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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The Guardian, 20.12.1997

The Making of OK Computer

TONY WADSWORTH (MD of Parlophone records)
I've learned not to expect anything with RH, and that way you are constantly surprised. They had been playing a lot of the songs live over the previous year, so we were starting to get an idea of the sort of album it could be, but a lot of the songs they played live they didn't put on the album. So we left them to it, and checked in now and again to make sure they were going the right way.

JONNY:
We wanted to make OKC by ourselves. We did Lucky as a try-out, we used this engineer Nigel Godrich and got on great with him.

THOM:
Nigel is a very positive and emotionally engaging person, and thats what we needed. We needed someone who was passionate and shared our taste in music. He also works incredibly fast and is our best mate; it's that simple. We rang him and said, "We want to build a studio so write a wish list", so he went away and bought all this dream gear he would want to record with.

NIGEL GODRICH:
They hadn't really enjoyed recording previously, so they figured if we could make an environment where everybody feels comfortable, it would be a real bonus. I had a free rein in what equipment I wanted to buy, and apparently I was imposing more spending limits than I had to. They have a rehearsal space in the countryside in Oxfordshire, and we set it up there and did about half the album. Thom is always writing; he's very prolific. He has countless little bit and bobs up his sleeve. Then we felt we deserved a treat and should go somewhere nice, so we went to Jane Seymour's house near Bath, which was an amazing experience.

PHIL
For us to work on our own in these various locations was like coming full circle, back to before we signed a deal and we were just making demos. It would just be the five of us and a little recorder, and it was a very unselfconscious way of working. There's a lot of direct emotion in OKC which maybe we haven't captured before. I feel far more comfortable listening to this album than I do to Pablo Honey or the Bends. For me they sound quite wooden; quite emotionless.

ED
When we go into the studio it's about finding a soundscape for the song. When you rehearse you think it sounds great but when you consign it to tape it's like "Oh God this sounds awful". So we spent quite a lot of time trying to find the right sounds. On Pablo Honey and the Bends we ummed and ahhed: it was a lot more vague. This time we knew fairly early wheter it was right or not. The stuff we were vague about didn't make it onto the album. We're coming up to our 12th year together as a band, and we're playing much better.

CHRIS HUFFORD (RH's manager)
There's a strange kind of emotional honesty which is always there in their shows. Thom cannot stand going through the motions, and when he catches himself doing it he gets furious with himself. Thom is a highly strung, emotional person. He's also incredibly shy, and he can go off one when he feels something's been put the wrong way, so people immediately say he's a manic depressive. That's understandable because they only see him in his public role when he's highly stressed, but he's not like that at all.

THOM
I spent a lot of time trying not to do voices like mine. The voices on Karma Police, Paranoid Android and Climbing up the Walls are all different personas. I think Lucky, the lyric and the way it's sung, is really positive, really exciting. No Surprises is someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't. Electioneering is a preacher ranting in front of a bank of microphones.

ED
The vocal is the most important thing. It's more important than any guitar textures or rhythms or anything. The vocal is the thing that pulls you into the song...

JONNY
I did the string parts for this album. I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like Eleanor Rigby, which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past 30 years. We stole a lot of ideas from film music, and composers like Penderecki, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. We used violins to make frightening white noise stuff, like the last chord of climbing up the walls.

NIGEL
They are well educated boys and they know about classical music. The way they do it, the classical undertones are probably very attractive to people who probably wouldn't like classical music. You have to sit through the whole album because it's a whole piece.

JONNY
We did use a mellotron (steam age sampler/synthesiser much used in the 70's) quite a lot, but the others won't let me take it on tour because it's too fragile. When it was used in the 70's people used to find dead mice inside it and it would stop working, it's that kind of level of technology, so when we went on the road we have to reproduce it with a sampler..

ED
We spent two weeks track-listing the album. The context of each song is really important. There was a time when Let Down wasn't going to make the album, but it really fitted in well after Exit Music. Paranoid Android is an entity in itself, but the other tracks are very much part of the whole thing. It's not a concept album (argue amongst yourselves !!) but there is a continuity there. We learned the importance of track-sequencing from Pablo Honey, because that's one of the most dreadfully sequenced records ever.

KEITH WOZENCROFT (Parlophone AR man who signed them)
People say RH are just a prog-rock band like Genesis or Pink Floyd, but both those bands were amazing in their time (Hmmm...Genesis ?!?). I feel RH draw on more influences than they ever did, and I feel that they have songs that the Floyd certainly didn't in the same way, although I love Pink Floyd. If people say RH play prog-rock thats good because it means they're moving forward.

NIGEL
All the bands RH liked when they were kids were like Joy Division, and people who couldn't necessarily play their instruments very well. I've learned that you don't have to be a good player to be a musical person, and some of the most musical people I know have been crap at their instruments, but they've always produced something really good. Then you have someone who's a shit-hot session musician but is soulless and boring to listen to.

ED
I don't think we're individually amazing musicians, but what we do collectively is pretty good.

THOM
I think we're much better at shouting at each other now, which is good. There used to be a lot of serious infighting under the guise of reasonable discussion, and now it's lots of shouting and eventually we decide, so that's kind of cool. It's sort of like a marriage where you learn to shout at somebody and that's a good thing.

And the inevitable quote from Colin at the end...

COLIN
If you thought there were no singles on The Bends, you should hear this one !!

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Rolling Stone, 16.10.97

Dream Weavers
by Matt Hendrickson

On their fantastic voyage, OK Computer, Radiohead blast off into uncharted territories - and take a new generation of fans along for the ride.



EL CHOLO, a popular Mexican restaurant located smack in the middle of Los Angeles' Koreatown, has the sort of kitchy decor that's part Southwestern stucco and part basement rec room: cheesy wall ornaments, table-top video games, worn couches. The din is intense tonight: Amid a symphony of clinging glasses, one group is screeching "Happy Birthday to You", while the women at a nearby table are hooting and hollering, and various drunken professional types are sitting at the long wooden bar, turning happy hour into a liquid dinner.

Radiohead guitarists Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood survey the pandemonium with bemused looks. "This is insane", says O'Brien, who, at 6 feet 4 inches tall, towers above the rest of his band. "I'm going to the bar". Margaritas are ordered for everyone except Greenwood, who requests an espresso. Just as O'Brien returns with drinks in hand, singer and guitarist Thom Yorke arrives at the restaurant and, with a look of mock horror on his face, quickly finds a seat in the adjacent lounge as far away from the fracas as possible. His band mates follow close behind him. As he takes his seat, Yorke grabs a friend's jet-fuelled margarita and exclaims "What...is...this?" He takes a sip. "Yeow", the scrawny singer yells, shaking his head. "I think I'll be having one of those".

Radiohead have chosen El Cholo as the place for an impromptu kickoff dinner for their North American tour. Given the downpour of accolades for their latest album, OK Computer, and the sold-out performances, it would be understandable if the band's mood was fraught with nervous excitement. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Despite serious jet lag, the group's members - all but drummer Phil Selway, Radiohead's eldest member at 30, who rarely ventures out after dark - are in a jovial mood, making jokes about the Spice Girls and devouring enchiladas and burritos. Sold-out tour? Rising superstars? Shut up and pass the guacamole.

Chalk up Radiohead's laissez-faire attitude to experience. This is one of the few bands in recent years to surf a brief wave of post-Nirvana success, watch it die and then paddle out again in search of the big one. Until now, Radiohead were best known for their 1993 hit, "Creep" (the sarcastic, self-deprecating baby brother to Nirvana's "Negative Creep"), which helped their first album, Pablo Honey, to sell nearly 800,000 copies. Subsequent singles from that release were given scant attention, and the band was relegated to the one-hit-wonder bin by the time of its second album, The Bends, in 1995.

The Bends was more expansive and intricate, both sonically and lyrically, than Pablo Honey, but it sold only half as well. Then, due in large part to Radiohead's relentless touring, (they crisscrossed America five times), a burgeoning reputation for electrifying live shows and the moderately successful single "Fake Plastic Trees", the band crept toward renewed popularity by the end of the record's run, headlining theaters and large clubs. Capping off the hard-earned comeback was a string of dates opening for Alanis Morissette, during which Radiohead tested new material - including a 10-minute, hair-raising version of their current magnum opus, "Paranoid Android".

