Radiohead Get the Details
by Mac Randall
photographs (though not present on this file...) by Tom Sheehan
On tour in Spain with five musicians for whom the little things mean a lot
It was just a simple question. I was sitting under a tent on the patio roof of the Claris
Hotel in Barcelona with Radiohead's guitarist Ed O'Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood, and
drummer Phil Selway on a warm May afternoon, and I was wondering which member of the band
played the intricate guitar line in 5/4 time that begins "Let Down," a song from
their new album OK Computer. "That's Jonny," O'Brien said. Jonny Greenwood,
Colin's younger brother, is the Oxford, England-based quintet's resident
multi-instrumental prodigy. He's also Radiohead's closest approximation of a traditional
rock lead guitarist--though you only need to listen to his playing for a moment or two to
realize that his approach is anything but traditional. Okay, so Jonny's playing the 5/4
line at the beginning. How does the rest of the band know when to come in? Everyone
besides Jonny is playing in 4/4, but on the album version, the song starts at a seemingly
random point. Where's Phil going to start the count-in when they play the song live?
In response, Selway took a deep breath. The corners of his mouth curled up in a bemused
smile. Slowly, he spoke. "Well, that's the whole mystery of it, isn't it?" The
smile became a wide grin, and the sentence ended with a loud laugh. "Actually,"
he revealed, "there's an acoustic guitar at the beginning that was mixed out for the
album."
And that's where the argument started.
"We should try to have Thom play the acoustic guitar again at the beginning,"
said O'Brien, with a touch of heat in his voice. "I really think so." Thom Yorke
is Radiohead's frontman, the one with the spiky hair and the voice that can travel from
Johnny Rotten-ish bite to Bono-esque passion to choirboy purity in a matter of seconds.
"It sounds good without the acoustic on the album, though," Colin piped up.
"Yeah, but we didn't ever start the song like that before," Ed replied.
"Doing it live, we need to establish that tempo."
"Otherwise, the drums might not lock on," Phil warned.
"Exactly--it's so dodgy. With the acoustic, we'd know when to come in." Ed was
pushing the point hard. It was obvious this wasn't the first time this debate had raged,
and it probably wouldn't be the last. For a few seconds, all three members were talking
loudly at each other. Then, just as quickly as it had started, the conversation ended.
Everyone stopped. Selway looked around at the other two, turned to me, and said with a
smile, "So there's your answer."
This brief exchange reveals a lot about Radiohead. First, it demonstrates how sensitive
they are to each other, even while arguing. No throwing chairs, no kicking over tables, no
yelling, just sensible making of points, and then a spontaneous end to the conflict as
soon as the volume got too high, as smooth as if it had been pre-orchestrated.
Second, this three-way argument shows just how important the little details are to
Radiohead. Guitar parts, drum grooves, slight manipulation of an arrangement--it's all
cause for constant discussion, and all five members are involved. When it comes to playing
or talking music, their enthusiasm is rarely dampened.
That enthusiasm, that attention to detail, and that intra-band sensitivity, along with a
large amount of imagination, talent, and skill, have helped bring Radiohead to an enviable
point. After two albums that have sold in the millions worldwide (the second of which,
1995's The Bends, also garnered critical raves by the truckload), they've become an
Important Band in the eyes of their record company, EMI (Capitol in the U.S.). And so, for
the followup to The Bends, they were granted the freedom to record wherever and however
they liked, and take as long as they liked to do it. The band returned the favor with OK
Computer, a self-produced collection of twelve songs that takes the daring sonic and
structural experimentation of The Bends at least five steps further. It's a thrill to
listen to, but it doesn't exactly sound like it's going to knock the Spice Girls out of
the Top Ten. Regardless, EMI welcomed it with open arms--or so we've been led to believe.
