Jam! 17.10.00

JAM! interviews Radiohead
Paul Cantin


Although Radiohead won't be releasing any music videos from their current album, Kid A, the group has compiled live footage shot on their current tour and submitted it to video channels.

The band's Jonny and Colin Greenwood told JAM! Music they have no interest in putting together the kind of music clips they have previously prepared for songs such as "Just," "Fake Plastic Trees" and "Creep."

But any video outlet hankering for a Radiohead clip is welcome to play the concert footage, which shows the group performing various songs from Kid A during the European leg of their current tour.

"A lot of (the video channels) are going to be given (live videos), so we'll see whether they play them. That is okay, showing footage of a band playing can be interesting, if you like music. Watching a band mime, though ...," Jonny Greenwood said during interviews in Toronto on Monday, prior to the group's sole Canadian performance Tuesday in the sold-out Sears Theatre at the Air Canada Centre.

"We'll see who shows it. It is going to be submitted as bits and pieces we have done (in concert), on videotape."

Canada's music video channel, MuchMusic, confirmed late Monday that they have received the band's collection of concert footage, and at an upcoming meeting will consider whether they'll air the results.

Like much of Radiohead's approach with Kid A, their attitude towards videos has been unconventional. Typically, any new, high-profile release is preceded by a single and video clip to accompany the song. In this case, no official single or video has been released from Kid A.

Instead, artist Stanley Donwood, who prepared the album's cover in collaboration with singer Thom Yorke, has worked with animators to create moving versions of the album graphics - brief animated snippets the group haas dubbed "blips," which have circulated through the Internet and have been incorporated into TV ads for the album.

"They're just adverts, and they are also very long adverts," Jonny Greenwood says of traditional music videos.

"Four minutes is too long for a car advert, so it is certainly too long (for a record). Stanley Donwood, who works with Thom on the artwork, is making (the artwork) move and animating parts of it. That is really good, but not beyond 20 seconds.

"Music videos just make me think of (Peter Gabriel's) 'Sledgehammer', and that was when it was innovative. Talking Heads. It is like tap-dancing, is what I compare it to. It had its day, really... I think miming is absurd."

Here's some other wisdom dropped by the Brothers Greenwood during their interview with JAM!.

On their next album, provisionally to be released in the spring, drawn from songs recorded for, but cut from, Kid A

Jonny: "We've got about 13 or 14 songs which we need to edit a little bit, maybe take a couple out, maybe remix one or two, put them in the right order, and then it is done."

Colin: "I"m not sure they are two records. We had that group of songs to make one record, and the other ones are left over. It's that we had, say, 23 songs and we wanted to have around 47 minutes of music, so we chose the best combination out of that number (for Kid A), and the rest are waiting on the bench, waiting to be picked for the next team lineup."

Jonny: "We wanted to release them as well, but we don't know how yet, or what combination. We are still working out how to release these songs."

Colin: "We haven't decided what it is going to be like. It is a combination of like, more conventional, perhaps, but also more dissonant stuff. But it continues on from Kid A, really, I think. It was all done in the same recording period. It is all a whole. We'll see. It is good playing them live, though. 'Dollars And Cents' and 'Knives Out.' It is cool. It is good."

On the satisfaction of Kid A entering the charts in the top spot

Jonny: "Of course it is gratifying. But someone pointed out to me that going in at number one on the charts means none of them have heard it yet. So maybe we don't know (if that means they like the record)."

On Kid A's unconventional sound, a departure from the more structured sound of previous albums OK Computer and The Bends

Jonny: "It sort of feels like some of the people... think there are a few bands that sound like us. I think maybe some of them thought or hoped we'd make a record that sounds like them, but maybe a bit better or something, do you know what I mean? That is sort of backwards... And we didn't (make that kind of record)."

On the decision to keep an online diary at the band's website while making Kid A

Jonny: "(The diary was an alternative to) talking briefly to a press person who writes a much longer piece, which is sent to newspapers, edited and printed. By the time the person who likes you reads something about you, it has gone through five people. So it is quite nice to gab on and the rubbish that we do. (Doing it online) shuts out people who haven't got the Internet, which is still lots of people. That is the only bad thing.

On the evolving live arrangements of the songs on Kid A

Colin: "It is very important as a way to stave off tour boredom. It is very important to have music that is a bit more open-ended. Not much different, but you can have some variation when you play it night-to-night. 'Everything In Its Right Place' has changed. Like, everyone is playing all over it now. On the record, it is just Thom and (producer) Nigel Godrich playing with it."

On the horn section featured on the song "The National Anthem," which appeared with the group on last weekend's Saturday Night Live guest spot

Colin: "I think we all think it is not a good idea to have other musicians on stage. It taints the experience of the live performance."

Jonny: "Plus the economics stopped Big Bands touring in 1953."

Colin: "There is a very good reason for that."

Jonny: "I was listening to them (on stage), turning around. All that noise is terrifying. It is louder and more terrifying than any guitar I've heard."

Colin: "Like Angus Young in his shorts."

On the documentary Meeting People Is Easy, which was shot while Radiohead undertook promotional duties for OK Computer

Jonny: "It was a very fair representation of what somebody unconnected with the band would be surprised about if they followed us around on tour. (The director, Grant Gee) emphasized the parts that surprised him. So obviously it is not like that all the time. Sometimes you are sat on the beach in Australia having a day off, thinking this is the greatest. I think he was surprised to see what goes on, so he made a film about it. That is always going to be far more interesting than the guys having a beer backstage and laughing."

Colin: "But it is a carefree existence. It is fantastic. You get to travel around and see other cities and enjoy the food from various cultures and play in interesting places. It is great. I love it. It is fantastic. I feel that we are incredibly lucky, obviously. There's no sense of us thinking it is hard."

On things they just won't do as part of their career as musicians

Colin: "You can change things by accepting less. If we all wanted to have castles in Spain, as we say in the rock business, we would be doing loads of videos and doing a big tour sponsored by Volkswagen, and we would have done a Moby and sold our music for advertising around the world, for $16 million. But since we don't have castles in Spain, we don't come across those kinds of decisions. (Radiohead has been offered) adverts for drinks. Drinks companies want to do advertising on our website."

Jonny: "ISPs want to have close connections with us."

Colin: "It is fine if someone else wants to do it. We've been very lucky not to have to."

On performing in a big, travelling tent in Europe, and whether they'd consider doing the same thing in North America

Jonny: "It is a good venue. Just find a big field, not too far from the city. We played in parks and stuff like that, Belgium, France, and stuff like that. (It could work in North American), if you have any big, flat spaces, with good transport."

On the various musical influences on Kid A

Jonny: "Different people we stole from, really. Coltrane, Charlie Mingus. Kraftwerk. Can. We take what we can. Bits and pieces. We are always comparing what we do to other records we like. Whereas other people compare it to other records we've released. And it is a very different."

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The New York Times 30.09.00

The Post-Rock Band
Forty years after the Beatles, Radiohead has reinvented the idea of the rock group - with as much John Cage as John Lennon.

By Gerald Marzorati


Radiohead is a significant band at a bad time for significant bands. Radiohead took its name from a song by Talking Heads, which says something about Radiohead's aspirations, and something too about how self-conscious and historically freighted any aspiring band cannot help being now. Radiohead is making music at a moment when the epoch of bands would seem to be coming to a close, a moment when what is novel in popular music is being made not by groups of young men playing guitars and writing and singing their own songs but rather by individual D.J.'s and one- or two-person production teams using turntables and computers and assorted electronic gadgets. It's a moment that has the feel of a mainstream-music paradigm shift - away from pop-rock and toward hip-hop, dance music and what gets called electronica. It's a moment nearly 40 years removed from the last big paradigm shift, secured by the advent of the first significant band, the Beatles, whom the members of Radiohead seem to talk about all the time.

Radiohead is a band that is dealing with the sea change in popular music in ways wholly unlike Limp Bizkit and the other "rap metal" bands whose albums have dominated the Billboard charts for the last two years - bands that have taken the worst aspects of hip-hop (misogynist rap lyrics and monotonous beats) and fused them with heavy-metal white-guy bathos. Radiohead is a quintet whose members first met 15 years ago at the Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, England. They are not angry or wildly disaffected but serious, inward-turned and uneasy, in particular Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer. Yorke possesses one of the finest voices ever to grace a pop recording - it circles operatically on its way to a lustrous falsetto, and it is what ultimately makes a Radiohead song a Radiohead song. Yorke is also the band's chief songwriter and driving force, or as he has put it: "We operate like the U.N. I'm America." Yorke would not speak to me for some time when I joined the band on the road for several days last month in Copenhagen, and he also chooses not to speak to his fellow band members from time to time, which tends to make them even more uneasy. ("Thom can be rather... hard on people," is how Nigel Godrich, the precocious young producer who works with Radiohead, put it, choosing his words carefully, so as not to make things harder for himself, I did not doubt.)

Three years ago, Radiohead confronted the looming end of album-based, guitar-saturated, lyric-dense rock by counterintuitively releasing OK Computer, a 70's-redolent concept album stuffed with grandly contoured melodies, rigorous guitar patternings, odd time signatures, melancholy minor chords and atonal changes and weighty dystopian lyrics summoning a world of technological disasters, hypercapitalist conformity and things moving so fast that there was no longer time to do things like listen to painstakingly wrought, crepuscularly beautiful concept albums like OK Computer. (If Don DeLillo's Underworld were a rock album, it would sound like OK Computer.) The kind of aging white men who edit music journals and write rock criticism and still listen to albums under headphones (and many times over again) hailed OK Computer as a masterpiece, and a lot of other people loved it, too: it was nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy and has sold, at last count, 4.7 million copies worldwide. At one of the shows I saw the band play, it seemed half the mesmerized crowd (hipster student types, mostly) were singing along to the strangest song on the album, "Paranoid Android" - a song that begins with the lyric "Please could you stop the noise I'm trying to get some rest/from all the unborn-chicken voices in my head," and climaxes six minutes later with a brooding Russianate chorale.

