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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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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Hot Press, 1996

Transistor Act

Whinging, yak-herding and masturbating over the Sunday dinner are just three of the tenuously-related subjects that come up for discussion as Stuart Clark gets completely wireless with Radiohead plankspanker from hell Colin Greenwood.


Brian Wilson once tried to decapitate brother Dennis with a cymbal, Liam and Noel Gallagher exchange regular kung-fu kicks on stage and Colin and Jon Greenwood have been known to, er, occasionally shout at each other. Quite loudly.

Yuh, demon plankspankers from hell they may be with guitars in their hands but in the sibling rivalry department, the fraternal Radiohead pair are a dead loss.

"What, you never heard about the time I attached electrodes to Jon's testicles backstage at Glastonbury?" blatantly lies Colin who at a Zimmer frame-necessitating 27 is the elder of the two. "I think there are a couple of people at EMI who wouldn't mind us going on a stress mis-management course because inter-band violence seems to be all the rage at the moment. It's a standard question we get asked and I always feel a bit guilty saying, 'well, no actually, we haven't hospitalised each other recently.' The trouble I think is that beyond the normal brotherly thing, I respect him as a person and a musician. I mean, Jonny's a great fucking guitarist which makes up for a lot of his unsavoury personal habits."

Forget comedy, you only have to glance through your average Pearl Jam/ Smashing Pumpkins/Hole interview to realise that incessant whingeing is the new rock 'n' roll. Radiohead, on the other hand, belong to that dreadfully un-hip bygone age where being in a successful band wasn't regarded as a life sentence in Sing Sing prison with no hope of parole.

"Again, there have been interviews - particularly in America - where I've felt guilty because we're not close to the point of self-destruction," reflects the bassist. "If someone genuinely feels that way, fair enough, they should say it but there are groups who use being fucked-up as a sales gimmick and I think that's unforgivably calculating and potentially damaging to the people who take their word as gospel. I never gave much thought to this 'responsibility to your fans' thing until we started getting letters in response to 'Creep'. Some of them were really, really heavy and I know Thom, especially, found it hard to deal with. I suppose that's because he wrote the words."

Indeed, Radiohead's small-but-perfectly-formed frontman recently confessed that, "I don't want to set myself up like that again. I've had letters from Death Row, guys who have killed people, and they're responding to the lyrics on 'Creep'. That scared the fucking hell out of me."

If Yorke was phased by his innermost personal thoughts becoming public property, it doesn't show on Radiohead's latest opus The Bends - an album so full of self-loathing that you almost expect it to slag itself off in reviews.

"Most of the genuinely creative people I've come across thrive on conflict," Greenwood continues. "You mentioned Pearl Jam a moment ago - well, I don't think Eddie Vedder would be able to write the songs that he does if the tension was missing from his life. Obviously I can't speak for Thom but generally within Radiohead there's always been this lack of confidence and a desire to be seen as underdogs. As childish as it might be, we're never happier than when we're triumphing over adversity."

Between you, me and Hot Press' half-dozen readers, how does Thom score on the miserablegitometer?

"If you caught him while he was writing his lyrics, probably a '7' or an '8' but otherwise he's a reasonably upbeat sort of person. It's not easy - you put stuff in a song because it's too difficult to talk about straight out and then you're expected to discuss it in minute detail with total strangers. Like everyone else, Thom has things that he needs to get out of his system but that doesn't necessarily mean he wants to psychoanalyse them in public."

I risk ex-communication from the Lightning Seeds fan club for uttering such heresy but there are moments on The Bends when the sheer gut-wrenching intensity of Yorke's lyrics shows most of today's pop music up for the hollow sham that it is. I use the word 'pop' advisedly because no matter how dark the subject, Radiohead never lose sight of the fact that you need a decent hook to hang it on in.

While their recent press has been almost embarrassingly fawning, there was a time when Greenwood and Co. were subjected to the sort of gratuitous abuse that makes you want to chuck in rock 'n' roll and take up yak-herding in Tibet. Might this have had something to do with Radiohead being university graduates rather than cor-blimey-stone-the-crows-and-make-no-mistake-missus cockney wideboys?

"I don't think it was particularly that," proffers Colin. "Most guitar music in the UK is the product of bands who have the money to be able to afford the equipment and that points towards the middle-classes. The first guitar I had when I was 15 I bought myself but my mum helped Jonny out with his and there was always a couple of quid there if we needed new strings or an amp repaired. It would've been far more street cred if we'd 'done a Sex Pistols' and nicked it but we didn't need to.

