Channel V, 2-98

Radiohead were in Australia in February 1998, and played to adoring crowds all over the country. In this interview, Jabba and bassist Colin Greenwood get cosy in a lounge chair and discuss everything from video clips and remixes to the pressures of success...

Jabba: Hello there. Jabbatron here, in this luxurious hotel foyer with Mr Colin Greenwood from the band, Radiohead. He plays bass, his brother's in the band too... How are you?

Colin: Fine - I just had a nice lunch down opposite the Stock Exchange in the centre of Sydney - it was lovely.

Jabba: How long have you been in Australia for?

Colin: Only about four days; we flew in from Wellington and we landed in Melbourne. We did two shows in Melbourne - the Exhibition Centre I think it is - where the Beatles played in the 60s. It was great - hasn't changed since ...

Jabba: Did you come across stage-diving, moshing at the gig?

Colin: No, in fact, cos we don't like that very much, and we make sure the audience knows that as well. It's not much fun doing a gig and seeing the kids getting hurt at the front. Kind of puts you off your stride.

Jabba: You have been out here before ...

Colin: Yes, in the spring of 1994 - we were in the middle of recording our last album, The Bends.

Jabba: Last time you came out "Creep" would have been really huge

Colin: Last time we came out "Creep" had already been huge up to eight months before and nobody came to see us apart from Sydney which has always been the happening centre of Australia obviously. We played in front of 50 people in Adelaide and 60 people in Brisbane, a few more people in Melbourne actually... but it was a bit of a disastrous tour really.

Jabba: Do you think you were battling the one hit wonder stigma?

Colin: Yes exactly. We arrived too late to get any vibe off the hit single and too soon before the new album had come out... so it's fair enough, we weren't surprised.

Jabba: Your latest album OK Computer has received rave reviews pretty much everywhere in the world, was there anywhere where it didn't?

Colin: Well, no I don't know... the fact that it has been well reviewed has absolutely nothing to do with us so it's very flattering. Certain factions in the NME cite it as an attempt to revive the excesses of the progressive rock of the 70s without bothering to listen to anything that we were listening to at the time, when we were doing OK Computer... from Miles Davis to Shadow to Massive Attack to Bjork to Sparklehorse to... all the contemporary music stuff that we all love and worship and attempt to reflect in what we do, so you know. It's just boring anyway, I don't want to talk about them.

Jabba: Thom appears in the videos, and you guys do the interviews - does the media try and separate the front man and put him on the pedestal and leave the band?

Colin: No all those things that happen are all decisions made by the five of us, so to be honest with you I'm very grateful that we haven't been in the videos for the past three because they are awful things and all of us would rather not have to do them, they are a no-bonus job which cost a fortune and put you into thrall with the record company and they are just one more tool for them to be able to control and manipulate you. So we are in a fortunate position where we have sold enough records to recoup against our video costs but what sort of sense is it to spend an album budget... you can make a well-recorded album for the price of filming one video. So it's crazy... as soon as whatever happens in the next 10 years happens, then hopefully all video channels will all be fucked then, that would be good.

Jabba: We'll all be making chips!

Colin: Obviously there is diversification, there's other things to do with the medium, you don't just have to use the same format. Hopefully it will change.

So yeah, there was an animation with "Paranoid Android" and then Thom was in "Karma Police" and "No Surprises" and I am very grateful for that cos there is nothing more boring than hanging around on a set waiting to do a video between the hours of 6 in the evening... or even 9 in the evening till 7 in the morning for two days, costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars ...

Jabba: I read there was a plan where you were going to do a film clip for every song?

Colin: Yeah, that was the plan originally, but the budget just got crazy, so what we've decided to do instead is pursue this documentary thing, with this friend of ours, colleague of ours, Grant, who's been basically following us on tour and photographing. And we've been doing sound recordings of the records since the launch of the album in May in Barcelona last year, all the way through to now. He's actually here with us in Australia.

Jabba:Is he filming any of the shows?

Colin: Yeah, he's filmed lots of live footage. I think he's going to stop doing that now, he's just trying to get his head round what we do. I think he's done more interviews and stuff than anything else.

Jabba: You mentioned the cost of making a clip, the "Paranoid Android" clip which was done by Magnus Carlsson, wouldn't that save money?

Colin: Animation is very expensive - well his type of animation is very expensive, well that's what he told us - because it's all line drawing and stuff. It's not like computer animation, it's not like programming various cells. They are very expensive things. The cheapest video we've ever done was for "Creep" and that was twelve and a half thousand pounds and it was our first video and it was filmed in our village hall, well community center, round the corner from where we all lived in Oxford and sadly the prices have since escalated... and in some ways it's our most successful video I suppose.

