Radiohead talk about their new video

June 2nd 1997

TORONTO -- As odd as it may seem, a disparate pair of famous Canadians ended up influencing the sound and substance of Radiohead's astonishing new album, OK Computer. How disparate? Try Alanis Morissette and Noam Chomsky. 

"We opened 12 shows for Alanis last August," frontman Thom Yorke is explaining in a Toronto hotel room, where he and guitarist Jonny Greenwood are holding court during a three-day media blitz Monday, a few hours before playing a sold-out club show at the Opera House. "I think the fact that, here we were standing in front of 10,000 people in a shed (industry parlance for "outdoor amphitheatre") who really weren't that interested in what we were doing, forced us to do a lot of tidying up of the songs really, really fast," says Yorke, whose friendly manner belies reports out of the U.K. about his supposed surliness. "I know it sounds stupid, but there was something about playing in really, really huge, sterile concrete structures that was really important to the songs. Because a lot of the songs needed to sound quite big and messy and like they were bouncing off walls. "When we went back into the studio, we were actually trying to create the sound of a shed soundcheck, or a big baseball stadium thing, without sounding like bloody Def Leppard or anything. Just the fact that you have this trashy, volatile thing going on aroundyou, which we discovered was really important to the way we did the songs."  

Those songs comprise Radiohead's third, and best, album, the ambivalently titled OK Computer, which rolls into stores in Canada on June 17, a full two weeks before our American cousins will be able to buy it. Prior to that, the band has just released the lead single and video, "Paranoid Android," a complex six-and-a-half-minute suite that is intended to show the world that it's okay to laugh during a Radiohead song.  "Absolutely, you're supposed to," says Yorke. "I do. I mean, the title was chosen as a joke. It was like, 'Oh, I'm so depressed.' And I just thought, that's great. That's how people would LIKE me to be. And that was the end of writing about anything personal in the song. The rest of the song is not personal at all."  

Try telling that to the British music press, which has seized upon one couplet in particular -- "When I am king, you will be first against the wall/With your opinions, which are of no consequence at all" -- as being a slam at, well, the British music press.  "Again, that's just a joke," says a mildly exasperated Yorke. " It's actually the other way around -- it's actually MY opinion that is of no consequence at all.  "When it came time to make thevideo for that song, we had lots of people saying, 'Yeah, great, we can have another video like "Street Spirit" (from 1995's The Bends), all moody and black and dark. Well, no. We had really good fun doing this song, so the video should make you laugh. I mean, it should be sick, too. The whole thing about the lyrics is that they're very twisted, but because of the way we played it, it permitted me to write something I wouldn't normally write: humor."  

In typical Radiohead fashion, the video -- which should be added to MuchMusic's regular rotation this week -- doesn't feature the band at all. Instead, it is the work of demented Swedish director Magnus Carlsson, who came up with a fully animated cartoon based around Robin and Benji, a pair of comic-strip characters popular in the U.K. The enigmatic plot has something to do with a sweaty diplomat, an alien, several topless mermaids, and a lot of drinking.  "When we did it, we deliberately didn't send Magnus the lyrics," says Yorke, "because we didn't want it to be too literal. So what he did was he  sat in his garden one Sunday with the song playing very loud, continuously, all day long, and he just wrote down the pictures that came into his head."  The character of Robin, observes Jonny Greenwood, is "quite an affectionate one, quite vulnerable."  Yorke agrees. "Robin is quite the vulnerable character, but he's also violently cynical and quite tough and would always get up again. And the rest of the video is really about the violence around him, which is exactly like the song. Not the same specific violence as in the lyrics, but everything going on around him is deeply troubling and violent, but he's just drinking himself into oblivion. He's there, but he's not there. That's why it works. And that's why it does my head in every time I see it." Given the video's topless mermaids -- not to mention one scene in which a character accidentally slices off his arms and legs -- has the band run into any trouble with censorship? "Well, MTV Europe ran it for two weeks uncensored because their censor was off ill," says Yorke, laughing. "This one woman was ill and she didn't know about the video, so they just put it onanyway, which was great. Funny, most people object to the nipples but not the guy chopping his limbs off." Yorke says that MTV is airing "Paranoid Android," but blurring the image every time you see a nipple. "THEY can use sex to sell everything else, but they can't put it in pop videos," he smirks.   As for the new album's cryptic title, OK Computer started out as a song title.  "We did this promo trip recently to Japan," says Yorke. "And on the last day, we were in a record shop and this one kid shouted at the top of his voice, 'OK COMPUTER!', really, really loud. Then he had 500 people chant it all at once after the count of three. I got it on tape. It sounds amazing.  "It reminds me of when Coca-Cola did 'I'd like to teach the world to sing,' that amazing advert in '70. It completely did my head in as a kid. The idea of every race anad every nation drinking this soft drink. Anyway, as well as all that, a lot of people have picked up on fact that it's actually a really resigned, terrified phrase.  "It's both at the same time," says Yorke, pausing. "Which is really cool." Which brings us, finally, to the Noam Chomsky connection. Seems Mr. Yorke has been ploughing through the collected works on the brilliant media critic, especially the classic text, "Manufacturing Consent."  One of OK Computer's most powerful songs, "Electioneering," reflects Chomsky's influence on Yorke's thinking.  "Like a lot of songs I write, it came from two places at once," he explains. "I had this phase I went through on an American tour where we just seemed to be shaking hands all the time, and I was getting a bit sick of it and upset by it. So I came up with this running joke with myself, where I used to shake people's hands and say, 'I trust I can rely on your vote.' They'd go hahaha and look at me like I was a nutcase. But the phrase sort of carried on. It was like a mantra.    "As well as that, I had been reading a lot of Chomsky, and I had that feeling when you read Chomsky that you want to get out and do something and realize, in fact, that you're impotent."   In the end, after writing pages and pages of words about the third world and wars and world politics, Yorke thought of Chomsky's writings and ended up boiling it all down to just one phrase: "Cattle prods and the IMF" (International Monetary Fund, a global financial monitoring agency).  "There's no other way to say it, really."  In the meantime, look for Radiohead to return to Canada in August. They're also teaming up with influential British band Massive Attack, who will likely end up remixing the claustrophobic track "Climbing Up The Walls" for future release as a single.

[John Sakamoto -- Executive Producer]