"The main reason, I think, that certain journalists reacted to us in a hostile way is that we didn't fit in with what they were trying to push at the time. We weren't dancey, we weren't political and we didn't have particularly great cheekbones. We could've developed a persecution complex about it but, to be honest, all it did was make us more determined to prove them wrong!"

Too bloody damn reasonable by half, that's Radiohead's problem. Having by some mad aberration of the UK educational system fluked his way into Cambridge, Colin set about getting himself elected College Ents Officer so that he could book the band he was in at the time for exorbitant fees.

"Actually, we did a pretty nifty cover of Elvis Costello's 'Pump It Up'," laughs Greenwood, who's obviously overcome the shame of being associated with a combo called On A Friday. "At one gig we did we had couples shagging on the lawn which I like to think was down to the seductive qualities of our music but I'd say had more to do with the vast quantities of beer that'd been consumed."

What did his mum make of Colin turning his back on the professions to become one of those acid-smoking, cannabis-injecting rock 'n' rollers?

"She wasn't too concerned about me because I'd already got my degree but she thought our manager was the son of Satan for taking Jonny away from the first year of his music studies course at Oxford. She still tells us off for swearing too much in interviews but otherwise she's well into the band and the music. Her favourite track on Pablo Honey was 'Thinking About You' which I never had the heart to tell her was about masturbation. Wanking's one of those subjects you can't really raise over Sunday dinner."

Not unless there's cream custard on the menu. Being a vindictive little sod, I have to admit that I derived great pleasure from the Mondays, Suede and The Wonder Stuff falling flat on their over-hyped faces in America while the runt of the Britpop litter, Radiohead, sailed effortlessly into the Billboard top 20.

"No one was more suprised when that happened than we were," Colin reflects. "We genuinely thought Pablo Honey was a good album but you only have to look at The Smiths or The Jam to realise that quality isn't always what wins through in the States.

"In fact, what it all boils down to is having the one song - like 'Creep'- which is distinctive enough to capture people's imaginations and gets pumped out on MTV 24 hours a day. Another half-decent track's useful if you want to get played on album radio but beyond that, it doesn't matter if the rest of the record's crap."

Having sampled the financial rewards that being big in America can bring, it's to Radiohead's considerable credit that The Bends doesn't contain a single moment that could be described as 'Son of Creep'.

"Somebody said to me the other day, 'it must be great no longer having anything to prove', and I told them, 'you must be joking!'

"There are a lot of people who've already written us off as a one-song band and getting back to being the underdog, we need to prove them wrong.

"I've got to hand it to EMI," he continues. "We feared they might be in and out the studio every five minutes asking where the next 'Creep' was but they pretty much left us to our own devices. We got quite a bit of stick when we originally signed to them because they were a major and therefore perceived as the enemy of all things alternative. They offered to set our own label up for us so we'd appear 'indie' but we felt that was a complete nonsense. Actually, I've got a mate in a band who're on Creation and he was saying to me, 'I wish we had the fucking distribution you do'. That's what's important - having your record in the shops so that people can buy it."

As a keen amateur rock 'n' roll psychologist, I've noticed that British bands who fail to crack the States always go into a state of denial - blaming everyone from Bill Clinton to Colonel Sanders for their inability to woo the baseball-capped masses when in fact it's their own arrogance that's he cause of them getting the bum's rush from Uncle Sam.

"The attitude that pisses Americans off is groups coming over and expecting the red carpet treatment because they were on the cover of The Melody Maker last week. That's certainly what happened to Suede in '93 although, in fairness, I don't think the record company helped by hyping them up to such an extent that whatever they did was going to be an anti-climax.

"There's also a different work ethic in the States. Bands are quite prepared to spend six months non-stop on the road which is not something we're used to in the UK where the circuit is a maximum of 20 or 30 gigs. You really have to gear yourself up psychologically for that sort of long haul because it's not only physically but mentally draining. Then again, we've had some brilliant experiences touring the States and going south of the border into Mexico rates as perhaps the best week of my life. It helps that I'm not married or seriously girlfriended whereas Phil, our drummer, has a wife and goes through severe withdrawal systems when he's not with her."