Jabba: As the band gets bigger do you have more people coming to you saying, wow we can do a million dollar clip for you now?

Colin: No the thing is, as our career continues, we get more and more hacked off with doing them so we actually have to set limits on the cost of them... but if you meet a good talented director who has great ideas... we are very lucky, we have worked with some brilliant people like Jonathan Glaser and Magnus Carlsson and Grant's done the video for "No Surprises", the guy that's doing the documentary. What we learnt is that you have to trust the artistic judgement of the people you are paying the money to get involved. There's nothing worse than a group of people who all think they know how something should look.

Jabba: What's it like having your brother in the band?

Colin: It's wonderful, it's good, it makes my promise to keep an eye on him for my mother a lot easier, having him right next to me all the time. But he's very easy to look after anyway, cos he's very well behaved.

Jabba: Has there ever been conflict?

Colin: I was really naughty to him as a kid - he was colour blind, and I'd mix up his colouring crayons and he had to go and see the educational psychologist after he'd done too many grassy lawns the colour of blood. I once told him to sniff into a pepper pot - which is a really nasty thing to do. It has plagued me - sleepless nights racked by guilt.

Jabba: We were talking before about the critical success of the record. Does that put more a creative pressure on the band instead of commercial?

Colin: Yes definitely. What happened with the first album was that it was critically successful about a year after it was released which was nice for us but it meant that we were aware that we had to follow up with an album whereas previously we just had to follow up a song - "Creep". We just removed ourselves from the public and people and went to this old haunted country house owned by Jane Seymour in Bath and recorded there... we didn't see anyone and... (burps) excuse me, sorry I've just had a Lime Spider. When I was a kid they were one of my favourite bands and I just finally found out what it is, it's a fruit float, soda drink with an icecream dollop on the top... fantastic.

Jabba: Were you into any other Australian bands?

Colin: Oh yeah, the Triffids, and obviously Mr Cave... there was this seminal compilation called Beyond The Southern Cross that came out... antipodean to us, to be honest, is all grouped together in England - Australia and NZ... there was this period - '85, '86 - John Peel this radio DJ used to play a lot of Antipodean music, it was really good.

Jabba: Do you have any idea of what kind of sound you want to take Radiohead to, maybe the drum & bass path?

Colin: Well Tricky has asked us to do some work with him in New York; I don't think we'll be able to do anything with that, but it is very flattering for him to invite us. And Massive Attack want to remix a record.. Eddie and I concocted this ridiculous idea when we were wasted one night in Auckland last fortnight. We had gone to see where Crowded House had recorded their Together Alone and we thought it would be really cool to go somewhere like that with Massive Attack and spend a couple of weeks just cutting some stuff, that would be really good.

Jabba: Bjork just recorded some of her second but last album on a beach in the Bahamas... if you can do it on the beach... why not?

Colin: We're all such pale, white, skinny English boys, we would end up with melanomas, it would be disastrous. But there is lots of things we are planning to do - when Massive Attack finally finish and release the album in March we might ask them to do some remixes and stuff... But with the remixes, Thom has done a collaboration with DJ Shadow and Mo'Wax - that's really cool. That is going to come out some time in the future. Remixes are like videos and you have to approach them with a certain amount of disdain, because quite often people are there to rip you off. But we are lucky again because we are in a position where a lot of dance people like our music so we are in a position where we can ask people to do remixes and we only pay for it if we use it which is brilliant because people want to do it.

Jabba: What about film soundtracks?

Colin: Well I suppose the most successful thing we have done is the collaboration with Nellie Hooper who is the musical director for Romeo & Juliet with Baz Luhrman. The story behind that is that we were on tour in America - about two years ago now - and we got thhis call through that this Australian director was doing this Romeo & Juliet and Nellie Hooper wanted to get us involved in it. Because we are big fans of the production work that he has done with Massive Attack and Bjork and stuff, so they sent us the last half hour of the movie... and it was fantastic, it was the scene where Di Caprio goes to the church and find Clare Danes at the funeral byre and we thought it was wonderful. Thom wrote this song for exit music for the end of the film that no-one has really heard because we didn't want to put it on the soundtrack because we wanted it for our album so it is always heralded by the closing of seats in the cinemas because it is right at the end of the movie. And Nellie did a good job... a version of 'Talk Show Host' and added a few things which will go on the B-side. That was really cool but our whole approach to working with music for films is to do it as sympathetically as possible because when we started off with our career we just sort of signed off on a couple of things stupidly . There was this awful film called So Fucking What with Steven Dorf that has "Creep" on it - we were young, foolish, naïve... we were drunk at the time... it wasn't very good, but we are well up for looking at soundtracks and stuff.