Radiohead is releasing a new album this week, its fourth. And in the music industry, which, in the wake of the success of OK Computer, has been scrambling to sign Radiohead-esque bands (Travis, Coldplay, Muse and others), the new album has created that amorphous though tinglingly palpable sense of anticipation no album by a band has generated in years. (Playing no small role in this has been Radiohead's aggressively passive rollout strategy: no advanced single for radio and no video, though MTV is showing brief video "blips" provided by Radiohead that feature sound bites from the album.) Titled Kid A, the new album is not a concept album, but it is, like its predecessor, one for the headphones.

Kid A has one genuine rock song, "Optimistic"; it's janglingly reminiscent of R.E.M., a band whose music and artfully considered way of going about being pop musicians had a considerable influence on Radiohead early on. As for the other nine songs, many of them don't have verse-chorus structures, most of them blur at their edges beneath synthesizer- and radio-generated atmospherics and nearly all of them have lamentatory or incantatory or imperative lyrics built of fragments that might have been pulled from Tristan Tzara's hat. It is not "difficult" music, though, as searching as much of it is, mainly because the sonic textures Radiohead has worked up for the songs are so evocative and absorbing. Sounds from the past (a churchy harmonium, a bowed double bass, a florid, cascading harp) surge and fade amid burbling electro-beats, taped and looped vocals and computer-manipulated guitar and keyboard riffs: it's an aural palimpsest, its delights surfacing slowly, and concentrated in the rubs and the musically shaped spaces. For example, on the album's title track, the name for which was lifted from a software program of children's voices, a ravishing sound sculpture is constructed from an Old World music-box motif; a bit of jazzy drumming taped, cut and pasted; a Gramophone-era vocal melody stretched and garbled by a vocoder; and a watery foundation established by an Ondes Martinot, the protosynthesizer used by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who is much admired by Radiohead's lead guitarist and keyboard experimenter, Jonny Greenwood.

Jonny's older brother, Colin, is Radiohead's bass player and, even in a band that unwinds back at the hotel by drinking a glass or two of wine and worrying about the consolidation of the British publishing industry, he stands out as the most intellectually minded member of the group. (He read English at Cambridge.) When I asked him one morning last month, while we sat and chatted in the gardens of Copenhagen's Rosenborg Castle, how Kid A had come about, he thought for a moment, cited a Leonard Bernstein dictum that all music-making is about ambiguity and deletion, mentioned matter-of-factly that during the Kid A sessions there had been moments when the band seemed on the verge of breaking up, then finally said: "The whole thing, really, comes down to finding a new sound. You think about the Beatles, they sort of came up with a new approach every album - they listened to all this stuff then brought it to bear on their work. And that's how we work, too. But of course they were at the beginning, inventing how it could be done." He paused, and then he said, "We are people who have worked together for 15 years, a rare thing - especially for men, when you think about it - and it's getting harder not only for us, but it would seem for music itself, to do something new."

The surprisingly strong sales of OK Computer may have been driven to some small degree by the overwhelming critical embrace of the album, but are more likely owed to the labors of the band itself, which spent a year and a half on three continents touring in support of the album. It is the way a band has always become big, and it is a terrible grind. Of course, only a band with considerable ambition would ever find itself out on the road that way. But Thom Yorke doesn't like the word "ambition." "We used to be more ambitious," he said when I brought the topic up. "And what does that mean, anyway, ambition?"

'I think we managed somehow to bend the machines to our will,' Greenwood says.

I shifted a bit: hadn't the fame and fortune that resulted from the saturation touring of OK Computerbrought Radiohead a whole new level of freedom and control?

"You can say we've earned the privilege to do things our way," he replied, "and I would say to you" - and he did say it, and you can imagine.

Then he laughed a little and seemed slightly embarrassed. Yorke comes across as someone who has had to work up a certain hauteur to get what he wants aesthetically and also to insulate that art-minded aspect of him from all that encompasses the Biz. But there is also a boyish sweetness to him, and that English decency Orwell put such stock in, and that goes too for the other band members - they hold doors and ask after the health and spirits of roadies and sign autographs in the cool drizzle outside their hotel as if they liked nothing more and apologize for everything. "Sorry," Yorke said to me. Then he thought for a moment before going on to say: "We knew a lot about bands, you know, about the endless touring and things you need to do to be able to be a big band at the end of all that. But by the end, those last months on the OK Computer tour - it was just totally wrong.

"You know," he continued, "we always had this idea that the good thing about being in a band was people clicking, keeping one another's interest going - all the stuff you can't do in a bedroom by yourself. And here I was spending days thinking: The hell with this band. It was awful."

Yorke, who is 31, which is roughly the median age of a Radiohead member, was seated on a sofa and sipping white wine in the band's dressing room following one of the concerts last month in Copenhagen, an early stop on a brief European tour nothing like the one to promote OK Computer. Because Radiohead can stand neither the acoustics nor the atmosphere of big arenas, each concert was being staged in a huge, custom-built tent carefully raised in a big city park. This required a crew of dozens not only to hoist and lower the indigo-colored tent but to work the custom sound and lighting systems that were fitted beneath them, and this crew, in turn, as well as the band and its crew - managers, the "guitar tech," and so on - were fed through the day by a catering team that also found time to shop locally each morning for an elaborate, multicourse preconcert dinner each night. Mornings and early afternoons were mostly free for band members to read, exercise, stroll around. Late in the afternoon they assembled under the tent for a brief sound check. Radiohead went on stage on the early side by rock standards, around 8:30, following an opening band (in Copenhagen, it was an arty Icelandic group called Sigur Ros), and were done by 11. "Thom just didn't want be working all the time anymore," Colin Greenwood said. "People still cling to this idea that bands don't work hard - maybe they can't acknowledge it, since we are part of their leisure - but it is hard."

Radiohead's two Copenhagen shows were workouts - spirited, exacting and at times wondrous, as when, say, Jonny Greenwood "played" a transistor radio like a Stratocaster on one new song, or, when he and the band's other guitar player, Ed O'Brien, during another new one, knelt over sampling machines, capturing Thom Yorke's voice and strange electric-piano chord changes and sending them droning and echoing over the crowd like otherworldly plainsong. "It's set up as an experiment in a way, that song," Yorke said later. "I like that it cannot ever be the same any night by design. I get bored. I'm bored with the rock thing. Aren't you?"

One morning last month I drove through Abingdon, a picturesque market town, and then past the Abingdon School, with its brick-red Victorian buildings and beveled hedgerows and schoolboys in their blazers and ties, gathered on a wide stretch of lawn. Showing me around was Chris Hufford, a partner in Radiohead's longtime management team, Courtyard Management, and as he talked of how his son had decided against attending Abingdon - Hufford and his associates have their offices in the nearby village of Sutton Courtenay - I couldn't take my eyes off those public-school boys, baffled as to how the members of arguably the most significant band of this moment could have been among them not so many years before. At the Abingdon School, Colin Greenwood studied classical guitar, Selway studied percussion, Yorke wrote incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Jonny Greenwood manned a viola chair in a local youth orchestra. What would become Radiohead more or less came together, at Yorke's instigation, in a school band room.

The success of Radiohead has brought with it the publication of no fewer than three quicky biographies of the band, and in each, the impetus for the band's formation, and, for that matter, the darkish modalities of its lyrics and music, are traced to Yorke's childhood, and a series of painful operations on his lazy left eye that not only failed to correct the condition but also damaged his vision and left his eyelid drooping slightly, for which he was ceaselessly ridiculed by other boys ("Salamander," he was called at Abingdon). Ultimately, though, Radiohead's roots are not that much different from those of the countless bands before them: they liked hanging out together, clique-style, shared a passion for particular recordings - especially those of American groups like R.E.M. and the Boston-based college rockers the Pixies - and thought playing music would be a great means of cementing their bond and a way to make use of it.

"The really weird thing is how serious I was about it," Ed O'Brien recalled one afternoon in Copenhagen.

"We all were," Jonny Greenwood quickly amended.

The three of us were having a cup of coffee at a bar near their Copenhagen hotel before they headed to the tent for a sound check.

Greenwood: "I went off to college, and it was for me, like, O.K., I hope this week isn't too rough, because I have to get back home for band practice this weekend. I mean, the band's been what I do - been my life - since I was 13."

O'Brien: "At Abingdon we'd rehearse, tape the rehearsal, listen to the tape of the rehearsal, rehearse some more..."

Greenwood: "Yeah, we'd hardly ever play for anybody."

O'Brien: "Nobody liked us, except us."

Greenwood: "That's true."

O'Brien: "I'd play tapes of us for people when I went off to college - I mean, the band was my raison d'etre - and they'd give me that look that said: Keep studying."

Greenwood: "We were so serious."

O'Brien: "We'd sit together in a pub or something in Abingdon, which can be an incredibly boring place to be at that age - maybe we're 16 or 17 - and we'd lay out the plan of what we were going to do."

Greenwood: "I mean, when you really think about it..."

O'Brien: "Uh-oh. I feel a Charlie Watts-ism coming here..."

Greenwood: "Actually, I think we just wanted to make a record."

O'Brien: "More than that."

While Thom Yorke was at Exeter University in the late 1980's, where he studied art and literature, he wrote a song called "Creep." It's about a drunken guy, troubled by his self-image, for whom the sight of a young beauty brings on a crisis of confidence, and worse. Late in the summer of 1992, when Radiohead was in a studio to work on a single, it got recorded, almost as an afterthought, and the producers applauded. A four-song EP, their first recording after signing a deal with Britain's Parlophone label, which is part of the globe-spanning EMI Group, had been released at the end of 1991 in Britain, and gone nowhere. "Creep" pretty much went nowhere in Britain, too.

But the story of "Creep" does not end there. A music director at a San Francisco college station found the single in a Berkeley record shop's import rack and added it to his station's playlist. Within weeks it was an underground rage up and down the California coast. "Creep" was included on Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey, released in February 1993, and "Creep" drove it into the charts. A new, bowdlerized radio-edit version of "Creep" was produced for American modern rock stations, excising the emotive use of an obscenity, and the single went into deep rotation. By the end of the summer of 1993, "Creep" was a national alt-rock smash - the next new slacker anthem, following Nirvana's "Teen Spirit" and Beck's "Loser."