Excuse me while I surreptitiously dab a tear from my eye. What, when they're not being great big soppy girl's blouses, do Radiohead do for kicks?

"What, apart from our crocheting and flower-arranging?" Greenwood deadpans. "The same stuff as you probably."

And there I was thinking I was the only one who enjoyed the sheer animal thrill of philately!

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NME, 12.09.1995

Boom Shake The Gloom!
by Andy Richardson


Thom Yorke stands alone backstage at Nottingham Rock City. He stares at the walls, stares at the floor and sighs. When the press officer approaches, Yorke looks up, his face a picture of discontent, then measures up the person next to his press officer - a journalist. An invader.

The press officer asks how he is and he lies "Fine," eyes wide, shoulders tight, hands hanging limp at his sides. For two minutes he tells her about his troubles, then wanders back to the dressing room and his girlfriend, still shuffling restlessly. A mass of contradictions, he wants to be here and he wants to be far away. He wants to be with his girlfriend and yet...he doesn't.

They talk for a few moments, then Yorke's girlfriend ambles off into the crowd. Yorke walks into catering, looks blankly at the food then returns to his dressing room. He sits briefly then drifts away yet again, unable to sit still for more than a minute...

Three hours later Yorke is again backstage, this time smiling. Nottingham enjoyed tonight's show. He talks to his girlfriend animatedly and for a fleeting moment, affectionately. Soon, she leaves and for a minute, Yorke is sullen and mumbling miserably, before shrugging off the disappointment and talking to two female fans who have procured backstage passes. One is from Japan and urges him to drink more vodka, though Yorke declines. The other is coy and gives him an inflatable birthday cake for Johnny. "Where did you get this?" he asks incredulously. "Oh, I found it in my house," she bluffs. The singer smiles his gracious rock star smile, places the cake on the floor and says he'll leave it outside Johnny's door.

Then he's off wandering again; amiable, chatting, snatching food where he can. All the time he's smiling, content that he performed well, pleased that tonight's gig was so good.

Clearly, this is not the Thom Yorke of old. The Yorke who was prone to panic attacks, spitting, swearing and desperately bleak moods. The people around him can't believe how comfortable and confident he is in this dressing room full of people. He's changing they reckon. And they're right. No longer crippled by an enormous, irrational fear of failure, there are times tonight when he positively revels in the acclaim and attention, when he enjoys being in Radiohead. When he feels momentarily satisfied. He can't quite believe how he got here, how easy it all now seems. Yep, Thom Yorke is lucky, and tonight he knows it. He really does.

The most important British band of 1995? it could well be Radiohead. It is Radiohead, after all, who have defined fashion rather than followed it, who have kept a healthy distance from the hedonistic excesses of Britpop and refused to indulge in cocaine binges, chic heroine habits and the brash arrogance of their contemporaries.

Radiohead are an exception. In 1995, most bands sought solace in an unreal world, in a Prozac and intoxicant-addled world of rose-tinted Englishness. Lyrics were filled with fantastic falsehoods and few dared to mirror the ideas and failings of a disaffected generation...except Radiohead.

And while Yorke talked at every turn about his inner turmoil he was too smart, unlike Courtney Love, to use his pain as a bargaining chip. Rather, he described his feelings with honesty, eloquence and dignity. He found ways to enjoy his somewhat precarious lifestyle without becoming an idiot. And, like the rest of Radiohead, he made a friend of reality despite living in an unreal world.

So backstage at Nottingham Rock City is a typical scene. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood ignores a collection of presents and 24th birthday cards and leaves for the sanctity of his modest hotel room. Drummer Phil Selway collects a small kit bag and heads home to his wife in Oxford: "I clock on and clock off." he says as he breezes past.

Guitarist Ed O'Brien leaves with his girlfriend, while Colin Greenwood sinks into a three-seater sofa with a large glass of Stolichnaya and cranberry juice. But I am sure he is the only one left, surrounded by a half-finished bottle of vodka and a row of paper cups soiled with fag butts.

Radiohead on tour is like a well-behaved public school trip. They are reliable and calm. They arrive on time and treat their crew and tour manager with respect. their only excesses are a drop of vodka and the occasional late night.