Which brings us to Barcelona. The dark, mysterious medieval streets and grand tree-lined
boulevards of the Catalan city have long made it a favorite band destination, and so they
chose to play a couple of warmup shows here, debuting some of the OK Computer songs
onstage. "We didn't want to start in the U.K.," Yorke explains, "because we
had a lot of obligations in Europe. But now because we're a big band, you see"--he
breaks into a grin--"we can say to people, 'Actually, we're not going to play all
around Europe for a month going through airport X-ray machines and getting sterile, so
we'll choose a city.' And that was Barcelona."
Before my interview with Thom and Jonny, Jonny takes several photos of me; he explains
they've been doing this with everyone they've met on the trip. And the whole shebang,
including our interviews, is being filmed. No one knows exactly what'll be done with the
footage, maybe a documentary sometime down the line. All they know is that this period of
time has to be captured for posterity. "Nothing's been documented ever in out
history," O'Brien explains, "and this week is something we wanted to
document."
Why? "Don't you think it's unusual? We're in this beautiful city, and all these
[press] people have flown in just to see us. It's a pretty bizarre time."
The buildup to this "pretty bizarre time" began back home in Oxford, when the
members of Radiohead decided they didn't need a producer for their next album. Instead,
they'd buy their own recording equipment, set up their own studio, and do the work
themselves, with technical help from their engineer Nigel Godrich. "That came from us
realizing we enjoyed recording B-sides [with Godrich in their Oxfordshire rehearsal space]
more than the traditional recording," Jonny says. "Moreover--which is a word
I've never used before--our B-sides were occasionally better than anything we'd done. So
someone was trying to tell us something."
"And we listened," Thom adds. "Actually it was our manager who dropped this
bombshell by saying, 'Look, you should buy your own gear.' We'd been talking about
producing ourselves anyway, but this whole trip of getting your own gear, being
responsible for it, putting it in cases, you take it where you want, it's your shit--that
was the most exciting idea. We'd been listening to Can at one point, and they used to
record that way, in big rooms with bits of blankets and beds and shit on the walls, and
Holger Czukay would endlessly tape, tape, tape and then splice it together. It just
sounded amazingly cool--basically, four-track gone badly wrong.
"The one thing we knew we wanted was a huge plate [reverb]--that was Jonny's idea.
Other than that, we got whatever Nigel told us to get."
It should be noted that the gargantuan reverb on Thom's voice during "Exit Music (For
A Film)" was not produced by a plate, but by the stone floor of a large hall in
actress Jane Seymour's fifteenth-century mansion near Bath, where the band did some later
tracking. "The initial recordings were done in our rehearsal space," Thom says,
"and the problem with that was we could go home when we wanted. It was impossible to
commit yourself to it when you knew you had to go home and do the washing up. So we had to
find somewhere else, but we didn't want to be lab rats in a studio, and someone mentioned
this house. It was in a valley stuck on its own, nothing anywhere, and it had the most
enormous ballroom. I spent my whole time there terrified, because everything constantly
reminded you of your own mortality."
The Bends was distinguished by sterling production from John Leckie, for whom the band's
had nothing but good words. The relationship was clearly a pleasant one, so why not
continue it? " We wanted a clean slate," Thom replies. "It would have been
more meaningful if we'd chosen a different producer," Jonny says. "The fact that
we chose none at all is no reflection on John Leckie. It's a reflection on producers
generally, I suppose. But then we keep meeting them and they say, 'I'd love to produce you
but you patently don't need me.' Scott Litt said this to us, which was a lovely
compliment."
Would the band ever consider using a producer again? Ed: "Only if there was something
a producer could do that we knew we couldn't do. If we needed a Teddy Riley-type sound,
we'd hire him," he says, at least partly in jest.
Still, the band is humble about the achievement. "We didn't put the word 'produced'
on the album," Thom says. "We put 'committed to tape,' because that's what it
was.
