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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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~.
CPJHOQA“ ALFIHIWUSAZ;/P ioy iqNLKH GZW IGDB.
Nice to meet you. Good luck piecing this together into bite-sized chunks.
:) Thom x

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Humo, 6.2000

Radiohead reveal the secret of their greasy sound

'We put dirty underwear in our amplifiers'

After the amazing 'OK Computer' (1997) and the following tour, we haven't heard much from Radiohead. Here in Belgium we find that normal - the band has prepared itself for the new album in all silence and tranquillity - but in England they don't tolerate heroes to get out of the spotlights. Ok, on an unguarded we too ask ourselves what Mauro Pawlowski (ex-singer of Evil Superstars) is in fact up to, and when that pioneer solo début will come out, but we won't go and ring at his grandma's house to ask if she has already heard the new record. The British magazine Melody Maker díd find it necessary to go to Radiohead-ville Oxford and to interview everybody who had seen, heard or smellt singer Thom Yorke and his band in the last 2 years. A friend of the band told them it would be a 'stormy' record, the wife of bass player Colin Greenwood thought that they were stalkers en smashed the door in their face, en a local bartender said that Thom Yorke had been fooling around with Björk once in his establishment. Other magazines made a sport of getting to know as many titles of the new songs as possible. Here are some: 'Follow Me around', 'How to Disappear', 'Move along', 'Optimistic', 'Up the Ladder', 'Cuttooth', 'Knives Out' and 'Say the Word'.

And then last week Radiohead announced they would give a concert in Werchter on September 11. They even were prepared to tell Humo about their plans. While Thom Yorke is thinking about the cd title and cover, somewhere in London, we talk with the Greenwood brothers, Jonny (guitar) and Colin (bass).


HUMO Why did you decide to talk to the press after all?

Jonny: We wanted to let the people know that we're still alive. It's been very quiet, but we needed that. If we hadn't locked ourselves up like we did, we would have had so much bother that we would have never been able to make the record we wanted to make. We didn't want to know what the people wanted from us, we wanted to make our own record.

Colin: In fact we just got out of the madhouse, and we try to get in contact with the rest of humanity again. (laugs) When you play in a big band, you automatically get pushed into strait-jacket: you make a record, you tour for 2 years and you get pushed straight from the tour bus into the studio again. We've decided that we didn't want to do it that way. Every now and then we take the time get some air, because before you know it, you're so confused that you put dirty underwear in the amplifiers, thinking it's a washing machine. Or you plug your guitar into the washing machine, which is even more dangerous (laughs).

HUMO Many bands complain about their hectic life, but you seem to be the only ones who're able to escape from that. How come?

Colin: We try to do it in a different way, but that doesn't mean we'll succeed. Maybe, in a year, we'll have to admit that those other band were right, en we'll be sitting here, saying: "Sorry, we were so wrong. Here's the record, here are the glossy pictures, here are our photomodel-girlfriends, here's our MTV-special, sponsored by Carlsberg." (laughs) We didn't say it'll be easy, but we'll try. It's better for everyone: for us, for the listener, ánd for the record company and the concert promotors who will get better and more honest music. We're planning on playing a gig here and there, taking a little brake, getting back into the studio... That's much more interesting than planning your life for the rest two years minute per minute. And the tabloids will have less to make up, cause every 6 months or every year something new from Radiohead will come out. It's really better for everyone (laughs).

HUMO How are you going to do that, through the Internet?

Jonny: Unfortunately, the Web isn't fast and flexible enough for that yet. We already did a couple of low budget webcasts, but the quality was too low. For the time being, we want to bring out a couple of songs now and then, and organising special concerts, like the one in Werchter in september.

HUMO Right, what is that going to be exactly?

Jonny: We're bringing along our own circus tent, cause we are tired - and I think the crowd'll agree on that - of playing in sports halls. We were really getting sick of it: the sound always sucks, there's no atmosphere, it's all so unperonal.

HUMO Is it going to be something like the Rolling Stones' 'Rock 'n Roll Circus', end of the sixties?

Colin: Yeah, Jonny already ordered his clown's costume with flannel buttons, and he also started doing LSD (laughs). No, not really. What the Stones did, was a rather bizarre combination of circus and rock 'n roll, which was influenced by the drugs from that time. We're just gonna give a concert.

HUMO Why do you play live before the new album comes out?

Jonny: We want to around the classic single-record-gig-order: first we play, then we bring out the record, en then we might talk about an eventual single. It's nice if the people have caught a glance of the record in good conditions, before they can listen to it intensively.

HUMO Are you also starting to reherse áfter the gig?

Jonny: No, we don't wanna do that to the people (laughs).

HUMO Is the record finished completely?

Colin: Yeah, in fact. The recording is over, but we don't have a cover nor a title - well we do in fact, we've got 15 of them - and we have way too much songs. Covers and titles are Thom's thing, he's thinking about that in London now, but for the choice of the songs, we all do that together. I can assure you: it's hell. We have meetings that take hours - often from 4 pm until midnight - only about the order of the songs. We have had 3 of those sessions already. Also, we want a short record - 10, 11 songs - but we've got more than 20 songs. That doesn't make it any easier.

