Band of the Year:
Radiohead
by Pat Blashill
The pupils of Thom Yorke's eyes zip from side to side
like nervous
insects. We're on the Eurostar train from Paris to London, and
Radiohead's singer is compulsively looking out the window at a pastoral
French countryside. He doesn't see the sheep and the farms- he is
keenly aware that those things will disappear very soon, and then we
will enter a tunnel and be deep, deep underneath the sea. This is
significant for a man who once wrote an album called The Bends.
When we go under I ask Yorke if he's claustrophobic.
"Yes,' he says matter-of-factly. "Er, increasingly so, actually."
A couple of days on the road have taught me that even when Thom Yorke
isn't suffering one of his various phobias, he's still more than a touch
intense. He moves like a shattered little prince. He laughs a sudden,
explosive, truncated laugh. His hair is short, black, and spiky. His
lazy eye flutters and droops, a handicap as well as the punctuation
point of his fractured charm. When he was a kid, they used to tease him
about it. That may be why he's so worried that people occasionaly
mistake him for an arrogant prick.
Life has been like this for Yorke: His problems have become his
streangths, his obsessions have fed his repulsions, and his fears have
inspired his music. We're on this train because Yorke hates to fly, and
he's positively terrified or cars. Just yesterday, a fan asked him why
he's written so many songs about car crashes. This was Yorke's answer:
"I just think that people get up too early to leave houses where they
don't want to live, to drive to jobs where they don't want to be, in one
of the most dangerous forms of transport on earth. I've just never
gotten used to that."
Of course, because of his job, Yorke has to ride in cars all the
time. He even got inside one with a remote-control driverto shoot the
video for Radiohed's latest single, "Karma Police." And as he sat in
the backseat, lip synching, something went wrong, and carbon monoxide
fumes began pouring into the car. Yorke was terrified. And as he
started to feel faint, he thought,"This is my life. . ."
Radiohead may be the most uptight paranoid art-rock band presentley
operating on the planet. But even as such, they've been pretty lucky
bastards. The group- Yorke, bassist Colin Greenwood, guitarists Jonny
Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, and drummer Phil Selway- began their career
with a smash-hit song about being worthlee. They weren't even sure they
liked "Creep," or the 1992 album it came from, Pablo Honey- especially
after the song became a slack-rock anthem, the kind of timely hit that a
band can come to regret, like a tatoo of your last girlfriend's name.
So in 1995 they made a much better, much weirder second album (The
Bends) and a bunch of very cool videos that evoked nothing so much as
the finest Pink Floyd album covers. It wasn't a miracle that rock
critics started loving Radiohead- it was a miracle that 14-year-old
girls didn't stop.
"I was surprised to see what the music meant to people." Yorke says.
"We went from being a novelty band to the band that everyone quoted in
the NME and Melody Maker 'Musicians Wanted' columns. After a hit like
'Creep,' bands don't normally survive. It can kill you. But it
didn't."
Radiohead toured behind the Bends for a year and a half. When Yorke
returned to the band's semi-sleepy hometown of Oxford, he was full of
new causes for alarm. He'd always been pretty familiar with the scary
things inside his own head, but international touring had bestowed upon
him a whole new world of inspirational hobgoblins. Now he knew he had
to write songs about all sorts of horrible things. Domestic violence.
Politicians. Cars. Bacon.
So Yorke and Radiohead went to work on an album about global
hideousness. He fussed and fretted and became annoying to everyone he
knew, but in the end it was all worth it. Because OK Computer is a
gorgeuos and haunting record. It's full of spindly guitars and
freaked-out noise, poppy songs with Beatles in-jokes, and other numbers
that ramble on for minutes before they actually become songs, and it's
especially full of mystery. Nothing is explained, everything is
suggested.
OK Computer is rife with terror and cynicism, but it's not
particularily ironic or self-concious. Apparently, the only thing that
doesn't make Thom Yorke uncomfortable is the idea of making something
quite beautiful, and sincerely creepy.
"I think people feel sick when they here OK Computer," Yorke tells me.
"Nausea was part of what we were trying to create. The Bends was a
record of consolation. But this one was sad. And I didn't know why."