Of the twelve songs on OK Computer, four may already be familiar to Radiohead fans. The
bleak but melodic "Subterranean Homesick Alien" (featuring Ed on Rickenbacker
360 12-string and Jonny on Fender Rhodes), the gorgeous "Let Down," and the
album's sole heavy rocker, "Electioneering" (written in double dropped-D
tuning), were all tackled by the band live over the last year or so. The dramatic
"Lucky" was first featured on the War Child charity album Help, released in
1995. The band hemmed and hawed about including it on their own record and even attempted
to remix it, but eventually went with the original version. "The song deserved a bit
better than what it had gotten," Jonny says. "It was indicative of what we
wanted to do," Thom adds. "It was the first mark on the wall."
This large amount of older numbers doesn't mean the Radiohead songwriting well has run
dry; it simply indicates that, as Thom puts it, the age of a composition "wasn't very
relevant. What was more important was how we approached the song, how to find a way in.
Nigel said all through the sessions, 'It doesn't matter how you get there as long as you
get there.'"
OK Computer's newer songs are riskier structurally, loaded with odd numbers of measures,
disorienting key jumps, and time-signature skips. ("We have gotten a big sick of the
number four," Jonny comments. "Like the Pixies did. I mean, is repeating that
riff a fourth time going to make your life any better?") The album's leadoff single,
"Paranoid Android," is a six-and-a-half-minute, four movement epic that sounds
like it owes something to Seventies prog rock. Jonny, who was responsible for writing a
large chunk of it, downplays that influence: "I've been trying to find some good prog
rock, but every last record is terrible, sadly, except for the use of Mellotron."
Prog or not, the song was recorded in three sections at different times, and then grafted
together later. "Our working model for it was 'Happiness is a Warm Gun,'" Thom
reports. "I didn't honestly think it was going to work, so when we put it together it
was a shock."
Although Thom remains the band's principal writer, Jonny's contributions have increased
considerably. "It used to be hard to say, 'Listen to this,'" Jonny says.
"You know, 'I can't sing a note, but what do you think?' But something like the 'rain
down' section of 'Paranoid Android' was worth doing--it just need a context."
"I always get to a point in a song were I can't go any further," Thom says,
"and I'm not the world's most interesting or interested guitar player; it always has
been a totally functional thing for me. So to respond do something that someone else has
put forward is far more exciting.
Creating the sounds to go along with the songs was apparently more than half the fun for
Radiohead. The opening track, "Airbag," features a distorted drum track that
sounds almost as if it were looped--if only there weren't so many variations. Yorke
chuckles when asked about it. "It took two days to put that track together," he
says. The band weren't happy with the drums as they were played live, so Yorke, Selway,
and Godrich used a Mac and as Akai S3000 sampler to cut up, rearrange, and generally
manipulate them. "We took inspiration from the way DJ Shadow cut up and reassembled
rhythm tracks," Phil says. "I went in and drummed for a quarter of an hour, and
we took the three seconds' worth of any value out of it, and then out it back together to
form this angular track that you don't generally get from programming or loops."
"We were trying to imitate an old demo that we'd done when we were very young, with
Jonny putting a drum track through his Moog, sampling it, and then fiddling with the
EQ," Thom says. "I wanted something that sounded organic, so you'd never think
it was a loop." As for the songs funky, lurching bassline, Colin swears it wasn't a
product of the recording console's mute button; he really played it with all those gaps.
"I was thinking originally I might put something else in those empty spots, but we
never got 'round to it."
Another particularly noisy track, "Climbing Up The Walls," is distinguished by
the use of several tape loops (Thom: "We had tape running around the room on that
one"), as well as a bassline played by Colin on a Novation Bass Station synth.
"There's no distortion on it; it just gets that squelchy analog sound naturally.
Jonny told me the notes to play," Colin says dryly, "'cause I'd never seen a
keyboard. Now for the gigs we've got colored dots on the keys so I don't get it
wrong." "Karma Police" ends with an explosion of distorted guitar peppered
with ugly dropouts, courtesy of a rackmount AMS digital delay. "That machine
malfunctions wonderfully," Thom says. "Ed played the notes that started it, but
basically it's the machine playing itself." Ed explains that the noise was made by
turning up the delay's regeneration, then slowly turning the delay speed down.