HUMO You were going to bring out songs faster? Can't you just keep the rest?

Colin: Yeah, but then we have to choose what we already want to let the people hear now. In September 2001 we want to have finished a new album with all new songs. Before that, everything we still have has to be brought out first.

HUMO Why do you want to bring out a short album, in fact?

Colin: We didn't want to bother anyone, and -again- we want to avoid the classic rock-'n-roll traps. The more successful and rich a band gets, the bigger the danger for a double album. If such a band records it's fourth or fifth album, suddenly they have enough time and space, and usually the band members think they've made a huge progress as musicians. And then they decide to bother the audience with a double album. No one needs that. Even the best double albums - 'The White Album' by The Beatles, or 'Sandinista' by The Clash - would have been even better if half of the songs had been deleted. It's no popular point of view, I know, but I'm sure that if 'The White Album' had been óne single album, no one would dare say that 'Sgt. Pepper's' is the best Beatles-record.

HUMO When does a band grow the most: during touring or between the tours?

Jonny: Not during tours, that's for sure, cause absolutely nothing changes then. You feel musical tentions coming up, you feel that something's going to change, but only when you're going to reherse for the new album, all of that comes to the surface.

HUMO And what came to the surface with this record?

Colin: Thom's the most creative man of the band, so most of the new things come from him. (thinks) He has written completely different songs, but of course it's still Thom.

But it doesn't depend on Thom only, of course. Everyone evolves, although you usually don't notice that immediately. I, for instance, only discovered after a week that Jonny was getting a completely new sound from his amplifiers. Seemed that he had already been experimenting with that during the tour.

HUMO Don't you ever write songs on the road?

Colin: Oh yeah, we do, on the new record are songs that originated during the soundchecks of the last tour. You can be creative on tour - the big benefit is that you always have everything with you - but you can only finish the stuff at home.

HUMO In English magazines are the wildest stories on your new record. Are they true?

Colin: I'm sure they're not, but I don't really know: I don't read those things anymore. What doesn't mean that we haven't experimented. Recording an album is trying, and some things succeed, others don't. For instance, we've recorded one song with a jazz band, and another song with a 10-piece orchestra. Both songs will be on the new album.

With the computer program ProTools you can really try wicked stuff in the studio. One one song, for example, Thom sings backwards. Now that's gonna be a challenge when we play live (laughs). We don't have a clue how we're going to play some songs live. For example, Thom has built up a piano part with a sequencer, because he doesn't know how to play a piano. You just can't play the result, unless you have 5 hands with 20 fingers each.

HUMO You could just use the sequencer during live shows?

Jonny: Oh, no, we don't do that, no machines on stage. We've played with band like Massive Attack, and we know what kind of a hell it is: you become a slave of the technique. In the best case, it gives you some sort of karaoke.

Colin: You can't respond to the crowd either with machines, which is Radiohead's exact strenght, especially Thom's.

Jonny: The great benefit of playing live, is that you can make mistakes. I'm really convinced that that is Radiohead's strength. We're really sure about our songs, we know they're strong, but we're surely not the most talented musicians in the world. But thanks to our restricions, our songs get something extra. No one can play our music better than we: our mistakes are in them.

HUMO I've heard bands say that old songs often feel like covers.

Jonny: With us, that was the case with 'Creep'. It seemed like the crowd had written that song. We had nothing to say to it. But I recently saw a band that covered 'Creep', and then I found it fantastic again.

HUMO Before I forget: thank you for the documetnry of Grant Gee, 'Meeting People Is Easy', where quite a negative image of music journalism was given. I have, seriously, had a hard time during interviews for about a month.

Colin: Our appologies, that really wasn't the aim. Grant Gee wanted to show the boredom during a long tour mostly. Many people don't understand that artists moan about their tours, but it's really exhausting. In most tour documentries you only see pleasure and fun. Sometimes it indeed is fun, but usually it's not, and 'Meeting People Is Easy' show that other side. Grant Gee consciously filmed us when it was extremely cold. We also played at paradisiacal sites during that tour, we swum in the sea and froliced around, but he was never around then. Apparently he didn't want to show that. Grant Gee's an artist, en artists need to get 'carte blanche'.

HUMO What do you think of the uncountable amount of bands who try very hard to sound like Radiohead?

Colin: (sighs) Muse, Travis, ... I don't really know them, but I've heard of them. I think it's very weird. We have never ever tried to create our own sound, we've always just played.

Those bands know how you can make music that sounds like Radiohead, so apparently they play better than we do, but is that what it's about? I don't think so. A couple of days ago I saw Muse on MTV, and I really got scared. They really try to look like us, but they didn't seem to enjoy it very much. Those guys really need to cheer up, and quick. Apparently they've seen 'Meeting People Is Easy' one time too much (laughs).

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Spin Magazine, 5.98

THE SPIN TOP 40 VITAL ARTISTS IN ROCK
#2 - RADIOHEAD

Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, international man of mystery

Spin: Mr. Bloke? Do you always take calls at hotels under an alias?

Colin Greenwood: It's even more necessary when we're in Japan-fans are always calling up.

