MTV Australia, 04.02.98

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


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

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

MTV: I hear you love New Zealand?

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

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

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

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

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

MTV: So has it taken it's toll?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MTV: You've got two Grammy nominations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MTV: How does the songwriting process work with Radiohead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MTV: Can we expect a live album?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Now Magazine, 14-20.08.97

RADICAL OK COMPUTER DISC BOOTS UP UK'S MAGNIFICENT FIVE

Radical OK Computer disc boots up UK's magnificent five.
By Kim Hughes


With the fleet-footedness of a purse-snatcher, a scalper darts across the street toward two people approaching the Opera House, tickets in hand.

He eclipses the best efforts of his competition by 10 seconds easy and stuns his prey with his daring negotiation of passing traffic.

It's June, and England's Radiohead, passports already dog-eared from yet another hysterical promo trip to Japan, are playing their first North American show in support of their third disc, OK Computer.

This little gig - a combination industry showcase and humble introduction to their newest work - is the most coveted of the year.

The few hundred publicly available tickets have sold out in an astonishing 48 seconds, not just because the affable Oxford quintet has never played such a small house in town, nor because their live shows juxtapose studio-like precision with white-knuckled temerity and include an impressive selection of shakers and claves.

No, the madness stems from OK Computer, a highly complex work, at once beautiful and tortured, sinister and weirdly hopeful, the bounty of endless rehearsals, gigs and post-mortems.

Recorded at Radiohead's Oxford studios and a Bath manor owned by actor Jane Seymour, the disc is a watershed, a Big Rock Record but with better lyrics than most, and fans aren't the only ones blindsided by its arrival.

Smitten critics have struggled to pinpoint the magic rushing through the music -- its themes of disenfranchisement and technological impotence shot through a grandiose landscape of guitars, piano, drums and assorted whazzits, its fearless embrace of darkness and light boiled down to a cold, detached spoken-word centrepiece.


Random work

"It's funny when people say to us that it sounds like a complete work, when the way we actually did it was very fragmented," singer Thom Yorke offers. "It was never all one album with one sound. It was really, really random.

"Most of the songs on this record are one performance, with virtually nothing changed but with months of analysis. Because of the instruments we used and because it was the same five people doing it, it has a cohesive sound."

Ironically, in a business that rewards backbiting with slavish press coverage, fellow musicians have been unanimous in their praise of OK Computer. Veruca Salt's Louise Post can't shut up about it. Neither can Courtney Love or REM, the latter ad hoc keepers of the Radiohead flame. Even Echo & the Bunnymen blowhard Ian McCulloch - a man so conceited that only the occaasional mirror receives his praise - allows that the band might be as goodd as his.

Actually, they're better. Yorke, especially, is a rare talent, capable of heart-stopping highs and lows. When he sings, he doesn't just convey emotions, he embodies them, absorbing and distilling sadness, fear, anguish and passion through his skin.

Live, he's electrifying and can literally silence jam-packed rooms. The aftershocks linger long after the guitar-guided Radiohead machine fires up.

And so tonight, in an unprecedented switcheroo on the hallowed concert enterprise, Mr. Scalper isn't selling tickets to Radiohead's concert. He's begging to buy and he can't find any takers. He'll doubtless be on hand for their show at Arrow Hall Tuesday, since 75 per cent of the available 6,000 tickets sold out in a single morning, the rest the next day.

The down-to-earth quintet - singer/guitarist Yorke, versatile guitarist/ keyboardist Jonny Greenwood, elder brother, bon vivant bassist Colin Greenwood, peripatetic guitarist/singer Ed O'Brien and dramatically shorn drummer Phil Selway, songwriters all - may find the hoopla discombobulating, but they're too gracious to proclaim their own preeminence in rock. Fortunately, the queue of those willing to do it for them stretches round the block.