"I'm sure we'd probably all be much happier and better party monsters if we indulged in Class A drugs," Greenwood says later, wryly, "but we'd probably self-destruct six months down the line, which is what a lot of bands do. I'm not defending or condoning bands' use of drugs, it is a bizarre, precarious, insecure, paranoid, falsely comfortable, perspective-distorting lifestyle.

"Personally, we've never been a band to focus any energies in groupies or drugs or anything like that. I mean, I don't know any bands that do, to be honest - maybe I don't see it. We're quite a solitary band, but everyone is so different, you talk to each member of the band and you get a different answer."

The turnaround for Radiohead happened because of The Bends. Twelve months ago they were stuck at RUK studios, in Chalbert Street, northwest London, fuming with each other and causing endless tantrums and panic attacks. Both Greenwoods, O'Brien, and Selway wanted a break. Yorke insisted they carry on. in November, the issue was resolved when the band went to Mexico.

"It all just came out," Thom Yorke remembers, "all the stuff that we'd always been fighting and I think, when we started our little band, when we were kids at school, it was never really about being friends or anything. We were playing our instruments in our bedrooms and wanted to play them with someone else and it was just symbiotic. We never really thought about it.

"Years and years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we'd met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don't want to talk about and I think if we hadn't ever done that... I think that completely changed what we did and we all went back and did the album and it all made sense."

"It was like that typical Radiohead thing, things had been brewing," Ed continues. "We're not really confrontational with another. Things had been brewing and they basically came to a head. We were all completely knackered on this Mexican tour bus, 12 of us, with six bunks and they were about 5ft 6inches long, so you're getting no sleep. It was just ridiculous. It was something we'd been spending eight or nine years working towards and it was like, we'd never been totally honest with each other in terms of... We're not into bonding, we're friends and everything, but because of maybe our upbringing or the school that we went to we don't tell each other our problems. We deal with them ourselves. It's the only way you can deal with them."

"It's really shit to talk about that in interviews," adds Yorke, "because for most bands, it seems, there is this sort of thing about it's all ready and presented and it's like Here you go' and there's an angle and there's so on and so on and it's wonderfully easy to write about... And here I am just talking about how in Mexico we all just started swearing and crying and throwing things around."

The fighting in Mexico was productive, though. Somehow, it gave Radiohead fresh resolve and, most importantly, Yorke's belief in the band grew: "It was coming out rather than not coming out, do you know what I mean? I think it's something you fall back on. I'm really into this theory now that anything worthwhile is really difficult and if it's becoming easy it's time to fuck it up."

The only thing Radiohead want to fuck up now are the preconceptions of the press and public. Yorke is no longer the tortured, angst-ridden subject who prompted one newspaper to describe him as the rock star most likely to commit suicide. Sure, he can still be moody, surly, difficult and solitary, but at least he now manages to balance many potentially destructive characteristics.

"I get people coming up on the streets in Oxford," he says "saying, Can I have your autograph?' Sometimes I'll say Yes' and sometimes I'll be really, really rude because they'll catch me when I'm not being Thom Yorke from Radiohead, like in a restaurant or something or something and it'll be, No, piss off'. But then to have people come back and say, We heard you're a bit difficult, a bit weird, you're not very easy to talk to'. It's the circumstance that people are talking to you in, when people come up and they want a little bit of you, their two cents' worth.

And that to be perfectly honest is not why I got into this, and that's just me being honest. You feel like saying to them Look, this is not why I got into this, and I don't really give a flying fuck whether you have my autograph or not and I'd rather you didn't bother me because if I was anyone else in the street you wouldn't."

Plainly, Yorke despises many aspects of fame, biting the hand that feeds him when it suits him. He pisses off business people to preserve his sanity and dismisses the press as self-serving and pointless because that protects him and his few close friends.

"I stopped reading the press when they printed I was going to top myself. And my girlfriend rings me up, really really upset, saying, What's all this, what have you been saying?' You know, that's when I stopped reading it. That was enough for me... But then I'm in this business, but I also want to be in this business on my own terms, you know."

Undoubtedly, the death of Kurt Cobain - who took a not dissimilar stance - and the consequent demise of grunge has heightened Yorke's position. He is now one of the most successful of a dwindling breed of songwriters who deal only in reality. In fact, only Richey Edwards was the only mainstream British lyricist in a similar position.

That was all sort of happening as The Bends came out," says Yorke. I had people warning me a few months before Richey disappeared, before he went away the first time, warning me that he was in a bad way and his behaviour was..." his speech trails off.