Jabba: Have you ever been approached by a large commercial institute?

Colin: Yes we have been approached by a big brewing company to use one of our songs for an obscene amount of money worldwide and it's a tipple we all enjoy as well... but we didn't do it, but at the same time I respect other people's bands for doing it because ultimately it's their property to do what they want with their music. We are the last people to get on a pedestal and say that some people are compromising their art, so it's just bullshit.

Jabba: The portrayal of Radiohead is a serious group of guys - do you think there is a humour in your music that people miss?

Colin: Humour... yes. All the baudy quips and punchlines that people just fail to pick up on... no. I suppose so - it depends what song you talk about, there is some dark humour definitely. The thing about a song like 'Paranoid Android', is that it's just put together and taking the piss, it was just a joke, a laugh, getting wasted together over a couple of evenings and putting some different pieces together. It's a good question though in terms of like, you do something and you are never aware how far it is going to be scrutinised when it's released in the public and it takes a life of its own and becomes this creature that you have no control over. That's if you are successful, of course... if you're not, then it sits in a box in the back of a record store covered in dust, so we are lucky.

Jabba: Radiohead.... Colin, thanks you for talking to us.

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Whirlpool ezine, late 1995

Caitlin Moran's lovely, lively Radiohead interview!

The Corn Exchange in Cambridge is a 16th century barn - high, arc'd roof; buttresses colliding in the centre in star-bursts of roughly carved rose and flame. The walls are honey coloured stone, still boiling from the sunset which streams through the open fire exits. To the right is the mixing desk and the main entrance; to the left is the stage. Just above the stage is the Salisbury Box ('No drinking or smoking allowed in the box') and we are perched up here, waiting for Radiohead's soundcheck to begin, having travelled 70 miles to do so because Radiohead soundchecks aren't the usual, pulverisingly dull mike-shifting and bass-drum testing ("Two. Two two. Two. Two two. Thump' etc.) of other bands. Radiohead soundchecks are a microcosm of the band itself and one of those free, rare treats like wet-ghost clusters of wild inkcap mushrooms and rare meteor showers, that involve a pain-in-the-arse amount of effort to sort out, but once you do, are worth it 12-fold.

Stages waiting for gigs to happen on them are like the blacked-out airstrip on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind; dark, skeletal structures which, with one flick of a switch, suddenly roar into terrifying neon organisation; and an immense air of waiting for things to happen. The lighting man is running through his moves; the room alternately flashed sea green, pink and white-out strobe as roadies shuffle around doing Useful Things and Ed, Radiohead's unfailingly polite guitarist and backing-vocalist - the man who puts the whoops and fire-string harmonies into The Bends - wanders around the empty venue, chewing the end of his laminate and looking at the ceiling with wonder.

Thom, a tiny, beautiful rag-doll in scuffed trainers and chrysanthemum-orange hair, comes onstage with an acoustic guitar which looks like it's had all its innate Guitar Glamour sand-papered off, and stands awkwardly in front of his mike. He absently brushes a couple of chords whilst watching Ed with a bemused air. Slowly the chords stick themselves together, start sewing themselves into a song; so gently you don't realise what's happening until it occurs to you you've been holding your breath for the last three minutes. Thom screws his eyes up, and starts singing - chasing his voice around the room, higher and higher, wilder and wilder, a feral choirboy singing the sun down, and wailing as night and all the terrors therein approaches..

The rest of the band slowly come on stage and take up their instruments silently - they're running through a new song and each instrument comes in at the end of a refrain, slowly swelling the song beyond Thom's scrunch-faced introspection into something that makes the walls buckle. It's got Led Zeppelin heaviness with a middle passage that soars like a bird released. The words 'album' 'next' and 'will be amazing' come to mind. That is, until the bass comes in.

"Colin! Colin! Can we check your mike?" Colin bounds up to the microphone. "Helloooooo" he greets the engineer with Pathetic Sharkesque enthusiasm. "This is lovely, isn't it?" He strums a couple of notes experimentally, as the rest of the band swoon and sway behind him. "Ooooooh," Colin moans. "That sounds all wibbly. Could we, um - " and here a look of profound embarrassment takes hold of him " - stick another three or - um, I don't know - four on the top end? EQ it a bit? It's all - " (large grimace) " - a bit splurgy" (another grimace, to apologise for using such technical language. Centre-stage, lit holy by the spot, Thom reaches a run of three notes which turn the spice to ice. To the right, Colin waves "Hello" and mimes that his bass has gone 'All wrong' to a bemused friend. Radiohead are ace, aren't they!

