Select, early 1996

Interviewer - Did you start to think the REM tour was cursed?

Colin: We did consider it. We had all our gear nicked just as we left the tour - I think it was someone telling us that we should have got off a bit sooner. In fact, all their illnesses happened when we weren't with them. I think we were a kind of their lucky rabbits foot.

Interviewer - You've met a lot of heroes this year.

Thom: Yeah. Michael Stipe and Elvis Costello were the two people I really wanted to meet. I guess the only one left now is Tom Waits.

Colin: It was very strange. I mean you'd be sitting there on a sofa with Patti Smith on one side and Michael Stipe on the other.

Interviewer - What did you say to them?

Colin: I just asked them what they'd like to drink. It's times like that your English training in hospitality comes to the fore.

Interviewer - And lets not forget Soul Asylum.

Colin: Really Nice people.

Ed: Very friendly.

Colin: Very friendly people. Although personally not my favourite cup of tea. The lead singer invited us to all go and jam with them at the Hard Rock Cafe. But, unfortunately, we'd already packed our gear away……

Interviewer - In '94 you video'd your every move. In '95 you bought powerbooks. What's next on the techno superhighway?

Thom: Samplers. Ha! In my dreams.

Colin: Well Jonny's just got an environmental - friendly stunt kite.

Ed: I think we're probably going to go back to basics. Polaroid's, Etch-o-sketch. Painting the side of the bus with charcoal. That kind of stuff.

Colin: I'm actually using my Powerbook to write the unauthorised biography of Radiohead, including all the scandal that never makes the press. You know, which members of the band are on the seven step programme. Which ones are in wacky religious cults. Which ones are pederasts. I hope to then sue myself. It would be quite an earner.

Interviewer - What's with the barnet, Thom? Have you jumped the ginger bandwagon?

Thom: Is there a ginger bandwagon? Who else is on it?

Interviewer - Chris Evans, Mick Hucknall..

Thom: Oh well all the right sort of people then.

Interviewer - Has anyone called you carrot top yet? Or Duracell features? Tango Head?

Thom: Someone said 'You're a fucking vegetable, ginger' That's pretty good. Maybe Tango would be interested in me being slapped around the face by some big blob.

Interviewer - In Clueless, 'Fake Plastic Trees' is playing and Alicia Silverstone moans about how American students only ever listen to 'complaint rock'?

Colin: There's is an early modern English literacy analogy to that, which is the poetry of complaint. Basically it was an oral tradition in which the peasants bemoaned their losses. And of course 'complaint' can also mean illness. So, it's good to see Alicia has a good grounding in literature.

Interviewer - There was also Soul Survivors on TV in which Ian McShane as a soul DJ says "Who the hell are Radiohead?"

Colin: It's no secret in the band that I am massive fan of Ian McShane. Maybe he'll record another one of those covers albums and do 'Creep'. Hopefully he could produce the same kind of emotion that he brought to Roxy Music's 'Avalon'.

Interviewer - Do we need a new Romantic revival?

Thom: We probably need it as much as we need people doing Wire songs and claiming them as their own.

Interviewer - Why don't 1FM play your singles?

Colin: They do play our singles. They just won't playlist them. They didn't playlist 'Lucky' anyway. Apparently they're turnoff tracks. They figure the moment a listener hears a song they'll lunge across the room and switch it off.

Interviewer - Do you think it's true?

Colin: Well…um… I don't think you could say that Radiohead write escapist music. It's not the kind of thing you want to take on holiday - unless you were holidaying in Beirut. Apparanetly Kate Adie's a big fan. No seriously. It kind of fits doesn't it?

Interviewer - You released one of the years most critically acclaimed LP's, and you saw Oasis and Blur grab the headlines. Did that hurt?

Thom: We haven't been around enough for it to really hurt. We've been through the same thing for three years. You know, buy the Guardian and there's Jarvis Cocker telling his life story again. I find this obsession with personalities offensive. I find it offensive that I have to read about Noel and Liam's extremely banal antics.

Interviewer - Who'd win a Greenwood - Gallagher tagteam wrestling match?

Colin: Jonny would be quite tasty with his mitts if he got a few in early on. No, I'd like to see Jonny and Noel in a guitar duel. They would cover 'The Devil Went Down To Georgia'.