"We're hypercritical within the band, but when you put it out to people, they're more forgiving," Yorke confesses, as he, O'Brien and Colin Greenwood bravely face a conveyor belt of journalists the day after the Opera House gig.

"It's a good job we do go out in public. Otherwise, we'd have given up years ago. Going out and playing shows and hearing what people think of the record means we don't fall into a black hole of our own self-criticism."

"Every song seemed to come from a different direction", Yorke continues, elaborating on the new album. ""Subterranean Homesick Alien" was the product of our buying an electric piano. "Exit Music" is a song that wrote itself."

"The day we did it, we received delivery of a mellotron we had bought. You can buy these remodelled, remade mellotrons that are exactly the same as the originals."

"So we got this thing and the first thing we did with it was all the voices on "Exit Music", and after that the song came together in two days. That was the first thing that really got me, where I said 'Wow.'"

"But lots of songs were really hard, like "Paranoid Android" - just getting all the parts to fit together. We didn't know how we were going to get there, we just knew we would."

"It's true", confirms Greenwood softly."We kept playing with these new toys. We do this as much for our amusement as for the people listening to the record."

"It's also valid to go off in different directions and not really know where you're going", Yorke says. "The only thing I get worried about is, once you start doing that you can do it endlessly. It's self-perpetuating and it can get quite dull."

"Some of the songs we discarded were ones that worked with just guitar, bass and drums. But because we didn't have that head on, we just left them for now. And that's what OK Computer was all about -- just wandering off down paths and getting lost."

In that light, the fact that the group self-produced the new record - effectively learning how to scream "Stop!" on their own rather than tweaking and noodling on into infinity - is even more admirable. But then, thee writing was on the wall in 1995 with their brilliant second disc, The Bends, which also rattled the craniums of critics and musicians worldwide.

Typically, the group won't cop to any sort of vision. OK, maybe just a little.

"For me", says O'Brien,"the biggest high I got from reactions to The Bends was, I've got friends who do not listen to bands with guitars. They're just into dance music. And universally, they would say they'd come back from a rave or whatever and would stick on The Bends to chill out and--"

"How", snaps Yorke incredulously, "can you chill out to The Bends?"

"I know", O'Brien continues, "but my friends said that even though they weren't into that kind of music it was the only guitar album of 95/96 that they really loved. That was very, very cool."

"Yes", counters Yorke, "but there's also the element of people hearing that a record is cool and feeling as though they'd better say they like it. I'm sorry, I'm quite cynical. There are records every year that are like that."

"The classic example of that", Greenwood gamely interjects, "was Massive Attack's Blue Lines, which was mentioned by every journalist in the UK one year and went on to sell 40,000 copies."


Honey numbers

Nice try, but The Bends sold more than three times that in Canada alone. The barely three-month-old OK Computer has already surpassed platinum here and elsewhere. And let's not forget the numbers racked up by their 93 debut, Pablo Honey.
Not that the group is idly hanging around waiting to collect its lovely awards. The work continues, including collaborations between various members of Radiohead and Michael Stipe for the soundtrack to the forthcoming Velvet Goldmine film, and with DJ Shadow for the forthcoming U.N.K.L.E. Mo' Wax label showcase.

If video remains a sore spot with the group - "The videos we made for The Bends", steams O'Brien, "cost twice what the album cost. I can't justify that" - they nevertheless uphold the Radiohead tradition of excellence.

"If we have to do it", gripes Yorke, "we might as well make sure they're bloody good". The plan is eventually to shoot clips for each song on the new disc".

"I think the difference between making The Bends and making OK Computer", surmises Yorke, "was that we weren't answerable to any particular group. When we first, first started, before we got signed, I felt we could do anything and come from any angle and it wasn't relevant. It just didn't matter because no one was watching."

"And that was the one thing about OK Computer that really excited me. It just didn't matter. I know it sounds wanky, but it's like the Beatles - with their good records, you can tell that they just didn't care. That's how to write songs."

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