Radiohead toured America, and everywhere kids in flannel shirts screamed for "Creep." But often they would leave once the band played the song. And then a follow-up single went nowhere. And by the end of 1993, Radiohead was being written off.

Kids still yell for "Creep" at Radiohead concerts, which is an indication of how important a hit single can be in building a fan base. Radiohead won't play "Creep" anymore, and when I brought it up with Yorke, he lit into American radio, and how modern-rock D.J.'s tormented him with questions as to whether the "Creep" was him, and what had his parents or somebody done to him, did he think, to make him turn out this way: the pop-analysis inquiries of the grunge era. "You can't imagine how horrible that was," he told me. "And the thing about being a one-hit wonder: you know, you do come to believe it. You say you don't but you do. It messed me up good and proper."

Kid A came together not far from Abingdon, in a gathering of old stone barns that the band has converted into Radiohead Central, with recording studios, workstations, meeting areas and bedrooms. Kid A did not come together easily, however. In making the previous albums, it worked like this: Yorke would have some songs roughed out, and these would be added to songs left over from previous sessions, and the band would gather and rehearse them, each member going off into his corner for a day or two and working up his riff for a song or, perhaps, an entire idea for an arrangement. There would also be time during these rehearsals for listening to recordings each of the members happened to be intrigued by then.

"It's like you hear something and you say to the others, Let's aim for that - that sound," Jonny Greenwood explained. "And then you might aim for that, knowing your style and limitations will keep you from ever getting there - John Lennon said this - but they will, as a result of where you've aimed, maybe get you somewhere new and great." (Greenwood mentioned that his obsession with Miles Davis's Bitches Brew had set the tone when they were working on OK Computer.)

O'Brien had convinced himself, even before work began on the new album, that Radiohead should do a sort of back-to-roots guitar record, closer in feel to the band's second album, The Bends. However, when he and the other band members gathered to rehearse and begin recording in a Paris studio in January of last year - the new Oxfordshire complex was still under construction - they learned that that was the last thing Yorke had in mind.

He just didn't think guitar bands were "relevant" anymore, he told the other band members. He was interested most in new, more contemplative forms of hip-hop, like that produced by San Francisco's DJ Shadow; and Yorke had taken with him to Paris recordings from the early 90's by Autechre and the Aphex Twin, weavers of rave-scene chill-out sound tapestries. The other band members didn't get it.

"It was rather incredible to see," Nigel Godrich, who went to Paris with the band, recalled one evening a few weeks ago, sitting behind a control board at a studio in St. John's Wood. "I mean, Radiohead is a remarkable guitar band. But what Thom wanted now was a sound that doesn't tend to get made by bands."

The band left Paris having gotten nowhere and reassembled in Copenhagen a few weeks later. It got worse. The new songs Yorke had, dozens of them, were mostly sketches. Godrich recalls Yorke not talking much to anyone. O'Brien found the two weeks there "horrendous." In April, the group tried it again, in an empty mansion in Gloucestershire. There were tense meetings. What basically got decided was that the band would not split up. Phil Selway, Radiohead's soft-spoken drummer, told me : "I think what was happening back then was that for the first time we didn't have anything to push against as a group, and so we pushed against each other."

Not until early this year, with Radiohead regrouped in the new studios, did Yorke's idea for the album begin to sink in with everybody else. The band members became more comfortable with setting aside their instruments; at one point last winter they actually split into two groups in two different rooms, one of them charged with making and recording noises and musical snippets without using guitars or drums, the other with reworking this material technologically with studio gizmos and computers. The understanding grew that there would be tracks on which one or more of them would not appear. In a sense, the very notion of being a band member was evolving: what would count most now were taste and ideas. "We were working more like producers than musicians," Selway says.

By spring's end, they had enough material for two albums. That freed up time for another round of anguishing meetings about what tracks should make itonto the album, and in which sequence they should be arranged. "Nigel says working with us was like working with five method actors," Colin Greenwood says. Then, talking about the album itself, he went on to say, "I think we managed somehow to bend the machines to our will - that's what we did together, as a band. We approached them our way, navely, without reading all those instruction manuals - we don't have the patience for that. It's as if in this way we created a kind of false sense of the nostalgia some people get by using older synthesizers from the 70's and 80's."

Strangely, this does come through: Radiohead used up-to-the-minute methods to make a kind of artifact of the future's past - a work that weirdly harks back to right now and the looming exhaustion of the band paradigm.

Defying record-industry conventional wisdom, the band's current European tour will be all but over before the album's release, and there will be no American tour at all. Radiohead will appear on "Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 14, and play one concert at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles later in the month. The only radio show the band will visit is "Morning Becomes Eclectic," the art-pop drive-time show on the Santa Monica public-station KCRW. Radiohead's renunciation of the standard album-release strategy is talked about by industry people as the most understatedly ingenious publicity ploy since the Beatles' cover for the White album.

Tony Wadsworth, president and C.E.O. of EMI, caught himself when he began to tell me recently about how commercially savvy the band is. But he did venture: "These five guys are at a point where they are not going to do a thing they don't want to do - they're not going to be traveling salesmen. They want to find other ways of doing what has to be done to get their records into as many hands as possible."

The members of Radiohead talk about releasing more music from their recent sessions as early as next spring, either in album form, as an EP or online. They have also begun to discuss taking their tent tour to the United States next year. For the moment, they are not talking about not being Radiohead. "I think it will be our personal lives someday that get us drifting away from each other, not aesthetic disagreements," Colin Greenwood said. "I think we'll know the moment when it really comes, as opposed to all the moments when it almost really comes," said Ed O'Brien. Thom Yorke said: "I think we will exhaust all the ideas the band has. And then we'll exhaust the band."

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The Inside Connection 10.2000

Radiohead and their New Kid A

Breaking Away From their Past
by Gabriella


Thom Yorke (vocals), Jonny Greenwood (guitar, keyboards, xylophone) Ed O'Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass) and Phil Selway (drums) began playing together in 1987 in Oxford. With their new album, Kid A, it seems that Radiohead said goodbye to everything that made them so popular in the past. Instead of melodies it sounds more like an art project, a mood-invoking avant-garde piece of work, as if they were overdosing on Can and Kraftwerk. Colin Greenwood agrees. “It's true, Can and Kraftwerk were the bands we’ve been listening to a lot, but also Charlie Mingus,” he says. “We wanted to show some new angles in our work. It felt a bit like we were in a dead-end street and that was really frustrating.” Their shy frontman, Thom Yorke, claims that after the enormous success of OK Computer, he felt like he was in a creative prison and tried to break out with this album.

To avoid once again being labeled "guitar pop," they experimented with their fourth studio album, using an Apple Notebook and a vocorder program to get some weird sound effects. "Thom sang through the Notebook and at the same time Jonny’s keyboard was hooked up. We made all sorts of weird experiments, a little bit like the Beastie Boys maybe. They also tried a lot of new and sometimes weird sound effects. It was a very creative, relaxed atmosphere and we really enjoyed working together."

Even Yorke confessed he enjoyed it. "We didn’t have to push ourselves to work. We wanted to get things done, to experiment and find new angles, leave the old paths. We tried to treat the album like a song, let the album develop itself rather than giving it a shape and molding it into a shape, and it worked. It was a completely different way we used for work and it was rather liberating. We had about 40 songs but only a few made it; only a few of them were what we wanted on the album. We toyed with the idea of making it a double album, but I think that would only have confused everybody even more, so we decided to stick with the songs we picked."

The opening cut, "Everything In Its Right Place," continues Radiohead’s evolution of a distant, haunting sound that first appeared on OK Computer in 1997. With just keyboard and vocals, the song goes from stark to swirling when some added effects blend the sound. But the title is a bit misleading: nothing in "Everything In Its Right Place" seems to be in the right place, and it leaves you slightly confused.

The second cut, the title track, offers more of the same free-falling, space-jam, groundless sounds. It’s here that the CD starts to abandon the traditional, blues-based, rock and pop construction of songs, providing a sense of the future. Colin Greenwood is enthusiastic about the beginning of the song. "The way Thom sings those first few lines about Kid A, that's such an excellent opening for the whole album. It really shows you were we're going and what is happening in the album."

While the languid and melodic "How To Disappear Completely" might have fit nicely on OK Computer, the rest of the songs on Kid A don’t fit into the line of classic rock thrillers we're used to from Radiohead. The whole album has a rather strange and slightly scary feel to it. It’s cryptic and yet tuneful, but something is still amiss and one cannot help wondering if Yorke should not be on Prozac, so depressive and scary sound the lyrics and the music together. The lyrics seem to be angst-ridden and a tad darker than just gray, but brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood claim that there is no reason to be scared for Thom’s mental health.

"Thom isn’t half as moody and unstable as his lyrics can make you believe he is. I think a lot of people take the lyrics too seriously and read too much into it. They only show a part of Thom’s personality, maybe the dark part, but it is still not the whole guy. He used his voice like an instrument and we used the lyrics like pieces in a collage, pierced something together and created an artwork out of a lot of different little things. There is no point in taking the lyrics alone; that’s one of the reasons why we won’t have a lyric sheet with the album."

There is also another reason, but it takes Colin a while to voice what Thom apparently told the band a few times. "Thom is really fed up with being the spokesperson of a lost generation until all eternity, with all their fear, angst, loneliness and post-millennium neurosis. He’s trying to escape that fate by moving, always moving forward, never standing still, always developing."

The CD somehow has the feel of a rather morbid soundtrack, a concept-heavy album that is at times breathtakingly lovely, and at times maddeningly disharmonic and plainly strange. It seems more admirable than likable, filled with long, bleep- and loop-heavy instrumental suites, harmonic and atmospheric songs that are lovely but simply seem to go nowhere. Its 10 songs somehow do fit together, but more in the sense of a concept than an album. Of course, it is a great piece of work; after all, the members of Radiohead are geniuses, but I can’t help wondering if they haven’t started to take their status as geniuses a bit too seriously.