Right now, to a lot of people, Radiohead seem the sovereign artistic operation in rock'n'roll. What, if anything, connects "Creep," The Bends, and OK Computer?

When we rehearse, we're always trying to aim for something else. But we never quite succeed in getting there. For example, we used to call "Creep" the "Scott Walker song." Of course, it doesn't sound at all like him. We wanted it to-we're enormous fans-but it fell short.

But many of your fans have this romantic notion of your music as being somehow sourceless-especially OK Computer.

Completely the opposite. To us, it's rooted in obvious things-what we've listened to, that is. At the same time, the ways in which our music is rehearsed and played and recorded are, if not sourceless, placeless. We are kind of one step removed, not really in the center of things. Well, Oxford is in the center of England, but it's not really a rock'n'roll town, and we don't record in a rock'n'roll place. We rehearse at an old fruit farm-an apple shed, really. I suppose that's where the Pink Floyd comparisons come in. They were from Cambridge. It's that whole middle-class thing.

Class, that little-discussed rock'nroll issue.

There's no point apologizing about where you come from. The thing about rock is that people are not just interested in bands because of where they want to go. It's where they want to escape from that matters. Sometimes the actual places they're escaping from don't really exist.

When you're onstage, audiences often get blown away by that famed Radiohead presence. Maybe that's why rock stars drop your name as often as Prada's these days.

[German film director] Wim Wenders came to a show in Cologne last year with his son, who is a Radiohead fan. Wenders had listened to OK Computer because he was going to the concert. He liked it, but he didn't think there was a way it could be replicated live. He was amazed that it was.

Your studiocraft does tend toward the ambitious.

We always talk about doing simple pop records, then end up doing some silly long things-no, I didn't say that.

Well, ambitiousness hasn't stranded you.

I was having drinks yesterday in Sydney at the top of the ANA Hotel, on the 36th floor, looking down on this neon cityscape of bridges and rivers. In ten days, I'll be in Tokyo.

So do Radiohead enjoy being rock stars?

Enjoy? You can never say that. It'd be a guilty pleasure, like saying one would enjoy 18 chocolates.

1997 ranking: -

James Hunter

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Guitar World, 04.1998

The Golden Age of Radiohead
by Mac Randall


With their Grammy nominations, hit singles and critical raves, Radiohead look like rock's next big thing. But who are they?
Flip through the end-of-the-year critics' polls of just about any music publication in the world, and see a stunning consensus: 1997's top band was Radiohead, and their album OK Computer (Capitol) was this year's masterpiece.

But don't think for a second that this British quintet's ambitious, expansive rock is just the sort of stuff only music scribes drool over. OK Computer, Radiohead's third full length release, has also caught the fancy of plenty of average listeners. It's the band's fastest-selling and highest-charting album to date, and in January of this year it received high honors from U.S. industry types with a pair of Grammy nominations, including one for Album of the Year. Not bad for a collection of 12 sonically and emotionally uncompromising tracks, of which the first single was a six-and-a-half minute, four-part mini-suite called "Paranoid Android." All this adulation comes as a bit of a surprise to Ed O'Brien, who along with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood make up Radiohead's formidable three-guitar contingent.

"When we were cocooned in the studio making OK Computer, we were immensely proud of it," says O'Brien. "But the longer the recording process went on, the less sure we became-it's very difficult to be objective, anyway. When the tapes went off to record company people alI over the world, the marketing people were not exactly optimistic about how it would sell, apart from the U.K., which unanimously thought it was fantastic. So we were a little nervous, because we want people to hear our music. There's a lesson to be learned from the album's success. It underlines the fact that radio and record companies underestimate what the general public are capable of listening to. This is not above people's heads. We're people, and we're making it; other people can get it too."

Over the years, comparisons of Radiohead to the likes of Pink Floyd and U2 have become more and more frequent, and the band's visionary studio work and transcendent live shows suggest that these comparisons may be justified. In a relatively short time, Radiohead has turned from pop flavor of the month to one of the most acclaimed rock bands working today.

The Radiohead story began in the mid Eighties at Abingdon School, a "public," boys-only grammar school located just outside the city of Oxford. Drummer Phil Selway was a year above Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood a year below them, and Colin's multi-instrumentalist brother Jonny a year below him.

Though the five didn't know each other that well, they began meeting up in the school's music department, which Yorke describes as "great-no one came down there, and there were these tiny rooms with soundproofed cubicles." Colin remembers Abingdon's music school as a place "where we would all run and hide away from the tedious conformity of timetables and uniforms."

It wasn't long before the boys formed a more or less permanent band, playing music heavily influenced by acts like Joy Division, Magazine, U2, R.E.M., Elvis Costello and the Smiths. After trying and ditching a series of names, they finally settled on the rather uninspired On A Friday in honor of the day they regularly rehearsed. The band played their first gig in 1987, at Oxford's Jericho Tavern. Jonny, who hadn't yet officially been asked to join up, sat onstage with a harmonica, "waiting for his big moment to arrive," as Selway recalls.