Interviewer - Did the next U2 label piss you off?

Thom: No more than people saying I was going to be the next rock martyr. Actually, that was worse.

Interviewer - What was the best day of your year?

Ed: Recording 'Lucky'.

Thom: Yeah, when Jonny did his choir sample thing I was a gibbering wreck.

Colin: The first day of my holiday. Lying on a beach in Mexico.

Interviewer - What was your worst day?

Colin: Getting all our gear nicked.

Thom: I quite enjoyed that because everyone felt sorry for us all day. We went to this restaurant and got the best tables, free pizzas…. I was walking down the street and this tramp say' Sorry to hear about your gear.' The worst day recently was when we found out that Radio One weren't going to play 'Lucky'. We're waiting for the Karma police to come and sort it out.

Ed: The first day of my holiday. Lying on the beach in Mexico. And then looking over and seeing Colin.

Colin: I knew you'd say that.

Interviewer - Are Menswear all over?

Colin: I saw them in LA supporting the Charlatans - feisty young British boys displaying pluck and determination in the face of LA indifference. So, good luck to them.

Thom: Well, they'd be all over if they'd ever started. When we were recording 'The Bends' our producer John Leckie said he'd seen the band the night before. Apparently every A&R man in the country was there and the band were a bit lame. But the best bit was they were called Menswear! We all wet ourselves. It was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

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Select, 07.1995

Just like The Beatles!

Yes, it was Hard Day’s Night type band-household domesticity for the ’Head...


After completing their respective college courses in 1991, schoolboy pals Colin Greenwood (bass) and Ed O’Brien (guitar) returned to Oxford and rented a semi-detached house near the centre of town. The house’s blue plaque credentials were confirmed when they were joined by fellow Radioheaders Thom Yorke (vocals) and Colin’s brother Jonny (guitar).

Thom: At first it was quite a nice house but we turned it into a complete fucking hole. We’d just begun taking the band seriously so there were musical instruments everywhere. We ripped half the wallpaper off taking the Hammond organ in and out. There was always fag ash everywhere. Plus, the carpet would roll down the stairs every time you went up them.

We all lived there in the course of the year but people would drift in and out. Technically-speaking, Phil had a room there but most of the time he couldn’t bear to come round. I felt sorry for the landlord because he could never work out who was living there. We’d get angry phone calls saying, ‘The rent is overdue!’ And we’d say, ‘Sorry, call Phil’... Also, the record collection was huge. I was sleeping in the living room so I moved all the albums in there. We’d have evenings of just sitting around listening to records which was really nice.

Colin and I got into cooking. But all the things we cooked had to have pesto in. Colin always referred to it as the ‘pesto slop’. It would taste great, though. You know, idiot food. But a month after I moved out I ate some pesto and started feeling really sick. I haven’t eaten it since.

I’d do it again if we had to. I mean that’s what we’re doing at the moment really, living together on the tour bus. Except the good thing is, you don’t have to clean out the toilet — not that we did anyway.

Colin: It was only really me and Thom who stuck it out all the way through. But it was a bit eerie because the woman who’d lived there before had died. I think she died in the house. And Ed and I kept finding things which had obviously belonged to her. Combs, half-empty fag packets, stuff like that. One day we found this half-eaten pork pie down the back of the soda. It must’ve been there for months but you could still see the teeth marks. Of course, being morbid people we managed to convince ourselves that she’d choked on it.

Thom had got into dance music at college and kept on playing these awful house records. God only knows what they were. I was working at Our Price and in the evenings all I wanted to do was sit round and listen to the Pale Saints. But Thom would stick on this horrendous techno music. He got pretty short shrift from the rest of us.

I don’t remember us socialising much. I think we spent most of the time trying to avoid each other as much as possible. We didn’t really argue though. Jonny never did the washing up, he’ll admit that, but he’d only just left school. I don’t think he’d quite got his head round this living together business. The only other thing was that one day Phil came back and I’d eaten all his honey. I mean, the guy hadn’t been there in weeks but still got really angry about it. He still brings it up to this day!

I don’t know if I’d do it again. Maybe if it was a house in Trinidad. But it would have to large enough so we never saw each other.

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