Because of the tortured feeling you get from the album, the question arises if it was planned this way or if it was all just by chance. Yorke claims that it was all just happening somehow. "I think it was the first time we didn’t have a clue what we were going to do, what we were doing. We were just experimenting. We’ve been in this state for about a year, just fooling around, trying out stuff and listening to what we did, then it finally started to get into shape ... after about 18 months."

He also comes up with a rather interesting metaphor for his songs. "The track listing is always the hardest part for me; it is so difficult and almost painful. I can only use the old metaphor about songs being like children. My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that’s just the way it is. I talked to Bjork about it and she agrees, she says she feels exactly the same way about her songs."

Compared to their other albums, OK Computer (1997), Bends (1995) and Pablo Honey (1993), I can’t help but miss the inspired, alternative rock band of the past, and I feel a bit lost with the slightly lifeless homage to artistic abstraction. While brilliant, it certainly is lacking accessibility and a spark of humanity. While all their previous work seemed to be alive and sparkling, Kid A sparkles with a machine-like glow that seems cold.

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Spill, 10.00

By Keith "K-Tel" McCalmont


A relaxed Jonny and Colin Greenwood of Radiohead sat down recently for an intimate conversation on the eve of one of only three concerts to be played in North America this year by the quintet from Oxford.

Their new album, Kid A, is garnering much critical acclaim, but more importantly it sets the band out in yet another musical direction assuring fans that the band is very real and very much in command of their artistic senses. Each song incorporates layer after layer of sound building into a well-textured and entirely original musical score defying comparison. The tag line in most circles being; "it's not an easy listen". However, Jonny laughs, "most people who approach us say that they love the album, but are surprised to find out that other people are enjoying it as well". What is being forgotten is just how abstract their previous album OK Computer seemed before going on to win several major awards.

With Kid A, Radiohead introduce several new elements to their music, the most surprising of which is the burying of lead vocalist Thom Yorke's operatic voice between and betwixt Colin's snarling bass lines and Jonny's feverish guitar/synth work. In addition, during the course of one performance, the group managed to involve tambourines, transistor radio, upright bass, piano, sampler, maracas, and the list goes on. While it may seem impossible to play this album in a live setting, Colin is quick to point out that Jonny's preparation work leaves him with very little keyboard work to do on the jazz/disco free for all that is "Idioteque". "Jonny literally wrote on each key 'first this one', 'then this one next', and 'next this one', and 'this is the last one'... a monkey could do it!!". (Really!) All kidding aside, this makes for a stunning visual performance in concert with strobe lighting, mass instrument exchanges, and the whirling rave style posturing of Yorke. This is an album that can be appreciated at different levels in both an exciting live setting as well as at home in your own CD player.

Once again, politics make an important foray into the conceptual artwork of the album, but not within the music itself. Colin wisely states that, "you don't use music as a soap box, it dates the music horribly to eventually become propaganda...". Instead, they are content to be active within their own circle of friends and to promote and treat their music with the greatest degree of respect possible. To that extent, they toured Europe this summer playing in their own concert tent, free of the corporate logos that surrounded their appearance in Toronto. "And this song," crowed Thom, "was brought to you by Labatts!!", after performing "Morning Bell". In fact, Thom went on to dedicate songs to Ford, Pizza Pizza, Molson, Much Music and Ticketmaster which receive a raucous chorus of boos from the angry punters.

There will be no typical music videos for the new album according to Jonny as, "we are not interested in miming". Instead, their are several fun yet creepy "blips" available for download on their website at www.radiohead.com created by Stanley Donwood, who also created much of the artwork for the album in collaboration with Thom Yorke. In lieu of their usually outstanding video work (see "Just" and "No Surprises"), Radiohead are sending out reels of live concert footage to be used by the major video stations. MuchMusic has yet to make a decision on whether or not they will use the footage. Incidentally, be sure to find your "secret booklet" hidden behind the CD holder of your jewel case, that features more artwork from Donwood influenced by the London Illustrated News (circa 1880).

The live performance was outstanding. During "National Anthem", drummer Phil Selway kept everything in check, while Colin stood coolly in the safety of the kit's shadow as Thom lunged furiously around the stage, spinning in circles and threatening to leap out at the audience. Guitarist Ed O'Brien stood shyly to stage right while Jonny draped his lanky body around each instrument, caressing the transistor, exhorting unthinkable sounds only to rush back to the piano, pounding furiously on its keys raising the tempo and lying in wait for the missing element to take us all over the edge. And then he sang, "Everyone is so near..." and we all went over. Radiohead maintained this pace throughout the concert, playing nearly the entire album, occasionally returning to their guitars to play favourites such as, "My Iron Lung" and "Just". The evening reached its peak during the encore with only Thom on stage to play a new gem entitled, "Follow Me Around". The band watched with awe from stage side as Yorke sang in his wavering angelic voice that rose from deep within his slight frame to the rafters of the building, to rapturous applause from the audience and polite clapping from his adoring band mates. Clocking in at just over two hours, this was a marathon performance from a band proudly strutting their new album, and left only due to the stadium curfew.

After such a breathtaking performance, I began to fear that maybe this would be the last time, but not to fear. Colin and Jonny maintained their cracking sense of humour throughout the interview by taking digs at each other in conversation. Colin in particular by dredging up memories of a young Jonny who, "would run about the neighborhood with a tennis racket playing air guitar" to which Jonny could only smile in guilt. In turn, Jonny would make fun of Colin's frequent use of the phrase "you know" by singing it softly during his responses, "youknowyouknowyouknow", leaving them to ask us for a friendly edit of their sound bites! What is refreshing about this important and successful veteran band is that they are still enjoying the music, enjoying each other, and look ahead to a strong future together. Where other bands have changed members or have a breakdown in the quality of music, Radiohead is still soaring high above their contemporaries. "It's great, exciting..." says Colin when asked about being famous. This confidence, along with a tremendous new album bode well for the future of arguably the most important band of our time.

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The Observer, 01.09.2000

Sound and fury

Radiohead don't do interviews and they're never photographed together. But when Andrew Smith joined them on tour in Paris, the notoriously temperamental Thom Yorke talked about Nasty Nick, bad reviews and how his breakdown nearly broke the band


In the early 90s, you knew you'd arrived as a rock group the day you made it on to MTV and the Beavis & Butthead show. So it's 1993 and the joke is that Beavis has heard the song before, while Butthead hasn't. Over soft guitars, someone is singing in a baleful falsetto about a girl who makes him cry. Butthead is not alone in feeling impatient.

Beavis: 'Don't worry Butthead, it gets cool in a minute.'

Butthead: 'It better start rocking or I'll really give him something to cry about.'

Beavis: 'Shut up Butthead, it's cool. Check it out, check it out! Here it comes...'

[Metallic guitars ejaculate into a chorus of 'I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, I don't belong here.']

Beavis: 'Yes! Yes!'

Butthead: 'This is pretty cool.'

Beavis: 'Yeah yeah yeah yeah.'

Butthead: 'Uh?...Uhh?'

[The soft guitars return.]

Beavis: 'What... what's going on...? How come they don't just, like, play that cool part through the whole song?'

Butthead: 'Well, Beavis, if they didn't have, like, a part of the song that sucked, then, it's like, the other part wouldn't be as cool.'

Beavis: 'Really? You're pretty smart Butthead. Hey, here it comes again. Yes! Yes! Raaawk...!'

By the end, they've observed that the singer seems a little low on self-esteem and have helpfully struck up a chant of 'I am somebody, I am somebody'. They are sending up Radiohead, five sallow public schoolboys from Oxford, and they will be neither the first nor the last. Back home, the single which broke them in the US, 'Creep', sank without trace on the first occasion of its release. The NME called them 'a lily-livered excuse for a rock band' ('and they may have had a point,' affable guitarist Ed O'Brien allows late one night in a Parisian hotel bar, seven years later). They were dismissed as a corporate-funded Nirvana-lite and eclipsed by the arrival of Suede, a home-grown rebuke to American grunge, who presaged Britpop and had everything Radiohead didn't; a clear raison d' être, a great first album and the support of the press.

And Suede had a sexy singer. If John Osborne had been born 30 years after he was, there is no question he'd have chosen rock'n'roll over the theatre, and if you imagine the adenoidal playwright modified with a few genes from Richard III, you have the public face of Radiohead's singer circa 1993. Thom Yorke was born in October 1968, with the muscles in his left eye paralysed, a condition which demanded no less than five operations before the age of six. It can still be the case that when he turns his head to the side and fixes you with his cornflower-blue right eye, his left appears to be glaring at someone on the other side of the room, who's annoying him even more than you are. Strangely, this gives him a kind of presence and may be what drummer Phil Selway is referring to when he says that Yorke 'was very noticeable and always stood out in a crowd' at school.

Needless to say, the singer was teased mercilessly when young and could be forgiven for being in a funk with the world, which he learnt from an early age to vent through his music. He was a fighter at school and there is often an undercurrent of rage and frustration in even his most reflective lyrics. He confirms that he still gets hate mail from fans he upset during his last tour. 'Being in a band is about wreaking revenge on the world,' he once conceded. 'It's like when you get chucked by your first girlfriend. You just say to yourself: "I'm going to be famous one day, and she'll regret that..."'

Now we find Thom Yorke standing on a stage, inside a huge blue tent, with lights skittering across the angled surfaces above him and 10,000 rapt Parisians gazing at him from below. In the early days, you'd have got long odds on Radiohead being here, with two seminal albums under their belts, in the form of The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997). You'd have got longer odds on their fourth album, Kid A, which is released tomorrow, sparking the kind of critical discussion which hasn't been heard since the two European groups who changed pop - the Beatles and Kraftwerk - were at their peaks. Some critics are calling it a commercial suicide note.