The stage was thereby set for OK Computer to be Radiohead's breakthrough. And while it still may be - the record debuted at No. 21 on the Biillboard chart but fell somewhat in subsequent weeks - the album is certainly not what people expected. OK Computer is a glorious piece of moody, spaced-out art-rock madness that alternates between compassionate, twisted tracks like "Climbing Up The Walls" and "Exit Music (For A Film)" and prickly, aural thorns such as "Airbag", which require numerous listens. "Women have told me they think the record is romantic", says gregarious bassist Colin Greenwood, Jonny's older brother. "I think that's pretty cool". Despite its popularity, OK Computer's sense of adventure was actually Radiohead's big "fuck you", a piss into the wind of success. "Everyone said, 'You'll sell 6 or 7 million if you bring out The Bends, Part 2'", O'Brien says. "And we're like, 'Yeah, right.' But we're not going to do that. The one thing you don't want to say to us is what we should do, because we'll kick against that and do exactly the opposite".

RADIOHEAD have been going against the tide from the beginning. Thom Yorke, who was born in 1968, moved with his family from Scotland to Oxford, England, when he was 8 years old. At the age of 10, he formed his first band, an unintentionally arty pop duo: Yorke played guitar while a friend smashed televisions. Yorke's aggression would play out in more constructive ways after his difficult stint at a boarding school in nearby Abingdon, where he was picked on and frequently engaged in fistfights, which he usually lost. Yorke spent ever-increasing amounts of time in the school's sound-proofed rehearsal rooms, teaching himself to sing. He soon joined a punk band, TNT, which featured one of his schoolmates, Colin Greenwood, on bass. After leaving that band, Yorke formed his own group with O'Brien, invited Greenwood to join them, christened the band On a Friday and added drummer Selway to the fold. Jonny was reluctantly made a full-time member after he waited patiently at the lip of the stage, harmonica in hand, during On a Friday's first gig, in 1987.

Soon after, the band was put on hold as each member went off to a different university. Yorke enrolled at Exeter, where he studied English literature and fine arts - and resumed his fighting career. "I was going out to a club one night, and these blokes just descended on me", he says, "just because I blew them a kiss". While at Exeter, Yorke played guitar in a techno outfit called Flickernoise and joined the university's anti-fascism club, which would hold demonstrations outside the town's European-football stadium. Unbeknown to his club's member's, the supporters of the local football team - who also happened to be members of the racist National Front organization - would take pictures of Yorke and his cohorts, from which they could later be identified. "We'd be sitting in the pub, and these skinheads would come up and start fucking with us", Yorke recalls. "It wasn't a pleasant experience".

After college, the members of On a Friday regrouped, in 1991, and renamed themselves Radiohead (the band name comes from a song on Talking Heads' True Stories). Following a few gigs in Oxford, they landed a record deal with Parlophone. The rage that had been seething within Yorke since childhood found its way into his tortured lyrics on Pablo Honey. With songs that were more musically focused and cohesive, Yorke's anger and disgust only intensified on The Bends.

In 1995, Yorke said in an interview in ROLLING STONE, "People ask me if I'm happy, and I tell them to fuck off". The singer was promptly anointed in the U.K. press as the Next Artist Most Likely to Put a Bullet in His Head. Now, he is more reflective. "The downside [about The Bends] was that everything I wrote had this significance to it", he says. On OK Computer, Yorke has replaced his earlier raw, confessional lyrics with a more oblique, universal discomfort; the songs seem to come from the perspectives of different characters, who comment on society. "I'm not trying to fight people in the same way [that I used to]", he says. "A lot of that was misplaced anger directed in the wrong way - toward myself. You say all these things, and you realize that you're revealing things that you really shouldn't be saying to anybody, except the people you really, really love".

Yorke's band mates defend him, saying that his misery has been overemphasized. "People try to pin this persona on him that has nothing to do with him", says Colin Greenwood.

A self-described perfectionist and control freak, Yorke is also a moody codger. In a matter of minutes, his demeanor can run from caustic crankiness (often displayed by burying his head in his hands) to unexpectedly charming. It is this unpredictability that drives his band mates, who feed off the singer's mania and channel it into an explosive, complex and melodic mix of guitar rock and electronica.

Yorke's control is not lost on the rest of the group. "Thom uses a great analogy", O'Brien says. "We're like the U.N. and he's like the U.S. He is the communicator, and the pressure on him is enormous".

The members of some bands might be resentful about such behavior, but Yorke's mates tend to stand by their man. They are a tightknit lot who all live within minutes of one another in Oxford. Yorke is also supported by a group of close friends from college, including his girlfriend of more than six years. "She's doing her doctorate in Dante's illustrations to The Inferno", he says proudly. He recently bought a house in Cornwall, England, that he uses as a sort of club-house. It has plenty of beds to accommodate his friends, who are not overly affected by his stardom. "When I go home, we talk about what's going on for five minutes, then everything's back to normal", he says. "It's as exciting for them as it is for me. They see me as happy, and that's cool".

UNDER a hot sun in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, the members of Radiohead are sitting in the production lot of Burbank's NBC Studios, waiting to perform on The Tonight Show. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. "I am so fucking bored", announces O'Brien, thumbing through the New York Times. The only member who is not going out of his mind is Colin Greenwood, who plops down on the curb and rummages for a cigarette. "I'm quite enjoying not thinking about anything at the moment", he says. Colin is two years older than Jonny, and the two couldn't be more different. With his big brown eyes, pouty lips and flailing, chain-saw-starting guitar moves, Jonny exudes the most onstage rock-star charisma, while Colin prefers to anchor himself by Selway's drum kit, delicately chugging to the beat. Offstage, the roles reverse. Colin is open, friendly and chatty, the one most likely to go out on a bender, while Jonny is quiet, self-absorbed and often at bed by 11. Despite their opposite personalities, Colin and Jonny remain close. Colin recalls only one fight in their relationship. "Jonny is colorblind", he begins, "and when we were young, I gave him a red crayon to use for the grass he was drawing. It was a blood bath". Their father died when Colin was 7, leaving Jonny and him to look to their older sister, Susan, as a role model. "she's responsible for our precocious love of miserable music", Colin says. "The Fall, Magazine, Joy Division. We were ostracized at school because everyone else was into Iron Maiden".

Colin is nonchalant about Radiohead's success. "Enjoy it while it lasts", he says as he spots a giant limo carrying another one of Jay Leno's guests, Evander Holyfield. "The record company always wants to send us limos", he continues. "I hate them. It's much better to have a van. There's no cachet anymore with limos. What's the point?"

The band's tour manager hands Colin an itinerary for his girlfriend, who will visit him in two days. "One of the benefits of being successful", he says with a crooked grin, "is flying someone you care about across the country. That's nice".
After the band's abrasive performance of "Electioneering" on The Tonight Show, the hallway of the NBC studio degenerates into a hellish fun house of celebrities. The group retreats to its dressing room, dodging Ed McMahon, Arsenio Hall and Magic Johnson. The Arsenio sighting brings up a discussion about which talk-show host gives the better gifts. "Arsenio gave us great bathrobes", says Colin. "We get food baskets from Jay".

All the band members leave the dressing room except for Selway, who stands and looks at the baskets. "I suppose it would be rather rude to leave them", he says. The comment underscores Radiohead's greatest collective character traits. They're polite, thoughtful and charmingly down-to-earth - the exact opposite of fellow Brits Oasis, whose bratty, headline-making antics far overshadow Radiohead's in the U.K. Thus, Selway gathers up the baskets, heads outside to the parking lot and gives them to the limo drivers.

In the lot, things get off to a strange start. Kato Kaelin - remember him? - is milling around the parking lot with a woman at his side. "Oh, yes, that guy", exclaims O'Brien rather loudly. "Should I go get his autograph?" Kaelin shoots a glare in the band's direction. Everyone stares in silence. After a few tense moments, Jonny mutters, "Nice hair, though".

Alarmingly, Yorke once had hair similar to Kaelin's. Around the time of "Creep", Yorke's gaudy blond tresses were a frightening collision of English mod meets L.A. glam. These days, Yorke has settled on a buzzed, spiky look, which today is dyed black.

After the band's performance at L.A.'s Wiltern Theater the following evening, Yorke jumps into a car and crawls into the back, slouching down low. "You're probably going to be followed", he informs the driver. "You know how to lose people, don't you?"