The album debuted on the Billboard charts at No. 21, and fortunately
for Yorke, lots of people have been eager to explain the meaning of OK
Computer. An online correspondant for Addicted to Noise divined that OK
Computer was based on Phillip K.Dick's V.A.L.I.S., a book that Yorke had
not read. Other less excitable critics pounced on the record's title and
songs like "Paranoid Android," the bizarre first single, and decided
that the album was about Radiohead's fear of technology- they were
unaware that Yorke and Jonny are actually quite avid Mac fans. Yorke
himself didn't explain much, except to insist that "Paranoid Android" is
about the Fall of the Roman Empire.
The band showcased most of the songs on the album in two sold-out,
high-profile concerts in Los Angeles and New York. In attendence were
Liv Tyler, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love, R.E.M.'s Micheal
Stipe and Mike Mills, Mike D. of the Beatsie Boys, three mysteriously
unnamed supermodels, and, apparently, Liam Gallagher. Gallagher alone
remained unimpressed, and felt the need to point out, in these pages on
less, that Radiohead are "fuck-king stoodents," or in plainer English,
college graduates. At least that was mostly true.
Meanwhile, MTV, a longtime supporter of the band, anointed the
unsettling animated video for "Paranoid Android" a Buzz Clip. In June,
Yorke met Jonathan Glazer, the director responsible for their earlier
clip "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," on a deserted lane three hours from
London, to shoot the chilling, Orwellian video for OK Computer's second
single, "Karma Police." In late September," Karma Police"
debuted on
the music channel in heavy rotation, despite the fact that the video
features lots of fire, the same element that got Beavis and Butt-Head
into so much trouble a few years ago. It would seem for MTV, Radiohead
are above the law. The truth is weirder: The folks at the network like
Radiohead videos because they don't exactly make sense.
"All the videos are intriguing," explains Lewis Largent, MTV vice
president of music. "Everybody has a different interpritation of them.
The videos aren't cut and dry- like the video for 'Just'[from The
Bends], when the guy dies- that sort of mystery makes them watchable
time and again. You can watch 'Paranoid Android' a hundred times and
not figure it all out."
For his part, Glazer thinks "Karma Police" is about retribution, but
he's not sure if that even matters. "Radiohead are all about subtexts,
about underbellies," he says. "Thom thinks about music in the same way
that I think about film- he thinks it's a dialogue. That's why in the
video he just sings the choruses- because the verses mean whatever we
want them to mean."
In fact, when Radiohead recorded OK Computer, Yorke was trying to make
each song sound like reportage from inside 12 different brains. The
record is a collection of fictions that might be true. It isn't about
soul-baring or venting, and it isn't really about Thom Yorke either,
which is just one of the things that sets Radiohead apart, not just from
the last few years of alternative rock, but from our entire culture of
confession.
"I just can't stand endless self-revelation." Yorke says. "Honesty
is
a kind of a bullshit quality, really. Yeeaaaaaaaahh. There's honesty,
and then there's honesty. Honesty about being dishonest is more healthy
than professing to be honest."
For better or for worse,Radiohead arrive at a time when most guitar
bands are still laboring under the legacy of hardcore punk and
Amer-indie rock, and are therefore as concerened with "realness" as most
rap stars. But Radiohead aren't afraid to be a little pretentious:
They make grand, sweeping rock music because they believe that rock
music can still be a transcendant thing. Even though their songs
sometimes seem as shambling as, say, Pavement's, or as odd as Tortise's,
they more certainly conjure up the epic paranoias of Pink Floyd or the
baroque grandeur of Queen. Like those bands, Radiohead really believe
they can fly. They may not have gotten around to acting like rock stars
yet, but OK Computer is definately a rock star album.
In Paris, I meet Radiohead for dinner at a Swiss restaurant.
Afetrward, we spill out onto the cobblestone streets and head for the
baind's van.
"Paris is unbelievable, isn't it?" Jonny Greenwood asks, as we glance
around at the darkening 17th century block.
Yes it is, I say. And now you get to do an interview at something
called Fun Radio.
"Which means it will be anything ut," Jonny says with a smirk.