This is the second of two Parisian dates on a short European tour which involves two different tents leapfrogging each other across the continent. It's an enormous production and all the dates are sold out. At this particular moment toward the end of the show, Yorke is the only real focus. His voice brings to mind an angel being attacked by a swarm of bees and he spins a melody the way a spider spins a web, gossamer and intricate, allowing it to drift across a jackhammer electro beat which makes the floor judder and your scalp tingle. As lights strobe and guitarists O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood help to propel the song towards an urgent crescendo, Yorke starts to shudder and squirm as though someone's plugged him into the mains, as though caught up in religious ecstasy. It's an extraordinary moment and I've only ever heard a more fevered response to something a band has done once before - and Take That only had to walk on stage at Wembley to elicit that.

The song is 'Idioteque' and tonight's audience have never heard it before, or anything like it. It's the eighth tune on Kid A and the most striking result of a creative crisis that afflicted the group and has taken the better part of two turbulent years to resolve. The trouble began with OK Computer, which is regarded, with a degree of unanimity as the finest British rock album of the past decade (closely followed by The Bends).

In its wake, the quintet were obliged to tour for a full 12 months, a process which they had been through with The Bends and nearly failed to recover from. This time, Yorke came back disenchanted with the guitar music he had been making and resolved to change it. Melody, he has said, came to seem like 'an embarrassment'. He wanted the emphasis to switch to rhythm. 'I just wasn't interested in guitar music anymore,' he will tell me, going on to deny any suggestions that bravery was involved in tearing Radiohead down and starting over again, saying, 'Yeah, but things were being torn down anyway. That's how I felt. There was no being brave. It was "I either do this or forget it. Just stop."'

The frightening thing, Yorke will add, is that he saw no way out. He had always been the catalyst for Radiohead and there was no one else to take up the reins now. ('We operate like the UN,' he told one interviewer drily, 'and I'm America.')

In February 1999, the five members convened in Paris for a month during which almost nothing was achieved. The same thing happened in Copenhagen later, during which time each individual member had begun to have doubts as to whether the less traditional, less methodical approach the singer was trying to foist on them could ever work - and even if it did, whether there would be a place for them within it.

Yorke had played in a techno group called Flickernoise while studying art and English at Exeter University, but the electronic artists he was holding up as pointers to the way forward now (such as The Aphex Twin and Autechre) mostly worked on their own or in pairs. Nothing was happening and the band was insecure. On some of the tracks, none of them were being asked to contribute directly at all. Only three of the 10 pieces that would eventually comprise Kid A have any obvious guitar parts on them. Selway was not alone in realising that they had been together for 15 years and were essentially the same schoolboy band they'd started out as. But they weren't schoolboys anymore.

Tensions rose until a series of blazing rows led to an acknowledgment that there was space for them all, even though they might not be playing their usual instruments on every track, and earlier this year the album began to take shape. The group were reputedly close to splitting up again in February over the issue of whether to pour all of the 23 tracks they'd recorded on to a double album, or whittle it down to a concise single disc. Once the brooding, piano-driven 'Everything In Its Right Place' had been chosen to open proceedings, the rest of the sequence followed naturally. At only 48 minutes long, Kid A was conceived of, and sounds like, a unitary piece of work, rather than a collection of songs.

Radiohead will admit to eschewing photo shoots partly because they look so peculiar together. They range in height from Yorke's flyweight 5'7", to Ed O'Brien's hulking 6'5", and in age from drummer Selway's 33 to Jonny Greenwood's boyish 28. They met at Abingdon school in the Oxford suburbs and, Yorke excepted, are as articulate and easy-going a crew as you could hope to find anywhere.

I met the brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood (guitar and bass, respectively) in a north London restaurant, where we chatted amiably about the obvious things, along with history (which Colin read at Peterhouse College, Cambridge), books and music. Jonny was at his most animated when describing the influence of composers Penderecki and Messiaen on his string arrangements for OK Computer and Kid A and Colin explained Radiohead's attitude to fame and success in a way that was unusually comprehensible.

'I think, as long as you keep moving, you're all right,' he said. 'The thing is you're always developing and expanding. It's a protean thing and a public image can't keep pace with it. So it - the process of success - is like this slow-drying glue that sets around you, that slows you down and gums you up. And while all that's happening, your own life's going on at the side of it, with your own relationships and your own experiences and that becomes sort of calcified as well. And the whole thing just grinds to a halt really. And then you suddenly find yourself in the paper or on the cover of a magazine and your life and experiences have become summarised. And once its summarised, its over. So the trick is to try to be in the corner of people's vision, but not full on.'

How much do you feel like rock stars, I'd asked? There had been a wary pause, before Jonny pitched in with 'I don't know. It feels like Radiohead are famous. But that no one knows who we are. Which is brilliant, really.'

By the time we sit down to talk on the train from Paris to London, Thom Yorke has been a thorn in my side for several days. On the whole, he doesn't talk to the British press, because he feels misunderstood and misrepresented by them. He is annoyed by the accusations of miserabalism and implications that he is a spoilt middle-class charlatan. On the latter, he is vituperative.

'The middle-class thing has never been relevant,' he spits. 'We live in Oxford, and in Oxford we're fucking lower class. The place is full of the most obnoxious, self-indulgent, self-righteous oiks on the fucking planet, and for us to be called middle class... well, no, actually. Be around on May Day when they all reel out of the pubs at five in the morning puking up and going "haw haw haw" and trying to hassle your girlfriend...'

He has also been irked by assumptions that a song like 'Exit Music (For A Film)' from OK Computer is about suicide, and that an early number like Anyone Can Play Guitar is a sardonic swipe at the vacuity of being in a band, when it was intended as an innocent celebration. Phil Selway has protested that 'I've always seen our songs as being quite positive. They confront very painful topics, but at some time there's always a sense that there's a struggle with them and an attempt to overcome them.' Yorke, too, considers that he worked through a lot of his post-adolescent angst on the patchy first album, Pablo Honey, and changed through the making of The Bends, at which time he realised that 'there's a fine line between writing something with genuine emotional impact and turning into little idiots feeling sorry for ourselves and playing stadium rock'.

The lyrics for Kid A will not be printed on the sleeve and Yorke has resisted even explaining them to the band. A few, like the refrain of 'You can try the best you can/ you can try the best you can/ the best you can is good enough' - a piece of advice his girlfriend frequently offers him - on 'Optimistic', seem self-evident. Most do not. He describes the indiscernible words to the whispering electronic title track as 'the most vicious I've ever sung'.

Yorke has been avoiding me to a degree that has begun to assume comic proportions and I'm marvelling at the extent to which people come to resemble their persecutors after a time, when word arrives that he will talk.

When I finally settle into a seat opposite him, I find him disarmingly friendly, even warm. He smiles and laughs a lot, turning out to have a keen sense of humour. I ask why he is so fearful of these situations and he explains that he doesn't like having to answer for something that someone else has written. He no longer reads anything about himself, not even reviews of his records.

We return to the turmoil that descended on Kid A.

'When we finished the OK Computer tour, I had a sort of big... block. I basically thought that was it. I thought that I wouldn't be able to do whatever it is that I do again. We were still sort of working, but I had no faith in it. So I was in this endless cycle - and it was very much on my own as well, because we didn't see each other much for awhile. And I was doing bits and pieces, mucking around really. But in the process I was discovering that I'd lost all confidence in myself.'

Why? You had just made two critically and commercially successful albums. What more did you want?

'Yeah, but if you've lost faith in the way that you're going, then that's where you end up. I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things and I sort of felt like, that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that. And that was all sort of wrapped up with feeling huge amounts of guilt about something that, when it was good, just came naturally anyway. So it all just went round and round in circles for ages. So there's no bravado about we're gonna shake this shit up, really. It's more like, I can't carry on like this.'

Do you have any sympathy with the idea that rock has run its course and there's nothing left to do but trot out the tired cliches?

'Oh yeah, absolutely. Totally. I 100 per cent agree with it.'

But Radiohead are regarded as one of the few groups capable of taking it anywhere new.

'God help us if we are. The thing I have a problem with is the fact that so much of what people - of what journalists - term rock music now is really not based on the music itself, but based on the lifestyle that goes with it. It's like a lifestyle choice... That doesn't mean that people should stop using drums and guitars, but why stand up and say, "I'm a rock star - in 10 years time I'm going to get fucked up on smack..." The mythology around it has run its course and is stale and uncreative now, and it has been destroying the people who've been trying to make the music.

'I worry about that in the context of the album we've just done, as well. I absolutely want no part in any suggestions that our decision to use some electronic instruments is some kind of lifestyle choice. It's not. You use the instrument to help you get across a certain thing that you want to get across. That's all.'

But haven't you often been hostage to the belief that you need to be in a state of turmoil to be creative?

'No. No, I dealt with that one. I think the turmoil that is required is one that you can find any day walking down the street. I don't think you need to go and seek it out. Any normal human being goes through states of flux which they need to resolve by talking to people or making their art or whatever.'

Would it be true to say that you have a generally pessimistic caste of mind, though?

'No. I don't think so.'

That's certainly your reputation.

'Yeah, whatever. It depends what it's about. No I don't think like that at all, actually. For me, even when things are incredibly bleak in terms of the world you see reflected in the newspaper, I still sort of find you can get excited when you look in people's eyes when they walk down the street and sometimes you see really nasty, terrifying things, but most of the time you just see a bunch of people trying to get it together and there's something really hopeful in that. It sounds a bit bonkers, but there you go.'

You've found touring tiresome and destructive in the past. Having seen it as close quarters, I'm constantly surprised that anyone with a modicum of sensitivity and/or intelligence survives that life for more than a year.

'I don't think they do. I think they either step out, or they go pop.'

Have you felt close to doing either of those things?

'Oh, I did go pop.' He smiles broadly and gazes out of the window, chuckling. 'I definitely went pop.'

How did this 'pop' manifest itself?