That sonic burst leads directly into "Fitter, Happier," basically a bit of
poetry written by Thom and intoned by the Macintosh, using it built-in SimpleText voice
generator. "It came out like a shopping list," Thom says. "I write stuff
like that all the time. I wouldn't normally use it, but I responded to the way the
computer voice pronounced it. That voice seemed a logical extension of this list
mentality."
Did anything in particular inspire the making of these trippy, disturbing soundscapes?
"We've just been obsessed by [Miles Davis'] Bitches Brew," Thom says. "That
is a record for the end of the world."
Jonny: "But it's the drumming and piano playing we get off most on, rather that the
guitar and the trumpet."
Thom: "Well, [John] McLaughlin must have felt a bit fucking lost. Two drummers, two
Fender Rhodes players, and all those bloody wind instruments. But the sound of the
trumpet, the delays on it and stuff, is what Jonny's trying to do with guitar."
"My ears get bored quickly," Jonny says. "Sometimes a guitar plugged into
an amplifier isn't enough. I can't play trumpet, so it's not going to sounds that much
like Bitches Brew. We don't have access to an orchestra, so it's not going much like
Morricone, either. But you aim for these things."
"Aiming and missing is the whole premise really," Thom continues.
As we speak, the first finished copies of OK Computer, complete with final art, are being
examined by the band's management in an adjoining hotel suite. Everyone's excited that MTV
has agreed to play the animated video for "Paranoid Android," and that the
single, despite its length, is being broadcast regularly on Britain's Radio One. Still, as
Ed points out, this is a bizarre time for the band. "We've just finished the
record," Colin says, "and we haven't got a clue what's going to happen."
"If a band has a successful album and then they start making records that don't
sell," Ed says, "that's when the record company's really got you, because
they've given you this taste of what it can e like, and they're like, 'Now you're not
selling, we're going to tell you what to do.' It would be scary if that happened."
"We'd get put in prison," Colin says, "or be shot." He laugh as he
says this, but the underlying uncertainty is real.
There's no detectable uncertainty in the band's performance later that night. Radiohead's
first Barcelona warmup show takes place at a nightspot called the Zeleste, which is in the
just about every respect exactly the same as any rock club you've been to, except that the
stage is a little bigger. The computer-spoken words of "Fitter, Happier," on
tape, greet the band as they come on; the Catalonian youth don't quite get it but cheer
anyway.
Before the adoring crowd, Thom confesses, "This is the most fucking nervous we've
been in about two years." Honest as this remark may be, it's in no way borne out by
the playing. Though tonight the band don't always achieve the inspirational heights that
they can attain in concert (a show I saw them play at New York's Mercury Lounge a couple
of years ago ranks in my all-time top five), they're still better than 97 percent of what
you'll see out there. It's a well-paced set, interspersing new songs with favorites from
The Bends. The band's obviously pleased with at least some of the new material live; the
break back into the heavy guitar riff toward the end of "Paranoid Android" gets
everyone smiling.
It helps to have a solid frontman, and Thom Yorke is perhaps the most compelling in rock
today. On older tracks like The Bends' "Bones," he still does his familiar
writhing, gesticulating, Mr. Uncomfortable act; on newer ones, he's more subdued but no
less engaging. With just a tiny wave of his hand or a subtle vocal inflection, Yorke
conveys several acres' worth of emotion.
While Thom holds the audience's attention front and center, Ed and Jonny go about their
work like old-fashioned alchemists. For "Lucky," which opens the set, Ed scrapes
the strings above the nut of his Strat with a razor blade; during "Exit Music"
he does a good job of approximating the background noise of the album version by
methodically scratching his pick along the strings over the fretboard, from sixth string
to first. On "Bones" Jonny bends over his tremolo pedal, turning the rate know
manually; the act seems invested with magical significance, like an ancient ritual.