Even though the band were already fairly certain that they wanted to keep playing together, when it came time for college, all chose to bow to parental pressure and continue their education, putting music on the back burner. For almost four years On A Friday didn't play a single gig, and they rehearsed only during holiday breaks. (The only member of Radiohead without a college degree is Jonny, the youngest, who abandoned his course in psychology at Oxford Polytechnic when the band got signed.)

On A Friday relaunched itself in the summer and autumn of 1991, playing a series of gigs at Oxford's Jericho Tavern and circulating its first real demo tape (which was officially released the following year as the Drill EP and featured three songs -"You," "Thinking About You," and "Prove Yourself "- that later appeared on Pablo Honey).

The band quickly attracted attention; within a few months, they acquired both management-Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge, who remain their managers to this day-and a record label-EMI, to which they signed on March 2, 1992. Neither the label nor the band, as it turned out, cared much for the name On A Friday, and so it was changed to Radiohead (taken from the title of a song on Talking Heads' True Stories album).

The release of the Drill EP in May 1992 didn't exactly set off any whoops of joy in the sales department (it reached Number 101 on the U.K. charts), so the band went looking for new producers. They chose the Boston-based team of Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, who'd previously worked with artists like Buffalo Tom and Juliana Hatfield.

The first two songs they'd planned to record as the next single, "Inside My Head" and "Lurgee," didn't turn out so well, but another song carelessly tossed off during e sessions proved far superior. "Creep" was recorded in one take, and the story goes that the band wasn't even aware that Kolderie and Slade were rolling tape. Kolderie remembered the session in an interview for the British music magazine Mojo: "At the end, everyone in the place was silent for a moment and then they burst into applause. I'd never had that happen before."

Once again, that reaction wasn't matched by U.K. sales figures. "Creep" only crept up to Number 78, and got hardly a notice in the press. But the situation changed radically once the song reached America where "Creep," like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Beck's "Loser," crystallized the attitude of a generation uncomfortable in its own skin. With the release of Pablo Honey in February 1993, MTV latched onto "Creep" with a vengeance, making Yorke's lazy-eyed, Johnny Rotten-meets-Martin Short visage a familiar sight. U.S. rock radio quickly followed suit, rocketing the single to Number 34 in Billboard and causing the album to go Gold in the States. (It has since gone Platinum, the only Radiohead album so far to sell over a million copies in America.)

As the year continued, the song became a worldwide hit, even re-entering the British charts, this time reaching Number 7. Radiohead commenced a rigorous touring schedule, visiting the U.S. twice and playing a total of 130 gigs in 1993.

The big problem with this success was that the band were never entirely keen on Pablo Honey. It had been recorded (with Kolderie and Slade) in only three weeks and featured six previously released songs, including their third single, the roaring anthem "Anyone Can Play Guitar." Jonny feels the album "lacks freedom. On the first record, we were so frightened. It's a lot more regimented, I think, due to our own fear and inexperience." O'Brien agrees: "We'd never been in a studio before, we were not very cohesive as a band and we were totally insecure." With all the touring, the band quickly tired of playing the same old songs, but their attempt at a new single, "Pop Is Dead," was poorly received in Britain and never released in America. "Thank God," O'Brien says now. "It was rubbish."

It's fashionable these days for enthusiasts of Radiohead's more recent work to put down Pablo Honey and the early singles, but listening to that music, traces of what was to come can be heard. Sure, the influence of bands like the Pixies- whom Yorke has repeatedly called "the greatest band ever" may be worn a Iittle too obviously, but tracks like the dramatic "Stop Whispering" and the album's climactic closer "Blow Out" are still impressive. "There are lots of mistakes on it," O'Brien says, "but you learn from your mistakes. I still think it's a valid album. It's very up, quite hedonistic-'Let's put on eight guitar overdubs and turn them all up!' I think it's one of those albums you might put on in an open-top car on a Saturday night going to a party, but I could be wrong."

More touring followed in 1994, plus rehearsals and recording for what was to become Radiohead's second album, The Bends, which, although without a defining single like "Creep," sold steadily and was hailed by critics. Perhaps more importantly, it laid the groundwork for OK Computer. The band's pick for producer this time was John Leckie, whose previous work included albums by XTC, Magazine and the Stone Roses. (Kolderie and Slade still mixed the album.) "The best part about working with John Leckie," Jonny recalls, "was that he didn't dictate anything to us. He allowed us to figure out what we wanted to do ourselves."

Even so, the early Bends sessions proved exceedingly difficult, as the pressure to make a follow-up that would build on the success of Pablo Honey created high levels of tension within the band. The solution: taking the show on the road. Radiohead took a break from recording and toured Australia, Southeast Asia and the Far East, during which time they continued to break in the new songs. The album was completed in about two weeks after they returned to England. "When we finished The Bends," Yorke says, "it felt like going back and doing four tracks again. That's what was so exciting that we were in control of it, that it was our thing. We were simply satisfying ourselves."

The one single released by the band during 1994, "My Iron Lung," was greeted with puzzlement at the time, but in retrospect its jangly, ring-modulated opening hook, smooth McCartney-esque vocal verse melody and pulverizing guitar explosions in the bridge sections mark it as a prime example of the new Radiohead style. But "My Iron Lung" fits in perfectly with the rest of the material on The Bends, and it has since become a concert highlight. (Interestingly, "My Iron Lung" is actually a live recording, taken from a show at London's Astoria in May, 1994. Only the vocals were replaced; there are no other overdubs.)