'Oh it was a fairly quiet little pop, really. I was really... I saw this really cheesy Bruce Lee film, the story of his life. And there's this bit in it where he's standing between two mirrors and there's this break and he goes nuts and he has a seizure. Well it was like that without the seizure. It was just on and off really. I mean it wasn't like... it was just a state of mind. But in a way it was just kind of not knowing how to deal with it. And I look back now and I'm really quite happy that it happened, because it makes you decide what to do and then go on that path for awhile. And then you sort of pick yourself up and you carry on and you feel so much better that you've done it. It feels like I'm a little bit tougher than I was. I have more confidence.

'I got really into these hawthorn hedges in the woods near where I live. The way the branches weave together reminds me of a human brain and I love the way that the rain flows along them and the life that's lived in them - it's like this path you choose to take and it gets thinner at the end. And I used to draw these things endlessly, for weeks on end, I used to go sit in the woods and draw these trees. I still do it.'

Did your friends stick by you through what sounds like a breakdown of some kind?

'They were brilliant. Even when I was being a bastard , they were really cool about it. That's when you find out... and that's another cliche. What I should really be doing is wearing a cowboy hat...'

Do you think the rest of the band is secure with your new recording methods now? You could work alone if you wanted to.

'No, but you see, I couldn't. Well, what I'd been saying to them all along... I'm built to always work with other people.'

What do you get from them?

'Points of reference. Otherwise, I'd just go off in lala land and then I don't know where I am, what I'm doing. It all becomes meaningless. Because I'll get bored or frustrated. My running joke with myself is like being one of those ad executives: you know, the ideas man, the painfully annoying neurotic ones who run around banging loads of charlie and coming up with one idea a month? That sort of thing.'

Kid A is the one of the first albums to make good use of the CD format. In the days of vinyl, artists were limited to 45 minutes worth of music, split down the middle. CDs have made it possible for records to grow enormously in length, beyond what many of us are prepared or able to take on in a single sitting. As a result, we skip about, consume in byte-size chunks, much as we do in so many other areas of our lives: as the author James Gleick points out in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are gradually losing the ability to relax and focus on one thing for any length of time.

To be appreciated in the initial stages, Kid A demands to be heard continuously, as a piece, in the same way that much classical music does. If this care, or rather desire, is not there on the part of the listener, it gives little of itself away. But under the right circumstances, when it does, it turns out to be the equal and more of its predecessors.

From the opening strains of 'Everything In Its Right Place', with its elliptical piano motif and mantra-like vocal, to the near devotional hush of 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' at the end, this is a record which constantly surprises with its emotional range and beauty. As if to underscore the point, Radiohead are refusing to release any singles from it, or make videos. In future, they say, they may choose to issue material as and when it's ready, over the internet, thus avoiding the bi-annual marketing putsch.

How do you think Kid A is going to be received? I asked Yorke

'I think people should just decide for themselves and we'll be getting on with something else. That's about it. No other feelings. If people have a problem with it, well, I wont be reading about it anyway. And I won't be apologising for it. You can't make music and then be responsible for the way that people receive it all the time. [Sarcastically] Not unless you really know your market.'

Is the title a reference to Carl Steadman's book, Kid A in Alphabet Street?

'No. It just seemed to work. I think the best ones are usually like that. Often, if you call it something specific, it drives the record in a certain way. I like the non-meaning. All sorts of bizarre things have come up in relation to it. But the one I like is based on the idea that, somewhere, some errant scientist has already created the first completely genetically cloned baba - Kid A. I'm sure its happened. I'm sure somewhere it's already been done, even though it's illegal now.'

Colin was saying that you and the others all have what he characterised as a middle-class aversion to altercation.

'Well, I think a lot of that is... I guess in a way... we were all brought up in kind of an... those sort of schools are ultra, ultra competitive. And you never really lose it. Like that bloke in Big Brother - he says, having not watched it.'

Nasty Nick?

'I absolutely recognised him. And you look at him and think, "You absolute arsehole." But then you think, "No I was brought up like that." Achievement is everything and if anybody gets in the way you just want to kill. I think there was quite a lot of that and... that was one of the things we had to sort out, really! Cos it couldn't carry on like that... like if you were a businessman and every time you didn't get your own way, you got really vindictive with the people involved, then...'

You were inclined to do that?

'Oh yeah. Big time. Because I felt like... it's a weird thing because if you have something in your head and it feels like its going there, then suddenly it's being dragged away by other people, you freak. Because, essentially, in order for me personally to stay OK about what I do I have to see through whatever it is that's appearing in my head. That's my instinct, anyway, but then the best things are often those that go somewhere you weren't expecting. It's learning to trust to that. The whole point of being in a band and having Nigel [Godrich] produce us is that things happen that I don't know anything about. And the best feeling in the world is when you sit there and watch it go somewhere unexpected. 'How to Disappear' on Kid A , for instance, I had no involvement in that at all after the demo stage. Jonny did everything else. We managed to turn it into this incredible thing. I think that was good for me to see that happen and to let it happen.'

Are you still surprised by what comes out of Radiohead?

'Oh yeah. That's the qualification for a song that goes on the record. Each one has had that happen to it. That's the best thing in the world. It's why I keep doing it.'

Spitting Image once did a skit on Orson Welles, under the title of 'The man who lived his life backwards'. Now look at this. What about the band who started out with an understated, little-understood album of opaque but brilliant songs, which John Peel loved, then went on to a critically acclaimed middle period, culminating in the big corporate sell-out and success in America with a compromised album at the end. Now look at that backwards. It's Radiohead, isn't it? What do you say to these people? Except, perhaps, 'this is pretty cool, huh huh huh...'

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Spin Magazine, 11.00

The difference engine

By Zev Borow

How do you follow up a brilliant opus of alienation and a documentary that portrays the rock star life as soul-sucking bollocks?

If you're Radiohead, you decide to “do things differently or don't do them at all.” The result is the best anti-rock album of the year.

The way it works is you meet Thom last. Better, safer, to start with Phil or Ed. The Greenwood brothers, Colin and Jonny, are another option, as they seem only mildly nauseated by the thought of public self-reflection. Regardless, it isn’t until the third drink that I begin to consider the possibility that Radiohead are slowly, surely, trying to destroy me.

The facts: Within seconds of first meeting them, each member, separately but like clockwork, practically shoves a drink in my hand: 1) Colin Greenwood (bass/white wine); 2) Ed O’Brien (guitar/champagne); 3) Phil Selway (drums/beer); 4) Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, electronic stuff/beer); 5) Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano/champagne).

It’s June and Radiohead are in Greece for a three-show leg of a short European tour, the band’s first since taking off most of the last two years to relax, regroup, and record what is the most highly anticipated rock record since Nirvana’s In Utero. Titled Kid A, it’s as aggressively indulgent, sophisticated, and art-ful (rather than merely art-y) a record made by a band at the crest of its mass-market popularity in a long time. A predominantly ambient experiment largely absent of guitars, traditional song structures, and lyrics, it still manages to sound distinctly Radiohead: cerebral and haunting, sweeping and fierce. Is it great? Yeah, but the trickier question is: How many people will be willing to take the jump? And perhaps more important, if only to the band itself: Does it matter?

Regardless, the drinks are coming fast, already opened or poured. I tell myself, “Relax, Radiohead are British, extremely British, from Oxford; offering people drinks is just what British people do.” Moreover, Radiohead are bewilderingly polite, possibly the most well-mannered rock group ever to roam the Earth’s midsized arenas.

But I can’t shake the Fear: After all, I am the rock writer and they are the rock band most likely to politely offer a journalist a bunch of opened, and hence possibly spiked, drinks. Finally, I flatly ask Selway if the band is fucking with me. “Now, that wouldn’t be very nice, would it?” he says. “Besides,” he adds with a smile, “we don’t know you that well. Yet.”

You, however, probably know them. Radiohead, a brief recap: The band whose career was launched via the mod-rock success of 1993’s “I’m a loser” anthem “Creep” and who then, somewhat surprisingly, followed with 1995’s The Bends and 1997’s OK Computer, both dense, bombastic masterpieces about pain, menace, and alienation.

The band that, thanks to OK Computer - delivered at a time when rock, at least sophisticated and inspiring rock, was nearly left for dead - is now the most revered rock band around, with a certifiably obsessive cult of fans.
The band that many of those people now secretly, and not-so-secretly, hope will save rock once again from stupidity and lameness.

The band most likely to secretly, and not-so-secretly, believe it can save rock once again from stupidity and lameness.

The band that once inspired DJ Shadow to ring up Yorke’s cell phone at Christmastime, and tell him, “I know I don’t have the right to do this, but I just wanted to say keep doing what you do - try and keep that honesty.” (“He was probably, like, ‘Uh, okay, thanks, I’m trying to shop,’” Shadow says. “But I felt like I had to do it.” )

The band that commissioned the 1999 documentary film, Meeting People Is Easy, an epic screed of media/music industry paranoia masquerading as a chronicle of the group’s 1997–98 world tour. In it, the bad guys are played flawlessly by camera flashes and real-life members of the press. Armed with an endless supply of brain-deadening, soul-sucking, planet-raping questions about - eek! - Radiohead, these villains’ apparent motivation is to make the band, and particularly its brooding prince, Thom Yorke, cry.

A lowlight: An aural montage of banal, repetitive interview questions is capped by a moment - shot in black and white for goth-horror effect - in which a squirming Yorke is asked what he thinks about his band being a celebrity favorite. (Brad Pitt, for instance, has called Radiohead “the Kafka and the Beckett of our generation.”) He fake-smiles and stutters his way through a non-answer, but the reporter pushes him. “So, have you met any of these celebrities?” he asks.

Yorke’s shoulder begins to subtly twitch. His lazy left eye narrows a millimeter or so. It’s hard to tell whether he’s about to break down or, with one frighteningly fast motion, jab his hand through the inquisitor’s chest and rip out his heart.

That Radiohead. That Thom Yorke.

So then, the barrage of drinks. What is the band’s plan? To fatten me before slaughter? Or am I just being paranoid and self-obsessed? Every ambiguity is suddenly open to menacing interpretation, shameless narcissism, delicious melodrama. Remember the movie The Usual Suspects, where Keyser Soze says that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was getting people to believe he didn’t exist? Well, spend some time around Yorke and you realize that his big trick is getting you to start thinking just like him.