Throughout the show, Jonny frequently jumps from guitar to keyboard and on to more unusual
instruments--xylophone on "No Surprises," transistor radio on "Climbing Up
The Walls." When he does step out on six-string, he snaps his picking arm back
violently after every gutsy stroke; no wonder he's wearing an arm brace for repetitive
stress disorder.
The bands gets called back for three encores. "The Tourist," the slow, spacious
album closer, is a standout. It benefits, as so many Radiohead songs do, from a fine
guitar arrangement. For the final part of the songs, Ed strums chords, Thom plays a melody
line on the low end of the neck, and Jonny solos up top. The parts mesh beautifully; this
is that rare three-guitar band that is always tasteful, never overbearing. Ed, Thom, and
Jonny stay out of each other's way and each other's frequencies. Sounds easy. It's not.
One songs is conspicuous by its absence from the set list. And that is--you guessed
it--"Let Down," the songs with the five-against-four line that Ed, Colin, and
Phil were arguing about earlier. Evidently, the band still hasn't agreed how the songs
should start. But knowing Radiohead, I imagine they'll get it sorted out soon enough. And
there's little doubt that the song will be better for the effort.
Then there's this article on the side, close to the beginning of the above article:
Plucky
When it comes to electric guitars, THOM YORKE's a Fender man, with a collection including
a Seventies Telecaster Deluxe, a Seventies Jazzmaster, a recent Japanese-model Tele with
stacked humbuckers, and a customized American Standard Tele with a Strat neck, one
humbucker, and an active preamp control. His fave amp's also a Fender, a two-year old Twin
Reverb, to be exact, and he plugs into it by way of a ProCo Turbo Rat distortion pedal and
a Boss digital delay. For the acoustic numbers. Thom hauls out a Yairi DY-88
acoustic/electric. When asked about strings, he replies: "I use them."
JONNY GREENWOOD plays a slightly rewired Fender Telecaster Plus (the extent of its
rewiring is apparently a trade secret) and a mid-Seventies Fender Starcaster through
Fender Deluxe 85 and Vox AC30 amps. Effects include a Marshall Shredmaster, DigiTech
Whammy, Small Stone phase shifter, Roland Space Echo and a few homemade boxes, including
the tremolo pedal that Jonny uses on "Bones." He tickles the ivories of a Fender
Rhodes electric piano, a Korg Prophecy, and a FATAR keyboard controller connected to an
E-mu Classic Keys module.
ED O'BRIEN's list of electrics includes a '67 Gibson ES 355, two recent-model Fender
Stratocasters, two Nineties Rickenbacker 360s (one six-string and one 12-string), and a
guitar handmade by his tech called The Plank. Among his many effects are a Lovetone
Meatball, DigiTech Whammy, MXR Phase 90, three Boss half-rack delays, Korg A2, Dunlop
Tremolo, plus the AMS digital delay heard at the end of "Karma Police." It all
runs into a Mesa/Boogie Tremoverb and a Vox AC30. Both Ed and Jonny use .010-guage Elite
strings.
COLIN GREENWOOD plays two Fender Precision basses, one '72 and one '77, through a
Gallien-Krueger 800RB head into an Ampeg SVT 8x10 cabinet, "with a backup 400RB just
in case the 800 goes down mid-rock." A late-Sixties 20-watt Ampeg combo is also
employed for overdrive purposes. Other electronics include a dbx 160T compressor, an
Alembic tube preamp, a Companion distortion pedal, and a Novation Bass Station synth for
"Climbing Up The Walls." He uses Elite Stadium Series strings. "They're
great for playing clubs," he says.
PHIL SELWAY pounds a four-piece Premier kit with Zildjian cymbals. He also uses Zildjian
sticks, size 5A.