The Bends was released in March 1995, and right from the opening, heavily echoed chords of "Planet Telex" (a sound produced by running a piano through three vintage Roland Space Echo units in series) it was clear that Radiohead had taken a stunning leap forward. This was powerful music of the arena-rock variety, no doubt, but with an intelligence and sensitivity that indicated something special. Arrangements had become more intricate; for the first time, the band was making creative use of its three-guitar lineup.

Ironically, O'Brien says this came about as the result of playing less: "We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren't aware of on Pablo Honey. There was a need to put more and more guitar tracks on Pablo Honey, and you had to play all the time. Whereas the approach to The Bends was, if it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with Phil and Coz [Colin], what was the point in trying to a something more?" As Yorke jokes, "Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it."

In general, it could be said that the division of guitar labor in Radiohead is that Thom Yorke plays rhythm, Jonny Greenwood plays lead and Ed O'Brien makes weird noises. But that's an oversimplification, as any of the three are capable of doing anything at any time. Yorke downgrades his guitar skills, saying, "I just keep time, really," while Greenwood bristles at being called a lead guitarist: "You could describe it like that, I suppose, but it's not really like that." But Yorke quickly comes to Greenwood's defense: "When I run out of melodies, there's usually something on Jonny's guitar that's a melody, like Mr. [George] Harrison used to do. You know, pick a melody up here [fingers upper reaches of imaginary fretboard], and so on, because it gets a bit boring listening to one voice all the time."

Two other prominent differences on The Bends are the expanded use of keyboards (mainly played by Jonny), and the amount of group contribution in the songwriting. Though all Radiohead's songs from the start have been credited to the group, most of the early ones were mainly by Yorke (he still writes nearly all the band's lyrics, though he says "the others help me with spelling, stationery and basic grammar.") This changed during The Bends. "Nice Dream," for example, was originally a simple four-chord Yorke composition, but Greenwood and O'Brien added more parts, including the intro, while the music to the propulsive "Just" was largely written by Greenwood, who Yorke says "was trying to get as many chords as he could into a song. It was like writing a medley."

Probably the best-known song on The Bends is the slow-building "Fake Plastic Trees," which it would be tempting to call a "power ballad" if the band weren't so diametrically opposed to the kind of histrionic show of (usually false) emotion that normally characterizes such songs. Yorke remembers the recording of "Fake Plastic Trees" as "a fucking nightmare." O'Brien says, "There was one stage at the first session when it sounded like Guns N' Roses' 'November Rain.' It was so pompous and bombastic, just the worst." Yorke explains that the song was saved through a mixing error: "Paul [Kolderie} missed a cue, so the electric guitars don't come in at the right place. It was a mistake, but we kept it."

Radiohead supported The Bends with more rigorous touring, including five U.S. visits. New songs soon began appearing in the set lists, several of which would appear on the band's next album: "Subterranean Homesick Alien," "No Surprises," "Let Down," the raucous "Electioneering" and the rather Floydian "Lucky," the first of OK Computers songs to be recorded (originally for a 1995 benefit album for Bosnian war relief), which opens with the sound of O'Brien strumming his guitar's strings above the nut with a nail file. lt was also during this time that Jonny's aggressive, arm-snapping playing style began giving him serious pain. A doctor diagnosed a repetitive stress injury and advised Jonny to wear a brace on his right arm, which has since become something of a trademark. "I enjoy putting it on before I play," he confesses. "It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match."

In a March 1996 interview, Yorke said that he felt The Bends succeeded because "we had to put ourselves into an environment where we felt free to work. And that's why we want to produce the next one ourselves, because the times we most got off on making the last record were when we were just completely communicating with ourselves, and John Leckie wasn't really saying much, and it was just all happening. I don't know if it'll work again, but I hope it does."

With the assistance of engineer Nigel Godrich, Radiohead did produce their next album themselves. They bought their own recording gear and went to work, first in their own rehearsal studio, then in actress Jane Seymour's 15th-century mansion near Bath. Their plan was to stay away from traditional recording studios and the bad vibes they'd previously set off in the band. But the same tension present during the Bends sessions appeared once again during the tracking for OK Computer.

"We thought we could get the same relaxed atmosphere recording the album as we'd gotten recording B-sides in our rehearsal studio," O'Brien laughs. "But that idea was quickly scrapped." Yet the band eventually realized that creative tension wasn't necessarily bad. "Part of it came from the fact that we'd never produced ourselves before," says Selway, "and there was a lot that we had to learn in a short time. But we know now that there are always going to be clashing moods whenever we make anything worthwhile. We've developed our coping mechanisms."