Yorke is on the way to a private after-show party, at a restaurant in West Hollywood, that was organized by R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. Since Radiohead opened for R.E.M.'s 1995 Monster tour, Stipe and the rest of the band have become big brothers to Yorke and Co., offering advice on how to navigate the potholes on the road to fame."We were a different band after we toured with R.E.M.", O'Brien says. "They did it their own way, and we spoke about that as the way that we wanted to do it; go out there and gig, and win a few more people over on each album. Then when we met them, they really seemed to enjoy the position they were in, and they were being creative. It was really important for us to see that." Yorke and Stipe have since formed a tight bond. Before this evening's show, they even went shopping together, which nearly caused Yorke to be late for Radiohead's gig. "He's a good friend", says Yorke of Stipe. "He's been very helpful".

Yorke arrives at the open-air restaurant and shuffles in with his hands stuffed into his pockets, a sheepish grin on his face. Seated at the long table is a motley collection of rockers (Stipe, Mike D of the Beastie Boys, Hole's Eric Erlandson) and actors (Liv Tyler joined by three of the Phoenix siblings: Joaquin, Summer and Rain). Yorke settles into a chair, accepts a glass of champagne and orders french fries and a salad.

Yorke receives congratulations with a smile and a nod, and instead of working the room, chitchatting with the celebs, he stays in his chair, quietly eating his midnight meal and politely answering questions ("I'm running out of people to get star struck over", he will say later). Only after the plates are cleared does Yorke excuse himself to huddle one-on-one with Stipe. After an hour, the tour bus arrives to pick up Yorke for Radiohead's overnight trip to San Francisco. He says goodnight to Stipe, turns and gives a wave to the rest of the party, and saunters off, half-drunk and smiling.

A MONTH after the tour began in California, the Radiohead juggernaut has made its way to Philadelphia. By all accounts, it has been a success, and, according to O'Brien, last night's Boston show was the best gig they've played yet ("Aerosnith, eat your hearts out", he boasts jokingly). Joined on their tour bus by openers Teenage Fanclub for the drive to Philly, the bands tie one on until 5a.m.

Understandably, there's a feeling of lethargy hanging in the Electric Factory, a blade Runner-like venue just north of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. The band plays an average gig by its standards, but it does nothing to tarnish its reputation as one of the best live rock acts. Yorke's voice is still in unbelievable shape, even after four weeks on the road, and the crowd is spellbound by tense versions of "Exit Music" and "Karma Police", as well as a gripping "Paranoid Android".
It's a little odd, however, when "Creep" is played and Yorke, who has preened and posed his way through the song, lets the crowd sing the second verse. The song isn't a favourite of Jonny's, and when the time comes for his guttural belch of a guitar part, he rips into it with added vengeance. Yorke introduces the number - as he does most of the time - by sayinng "We play this because it's still a good song", an unnecessary apology for their biggest hit.

Sometimes I do have to justify it", he says. "Sometimes it's karaoke, and I enjoy hamming it up, but some other days it really means something to me". It is the crowd's response to the new songs that means the most to Yorke. "I've been amazed that people know the new material so well", he says. "Sometimes we play 'Creep', and halfway through we stop and say 'Sorry, that's boring'. If people don't want to hear it, you can tell".

After the show, the band piles onto the bus, eager to get to New York for the tour's finale, two days later. The bus is held up momentarily while Yorke signs autographs. "Whew, I almost didn't get out of there", he says as he sinks into the couch at the front of the bus. It's been a recurring event throughout the tour and has given Yorke a whiff of the idolatry that is simmering in America. But instead of running to the solitude of the tour bus as he might have done four years ago, Yorke has mellowed and accepted, albeit reluctantly, his public stature. "When we first came here, it was baptism by fire, and it was really freaking me out", he says. "I'm used to it now, and I have developed a leave-me-alone face".

Despite punishing fatigue, the guys are in good spirits. O'Brien and Colin attempt to roll a couple of spliffs. "Five weeks in America, and I still can't roll one", displaying something that looks more like a soggy noodle. After the joints are passed around, the band pops in a video of Kiss' infamous 1976 interview with Tom Snyder. The segment is sidesplittingly funny, with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley playing it straight while Peter Criss and Ace Frehley are bombed out of their minds.

"What a wanker", says Yorke as Simmons talks like a cocky businessman. "I'm sure there's a lesson for us somewhere in this interview".

When the tape ends, Jonny moves to the front of the bus to watch the looming New York skyline. "Oh, my God, look at that", says the driver. He's not referring to the World Trade Center; he's pointing to a toll-booth collector who is holding cassettes of OK Computer and Pablo Honey, shaking them vigorously. "He wants autographs!" the driver says. Jonny sits frozen in amazement, staring at the zealous fan. But the bus accelerates, leaving the fan empty-handed. Jonny turns around, looks at Yorke and deadpans: "Apparently we've made it".

"Yes", Yorke agrees. "We've made it".

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Request Magazine, 9.1997

Subterranean Aliens
Radiohead's got the end-of-the-millennium blues.


Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is not a swinger. Neither is guitarist Jonny Greenwood. If they look a bit like fish out of the water in the glaring mid-afternoon haze of Hollywood, they seem even more out of place in swingers, a restaurant reincarnated Aaron Spelling-style as a '50's diner.

Tinsel town fashion geeks might dig polyester high-waters, stringy hair, and horn-rimmed glasses, but greenwood's pronounced overbite and Yorke’s dropping eyelid are disconcertingly real. And their pallid English reserve and genuinely bookish air clash with the diner's retro-hip ambience as well. The setting becomes downright ironic when Yorke and Greenwood begin describing how crucial the atmosphere of their working environment -- a 500-year-old country house in southwestern England -- was in the recording of their latest effort, OK Computer.

The new Radiohead album bears all of the familiar features that have won Radiohead a devoted following and critical phrase -- impeccable songwriting, fiery playing and Yorke's transcendent vocals-- yet it's also streaked with moments of preternatural beauty and unnaturally human electronics. Though OK Computer is the Oxford quintet's third album, it's the first they've self-produced, and, in calling all the shots, they seem to have startled themselves with the fascinating depths of sound they uncovered during their time in the stately home owned by actress Jane Seymour (aka Dr. Quinn, medicine woman). According to Greenwood, Seymour doesn't live there; it's used as "a kind of corporate convention hangout" -- which didn’t make it any less of a sanctuary for musicians weary of working in the pop-culture confines of the here and now.

"What we found interesting and distressing was being in places that had a 20-year old history of Dire Straits gold records on the walls," the lanky, soft spoken 26-year-old Greenwood says. "Traditional studio history -- we wanted to get away from all that."

"This house was the total opposite," Yorke says with a muted intensity that doesn't at all jibe with the 28-year-old's spitfire stage presence.

Tucked into a naugahyde booth, sipping chamomile tea and a glass of carrot juice, Yorke exhibits body language that suggests intense caginess, as if he's not quite comfortable in his own skin. His somewhat furtive speech patterns (snagged by the occasional stammer or tight knot of sarcasm) belie the unguarded, insightful observations he imparts.

"You were constantly presented with your own mortality in the sense that people had lived and died in this place, had literally spent their whole lives there," he continues, obviously still haunted by the recording experience. "It was extremely isolated, so the house was absolutely full of it. It was in a sort of valley, and there was absolutely no life around at all, ever, except the occasional motor car driving down the single-track lane. It did something to your head, anyway."

"I was less like a laboratory experiment, which is what being in a studio is usually like, and more about a group of people making their first record together," Greenwood adds. "It felt like we'd been taken back to the days when we did recordings by ourselves, before we'd signed."

"It's about as far removed as you could get without going to a deserted island," Yorke says. "The house had the most incredible sound signature to it. We'd recorded in our rehearsal room previous to that, but it was too near [to where we live] and we all just popped off home every night before we could get it together, so it was a kind of enforced exile really."

OK Computer isn't a concept album per se --Yorke insists the only reason anyone interprets it as such is because of its title --though a distinct theme runs through it, and despite the sense of detachment that was so integral to its genesis, the music is far from dispassionate. It's an anxious meditation on the alienating effects of modern life. But in a broader sense, it's also about being out of step with the space/time continuum. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" is a forlorn earthbound prayer for freedom reverberating in a dreamy, stellar atmosphere. Spectral Beatlesesque harmonies transform the lilting, angst-ridden "Karma Police" into a sardonic '90s commentary on the lost ideals of the '60s. The delicately brooding "Exit Music (For A Film)" incorporates the disembodied voices of children recorded at a playground near the space needle in Seattle. The edgy, semi-acoustic "Paranoid Android" is about human automatons, while "Fitter, Happier" is a monologue about the benefits of healthy living delivered by a disjointed computer-generated voice. It all makes for a vibrant kaleidoscopic vision of the end of the millennium, but what gives the album its allure is its constantly shifting subtext. Sifting through a mixture of images, ideas, and sounds, Radiohead seems bent on picking them apart even as it embraces them.