(Three months later, on the phone to Colin in Minneapolis. Colin is drunk. Colin is a very good drunk - his eyes grow as wide as plates, and he lots out some secret in a flurry of giggles before clapping his hand over his mouth. "The next career move is to be Queen", he says seriously, before exploding into more giggles. "We've been practising all the moves. I'm making him a crown and cloak." )

Thom does seem to have been becoming more of a performer of late. He'd always give his all - often more than his all - on stage, but tonight's gig showcases some kitsch-Elvis moves that are disturbingly horny. Clutching the mike stand whilst collapsing, right leg twisting and jerking like he's in the middle of a rude dream - Thom's being ironically sex, if such a thing's possible. Actually, it is - I've just remembered Jarvis.

"Yeah", Colin affirms. "Thom's playing with what can be done on stage without turning into a complete tart. Not to distract from the music or the lyrics, but not trying to express the excitement by, um, wiggling his legs or something. Trying to combine the cerebral with the physical - a lot of bands who are more literary than others seem to think it's undignified to become physically expressive on stage - I think it makes things more exciting, don't you? I'd always fancy someone who's brainy and a good mover over someone sitting there in the corner reading poetry and scowling at everyone on the dance floor. Have you seen Sparklehorse yet?"

No. Dunno much about them. Their singer's leg exploded, didn't it? "He was very ill," Colin confirms. "We love them. Radiohead love Sparklehorse. We've dragged them from America to come on tour with us because we love them so much. We want to manage them. Make their t-shirts - 'Radiohead Say Buy Sparklehorse Records'. Oooooh no," Colin stops himself. "You have to say the word 'fuck' in t-shirts now, don't you? Radiohead Say Fucking Buy Sparklehorse Records.'"

'Fuck' is last year. 'Babe' is 1996.

"Oh." Colin seems momentarily confused.

"Well, then, 'Radiohead Say Have You Seen Babe Yet?" Will that do. Can we do the Sparklehorse t-shirts after the Babe ones? We really do like them. They're our friends."

FRIENDS ...Radiohead have made a lot of friends over the last two years. After the first, passionate kiss of 'Creep' in 1993, followed by a subsequent tricky two years which all the band seem relieved to be over. The Bends was a hugely unexpected shag-of-the-decade which left everyone slightly dizzy with lust, and reaching for a much-needed reflective cigarette. Working by wildly enthusiastic word-of-mouth, The Bends support by five top 20 singles, hasn't been out of the British charts since it was released. Two years ago Radiohead played in cruel and unexciting lunch-time sunlight at Reading. This year, they headline T-In-The-Park in Glasgow. It's unlikely they'll ever drop down the bill again, already having a back catalogue that can reduce a grown man to tears of joy and wonder in five minutes flat.

"It's soooo lovely, because we love Scotland", Colin says, brimming with enthusiasm. "We love Scottish people. We want to make it really thrilling - huge fireworks that scare the livestock or something."

Like Bjork's half-out blow out at Reading last year?

"Yes, but funny at the same time. Maybe we should finish on 'Lucky', and then have the stage blackout, and then as everyone claps and cheers and runs to the toilet, the fireworks could go up, all glorious, and explode into the word 'Colin'. Written like I do my signature - you know - with the 'L' making a little nose and the whole thing looking like a lovely, smiley face. Playing in the UK is great - you do miss out on things abroad. Like this Mad Cow palaver - we're missing all of that. What's it like? What's happening back there?"

Panic. Denial. Fibs. Huge sense of smugness emanating from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

"They're taking it really seriously in America," Colin reports. "Apparently, there's 34 British cows still loose over here that they can't find, and all the media is obsessed with tracking them down. They've got appeals on the TV and everything. Thom's going to write a song about it. It's so poignant. There's a little fiend somewhere in Minnesota with 34 cows wearing bowler hats and union-jack t-shirts all huddled in the corner and trying to hide behind a hedge. It's so funny that cows are at the top of the news, isn't it? Cow Crisis!! That's funny."

So what's the new album sounding like?

"Oh, it's brilliant," Colin enthuses. "I do like Radiohead. It's all written now."

Hi-NRG pop songs with choruses about sunny days and ice cream on the beaches?

"No, same old thing" he sighs, mock-despairingly. "Gloomy old rock. We've tried other things but it's not us, really. We do like to gloom."

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