Everyone in the band seemed pleased with the results. Yorke calls the epic "Exit Music (For a Film)" "the first performance that we recorded where every note of it makes me really happy." As on The Bends, much of OK Computer's music was contributed by members of the band besides Yorke, especially Jonny Greenwood, who wrote the slow "rain down" section of "Paranoid Android" and all the music to the album-closing "The Tourist." Also like The Bends, many of the more interesting sounds, like those at the end of "Karma Police," which features O'Brien's AMS digital delay unit feeding back on itself, were recorded with a sense of abandon. "We said, 'Put down the headphones and just go,' " says Yorke, "and so he made weird noises, and we taped that a few times. Sometimes the best stuff happens when you're not even Iistening at all. Once we get to a studio, we either do it together live at the same time, so we can hear what we're doing, or we do the exact opposite, so we don't know what's going on at all. A lot of the time you have to either make it really random or really calculated. There's no middle ground."

Among the more random moments on OK Computer are, the use of transistor radio noise and tape loops on "Climbing Up the Walls." (Yorke: "Whenever there was tape all over the studio floor, I knew things were going well.") Among the more calculated: The drum track to "Airbag," which was recorded, sampled with an Akai S3000 sampler and then laboriously edited and manipulated over two days on the band's Macintosh. Yorke admits this technique was inspired by the work of DJ Shadow [a sample/turntable artist from the San Francisco Bay Area who has released two acclaimed albums on the London/Mo' Wax label- GW Ed.], and the result has led many to argue that Radiohead are, in fact, creating a sort of new rock/techno hybrid. O'Brien downplays this idea, though.

"I think that's more a critics' interpretation. We do try to be diverse. The guitar sound on 'No Surprises' was supposed to harken back to [the Beach Boys'] Pet Sounds, 'Let Down' was a nod to Phil Spector, 'Exit Music' had a [composer Ennio} Morricone atmosphere, 'Airbag' was an attempt to do something like DJ Shadow-but because, we haven't paid the dues, if you like, to play those types of music, we fail to get what we hope to achieve. But by going down that route, we find our own thing."

Other notable albums that influenced OK Computer included Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (as demonstrated by the presence of so much Fender Rhodes electric piano on the album) and the Beatles' White Album" (the tripartite nature of 'Paranoid Android" was inspired by "Happiness is a Warm Gun," while the chorus of "Karma Police" owes an undeniable debt to "Sexy Sadie"). Of course, it's the way Radiohead absorbs these infIuences and turns them into something very different that's most interesting. They may be shooting for a certain familiar sound at first, but what they come up with is invariably new and quite their own. As Yorke says, "Aiming and missing is the whole point, really."

Radiohead followed up the release of OK Computer with their most rigorous touring schedule yet. One of their most notable shows of 1997 took place at New York's Irving Plaza, where the guest list included members of U2, R.E.M., Oasis, Blur, Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love, Madonna and many other notables- including Ed O'Brien's mother. "It was the first time she'd seen us in four years," O'Brien says. "Before the doors opened, I went round looking at the V.I.P. section, and I saw that Madonna had the best table in the house and my mum's table was way in the back. I thought, 'I'm not having this,' so I swapped the signs on the tables around. So," he continues with a giggle, "Madonna was at the back, and my mum had the best table in the house, between U2 and R.E.M. And that's exactly how it should be."

After the accolades of 1997, what's next for Radiohead? Word has it that their touring will continue, and they're traveling with a mobile recording setup, taking down ideas for new tunes.,O'Brien confirms this, but doubts most of the tracks recorded on the road will be used on an album. How and when the follow-up to OK Computer will be recorded is still anyone's guess, but if Thom Yorke's comments are anything to go by, it'lI be done as naturally as possible. "I just read in a magazine in L.A. that [writer Charles] Bukowski was once asked, 'What's your philosophy of life?' And he said, 'Don't try.' And that's right. You can't try. If you try, you're fucked 'cause then you're like everybody else."

***


Computer Hardware: The Guitars and gadgets that make Radiohead hum.


THOM YORKE AND Jonny Greenwood don't much care to discuss the equipment they use. That's partly because they've learned not to get too attached to what are in the end just tools-the fact that all the band's old touring gear was stolen after a 1995 New York gig and never recovered may have something to do with this-and partly because they don't want to sound like they totally endorse anything. "That's why we put on the album 'all instruments at retail price says Yorke. Nonetheless, with the 'help of one Of the band's guitar techs, Peter Clemens (a. k. a. Plank) we've managed to compile a basic roundup of Radiohead's live guitar arsenal. Yorke is a Fender man all the way, using a Seventies Telecaster Deluxe and Jazzmaster, a recent Japanese reissue Tele with stacked humbuckers and a customized Tele with a Strat neck, one humbucker and an active preamp control. "That last one started life as an American Standard, but now it's all bits and pieces that have been set fire to," Plank says. Yorke's main live acoustic is an Alvarez-Yairi DY-88, his main amp's a '95 Fender Twin Reverb, and his effects include a ProCo Turbo Rat and Boss digital delay. Jonny Greenwood's usual axe is a slightly rewired Tele Plus with Lace Sensor pickups, though Plank won't divulge the extent of the rewiring; a mid-Seventies Fender Starcaster also appers on a few numbers. His effects include a Marshall Shredmaster, DigiTech Whammy, Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phase shifter, Roland Space Echo and a few homemade pedals, including a tremolo. It all goes through a Fender Deluxe 85 and a Vox AC30. Ed O'Brien's guitar setup includes a '67 Gibson ES-355, two recent-model Fender Strats, two Nineties Rickenbacker 360's (one six-string and one 12-string) and a guitar handmade by Plank. Ed runs a pile of effects, including a Lovetone Meatball, DigiTech Whammy, MXR Phase 90, Korg A2, Dunlop Tremolo, three half-rack Boss delays and an AMS digital delay into a Mesa/Boogie Tremoverb and a Vox AC30. All three Radiohead guitarists use .010-gauge Elite strings.