"The songs themselves were about the present, very much photographs of where we've been," Yorke says. "And then to take these quite transparent ideas about technology and so on -- the general images I’d written down in the lyrics -- to a place that had all this incredible presence and spirit. It just brought them all to life, as well as the performances themselves. There was this thing bout, 'well, why am I singing about these things? What do they mean?' they mean nothing really. They're so important to you, and then you take them to a place like that and it's just so irrelevant, in a way.

"For the first two weeks, me and [bassist] Colin [Greenwood] literally didn't leave the house, and them we went into Bath, which is the local town, and it was like landing on another planet. We were sort of touching the walls and seeing all these people and just running away from them because they were coming so close. It was like landing from mars."

One of rock 'n' roll's most powerful is its seemingly limitless capacity to validate misfits of every hue, and while many artists struggle to cultivate the space-oddity syndrome, the members of Radiohead are genuinely odd. Not so much because of whatever individual eccentricities they harbor, but because they seem such an unlikely group of people to be making music together.

Earlier in the day, plied with bottled water and ensconced on a generically cozy conference-room couch at the capitol records building, the other members of Radiohead -- Colin Greenwood (Jonny's older brother), drummer Phil Selway, and guitarist Ed O'Brien -- contemplate the future and reminisce about the past that Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are reluctant to dwell on because "you'll spend five paragraphs on it and it'll get really boring." Contrary to Yorke's fears, however, the trio delivers a lively, succinct account of Radiohead's history.

Like most fledgling bands, On A Friday (as the quintet was known during their mid-80's Abingdon school days) had its flirtations with the happening sounds of the day, including those of the day, including those of The Waterboys, the Cocteau Twins, New Order, and The Smiths. (Yorke later admits that he had once been a New Romantic, complete "with honey hair and lipstick.") Colin denies O'Brien's allegations that he was a goth, though it's not much of a stretch to visualize the lean, slouchy bassist with mercilessly teased Robert Smith hair and wearing a black frock coat. But according to O’Brien, On A Friday never relied on covers, playing mostly original material from the outset. At one point, the band featured a trio of saxophones (friends from the neighbouring girls school) and briefly included a keyboardist, but other than that, Radiohead's lineup has remained unchanged for more than 10 years.

"Once we actually started the band, in 1985 or '86, I think we all shaped our lives towards that point where we would actually make it a full-time pursuit," Selways says.

Genial and clean-shaven (scalp and all), Selway, the band's senior member at 30, has a low-key, steadfast demeanor that suggests there's a grain of truth to Colin’s facetious assertion that the drummer is the band's father figure. Selway had played in several bands in oxford prior to Radiohead and found gainful employment as desk editor at an academic book press while waiting for the rest of the band to catch up. "I know that's how it's been for me," he says. "even though I’ve done other things, it's always been the band at the forefront."

"I think the way we got together is unusual," says Colin, whose animated facial expressions provide a running commentary on what his companions are saying. His posture is dismal as Joey Ramone's; at times he folds his arms behind his head and slumps so furiously that he seems to be sinking into the crevice between's the couch's cushions. "When we started, we were 15 years old in a boys school that wasn't that much fun. So we tried to [use] music as a way to find our own space away from it and kept doing it all the way through college."

In 1987, the year of the black Monday when stock markets crashed around the world, the 28-year-old elder greenwood matriculated at Peterhouse, the oldest college at Cambridge university. While classmates once destined for lucrative positions in business scrambled to set alternate career goals, Colin watched unperturbed, secure in the knowledge that he was destined to be a pop star.

"I mean, we were always, like, slightly cut off from what was going on," he says. "If you look at it like that, how we work is just really a continuation of that. We haven't really changed. I mean, we all still live in Oxford, so we haven't really progressed." he chuckles. "Our working methods haven't either."

"We were all at different universities around the country," O’Brien says, "and the commitment was pretty unbelievable in that we'd get back every three weekends. We'd all come back to Oxford, and Oxford's not --you know, I was in Manchester and Manchester’s such a great city. Why would you want to leave Manchester for weekends when there's so much going on? The only reason was 'cause of the band."

"Well," Colin says, a twinkle in his eye, "and 'cause of the friendships within the band."

Without missing a beat, O’Brien retorts, "that wasn't so important. It's even less so now." his expression is so dry it's hard to tell if he's deadpanning or dead serious.

Whether it's musical obsessions or social ties that bind the members of Radiohead together, the forces motivating them have fostered an extraordinary musical dynamic. Unlike many of the band's contemporaries, Radiohead’s relationship to Brit-pop forebearers like the Beatles and the Kinks is intriguingly muddied. There are a couple of Beatlesoid moments on OK Computer, but there are also deliciously warped, somber undercurrents that flow from the heart of the Pink Floydian vortex, and edgy outbursts as nervy as a mob of piled-up mods.

The ambient dabbling this time around has less to do with contemporary electronica then with works by composers who influenced its evolution like Ennio Morricone and Oliver Messiaen. Then there's Yorke, blessed with a voice that can plunge from a high lonesome wail to an acid rant without ever losing its musicality. Onstage, it all makes for a ungainly spectacle: an impish singer projecting his soul through his vocal chords, one statuesque guitarist counterbalanced by a second crimped over his instrument and hidden by a mop of hair, a perky but restrained bassist, and a hairless, unflappable drummer.

They seem to value their idiosyncracies, even if they can't really explain them.

After a growing interest in the music business inspired him to read Fredric Dannen's 1991 book, Hitmen, 29-year-old O’Brien concluded that those who made it to the top always seemed to be attorneys, and decided that his best bet for securing a niche in the biz would be via law school. Though he had never had a chance to test his hypothesis, it's not difficult to imagine the tall, toothsome guitarist in a navy suit and power tie consulting the virgin mogul Richard Branson on the legal ramifications of a corporate merger.

"I remember, like, '87 through about '91 you didn't have anyone from England coming over [to America]," he says, offering his explanation of why 15 years elapsed between the second, early-'80s British invasion of U2, The Cure, and The Smiths, and the current wave of bands encroaching on the U.S. pop arena. "The Manchester scene in '89, '90, kind of revitalized that, but because they became so huge in Britain very quickly, bands like the stone roses and Happy Mondays came over to America with completely the wrong attitude. You have to keep touring [America]. They didn't -- like Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, or U2 --come over for a year. They came over from this enormous adulation in their own home country to playing clubs, and they didn't like it that much. They weren't willing to do the work."

In contrast, members of Radiohead have had few illusions about America. They've been meticulous and pragmatic about building success on these shores as they've been about cultivating their music. When their debut, Pablo Honey, was released in 1993, they soon had a massive radio hit on their hands in "Creep." The single ignited so quickly that it threatened to overshadow Pablo Honey and any future albums. The quintet knew they had to circumvent the hit-single machinery of alternative radio, and upon completion of the bends, they hunkered down and, with delicate tenacity, set out to take their music to the people. Between April 1995, when the bends was released, and the completion of OK Computer this year, they toured the U.S. No fewer than five times.

Yet despite their wariness of the hit parade, they haven't compromised their pop aesthetic. For all the experimental sounds that wend through OK Computer, Radiohead never sounds as if it's being smothered under arty affections.

"Well, 80 percent of it was recorded live in a room," Colin says, "which I think is important. There was no time for that kind of self-consciousness, because we were all hammering the shit out the instruments. I mean, of course there are overdubs on there but..."

"I think there's... Not a lack of confidence," Selway says, "but we're not overly confident about over level of musicianship anyway."

Colin glares at him with bemused indigance: "I am."

"But," Selway continues when the chortling abates, "it's almost wanting to play the best of our abilities, as if you're proving to yourself that you can do it."

The others may jest about art and artiness, but Yorke is quite earnest about it, although his method isn't so much about applying principles like minimalism, primitivism, or Dadaism than it is about how he approaches the music's creation. Compared with the bends, Yorke says the making of OK Computer was a very external process, "like someone lifted the blinds in a room and the room's [suddenly] really really bright, like being electrocuted."

