Music - Rahiohead

All five members of the band are natives of Oxford, where they met at Abingdon School. Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood were the first to hit it off at Abingdon, sharing an affinity for Joy Division, Magazine, and cross-dressing. Ed O'Brien was added because Thom thought he was "cool and looked like Morrissey." Phil Selway replaced the trio's drum machine, and the foursome formed On A Friday, named after - what else? - the day they practiced. Soon, Colin's younger brother, Jonny, joined their ranks on harmonica, but the quintet soon put their budding career on hold as various members shuttled off to universities.

Radiohead Photo 2 During vacations from school, On A Friday was revived; live shows featured a brass section and, as a closer, a rousing rendition of Elvis Costello's Pump It Up. In the summer of 1991, after the members had all completed school, they regrouped in Oxford, and eventually changed their name to Radiohead (Radio Head is a Talking Heads song on the album True Stories). With other commitments out of the way, they began to take the band seriously, and it didn't take long for the powers-that-be to take notice: after their first official gig, Radiohead received more than twenty record-company offers.

Radiohead's first release was a 1992 UK-only EP, Drill, which sparked enough interest to land them opening slots on tours with PJ Harvey, Tears for Fears, and James, just to name a few. But this was only the beginning, as a song called Creep was about to change their careers forever. Creep hit UK airwaves in the second half of 1992 and was eventually named one of the top British singles of both that year and the next. The song, which was perceived as an anthem for the alienated, had little in common with the rest of their first album, Pablo Honey, released in 1993. In fact, some fans of Creep were disappointed by the comparative mellowness of the rest of the album, though plenty were fascinated by the band's distinct and varied sound. At last, here was a new British band that owed more to Pink Floyd than to usual suspects the Beatles or the Sex Pistols.

In 1994, the band next released an EP called My Iron Lung, which provided a taste of what was to come on 1995's The Bends. American radio jumped on the single Fake Plastic Trees, which also appeared on the oh-so-hip soundtrack to the film Clueless in 1995. Fake Plastic Trees, a slow and almost mournful tune, was a far cry from the grinding complaint of the earlier hit, as was High And Dry, which also received significant airplay.

Radiohead Photo 3 By this time, the band had plenty of fans in the music world as well as the population at large. R.E.M. liked Radiohead so much that they asked them to be an opening act on their 1995 European and American tours. Meanwhile, other bands paid their respects by doing covers of Radiohead songs. It was Alanis Morissette, however, who may have been the biggest Radiohead fan: she often performed Fake Plastic Trees during her live shows in 1995 and 1996, and she invited the band to tour with her in August in 1996.

Radiohead started working on material for their third album in early 1996, but it wasn't until after the Morissette tour that they headed into the studio to get down to some serious business. The working title of the new records was Ones And Zeroes, but that binary-code reference evolved to OK Computer by the time the set was released in 1997. Colin Greenwood, in an interview with NME, described the resulting sound as being "like a stoned Radiohead." The first single, a six-and-a-half-minute track in three parts entitled Paranoid Android, was released in May and entered the UK charts at number 3. OK Computer, released the following month, debuted at number 1 in the UK.