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MTV Australia, 04.02.98

Radiohead
MTV grilled Radiohead's bassplayer, Colin Greenwood about all things musical.


MTV: Your last tour was a while after 'Creep' and a while before The Bends, it must be better for you to be here this time?

Colin: Yeah, I mean the record was only released in Europe and America on June 16th, so about 8 months ago. It's not such a bad cycle. We've been very busy since we released the album. I'm glad to come down here and play, to play in this part of the world and also Auckland and Wellington, for the first time.

MTV: I hear you love New Zealand?

Colin: Yes. My brother in-law is from Christchurch. After we finished OK Computer, we finished mixing it in March and I actually escaped from England for about 3 weeks and spent time on this lovely little island. It was wonderful. But you know, the quality of life here seems wonderful as well. As you get older one appreciates more and more what somewhere like Australia and New Zealand has to offer.

MTV: If you don't live here...

Colin: Yeah, it's easy for me to say that. But then I also say that from the standpoint of being an army brat - hence the vaguely military clothes - and really not feeling rooted to anywhere in particular in England, and not particularly loving or hating where I come from.

MTV: So you've been touring flat out since June?

Colin: We've been touring on and off since 1992.

MTV: So has it taken it's toll?

Colin: I think it's starting to lose a bit of its freshness, and I think we need to take some time away from it and get hungry for it again, and try and come up with something new and different. I think with this record in particular the music is quite intense, and the way that we approached launching this record is very intense. We played to basically nearly 90,000 people in the space of a week. We played to nearly 40,000 in Dublin at our own show, and then a week later we played Glastonbury to around the same number. It was a very stressful and high risk way of introducing new songs and performance to the public.

MTV: So Glastonbury was a huge gig for you career wise?

Colin: In some ways I'd say Dublin the week before was a huge gig for us, because that was 38,500 people who'd bought tickets just to see us basically. Although Massive Attack and Teenage Fanclub, both wonderful, were also on the bill. Glastonbury is one of those kids-own dreams things you know, to close Glastonbury on the Saturday night. Unfortunately it's not something we'll have particularly fond memories of in some ways, because we had lots of technical problems; the monitors broke, the lighting computer broke, and it was quite stressful.

MTV: Was Dublin and Glastonbury the first time you played new tracks from the album?

Colin: No, we'd launched the album about a month before in Lisbon, and played a couple of shows to warm up before Barcelona, which I thought was wonderful. It was the same kind of weather as the finest Australian weather. So all the journalists and press were predisposed already, and Barcelona is a wonderful cosmopolitan city. We did like seven weeks touring around Europe and built up a good following in Spain and France. I think it's very exciting to be in Europe at the moment, to be European. It was an experience that we adored.

MTV: Were you surprised by the enormous success of OK Computer?

Colin: Well for a record with no singles on it, it's apparently gone on to sell over 3 million copies. It's going back up the charts in America at the moment...

MTV: You've got two Grammy nominations?

Colin: Mr. Dylan will get one of them, and for the other we're way down the bottom of the heap. I don't think any of us are going to the Grammys.

MTV: How do you feel about comments like 'OK Computer is the best album of all time' or that it's 'the past, present and future of rock'?

Colin: It's kind of flattering, but they're made in the context of 1997, not within the last 50 years of recorded music. I think 'Revolver' will be already as one of the greatest records ever, still.

MTV: Do you think time will be kind to you?

Colin: Well you hope, but you don't know. Time was very kind to The Bends. It wasn't overlooked, but wasn't anticipated, because everyone thought we'd shot our bolt with 'Creep', and there was nothing more to be heard from Radiohead, so The Bends crept up on people, took them surprise - given the benefit of the doubt and a few listens it became a very popular record for a lot of people.

MTV: Was it hard to follow up from The Bends, because it proved to everyone that you could do it?

Colin: Well this is the thing, was it hard to follow up from the success of 'Creep' and the idea that Radiohead don't have another song, and then we did The Bends, and it was like 'How can they follow an album like that?' - but I'd much rather be in a situation like that than the situation we were in with 'Creep' and Pablo Honey, our first album. I think Thom felt the pressure quite keenly when we were recording OK Computer, and he felt sometimes paralysed creatively because he was aware of the expectation of the album after The Bends. But you just can't work like that. You have to find a way of ignoring it.

MTV: How does the songwriting process work with Radiohead?

Colin: It varies a lot. A lot of the songs, the melodies and vocal are obviously written by Thom, and then the arrangements and music, we just play a lot of it live in the room looking at each other, in an old apple farm near Oxford. And it's very important. My brother Jonathan writes a lot of the music as well. There's a song called 'The Tourist' at the end of OK Computer that we recorded the music and Thom doesn't actually play on it, he just came in and sang the vocal on top.