There's nothing truly outlandish on the album. What's startling is the way things lurk in the tracks only to spring out at you, like the computerized voice in "Fitter, Happier," clangorous outbursts that erupt now and again, and the uncharacteristic shuffling percussion on "Paranoid Android." it's the spontaneity of the sound that's most surprising.

"I can never do it all at once," Yorke says of songwriting. "if I know that I’ve got to do it, I won't do it. I have to do it whenever I’m doing something else, whenever I’m driving or on a train or on a plane. The washing up, or whatever. Some days, everything means a lot and you write it all down in your notebook, extremely profound, and then you go two months and nothing'll mean anything. You can't really go and look for it, so I have to keep notebooks. The only valid thing I learned from art college is keeping notebooks all the time."

From 1987 to 1991, Yorke studied fine art and literature at Exeter University, where he took up the paintbrush for a time. "Everything [I painted] was brown," he says matter-of-factly. "So that kind of made me stop. All I did was paint Jesus all day for no good reason, and they weren't even good paintings. They were sort of yellow, murky brown, and quite miserable. That's why I ended up using computers, because then, technically, you can cheat. You've got more licence because no one else is doing it and blah blah blah. In the final degree show, there was a portfolio [with] all the final-year artists in it, and each one had 'future plans,' and I just put 'pop star'."

Being a pop star is a completely manageable thing in Yorke's book, because he and his bandmates know what their priorities are and where they want to go. No matter how gratifying adulation from the media or the listening public can be, the bottom line is the music and the creative process.

"Most of the time you can laugh about it because you can see how people might read [the music]," he says. "But that kind of has to be to the extent of your own involvement with it, because if you actually start to think, to worry about it, then you sort of become whatever they want, you just cease to have imagination. You'll cease to be surprised by what you're doing. Every time you record a song you have to be surprised by what the fuck's going to happen with it. You have to be surprised."

Fresh customers trickle into the diner, seeing and being seen. As the conversation dwindles, the balmy harmonies of The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" begin to seep out of the sound system. Greenwood slips off to join Selway, O’Brien, and his brother, who are headed down the street.

Yorke pauses for a moment, then wanders off after them, humming his own quiet, slightly dissonant fifth-part harmony.

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Q, 1997

They are serious men with serious sales. But, cautious, paranoid and in no way the new Pink Floyd, Radiohead have their troubles, and they have a new album to promote. Still, as singer Thom Yorke tells Tom Doyle, it's not all terrible news: "murderers have stopped writing to say how much they relate to Creep..."

Brightly early most weekday mornings before 9am, when other rock stars still have at least a good six hours of kip ahead of them - or have yet in fact to go to bed following another night of drunken or chemically induced shenanigans - Radiohead's curiously angular guitarist Jonny Greenwood can usually be found in the middle of a field in the quiet Oxfordshire countryside, flying his kite. If the widescreen possibilities of this undeniably evocative scene has a touch of Pink Floyd-like imagery about it, then that perhaps is no coincidence, since the soundtrack on the rake-thin 25-year-old man's personal stereo is Meddle, an album released in 1971, the year he was born.

This evidence alone may not be enough to suggest that Radiohead are slowly mutating into the new Pink Floyd. But then there are other factors which have to be taken into consideration. Not least the fact that singer Thom Yorke warmly recalls recording parts of their self-produced third album, OK Computer, at their recently acquired studio farmhouse while, outside the window, herds of jersey cattle lumbered lazily through sunny fields. In the background, an industrial chimney belched acrid smoke into the sky. "It was the Floyd", he enthuses before - perhaps typically - feigning vomiting in self-disgust at having been forced to draw this seemingly unthinkable parallel himself. Bassist Colin Greenwood has his own thoughts about his brother's kite-flying plot to turn Radiohead into a progressive rock ensemble.

"Jonny made us all watch Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii and said, now this is how we should do videos," he offers, grinning, his already frighteningly voluminous eyes widening in mock disbelief. "I just remember seeing Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar and Roger Waters with long greasy hair, sandals and dusty flares, staggers over and picks up this big beater and whacks this gong. Ridiculous."

Nevertheless, there is no getting away from it: Radiohead's keenly awaited third album is a sprawling, hugely experimental affair that cannot be described accurately without using the words "out" and "there". The return single, Paranoid Android, by way of an indication, is a six-and-a-half-minute epic in three movements. Jonny Greenwood admits that during the making of the record, he had found himself becoming involved in a brave, but perhaps futile side pursuit: trying to unearth half-decent prog rock albums.

"It's been very disappointing because most of it is awful," he softly admits in his engagingly posh way. "I've got it into my head that prog rock must be good because it attracted a lot of fans. So far, I've just trawled through fairly tedious Genesis albums."

Aside from all of this, there has also been the suggestions that Radiohead have been gradually morphing into R.E.M. Since the Oxford quintet's extended supporting sojourn on the Monster tour in the summer of 1995. Certainly Thom Yorke's friendship with Michael Stipe - who made the onstage pronouncement that "Radiohead are so good, they scare me" - has been well documented. In fact, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have just returned to Oxford from London, where they were collaborating with Stipe on tracks for Velvet Goldmine, the glam rock-scrutinising film Stipe is currently producing. Notably, on OK Computer, there is evidence that Yorke's approach to lyric-writing has taken on a distinctly more oblique, Stipe-like bent.

Whatever comparisons are being made, it's clear that Radiohead have gone through something of a transitional period. It seems reasonable to declare that toying with ground-breaking studio techniques and constructing wildly ambitious musical atmospheres now figures heavily in their collective imaginations. Queen for the 90's, anyone?

"I’ve been building up my chest just now so that it looks good in a white vest," warns the small and slight-framed Yorke, with his characteristic level of sarcasm. "Christ, you should've seen the 'tache I had last week."

After coming down from such a high as Radiohead experienced when R.E.M. Took them under their wing and nursed them through the crucial period where they learned how to get their music across to stadium-proportioned crowds (Yorke claims his most deep-rooted nightmare is to become Jim Kerr at his worthiest), the band were given carte blanche to record and self-produce their next album. As a consequence, OK Computer unarguably finds them breaking into new territory, from the looped-up, all-fronts assault of Airbag, through the searingly anthemic Electioneering to the soothingly effective Exit Music (for a Film), ostensibly She's Leaving Home retold with a panicky edge.

Preliminary sessions began - in a stroke of magnificent indulgence, at actress Jane Seymour’s mansion near Bath - in the spring of last year, the very same place where the cure initially developed the commercially disastrous wild mood swings. The previous summer, Johnny Cash had rented the house before an appearance at Glastonbury. The flowing-locked English rose could be reassured that Radiohead were something less of a rock'n'roll proposition. Although they did rearrange the furniture.

"We recorded in her library," Jonny Greenwood explains. "It was wonderful going somewhere that wasn't designed for recording. Recording studios now tend to be quite scientific and clinical. You can't really impose yourself without getting over the fact that there are fag burns in the carpet and gold discs all around. It's good to go and decide that we'll turn this beautifully furnished sitting room into whatever."

While they are a five-strong band of self-confessed "neurotics anonymous", the fact that Radiohead are so keen to guard the rural location of their studio farm headquarters, where the album was completed, is indicative of their growing status as the archetypal art school-grounded English rock band afford the imperial leather- like luxury of creative freedom. This, it would seem, is a direct result of the fact that, throughout their five-year existence - while everyone's heads were turned in the directions of initially Blur, then Suede and now Oasis - Radiohead have quietly grown into a formidably successful act. Their second album, The Bends, has now achieved platinum status in Britain, a trend more or less followed in most record-buying nations.

When, at the beginning of 1996, Parlophone records released street spirit (fade out), the fourth, campaign-closing single from the bends, its hypnotically languid tone rendered it too dark and sombre to be playlisted on Radio One. It still debuted with a one-fingered salute at number 5. On the release of War Child's Help album the previous September, Radiohead’s magnificently moody contribution, Lucky (oddly included on OK Computer), proved the stand-out - although the band had been forced to complete the track in an intensive five-hour period to meet the required deadline, after a day spent posing for a War Child camera crew dispatched to film them pretending to record.

"They were waiting for us to record the song, and we were waiting for them to go," smiles the unnaturally lofty Ed O'Brien, credited on the group's record sleeves for supplying "polite guitar", as opposed to Jonny Greenwood's "abusive guitar". Of the video footage depicting casualties of the Bosnian conflict that was subsequently set to the track, Yorke - never one to understate his emotional reactions - simply says, "it had me in tears".

