Click on the RealAudio icon to listen to Airbag Ahhhhh... the long awaited new LP, OK Computer, is finally available
at your nearest record store. I believe that it has definitely reached the standards that were
set for it, if not gone over! The whole band agrees that the success of this
new album is a surprise. Ed nicely explained it:
"It was only last year that people got The Bends; it took
a while for it to sink in, whereas this has been almost instant." Phil agrees.
Each track is very different and all are fabulously done. Here's the running order of the album:
1. Airbag
2. Paranoid Android,
3. Subterranean Homesick Alien
4. Exit Music [for a film]
5. Let Down
6. Karma Police
7. Fitter Happier
8. Electionnering
9. Climbing Up The Walls
10. No Surprises
11. Lucky
12. The Tourist
When asked about the album, Jonny, said:
"It's a mess really. One of the things we did was trying to make Thom's voice sound different in every song, because he was getting sick of the fact that he could sing about garden furniture and it would still sound very passionate. But to me the album's more about speed and transport rather than the future and technology. The title's not meant to summarise anything and the songs are very transparent, it's very clear what they're about to me." (VOX Magazine, September 1997)
In Select magazine (July 1997) Thom talked about what each song on OK Computer was about and/or inspired by:
Airbag
"Has an airbag ever saved your life?
Nah... but I tell you something, everytime you have a near accident, instead
of sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of the car and run down the
street screaming 'I'M BACK, I'm ALIVE! My life has started again today!' In fact, you should do that everytime
you get out of a car. We're just in those things - we're not really in control of them."
Paranoid Android
Basically, an excuse to weld loads of half-finished songs together, 'Abbey Road'
style. It's Radiohead pissed and having a party. I wasn't there when it was all
stuck together - I had been sent to bed to sleep it off. What's it about? The fall
of the Roman Empire."
Subterranean Homesick Alien
"Ah, this is us desperate to be Miles Davis on 'Bitches Brew'. It's got a groove.
And it used to be called 'Uptight'. That's it, really."
Exit Music [for a film]
"We wrote this for Romeo and Juliet. I saw the Zeffirelli verson when I was
13 and I cried my eyes out because I couldn't understand why, the morning after
they shagged, they didn't just run away. It's a song written for two people
that should run away before all the bad stuff starts. A personal song."
Let Down
"I was pissed at a club and I suddenly had the funniest thought I'd had for ages - what
if all the people who were drinking were hanging from the bottles... if the bottles
were stuck to the ceiling with string and the floor caved in, and the only thing
that kept everyone up was the bottles? It's also about an enormous fear of being trapped."
Karma Police
"This is really schizophrenic, isn't it? There's a complete personality change halfway through.
Wait until you see the video. We're making the whole LP into a film, commissioning
it song by song."
Fitter Happier
"The others were downstairs 'rockin''and I crept upstairs and did this in
ten minutes. I was feeling incredible hysteria and panic, and it was so
liberating to give the lyrics to this neutral-sounding computer."
Electioneering
"I was thinking of the Poll Tax riots when I wrote this - the moment when the
horses broke through the barriers and everyone started smashing windows. It's also
from watching too many MPs on the telly - you get the feeling of, Whoah, I've
seen this once too many times."
Climbing Up The Walls
"This one's about the unspeakable. Literally skull crushing. I used to work in a mental
hospital around the time that Care In The Community started, and we all just
knew what was going to happen in this country, because a lot of them weren't just
harmless... It was hailing violently when we recorded this. It seemed to
add to the mood."
No Surprises
"The first song we recorded. That, rem, haunting, child-like guitar sound
set the mood for the whole album. We were going for that 'Pet Sounds' vibe."
Lucky
"Everyone knows about this one. Recorded it for War Child, unplayed by Radio 1.
Who's Sarah? No-one I know. It's just my favourite name."
The Tourist
"Ah, one of Jonny's songs. The lyrics came from being in a beautiful square
in France on a sunny day, and watching all these American touristsbeing wheeled
around, frantically trying to see everything in ten minutes. You Know:
We've got to be in Paris tomorrow morning! And then I saw this old bloke on
telly, saying that he couldn't work out why the world got so fast and in a
hurry. I just had an image of him standing on a street corner, watching the traffic
hurl by."
VOX Magazine, Sept. 1997
One of the most impressive aspects of OK Computer is that it sounds utterly
modern without taking the obvious, creatively bankrupt route of grafting on last
month's cool dancefloor trend. Radiohead are big fans of DJ Shadow and
Massive Attack, and plan to work with both: Thom is guesting on Shadow's
next album project while Massive look set to remix the whole of OK Computer,
schedules permitting. But it's these artists' mastery of mood that the Oxford
quintet crave, not their hipster credibility.
After all, confesses Colin, they've never been very good
at copying other people's ideas wholesale.
"What we've always done is aim ourselves towards other people's music that
we've fallen in love with," he nods. "It's like a lovers' flattery,
we try to emulate these people and always fall short. We aim for the stars - and
we hit just north of Oxford, ha ha! Like on Exit Music we tried to do a Portishead
thing at the end, but it's all really stilted and leaden and mechanical - and
it's brilliant! Perfect for that bit of the song.
Jonny agrees. "'Airbag' is a classic example of Colin and Phil saying" 'Let's make it sound like
DJ Shadow'. But unfortuantely - or fortunately - it doesn't, because we missed
again. It's that thing of lumbering around in the dark, but still being
excited by what we do. We're discovering these things for the first time
rather than getting the pro in to show us how to do it."
ack to radiohead
back to karma police
© 1997 logan@passport.ca
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