Taking stock, he continues. "I thought that basically it was the British press that did it to Richey. Full stop. Although I've got lots of friends who are journalists, the few who I think were basically responsible for him having a breakdown I will always hold responsible and I will always see what we do in that light."

He pauses again, leans forward, holds his hands in front of his chest and slowly, deliberately concludes: "And I think he is still alive."

Yorke is justly proud of The Bends in all its brave, mournful, agonisingly painful glory. While Oasis sang of champagne supernovas and Supergrass spoke of feelin' alright, The Bends described tortuous isolation and despair. It was bleak and vulnerable. The cover featured a photograph taken in hospital and the inside sleeve included line drawings of ostriches with their heads buried in sand. You didn't need to be a psychoanalyst to interpret the symbolism.

Now, though, Radiohead are emerging with uncharacteristic optimism. Yorke, inching towards acceptance of his rock star status, seems eager to start recording again.

"I don't know how good the new songs are," he says, modestly. "The jury's out."

He and the rest of Radiohead have already decided, however, not to make another album like The Bends. They don't want to push themselves through so much torment again, and besides, they've reached a level where they don't have to. Instead, they will try to record at a much more leisurely, relaxed pace: Yorke has told their label, Parlophone, that they want a year to make their next album. Apparently, the paymasters have agreed.

"You know, the big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record, like lyrically," he explains, "but I really don't want to, at all. And I am deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. But I'm not able to put them into music yet. I don't want to force it because then all I'm doing is just addressing all the issues where people are saying that we're mope rock. As far as I'm concerned The Bends is like that because that was really, really where we were at when we did it. And you could say the same about REM's Automatic For The People. It's a really miserable record, you know."

Instead, Radiohead will record songs like Lucky, the stand-out track on War Child's Help compilation album. That was Johnny Greenwood's idea, to donate a song Radiohead were playing every night on tour which the fans loved even though they didn't know what it was. When Greenwood suggested it however, Yorke wasn't so sure.

"There wasn't that sense of screaming and fighting and being on the phone to people for ages and spitting and swearing anymore, I don't think. There was a sense of release to me, that was the thing, that was the thing I wanted. To me, Lucky was sort of like that. Lucky is a song of complete release. It just happened, writing and recording it, there was no time, no conscious effort."

Colin Greenwood adds: "I think we're learning not to think too much about stuff. Thought can be an inhibiting thing. I don't know if you've read Arthur Miller's autobiography Time Bends, but analysis can be crippling thing and self-consciousness can be a crippling thing, but it can also be a source of great creativity, and articulation of crises of thought can be a great thing in itself."

But Radiohead's change in attitude is not entirely down to the Mexican tête-à-tête. An equally important factor was their summer-long tour with REM. It acted as a stress-reliever, freeing Radiohead of the pressure of headlining each night. They went onstage, played for 30 minutes and actually - God forbid - enjoyed themselves.

The relationship between Radiohead and REM, too, was far more civilised than that between most headline/support bands - especially when the headliners just happen to be one of the biggest bands in the world. When Radiohead joined the tour Michael Stipe took Yorke to one side and told him he was a fan. They socialised after gigs, talked about shared favourite songs - like REM's Drive and Radiohead's High and Dry - and Stipe explained how he became a phenomenon and managed to retain his integrity.

Yorke recalls: "Everything that we've come to expect was turned completely on its head, like the idea that you get to a certain level and you lose it and that's it - you're lost -and for everything to be amicable and there be no bitchiness or pettiness about it. Onstage REM were playing songs they've written, mucking around with the idea of being who they are and having no illusions about it - or seemingly so. And you compare that with a lot of what we feel when we are at home and it was just so different. It's just such a headfuck."

REM smashed Radiohead's preconceptions. They emerged strong and triumphant from the tour.

"A lot of it was like, yeah, we're the support band and you could go onstage and make a complete prick of yourself and the more the better, which I enjoyed doing for several months.

"It was a real full stop and it really opened things up. It took the pressure off and I could just observe, which really helped me. I got really, really drunk on night and was talking to REM about fame, and Michael Stipe was saying he went through exactly the same thing during the Green tour, when suddenly they went from being a band to being a phenomenon for the first time, and he was a phenomenon' or whatever. And I'm not really at that stage at all yet, we're not playing Wembley yet. But I suppose it's quite funny, that idea of everything that you do, 24 hours a day, that when you go and have breakfast or go out into the street, that every single minute of every single day you're conscious of the fact that people might be watching you, is really, really unhealthy. The whole cult of personality surrounding bands, I think, is pointless. And I think the 80s really bore that out.