Today the five members of Radiohead, fresh from tramping through fields of rape for their Q photo session, mill around the management offices close to their recording studio, seemingly a relaxed and quietly polite bunch who enjoy a laugh of the wry and knowing variety. O'Brien, lightly stoned this afternoon, since this is effectively a day off for the band - although pockets of them will frequently disappear into an adjoining recording room to continue work on b-sides - is charming and affable and has earned a reputation as the band member renowned for his on-stage acts of over-exuberance. The band gleefully recall the guitarist once disappearing over the lip of the stage at a theatre gig in North Carolina, tumbling into the orchestra pit and then struggling for ages to clamber back out.

Groomed drummer and, impressively, ex-Samaritan Phil Selway proves suitably genial for someone who has had a Japanese fan club - Phil Is Great - set up in his honour. Another of the Phil Is Great club's occasional meetings is planned for the following week, when Radiohead make a promotional trip to the Pacific Rim.

The Greenwood brothers, who share no distinctive physical resemblance, are polar opposites. Jonny rarely touches alcohol; Colin can regularly be located in a pub after frenzied searches five minutes before the band are due on stage. Jonny is silent unless coaxed; Colin is effusive when engaged on the topic of books, records, other bands. Jonny was likely described as "a dreamer" by his teachers, his head seemingly operating at some cloud-high altitude; Colin is sharp and wary and likely the cornerstone of Radiohead. When together, both share an inscrutable look if questioned on virtually any subject. Colin admits to feeling guilty of acting a touch cruelly to his colour-blind younger brother when they were growing up: he would mix up the crayons, which the guitarist claims "retarded me".

"We share the same gene pool," states the elder, directing another meaningful look towards his sibling.

"But I got the shallow end," adds his toothily blessed younger brother, without any detectable hesitation.

Meanwhile, the boyishly proportioned Thom Yorke pads around barefoot in blue canvas jeans, Radiohead fan club t-shirt and Gaultier shades, his short spiky hair dyed black after extended periods as peroxide blond and retina-damaging orange. Quietly intense, he is a man possessed of a bitingly sharp sense of humour, although an air of brow-beaten cynicism can be detected in his every utterance.

The others simply describe Yorke as "a bit of a worrier", but it would seem that his enduring reputation as a troubled and overly angsty individual is reasonably well-deserved, despite his claims to having recently "learned to relax a little". He talks with his head bowed and eyes closed, covering his face with his hands and peering through his fingers, sometimes curling his limbs up into a tight ball, as if he is under physical attack. The prospect of Radiohead performing this summer to 40,000 people in Ireland as well as headlining a major festival (interestingly, on the same weekend as the strategically unannounced Glastonbury bill) seems to fill him with dread.

"I can't see why we're doing these big gigs," he shrugs. "thing is, whoever it is up there, it's not the person sitting here. It's a completely different state of mind, that you have to spend a long time getting into. I can't switch it on and off. When even the logistics of these big gigs are discussed, I just fucking freeze up. It's not something I'm emotionally capable of dealing with yet. Hopefully I'll get back into a different frame of mind where it won't worry me."

While there is a certain fragile quality to Yorke, the two sides to Radiohead's chief songwriter are exemplified in those moments when his distinctive singing voice swoops down from a choirboy falsetto to a low, anguished snarl. Similarly, in conversation he can suddenly cop an attitude, turning shirty and argumentative. O’Brien remembers his first impression of the young Yorke when the two were involved in a play - the former acting, the latter providing musical accompaniment - at the Oxford school where Radiohead first met as teenagers.

"There was this tense dress rehearsal," O’Brien remembers, "and Thom and this other fella were jamming freeform cod jazz throughout it. The director stopped the play and shouted up to this scaffold tower thing they were playing on, trying to find out what the hell was going on. Thom started shouting down, I don't know what the fuck we're supposed to be playing. And this was to a teacher."

Born with one eye closed on October 7, 1968, the infant Thom Yorke had already endured five major operations on his paralysed eyelid by the time he was six. Made to wear an eye-patch during his early school years, he was cruelly mocked by his schoolmates. He half-bitterly brushes off suggestions that this may have caused him to have a slight chip on his shoulder.

"Oh no," he states sharply. "I was sweet and lovely and nothing ever happened to me. (Cagily) when I was younger, I was in the music room most of the time, anyway. It was great. No-one came down and there were these tiny rooms with sound-proofed cubicles. I suppose I’m quite an aggressive person. I was a fighter at school, but I never won. I was into the idea of fighting (laughs hysterically). I've had to calm down a bit, otherwise I’d go nuts."

Yorke recalls the moment in his younger life when he realised that he was perhaps not quite as handy with his fists as he'd imagined.

"In first year at college, I went through this phase where I was into this granddad hat and coat I had," he quietly explains. "They were immaculate and I was into dressing like an old man. But I went out one night and there was these three blokes, townie guys, waiting to beat someone up and they found me. They said something, I turned around, blew them a kiss and that was it. They beat the living shit out of me. One was kicking me, one had a stick and the other was smashing me in the face. That put me off fighting a bit."

Back in mid-'80s Oxford, where Radiohead first bonded and began rehearsing, essentially as the school band, they called themselves On A Friday. Selway was in the sixth form, O’Brien in the fifth year, Yorke and Colin Greenwood in the fourth and Jonny Greenwood - the last to join - in the third.

"We’re still in our same classes and years really," the elder Greenwood grimly decides. "The thing about having been together for such a long period is that there are some heinously embarrassing group shots from ten years ago when were in adolescence with varying styles of haircut and demeanour which would now be openly laughed at in the street."

During this era, of course, the quiff was king ("you'd literally take a photograph of Morrissey to the barber and say, I want it like that") and if On A Friday resembled The Smiths visually, they had yet to find a foothold musically. The four others remember tapes of Thom Yorke's early compositions as being "schizophrenic".

"One track, Rattlesnake, just had a drum loop that Thom did himself at home on a tape recorder with bad scratching over the top and kind of Prince vocals," Jonny Greenwood remembers. "The Chains had viola and was meant to sound like The Waterboys. What is that you see was a feedback frenzy. After hearing it, I knew Thom was writing great songs and I knew what I wanted to do."

Nevertheless, the younger Greenwood's ambitions were thwarted by the group's reluctance to let him join. Described by them as "a precocious talent" who would whip through an assortment of instruments in an attempt to impress his potential band mates, On A Friday's first gig at Oxford Jericho Tavern in 1987 featured (according to Selway) Jonny sitting on stage "with a harmonica, waiting for his big moment".

As imageless as a police identity parade, and embodying such extremes of stature and build that Ed O’Brien probably towers a whole foot above Thom Yorke, Radiohead initially found it difficult to attract attention during the lifespan of their debut album, 1993's Pablo Honey, when other, more fashion-conscious outfits were hogging the limelight.

On its initial release in the UK, the second, self-hating single, the possibly classic Creep, stiffed. As with The Fixx before them and bush afterwards, Radiohead suffered the indignity of being rejected by their motherland and embraced by America when Creep became a slacker anthem after an extended period of over-exposure on college radio. By the time Radiohead arrived in America for their first tour, Creep was already in the Billboard Top 40, and for the summer of 1993 its mutant guitar crunch and soaring melody spilled out from car radios and apartment windows all over America.

Its follow-up, the bracing Stop Whispering, failed to maintain the momentum and the band found themselves performing to capacity audiences interested in hearing one song. For a time, Yorke re-christened the song Crap.

"At that time the whole so-called alternative rock thing had happened there," remembers Yorke, "populated by sap programmers from the 80's who didn't have a clue what they were putting on and Creep suffered from that. It was a good song, but afterwards it was, well, let's have more that please because the programmers understand it, and it's like, no, sorry."

"We didn't know what was normal in America," Jonny Greenwood muses. "We went over there and we'd turn on MTV and Creep would be on again. We though, oh, that's good."

"People were being very nice to us over there because Creep was doing well," adds Selway. "Stop Whispering didn't do quite so well, so that opened us up to the more cynical side of it."

"We were hysterical," decides O’Brien. "One moment we'd be giggling, the next we'd be really down. Our reactions were extreme."

Regretfully, it was around this time that Radiohead, under pressure to visually re-invent themselves, became the tightly trousered, big-haired rock band they felt America had expected of them. Jonny Greenwood and Yorke even accepted modelling assignments for American fashion magazines, the latter sporting a hellish tangle of hair extensions atop his cranium.