Jonny is the youngest and prettiest member of Radiohead. He's the one
with the cheekbones. He can tell you about the experimental music John
Cage composed for shortwave radios. When he was a kid, his older sister
forced him to listen to English art-punk bands like Magazine, and the
first instrument he played was the violin. On OK Computer, Jonny plays
viola, keyboards, and guitar. Onstage, he wears a wrist brace (a
souvenior from years of smacking around his guitar), and he sometimes
plays a transistor radio.
Is there a conceptual artist inside you struggling to get out? I ask
Jonny.
"I would never admit to that," he says with a frozen smile.
The next morning, as the Eurostar finally rockets out of the darkness
and back into the English sunlight, Yorke stops squirming in his seat.
But only a bit. We are, after all, still talking about OK Computer.
The band began recording the first bits of the album during the summer
of '96 in their rehersal studios, a converted apple shed. In September,
radiohead rented actress Jane Seymour's mansion, St. Catherine's Court,
moved in all their equiptment, and began recording there. Things went
well. At first.
"It was heaven and hell," Yorke says. "Our first two
weeks there we
basically recorded the whole album. The hell came after that. The
house was...."- Yorke pauses for a quarter of a minute-"oppresive. To
begin with, it was curious about us. Then it got bored with us. And it
stared making things difficult. It started doing things like turning
the studio tape machines on and off, rewinding them."
The house was haunted?
"Yeah. It was great. Plus, it was in a valley on the outskirts of
Bath, in the middle of nowhere. So when we actually stopped playing
music there was just this pure silence. Open the window: nothing. A
completely unnatural silence- not even birds singing. It was fucking
horrible. I coulb never sleep."
Radiohead finally finished recording and mastering in February of
1997. After they got some distance fromthe record, they were a little
bit startled by it. "At the 11th hour, when we realized what we had
done," Yorke admits," we had qualms about the fact that we had createed
this thing that was quite revolting."
The people at Capitol Records felt the same way at first, especially
since they didn't hear anything on OK Computer that sounded even
remotely like a single, let alone like "Creep." But now, everyone's
settled down a bit. Capitol's president Gary Gersh, when asked about
Radiohead, has even said this: "We won't let up until they are the
biggest band in the world."
Actually, the only folks that are still worried about Radiohead are
their fans. These days, Yorke gets a lot of concermed letters. Some
suggest that maybe he should take a long vacation.
"I need to get a life of some description, at some point," he says
quietly. "I mean,when your fans are writing to tell you to get a life,
you know you need to listen."
Do you think there's a reason for people to be concerned about you
when they hear OK Computer?
"I reckon."
Yorke pauses for a second, and then laughs a slightly warmer laugh,
one that suggests he's actually going to be just fine.
On the final night of the Radiohead tour, the band played a seaside
area in Brighton. They veered between moments of delicate, spacey
psychedelia and shrieking, cut-up guitar flurries, from the anthemic
chords of "The Bends" to the elegant schizophrenia of "Karma Police."
Thom Yorke held his arms out like some sort of Cubist Christ figure, and
occasionally made small requests of the audience. The senond thing he
said into the mike was," Don't do that thing where you move side to
side, because people go under, and this is not a fucking football
match." The third thing he said was, "Please don't do that
crowd-surfing shit either."
And the audience quite cheerfully obliged him. They were, by and
large, boys with glasses and girls making passes. "Stoodents." The cute
library couple next to me went into a clinch every time Radiohead
played something slow, but when I tried to talk to them, they just
giggles nervously and discovered they could not speak.
After the show, I found myself standing on the beach under a full
moon, laughing idiotically and throwing stones at the Atlantic Ocean
with a couple of Radiohead fans I met backstage. One of them was
Micheal Stipe, and the Brighton show was the third Radiohead gig he'd
seen in the last week.
"They played Reading on Friday night, and a band can't really lose on a
Friday, because for everyone there, it's fuck-or-fight," he told me.
"But they were great on top of that. When we toured with them two years
ago, they played 'Creep' every night. But now, they've taken that song
back from the fans, and they've made it really beautiful."
Stipe was refering to that song, the one with the guitar that sounds
like the Concorde. The big hit that made everyone think that Radiohead
were a flash in the pan five years ago. And he's right: "Creep" was
great that night. It was delicious and slow and sore all over. Yorke
even improvised a little. To be precise, he changed the words of the
chorus from "I'm a weirdo" to "I'm a winner."