Radiohead are playing a small outdoor amphitheater in Thessaloniki, a bustling, working-class port city in the north of Greece. About 5,000 people stand on rising steps of concrete running up a stony hill facing the stage; another 700 or so are comfortably packed in an open area down front, swaying to the music and singing along phonetically. Guys selling beer from wicker baskets step gingerly among them, and beefy security personnel in alarmingly tight T-shirts are nowhere to be found. It’s such a relaxed atmosphere that even Yorke seems loose, prancing about and, as one long-time band observer put it, “bobbing his head like a new waver, which means he’s digging it."

Yorke, 32, is small and wiry thin, but it’s from him and his alternately quiet-like-mouse/fierce-like-lion voice that the band’s enormous presence seems to flow. It’s not just because he’s the lead singer; he drips with the kind of suffering-protagonist anti-charisma charisma that makes both his highs and lows fascinating to ogle. His highs are on particular display tonight during the closing number, “Everything in Its Right Place,” an exhilarating Kid A whoosh. Yorke begins the song standing at an organ, recording his riff and brief lyric onto a computer, then moves to the front of the stage for a little jig-like dance, his looped voice swirling around the amphitheater like a hot wind. Suddenly still, he stands facing the transfixed crowd as if it were an oncoming train, then clasps his hands and raises them high over his head, an odd gesture of both triumph and vulnerability.

Backstage after the show, Yorke looks utterly drained. We make brief eye contact, but he walks quickly past me to his tiny dressing room. I’d been expecting this, told that the band, and Yorke in particular, didn’t want to do any “normal” interviews. Instead, they were hoping for more of a “hanging out” scenario. But Yorke is far from the hanging-out type. Most of the time. I see him in Greece, he’s either alone, or at least acting like he wishes he were. Even in a crowded room, surrounded by his band, he is a bubble that few seem particularly inclined to pop.

So instead I talk to the personable, doe-eyed Colin Greenwood, who upon introducing himself immediately offers me a drink. “Wasn’t that really amazing out there?” he asks, referring to the venue and crowd. Before I can answer, Ed O’Brien approaches, flashing a thousand-watt smile. (Note to groupies: He closely resembles the actor Hugh Grant. Really.) He offers me a drink (though I’m obviously holding one) and adds, “This is what we’ve always wanted - to play small, cool venues; to have fun. Not to do it the old way.”

True enough, the vibe of the Greece shows couldn’t be any further from the horrific touring abyss - a blur of sterile hotel rooms, boring bus rides, and bad fluorescent lighting - portrayed in Meeting People Is Easy.. “It’s funny,” O’Brien says later. “While we loved the movie, it was mostly shot over the winter, when it was cold and awful. Right after that we went to Australia and New Zealand where we were really happy - sun-tanning, go-carting, having a blast. But this tour has been different. And that’s the whole idea - to do things totally different, or not at all.”

This concept has become a band mantra, especially with regard to Kid A. Says producer Nigel Godrich, who also oversaw OK Computer, “Thom really wanted to try and do everything different, and that was... bloody difficult.” Specifics about the nature and degree of that difficulty are not easily elicited.

”Musically, I think we all came to it a bit vague,” O’Brien says. “Thom didn’t know exactly what he wanted the new record to be either, but he did know what he didn’t want it to be, which was anything that smacked of the old route, or of being a rock’n’roll band. He’s got a low boredom threshold and is very good at giving us a kick up the ass. But at the same time, sometimes you need a softer approach.” He sighs, then laughs.

Phil Selway says there was “a lot of tension, personality issues. Things that we hadn’t really even gotten close to discussing in years.” Like what? “Let’s just say the shouting got louder.”

Finally O’Brien, who admits that he’s “the softy in the group, sort of the band mother,” offers a little more. “The initial sessions of Kid A were really sort of make-or-break for us as a band. We had to think long and hard about whether we wanted to continue at all. For me, at least, it was about growing up. If there was a trade-off, my bottom line was I was not willing to become a completely inept asshole for the sake of the music.

“So we had a meeting, and there was a scary, unspoken sort of fear,” he continues. “We were really serious. I mean, why not go out on top? But we’ve known each other for 15 years, and here we are now just getting to the point where we can do things the way we want. So now it’s like, We’re going to make mistakes, but let’s retain a degree of calmness.” He laughs.

“We really can be quite hysterical at times.”

Despite the turmoil, Radiohead finally completed Kid A in late 1999 at the band’s home studio/hideout in pastoral Batsford, England. It will likely surprise even the most devoted fan, full of thick, beat-heavy, nonlinear arrangements, and layers upon layers of electronic sounds. Says Godrich, “In the same way the Beatles and the Stones wanted to sound like black American R&B, but couldn’t, and produced something special anyway, Radiohead now want to sound like Kraftwerk, but can’t, and that’s good in the same way.” But two Kid A songs, “How to Disappear Completely,” a beautiful, eerie wail, and the album’s rambling, mostly instrumental closing track, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” still capture much of the band’s trademark allure: enabling masochists to indulge the pain of feeling small (and desperately wanting to feel even smaller), blown up silver-screen big. Deft, angsty mood music for the self-pitying art-movies in your head.

Of course, some people at Radiohead’s American label, Capitol, consider Kid A uneasy listening for other reasons. “When I first heard it,” says one Capitol insider, “I thought, ‘It’s amazing, but weird, there aren’t any radio singles, and they hate doing press.… Roy Lott is going to shit.”

Roy Lott is the president of Capitol, and he claims he didn’t shit. “I had no expectations of what the record would or should sound like,” he says. “Is it a challenge for us? Sure. But the record is great. In fact, the analogy that comes to mind is the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and we still sell a lot of those.” In order to warm up Capitol’s L.A. staff, Lott instructed them to listen to Kid A over portable CD players as they rode in rented vans to the beach in Malibu.

But Lott can’t rent a van for everyone, and recently fans have been less than loyal when artists tinker with their sound (see Nine Inch Nails). “People do seem more open to this band,” argues Godrich. “I mean, if Oasis made a record like this, I don’t think anybody would go for it. But, you know, it isn’t something to put on at a dinner party.” He pauses. “I don’t really expect people to like it.”

Doing things “different” also means no plans to release any Kid A songs as singles, and though the band made several award-winning clips for OK Computer (including the creepily animated “Paranoid Android”), they will not be making any traditional videos. Instead, they’ve commissioned dozens of 30 second “blips,” which Meeting People director Grant Gee describes as “interstitial-type stuff, some live footage and animation, very artistic and cool.”

Not exactly MTV fodder. Or is it? Tom Calderone, senior vice president of music programming for MTV Networks: “Here’s why Radiohead are important to the channel - they’re a special band.”

So will MTV be playing the blips?

“We’re certainly going to try.”

Is Radiohead above the rules?

“Well, not above…maybe beside.”

“People think we’re control freaks, and maybe we are a bit,” O’Brien says. “But there’s an awful lot that’s just horrible about the process of the music business, and when you’re a young band, you can’t do much about it. Now we can. And we’ve stopped having that conquer-the-world sort of feeling. It’s less important to us than doing things our way.”

Still, Radiohead couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buck the system entirely and are doing some things they really rather wouldn’t - like (albeit very limited) interviews, and (coming soon) the obligatory spot on SNL. But you don’t have to be J.D. Salinger or Captain Beefheart to simply refuse to do press. Despite their anti-media image, Yorke and his mates clearly want their Boswells - not that they’re unaware of the hypocrisy that entails. As Yorke sings on “Paranoid Android,”“Ambition makes you look really ugly.”

I ask one of the band’s managers, Bryce Edge, about the Radiohead Way. He shrugs and says, “Sometimes I’m not sure if Thom and the boys think they’re in a rock band or an art project. Somewhere in between, I suppose.”

Radiohead leave ThessalonIki for Athens, a city they’ve never been to before. The first night there, Yorke plays ironic tour guide as the band’s bus passes some ruins. “Look everyone, to your left, extremely old columns!” It’s one of the few times I’ve actually heard him speak to anyone in the three days I’ve been with the band; he spends most of his down time alone in his hotel room, watching CNN.

After tonight’s show, he briefly attends a backstage party for Colin’s 31st birthday, a very adult (as opposed to, say, Def Leppard) affair. The only individual remotely resembling a groupie is a young Japanese fan whose father is apparently wealthy enough to subsidize her attendance at nearly every Radiohead concert in the world for the past several years. “One time after we played a show in Detroit, she hired a cab to take her to our next gig in Toronto,” O’Brien says. “Thom is very good about chatting with her.”

A lot of people ask if I’ve “chatted with Thom yet.” It’s a query usually phrased with an upturn of understanding and hopefulness. They may be quick to assure me that Yorke is actually “quite a jolly person,” but everyone’s well aware how impenetrable he can be. So after watching him say good-bye to his number one Japanese fan, I follow him to his dressing room, where he sits with Jonny.

After an uncomfortable moment, Jonny introduces me, if only to avoid seeming impolite. Yorke is slouched in a folding chair, clutching a plastic glass half-filled with birthday champagne. He slowly turns toward me, says hello, and… offers me a drink. Jonny, like a knowing mother realizing her son is chatting up a girl for the first time, quickly excuses himself. Yorke’s despair at being accosted by anyone not part of the immediate Radiohead family is palpable, and the room is overcome by a painfully awkward silence.

Normally I’m pretty good at navigating painfully awkward silences , but I’m unable to think of a single thing to say that won’t make me another one of them. I scroll through what I know of Yorke’s upbringing: father a chemical engineering equipment salesman, mother a teacher. He was teased some, got into a few fistfights, but admits to having had a relatively nontraumatic childhood. He felt lonely a lot but liked Legos, drawing, and his bike. At age eight, he got a guitar....