"I was rock," winces the frontman with an embarrassed laugh. "There were so many elements to that period, but the hair was the worst. It was such a weird trip anyway, because suddenly we were seen as this big investment and there was money being thrown at us. It didn't last long enough to mess us up, but then I suppose, for a while, it probably did."

The most positive knock-on effect of Creep's US success was that on its re-release in the UK it reached number 7. On the negative side, Radiohead were in danger of looking like a one-trick pony. Immediately they set to work on The Bends, titled after the dramatic side-effects of emerging from the depths too rapidly. Cutting between zooropa-fashioned loop collages (Planet Telex), folk rock (Fake Plastic Trees) and hushed atmospherics (Bulletproof), the record managed to distract the listener for long enough to forget that Creep existed. Of course, America couldn't get its head around it.

"There’s this assumption, especially over here, that Radiohead are big in America", O’Brien offers. "Radiohead are not big in America. We had Fake Plastic Trees as a single and it was played to a radio station. They did a survey of their listeners - 18-to-25-year-old males who drive four-wheel-drive jeeps - and it came bottom of the list. The thing with Radiohead and America is that we had one pop hit there."

"And they don't remember it anyway because they've got the attention span of insects," Yorke mutters, darkly. "Our so-called success in America was that it allowed us to do lots of things, but it also meant that somehow we owed somebody something. But I couldn't work out who and I couldn't work out how much."

Flying in the face of the drug-hoovering, groupie-rogerering rock band image, Radiohead present themselves as Evian-sipping abstainers, content to play a hand of bridge on their tour bus, thanking you very much. Nevertheless, the punishing 18-month touring schedule that followed the bends was not without casualties.

There is an undercurrent of obsessiveness within the group, a matter most evident when they play live. Jonny Greenwood plays his guitar with such teeth-grindingly frantic force that he unknowingly lacerates his fingers. Recently, he has taken to strapping on an arm brace, which could be seen as a unique guitar-hero affectation. However, Greenwood insists he's been ordered to wear it since it was diagnosed that his playing style was causing repetitive strain injury. Similarly, he is keen to point out that the bulky headphones he sported through the latter half of the bends tour are industrial ear shields he was advised to wear after suffering from a dangerously leaky lughole.

"My ear was ringing and bleeding for two weeks on an American tour," he reveals, with strangely calm detachment. "There was this terrifying gig in Cleveland, where I was nearly fainting. I was taken to the hospital at three in the morning and the doctor said the situation was really grim. I'd love to do without both of them, but the arm brace I’m still going to need.

"It's conceited to deny there's any affectation but having said that, I enjoy putting the arm brace on before I play. It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match. It's a ritual."

The most memorably grim incident of the tour, however, occurred in Munich, when Yorke blacked out and collapsed onstage.

"That had been building up," he mumbles while wriggling uncomfortably in his seat, head in hands. "There's been an incident in America where I’d been really sick as fuck. This cold had got to my throat and whacked me out. It turned into laryngitis. The promoter takes you to the doctor, that's the normal standard thing, and the doctor says, oh no, you're fine to play. You argue with them. They say, no, take these drugs and you'll be fine. Then you realise the promoter is paying the doctor.

"It got bad again in Germany because we were sleeping on a cold damp tour bus in the middle of winter. This doctor turns up - usual thing, paid by the promoter - with this huge bag of drugs. All sorts of shit, man. He offered to inject me with steroids, which I refused. I didn't take anything because I thought I could get through it. We did the soundcheck and I was like, oh shit, this is really bad. My voice was not there at all. By that point, it's too late, you can't cancel. I go on and third song in, I lost it. I remember hitting the floor and then I wasn't there."

He pauses and his face contorts into a perverse smile.

"It was great, actually."

Most things about Thom Yorke’s burgeoning rock star status seem to trouble him deeply. The word he uses most frequently is "doomed". While he claims not to suffer from an acute fear of fame ("it's just that I have no respect for it"), he admits that his growing friendship with Michael Stipe has involved the R.E.M. singer offering guidance on how Yorke should deal with his concerns, although the Radiohead frontman is protective of their relationship.

"If you don't have any semblance of a normal life, then you won't be able to write," he muses, "and if you can't write, then you won't be there. He's helped me to deal with most things I couldn't deal with. The rest is not anyone else's business and that's what's great about it. Anyway. Whatever. It sounds like I’ve been touched by an evangelist or something."

Why still bother to make music then?

"Because I can be very drunk in a club in Oxford on a Monday night and some guy comes up to you and buys you a drink and says that the last record you made changed his life. That means something. It makes you chill about it."

As a result of the anguished nature of your lyrics, are Radiohead fans fairly obsessive individuals as a whole?

"They were. In the letters they can be, yeah. But when you meet people it's a different thing. People put pen to paper for different reasons, some of them quite weird. It was set up like that from the first record because of Creep and all the hyperbole around that, but actually we lost most of that debris when we brought out the bends. Murderers have stopped writing to me to say how much they can relate to Creep, so that's cool. Now it's just people who're into what we're doing and there's a respect on both sides."

So your motivation is purely and simply the music you make and the reaction that you'll get from it?

"(Sarcastically) I know it sounds awful, but yes. (Changes mood) but, y'know, that's probably lies as well..."

You do seem to eat yourself up about everything.

"I’m not eating myself up," he continues, defensively. "It's just that if I read that last statement, I would think, wanker. Because whoever's said it isn't being honest."

There was a certain point at which Nirvana had to pull back because they felt they were getting too big and they couldn't handle it. Can you see yourself doing the same if you get really famous?

"Yeah, I've got the pull-back button ready. You have to have. That hotline back to the president."

How would you do that? Release a few 17-minute singles?

"No... No there's other ways to do it. There's other shadows you can find. You can still be there. That was the thing I’ve had to learn recently. But it still gets to me."

Do you ever fear for the ill-effects of increased success on your mental health?

"Oh, yes," he exclaims, his mood strangely and suddenly lifting. "Thank you, yes."

Later that afternoon, as the light begins to fail, Thom Yorke appears to have returned to a more balanced state and almost rhetorically enquires, "I don't think this has been about moaning, do you?" pulling an "urgh" face when his band mates invite him down to the beer garden of a local pub for some light tea-time refreshment, he wanders off instead in the direction of the studio to continue work on the b-sides for Paranoid Android.

As the others wend their way through the winding country lanes on the way to the hostelry, the talk turns to the fact that their frontman seems to be bearing so much intolerable weight on his shoulders.

"It's weird to see the public representation of Thom," ventures Jonny Greenwood after a time, "because it's quite different. I find Thom to be very affectionate and child-like."

"Yeah," his brother adds, "but we don't draw the curtains of our bedrooms at night when we're going to sleep and see all these people staring up at the window. We don't have to deal with that. It's different graduations of stress, I suppose. What's important to him is, if he can have two different personas, it's a way of protecting himself."

"Well, I shared a room with him for four years," Selway laughs, before tellingly adding, "and that's not the man in the interviews."

Deeply weird bunch, Radiohead. Insular, posh, irrationally paranoid, yet capable of creating achingly beautiful songs resplendent with mind-warping sonic tricks. They might just have the potential to rechisel the granite face of rock music, if their new-found prog edge doesn't devour them or they don't disintegrate in the process. God help them if they ever get into proper drugs.

"Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible," Thom Yorke had stated earlier, in a lighter mood. "We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams."

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Circus Magazine, 8.1997

Radiohead - Getting More Respect
by Adrian Gregory Glover

On paper it seems that Radiohead have always been about taking chances. They appeared in 1992 with the year's most powerful ode to mopedom, "Creep". The sudden Chinese-style guitar work provided by Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien set up the vulnerable musings of vocalist Thom Yorke with a refrain that brought them into the spotlight ("I'm a creep/I'm a weirdo/what the hell am I doing here?/I don't belong here"). The momentum of "Creep" was so overwhelming that it became a curse and a blessing for the five Oxford, England natives. The blessing was that the song pushed the band's debut full lenth record Pablo Honey to gold record status (500,000 copies). The curse was that the song became the band's identity. The song had such a long run in the public eye that even the follow-up videos and singles from Pablo Honey were overshadowed by its counterpart's staying power.

