worldwide; second album The Bends stiffs in US but is unanimously hailed by
the critics; band's songs covered by such diverse artists as Alanis
Morissette, Chrissie Hynde, Tears For Fears, Mark Owen and Brian Kennedy;
forthcoming album, OK Computer, tipped to push Radiohead into the U2 league
. . . Hello, Jonny! How nice of you to call!
"I just enjoy talking to people in Ireland," says the guitarist without a
hint of plámás in his voice. "I didn't want to just sit around waiting for
the NME to do something on the gig, so I thought I'd get proactive and
start pestering people like you."
Jonny is calling from the band's office outside Oxford, close to their
rehearsal studios and a stone's throw from all their homes. The Oxfordshire
landscape, he says, is "all cottages and power stations", which might well
explain the blend of pastoral strains and industrial textures in
Radiohead's music. They'd rather be in Dublin, confesses Jonny, but they've
got to stick around to finish off the mixing of OK Computer.
"Thom and I stayed there for a week after our show in Galway last year,"
says Jonny. "We just went up to Dublin and it was amazing, we go quite
often, we've got a lot of friends there."
That's the `we're really looking forward to playing in Dublin' bit out of
the way then. What's more interesting is that OK Computer was recorded over
a couple of months in, of all places, Jane Seymour's house in Bath,
Somerset.
"We sort of squatted there! It was cool. We just kind of got our own stuff
together and set it up there. Studios are generally very horrible places
for recording - they're pretty unmusical - so we just decided to turn a big
empty house into a studio, and that one was available. She said to us,
`come and stay', handed us the keys and told us to feed the cat."
Ms Seymour is busy elsewhere in the world, starring in the television
series, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, so she probably isn't home that often.
Her show's average viewer probably wouldn't know who Radiohead are either,
but that could all change when OK Computer hits the shelves on June 16th.
What's the prognosis on Radiohead becoming a household name?
"Well, I don't know, I'm not so sure," muses Jonny. "I think the common
perception is that we're all set up to do the big crossover, commercial,
stupidly large, colossal album, but we've just carried on from The Bends,
really, and recorded songs in a similar fashion. So I don't think that's
going to happen, really. There's no big crossover track on it. It's just
The Bends Mark II in a way."
So was The Bends deliberately designed not to be a big crossover album,
then? "Well, no. Everyone just started saying, oh, you've had it with
Creep, and you haven't got another album in you, etcetera, etcetera, so we
just recorded some songs."
Some songs indeed. The Bends is as close as bedamned to a modern rock
masterpiece, an album where crashing, cathartic sounds meet fragile,
faltering spirits, and anguished songs like High + Dry, Fake Plastic Trees
and Just have the piercing ring of honesty and truth. The Americans didn't
go for it much, since it lacked a dumbass anthem like Creep, but the Brit
crits put it high in their Best of 1995 lists. It may not have sold
zillions, but The Bends is proving a bit of a sleeper, still nestling in
the UK album charts almost two years after its release.
In the US, however, The Bends managed to dispel the stale smell of
premature success which began to waft around Creep ("we were afraid of
being lumped in with bands like 4 Non-Blondes, who also had a big hit
single") and it bought time for Radiohead to regroup their creative forces.
It has also allowed space for the Radiohead myth to grow, and by the time
the band hits the road this summer for live shows in Britain, Ireland and
mainland Europe, they might well be in for some all-out superstar
adulation. But is Jonny ready for the mad whirl of touring? "Completely
not, no," says the guitarist. "I've got no expectations really. We've kind
of got some expectations from Ireland, because we never fail to have some
wild, insane times there. I dunno, that's up to you really!"
They have sold all 35,000 tickets for the Dublin date, but regarding the
big stadiums everywhere else: "We haven't toured here [in Britain] for a
year and a half, so it's hard to tell. We put tickets on sale for the
British shows, and they sold out in so many days, so I suppose people are
interested. But we're only playing small theatres. Ireland is the only show
we're doing that's on that scale."
Irish fans will have to hold out till June 21st to hear Radiohead perform
their new songs on stage, but if you can't wait that long, just fly off to
Spain, where the new songs will get their first live airing in Barcelona
next Thursday. Two tracks have already been heard on record: Lucky, which
the band contributed to last year's Help album, and Exit Music, which
features on the best-selling soundtrack for Romeo And Juliet. On Monday,
the band release the official first cut from the album, the six-minute-plus
mini-epic Paranoid Android.
"We're still into the idea of releasing singles for people to own and
listen to, rather than just giving them free to radio stations and trying
to get the drivetime radio slot."
The other songs on the album include Electioneering, "which is certainly
the hardest thing we've ever recorded, and then again there's one song
called The Tourist which has got less movement and sounds in it than
anything else we've recorded. We get bored very quickly with styles of
music that we've done, which I think is one of the strengths of The Bends,
that each song is trying to do something different. And we've just done
that again really with OK Computer."
Radiohead's single Paranoid Android is released on Monday; the album OK
Com- puter is released on June 16th; The Longest Day, featuring Radiohead
and Massive Attack, is at the RDS Showgrounds on Saturday June 21st.
MOO!