Pretty normal, right? At the same time I can’t help but think: Don’t make any sudden moves. Because though I sense real fragility, I also get the feeling that if cornered or in some way startled he might try and take my eye out. The more I’m merely around him - he’s the type of person intense enough to reshuffle the energy of a crowded room without saying a word - the more I wonder to what extent he cultivates both these responses. After all, he’s simply too self-obsessed not to be aware of the Yorke Effect - which can basically be defined as Him inducing increasingly intense feelings of anxiety, alienation, frustration, and, finally, anger in You. His psychoses become yours. Some cryptic people are merely mirrors of those around them. Yorke functions in exactly the opposite way, which is a big reason why he’s a rock star and why his music is so compelling.

Trying to break the ice, I tell him that the crowd seemed to respond well to the new songs. “Yeah,” he says expressionlessly. “I was surprised.”

Conversation stalls. We’re on a bad date. I move to travel small talk. He says his girlfriend (she’s a doctoral student studying - shock! - Dante’s Inferno) recently spent time in Brazil. I say that I’ve heard Brazil can be dangerous. He says he was a little worried for her, but that everything was fine.

He runs a hand over his head, darts his eyes to the floor, and clears his throat: “Where are [long pause] you from?”

I tell him New York. “I was in New York once,” he says, “driving down 42nd Street, in a limo actually, and we saw a dead body lying on the street. We stopped the car and called an ambulance, but I remember looking out and seeing other people on the street just walking by, not doing a thing. It was the most crazy bloody thing.”

I tell him I’ve never seen anything like that in New York. “Hmm,” he says, then mentions traveling with Jonny through Israel sometime last year. One morning they took a dip in the Dead Sea, the world’s saltiest body of water. “I looked over at Jonny,” Yorke remembers, “and said, ‘Jonny, does your asshole hurt?’” Apparently it did. Then Yorke says it was nice meeting me, and I realize he’s asking me to leave.

I depart Athens, as scheduled, the next day. But I’m told I can follow up with Yorke when I get back, as “Thom is very into email.” Not really a surprise: like his songwriting, email allows him to express emotions other than fear and loathing without physically interacting with anyone. Interpretation is limited solely to his words—words he has time to shape. The more distance, the more control. Even so, it took Yorke almost two weeks to respond to my questions (an edited transcript of our email follows). In the interview, I’m allowed (manipulated?) to see several new sides to him. Yes, he’s still combative and inscrutable, but also unassuming, earnest, goofy, even sweet. And when we finish, I’m more sure than ever that I don’t know the guy at all. Yorke, of course, might take this as a compliment, which would be unfortunate.

Spin: The buzz about the new record is that it’s “difficult”. By difficult, what people really mean is, “It doesn’t sound like the last one/it’s not likely to sell as many copies as we’d like.” How conscious of that were/are you?

Yorke: We do not sit down and write a song or a piece of music considering any of these things—if we did I would have left the group a long time ago. You have a sound in your head, or a melody or a word or a rhythm and you need to get it out. You get it out because you need to give it to other human beings, otherwise you crumple up and disappear. Your question assumes that other people don’t believe sounds and textures are in any way emotional or evocative, which I think is retarded and symptomatic of what is holding back music in the mainstream. If you set about making music or sounds to alienate people then that can express as much as drawing them in; extreme sounds go with extreme emotions, or do we not have those? Am I simply in the business of creating the wallpaper to emptiness?

Art doesn’t always come from that place. It can come from places less dark, less extreme, less angry and guilt-ridden. Humor can produce art; exhilaration and joy, too. Is it wrong to assume that this isn’t also true of you and your lyrics/music?

Coool.

I stopped relying on extremes to get me through when OK Computer finished.… It made me nervous that the music was not coming initially from extremes, and for a long time I was kind of numb and in nonsense land. But then actually things only started working when I stopped thinking about it and just let it happen, guilt free. A lot of what I’m singing or saying I think is funny even if it’s only to me. A lot of it is on the edge of madness I’d say but when it works the nonsense sticks in your head and rings bells.

6:49 p.m. Tired now. Meetings/debates/arguments all day. Feels like work to me. All I need is the briefcase and the suit. Oh but which briefcase? Which suit?

About business matters, what compels you get involved as you do?

My fantasy has been to claim it all back for ourselves coz its all part of the same thing.... The politics still does my head in—especially with magazines and radio, wherever the celebrity thing comes seeping through the cracks. It’s kind of like a hall of mirrors at the fair. Lots of echoes and images that reflect and distort [and that] you become answerable to. Becoming answerable for stuff that you were not involved in, becoming a moving target, does my head in.

Your manager said that he sometimes wondered if you thought of the band as “more of an art project than a rock group.”

I never wanted to be in a fucking rock group. The Pixies were not a fucking rock group. Neither are R.E.M. Sonic Youth are not a rock group and neither were Nirvana. We use/have used electric guitars therefore we are a rock group?! Bryce was making a joke about me I suppose. What is an art project? An exercise? A kind of dabbling? Do we rig up and play in galleries? Are we relishing the stroking of critics’ contemplative chins? No. I don’t believe I’m being difficult. I am being protective of my sanity, regardless of the consequences. I’ve felt my energy sucked in ways that have fucked me up for years afterwards and nobody is coming close to me with that shit again. Is that the Art you mean?

I’m not using “art” as a nasty, pissy word. In my opinion, all great bands (see your list above) are rock bands and art projects. They can’t help it. I think what he meant was that you consciously approach the band—its dynamics, its output, even its business—in a way that is fundamentally different, more artful, from most other bands.

Apologies for my over-reaction, I misread your point like it’s easy to do in emails and bulletin boards. Special? no. Lucky? yes.
When I was at college I could never understand the desire to hang your life’s work in places that looked like pristine hospital waiting rooms.... I get so sleepy in galleries. I like the idea that our work gets to people reproduced 1000s and 1000s of times over for everyone to see. I can’t stand the idea of it being something exclusive like that.

Regarding you feeling your “energy sucked”—who or what did this to you?

I really mean that after touring whenever it was (1997/8?) I had lost all confidence, all faith in myself, I didn’t understand anything, no connection etc.… I had a mental block for about two years after OK Computer when I wrote everything down and immediately tore it up or erased it. I got my confidence back going on long walks in forbidding English landscapes, in storms getting soaking wet and sheltering in broken down buildings.… When I say “sucked” I mean my reason to write had gone; it was someone else’s property. I was never sure who exactly, so I had no one (or everyone) to blame.… D’you reckon Britney Spears will have this problem?

You once said of OK Computer: “At the llth hour, when we realized what we had done, we had qualms about the fact that we had created this thing that was quite revolting.” Any similar (or otherwise) thoughts about the new record?

When we finished it made me cry sitting in the back of a car from start to finish...does that help?

People who work with you mentioned that they believe you are as comfortable and generally pleased with things—both personal and band-related—as they could ever recall. Is that the case? (This would be my dressed-up version of the insipid “Thom, are you happy?” query.)

…….

Okay, while I sympathize with your hating such questions, I think the general despair inherent in your music, combined with the face you often choose to present to the public, makes them relevant. Those who know you say it’s a shame people think Thom is so unhappy all the time because he’s not. It’s fair to ask someone if they are currently enjoying their life, especially when that person seems to go to some lengths to avoid displaying/admitting it.

I’ve straightened stuff out in my head. But my head is my space. I don’t grin for my masters (paraphrasing Miles Davis). I feel alive again now. Not scared. That’s it zzzzziiiipp. Here’s a smile :)



Grant Gee said he thought the band, you in particular, were becoming more comfortable with, as he put it, “Being to other people what bands like R.E.M. were to you.”

I would not call it a comfort. I am English, this is a country where I got beaten up recently on the street for being Thom Yorke. For me guilt has been the most destructive force I have had to deal with. So I think I’m lucky to have gotten to know Michael [Stipe] so well as to feel okay about this place I’ve ended up in, he could see what was happening to me and that it was okay.
I did sessions with PJ Harvey and Bjork recently and it was great to share experiences, it makes you feel slightly less of a freak and that maybe your motives are really genuine despite the doubting voices in your head all the time. But I don’t feel part of no royal family, I’m here to do my stuff then leave.

You got beat up. Who? Why? When? Where? How?

I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of that, sorry.

Which of your motives do you generally doubt?

mmmmmmmmmm. The model rock star motives. The desire to be famous.

And, finally, I don’t know if this is as a question as much as a thought. Because I’m guessing that you won’t get involved with any serious back- and-forth with me here, I’m in the awkward position of having the overwhelming majority of my exchanges with you to be mostly surface-level. This, of course, will mean that I will most likely write something that is at least somewhat surface, featuring yet another wasted column inch about how difficult it is to write about you all. All of this will only further sullen you on the entire process, and ensure its repeat. A vicious and slightly ridiculous cycle (like the panic of 1859!). Perhaps you’re used to it, but all in all, I see it as a waste. Why do press at all? I can see you making the argument: Let the music speak for itself. That way the cycle stops, for you and for everyone. The record will still get reviewed, the people who do marketing will still do marketing. If the music is compelling enough it will still demand attention.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: if you were an animal, what animal would you be?

It has come to my mind, too. I am bored of being fucked around* with by major monthly publications. (*Compromised)
A komodo dragon. If he comes and sits in your living room to watch TV you’d be too scared to shoo him out coz he’d break your arm or your neck. So you sit there and don’t move and leave him to it. He’ll leave when he’s ready.

Re: your choice of animal representation. Were you in a lousy mood, or do you really want to be a huge lizard other people should be afraid of? Isn’t it possible to be outraged at the infinite outrageous things of the world, without being consumed by it? I hope so.

This was the first interview I’ve done about well...me, since I fell to pieces. It felt weird and…I was certainly not in a lousy mood, I was having a pretty good day, just like today. Like the komodo dragon in your lounge, I just came in to watch the TV, I’m just chilling
Personality. Personality. Personality.
Personality>Personlaity> peporisnailtiu.Peisonlaity>personality>PSODURYW`OB,> peotjuiuauA>PRFIVGUJSNN.; YN~.
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Nice to meet you. Good luck piecing this together into bite-sized chunks.
:) Thom x

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