In '95 Radiohead popped up again with its second effort The Bends, a collection of well-executed songs that for the most part avoids the slash of the wrist mentality that the band was tagged with. It proved to be the tim to Pablo Honey's yang. The songs on The Bends were optimistic in ways that left anyone expecting a "Creep" rehash out in the cold. "Fake Plastic Trees" one of the video/singles from The Bends, gave the culture a taste of the band's ability to create moody music that can mean everything and nothing in the same breath.

"Just" and 'Black Star" also proved to be two other incredible songs that created a mood of their own while staying true to the sound of the overall record. The band was taking chances with their sound and they all paid off.

The music tested well on the road as well. High profile tours with the likes of R.E.M. and Alanis Morissette gave them the opportunity once again to be seen and heard. The passionate and physical delivery of Radiohead, the live band was quickly becoming a trademark -- so much that Jonny Greenwood took to wearing an arm brace onstage to protect himself from finger lacerations and chronic strain injuries and Thom Yorke completely blacked out during a gig.

Physical casualties aside, the second record and tour campaign was not met with the same commercial force that greeted the band the first time around. The songs were great and the live show was compelling but the general public was busy snatching for Alanis Morissette who was busy covering "Fake Plastic Trees."

The band regrouped in their rehearsal studio in January last year to compose tracks for their next album, OK Computer. Released on July 1, OK Computer is a dramatic affair with a very extreme sound, from the heartfelt ballad and second single, "Let Down" to the bouncy "Karma Police." To achieve such extremism the band self-produced the album. Self production is always a hit-or-miss affair, but in this case the vision of the band is all that was needed.

They have been laying to waste the competition at festival sized events this summer as they gear up for a bonafide tour that will commence later in the year. The macabre animated video for "Paranoid Android" has been added to MTV's Buzz Bin and just about the entire music industry is talking about nothing but Radiohead. At their pre-album release gig in New York's Irving Plaza, members of the audience who went to see the band ran the gamut of today's popular music, including Marilyn Manson, Madonna, Courtney Love, U2, R.E.M., Oasis and Blur.

Their worldwide popularity didn't happen overnight. The five began rehearsing together in the mid-80's as a school band in their hometown as On A Friday, and incorporated influences like The Smiths, The Waterboys and The Fall into their performances and songs. Since their first gig in 1987, the band continued to play together and would do so into their colleg careers. Their first demo, the Drill EP, was circulated in 1991 and after the record big-wigs gained interest, they eventually were signed to Parlophone, and changed their name to the present moniker.

The band filled out by bassist Colin Greenwood (yes they are brothers), and drummer Phil Selway are poised to do it all over again. Let's find out if Colin Greenwood thinks it's worth it.

Circus: Over the past few years you've started to get a lot of respect from people in the industry. Other musicians and critics love Radiohead.

Greenwood: God knows why...(laughs) Cool well thank you... you are very kind.

I heard many celebrities attended the Irving Plaza show on June 9. Were you nervous playing in front of so many of your peers?

CG: To be honest with you, no. I think we were more nervous about playing The Troubadour in L.A. I mean them (famous musicians) showing up has got nothing to do with us. It's not real and it's not the real world. All of those famous people just happened to be there and were in town. There was a spotlight you know but next week they will be there checking out somebody else. There is just nothing particularly real about that. It's great that they all turned out and it was such a treat to see R.E.M. again.

From what I hear, Blur went on the Rockline National Radio Show later that night and raved about the show.

CG: That's right they didn't see the whole show. They had to go and do that radio interview. Aaah you see it's really cool to see English bands that enjoy being over here and doing well. God knows that happens over in the U.K. with your American groups. I look at it the way that English and American music ebbs and flows from one direction to another. At the moment there is a lot of cool English stuff happening in America.

With so many electronic bands coming down the pike, do you think that people are correct in saying that rock 'n' roll is dead?

CG: I think rock music or whatever you want to call it goes through periodic like almost revolutionary cycles. I think that's very important and in fact that I think that it is very much alive. It is just constantly in a state of flux. The elements that were around us in the times of The Stones and The Beatles are still around now. Things just keep changing and different flavors are added to the mix.

When self producing OK Computer, did you consider drama one of those flavors?

CG: Yeah! I think the overall mood on the record is starker than The Bends. I think that there is a consistent sound to 80 percent of the new album. I think we made things a little bit more extreme on this record. The important thing for us on this record was that we produce it ourselves. We had to learn how to make decisions amongst the six of us. There was the five people in the band and the engineer/mixer Nigel Godrich. We learned a lot from doing it on our own and in retrospect, we are very proud of this record.

You built your own studio, Canned Applause, for this one.

CG: We bought $140,000 dollars worth of studio gear to record the album with. We had this mobile studio type of thing going where we could take it all into studios to capture those environments. We recorded about 35 percent of the album in our rehearsal space. Which is built like a storage shed. You had to piss around the corner because there were no toilets or no running water. It was in the middle of the countryside. You had to drive to town to find something to eat. In a reaction to that stark, dreary place we recorded the other two-thirds of the record in this opulent country house.

Are you really going to a video for every song on the record?

CG: Well that's more of a goal than a definite thing. It's something that we would like to do. It's kind of like a journey and it's a journey that we hope to get to the end of. It's so expensive so we are not saying that they [the videos] are definitely going to arrive. We've got two being finished and one is done at the moment. We just found out that "Paranoid Android" has been added to MTV's Buzz Bin and that we are all very excited about.

I've seen it, it's a really cool video and the animation is incredible.

CG: Yeah, I think it's great! There was no way that we could appear in it to perform in it because that would be so Spinal Tap. This way we got to keep it twisted and colorful which is how the song is anyway. Every time that you make a video you realize that it's all a crap shoot anyway. You nver know how it's going to turn out until it's done. The only thing that you can do is put total creative trust to the artist that is directing it for you. We decide what happens [in the video] obviously but after that we don't interfere with the artistic process.

With the goal being to complete a video for very song on the record, does that mean there is a concept to this record?

CG: The only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves. You couldn't like put on "The Wizard Of Oz" and turn the sound down and find that Judy Garland is speaking the lyrics to "Subterranean Homesick Alien". There is obviously a certain continuity to the record. We try to stay away from all of that especially after the last album. He [Thom Yorke] wants to do something that is more like a collection of snapshots of images and impressions that he has had from the external world. That's where little phrases like "jack knife jeggernaut" [from the lead off track "Airbag"] come from. It's very much a record that encourages you to try to find a space, your own space mentally in the comtemporary world. Just trying to get away from some of the obsessive internalizations that were on The Bends. That record was very inward looking. This is more about engaging things in the outside world.

There were some health issues on the last tour. How are you gearing up for that?

CG: I don't think that we are that unhealthy, to be honest with you. We are not really a party group. We don't do any drugs or drink heavily at all. We don't really even stay out late. It's more like when you start off you don't know how much your body will or will not tolerate. So you try everything as far as doing shows and your body draws a line in the sand. From there you have a point to work from. We know when to say no and turn things down. I wouldn't say that we are a collection of invalids or anything. We are no sicker and probably much healthier than a lot of other groups. This is probably very un rock'n'roll to say but our biggest concern is the amount of flying that we do. Jet lag and the poor circulation in the cabins of these planes is hard on the larynx.

Ever get sick of playing the old stuff from Pablo honey since you have grown so much musically?

CG: On Pablo Honey we play "Creep", and "Thinking About You". The rest of the stuff is... well we only recorded that record in two and a half weeks. It was our first time really in the studio. I don't think it's a bad effort at all. I [think] that it's a seven and a half out of ten record. Well actually six....but then you put "Creep" on it so you have to say seven. It's cool really to have three, well, two real records to pick from. I think OK Computer is the best to choose from.

For those who have not seen the live show yet, what's that like?

CG: It's enjoyable to play material from The Bends in a relaxed way. It's a record that people really like, but it's not the record that is happening now. We are playing The Bends in its entirety, well except for "Sulk". I think it's really nice how it works with the material from OK Computer. We are going to be on tour in America starting in August.

We are going to be using the dates in August as a way of testing out some production ideas. After that in August we are going to be playing 3,500 to 5,000 seat places in England. We will be working with the best sound and lighting people in the business the best as far as originality and so forth. live is the one thing that we really are proud about and we want to get that right. We want to convince people about us and the new record, especially in America.

(Photo of Thom from High and Dry live package CD) Born on Oct. 7, 1968 Thom Yorke once wore clothes most associated with elderly people in college. He was operated on five times in his childhood for a paralyzed eyelid."

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