MTV: Thom's lyrics mean a lot to a lot of people...

Colin: He's constantly working on his lyrics. Sometimes what we do when we're working on a song is ask for lyric sheets, get a bit of gaffer tape and slap it to the wall and I look at the words and he'll play around with the sounds of the words. Sometimes the meaning comes later. Sometimes it's not good to be overly didactic and write something explicit because it can be two dimensional and flat, and we've definitely done that before. I think Michael Stipe's very good, his ability to suggest and imply rather than state you know? It's a fine line, you want to hold their interest...

MTV: Is that why the band is working on Velvet Goldmine with Michael Stipe?

Colin: Yeah that was Thom and Johnny. They were doing some covers of Roxy Music songs - that was over a year ago actually. It's incredible how slow moving film productions are.

MTV: What's the story with Massive Attack remixing OK Computer?

Colin: Massive Attack. Well they're really nice people and we really like where they come from, which is Bristol, not like London. It's West Country, left of centre, like being from Oxford. And the same goes for Portishead. Massive Attack got really excited, and they really want to remix the record, and they really wanted to do it over a short period of time. They wanted to go into a studio and just do it over a week or whatever. But we kind of said no, because we were really busy and we wanted to hang out with them. We're such huge Massive Attack fans, and they're really slow workers, so we really wanted them to finish their album first. They're on tour in March and their record should be coming out early springtime, so we really can't wait.

MTV: It will be really interesting to see what they do.

Colin: It will be. I find it really interesting that a whole lot of dance people and people who programme music are fans of our music, considering that we don't have a clue. We bought this technology for OK Computer and went in on a wing and a prayer. We bluffed our way through it.

MTV: But you still keep it quite organic...

Colin: Exactly. The first track on the album, Thom and Phil sat down and Phil did loads of drumming, recorded the drumming, stuck it on a Apple Mac and looped it all together... the musical arrangement of that track is basically the rhythm track. And then everybody just overdubbed, which is quite rare for us because usually we play it all live.

MTV: I hear you record all your live performances - where is all that going?

Colin: We were. We've slowed down on that for the moment though. After this tour of Australia we go back to England and on the 26th April we fly out to Houston and we do an American tour for four weeks, culminating with a number of shows with Bjork in New York. We've also invited Spiritualized to join us on these US shows. After that we take 4 or 5 months off, we won't really start work until September. So because of that we're keeping a lot of our songs as fresh as possible by not thrashing them to death live at the moment.

MTV: Can we expect a live album?

Colin: No, but what I would be nice, what I'd like to do after the next album is a B sides and remix compilation which I think would open a lot of people's eyes to some incredible music which has quite possibly escaped them. You know, were it not for people like Nellee Hooper and Baz Lurhmann people would not know a song like 'Talk Show Host', which is a very dramatic, powerful piece of music.

MTV: How did that come about, did Baz approach you?

Colin: I think it was Nellee Hooper. You have to be very careful with film soundtracks, they asked us to contribute to some later ones, but we didn't accept, because we didn't have the time or the energy to make it work. We'd be wasting our time. But it's probably been one of the best things we've been involved with, working with Baz. But you do have to be very careful about it, you learn as you go along. Because you can be offered silly money to slap a song onto a cheesy film now, after the success of the 'Romeo and Juliet' soundtrack. That soundtrack was so massive. A lot of film companies see it as a way of tying their music company offshoots, and making some money on the album sales and it really sucks.

MTV: The clip for 'No Surprises', do you like it?

Colin: I do. I find it very disturbing, and I find it very gripping. It's very powerful.

MTV: Your songs are all very similar, but also quite different.

Colin: They're all kind of similar in tempo, they're all mid-tempo but a lot of that is that when we worked out our songs we play them mid-tempo, or very slowly because we're not sure of what we're doing basically.

MTV: How did you work out the songs, was it quite difficult to work out how to get them across live?

Colin: A very important time for us was when we were on tour with Alanis Morissette in the autumn of 1996, in America. She invited us out, wanted us to do the whole tour, but we said we'd only do two and a half weeks... we weren't really into what she was doing musically, but as people they were wonderful.

MTV: Hasn't she just covered a song of yours?

Colin: Yeah she used to play 'Fake Plastic Trees'. Her old drummer Taylor, who now plays drums in the Foo Fighters - who are coming through Australia next week I think - he's a friend of ours. It was cool you know, because she had some good musicians in her band. They loved Supergrass as well. You used to hear Alanis Morissette's band doing covers of 'Lenny' from the first Supergrass album.

MTV: What music coming out of the UK do you really admire?

Colin: At the moment, the Propellerheads. I dunno, dance music is kind of funny. You have to see if it stays with you. Um, what are we into at the moment? Oh God, what a nightmare question! I like the Dirty Three album, I thought they were from America. Because last year I bought a Scud Mountain Boys album and a Dirty Three album, because someone recommended them to me, so I went to a mall and bought it. So that's cool. And I want to get Let Love In again, because that's such a great record, a very great record.

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