"Obviously people want to know about the people that make the music, but by the end of it it was just becoming so pompous. Like with the whole U2 thing at the end of 80s, and like Madonna and so on, it all became an extension of the whole Saatchi and Saatchi concept that you can sell anything to anybody if you put it across the right way."

So when people referred to you as the "the new U2", did that annoy you for those reasons?

"That whole idea of being Thom Yorke the personality... I don't want to die having been just that. The whole thing that most pop stars are desperately trying to attain immortality is through the cult of their personality... this phenomenon, this Sunday review section, glossy front page... It's like NO!, actually. No I don't want to be remembered for this, I want to be remembered for doing pieces of work that people liked, and other than that I don't really want to know.' I'm not into this for immortality's sake. Sixty years from now, I'm going to be dead, and that will that.

"I made the fatal error. You know I was saying that I don't read any of the press? Well I read this thing because it was in the dressing room and it was saying something about, these people don't look like the sort of people who have looked death in the face and have walked away again', and I thought, Yeah, but I'm not here to prove who I really am'."

Radiohead still manage to separate the personal and the professional, leading separate lives when the band is inactive, travelling separately to gigs during tours. Selway drives to and from his home in Oxford, the gregarious Colin travels with the crew on their tour bus and O'Brien, Yorke and Greenwood drive with their tour manager in a hired Renault space. Soundchecks are chaotic affairs kept in sync by a tenacious sound engineer, while before and after shows, the five Radiohead members are rarely in the same place at the same time.

"I think the more we are doing and the more successful we are being," says Colin Greenwood, "the harder it is to deal with on a personal level and to connect with personal wants and needs and personal life. You understand why people get caught up with quick fixes like drugs because it is quite a numbing experience. I was thinking about Blind Melon with No Rain, they had already toured that album at least twice before it was a success and they had to tour it again. And you can go mad. It's bizarre, it's like being in a band is a privileged, rarefied existence and you should never get complacent about it but at the same time there are pressures about it. It's interesting for me to be back here where I did my degree (Cambridge) and think about how far we've come and how far you can travel and how many places you can see, but you can still be unhappy about yourself as a person and the way you are, emotionally or intellectually."

Radiohead remain fiercely self-critical. Their level of self-analysis is acute, so that whenever anyone writes anything bad about them they've already thought or said it. But then, they revel in the paradoxes and contradictions they create.

"My father asked the other day how it was going," confides O'Brien, "and I said, Oh you know, it could be better from our point of view'. It's similar to when someone suffers from bulimia and looks in the mirror and thinks they're too fat when they're really thin. We're getting this amazing response from people and we're thinking it isn't good enough."

In January they will take a month off. Selway will spend time with his wife, Yorke will travel around Europe trying to avoid The Bends, O'Brien will go to India and Colin will move to London.

Yorke says : "The only other person I ve ever talked to about this is Michael Stipe and he just said, It takes me 6 months to come down from a tour at least, now, or more than that', so I can understand it actually now. All the emotions and all the tensions and the freak-outs are all stocked up and they all come seeping out at the end so you have to keep it together. It's the same with the live situation. Sometimes I think it's just amusing and it's just a joke and I just enjoy that rather than fighting it any longer."

The night after Nottingham Rock City, Radiohead play Cambridge Corn Exchange. It is another good concert. At 11.40pm, Yorke leaves his dressing room and sits at the bottom of the stairwell.

"The secret, that I'm slowly discovering, is that if you don't feel anything inside for what you're doing it doesn't necessarily mean that it's not working. It just means that you can't possibly mean it all of the time and if you do you're a sad fuck."

Is there more self-confidence? Do you finally think, Yeah we are really good'?

No. I hope not. But that's the same with anybody really, or should be. If you wake up every morning thinking fuck me I'm great', you're a boxer or something."

And are you learning, finally, to enjoy it?

"It barely pays the bills, really, but what's really scary is when you start hearing people saying things like, At least you don't have to work for a living', and it's fuck yeah'. You forget that... We are fucking lucky."

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