TIME EUROPE
October 23, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 17
Radioactive
With its punkish attitude, poetic grandeur and spectacularly inventive, chart-topping CD, Radiohead may just be the best band in the world
By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY Glasgow
The greatest show on earth has come to Glasgow. As the sun sets in the Scottish sky, some 8,000 spectators gather under a huge blue tent tipped with flashing red lights. The lights go down, a roar goes up. The British rock quintet Radiohead has taken the stage. Unhappy with traditional venues and their corporate-logo-covered interiors, the band is touring Europe with a portable circus-like tent. Singer Thom Yorke introduces each number with curt, dry wit; the music is forceful and precise, combining punkish attitude, tasteful art-rock grandeur and judicious electronic sampling.
Jonny Greenwood taunts his guitar into some snarling arpeggios and, switching instruments, adds warm, supportive keyboard colors to other songs. This is the sound of a band that, with the possible exceptions of American groups the Roots and Rage Against the Machine, is the best young band in the world.
Neil Young was right: rock 'n' roll can never die. But for much of the last decade, it seemed to be on life support. The wildly talented alternative rock band Nirvana, so self-aware and yet so self-destructive, penned rock's suicide note in the early '90s. Fluff bands like Matchbox Twenty and brazenly derivative retro-rockers like Oasis supplied the sleeping pills while gangsta rap acts like Jay-Z, gloating over their genre's dominance in the marketplace, delivered the eulogy. And yet rock still hasn't died: in the last two years it has been rejuvenated creatively and commercially by hip-hop-inspired rock acts such as California's Deftones. This month rock received another jolt of new life in the form of Radiohead's spectacularly inventive album Kid A, which in its first week of release topped charts in the U.S. and the U.K. As the funeral procession winds through the streets, rock rages on. It sounds pretty good for a dead man.
And in Europe, it emanates most vibrantly from the minds and souls of five literate English iconoclasts. Radiohead has altered its sound on every album since its debut, never allowing itself to sound stale, never allowing its music to wither. "Change is a basic philosophy in life," says guitarist Ed O'Brien. "Life is about continual learning. If you stop then that's it. Change is your responsibility to yourself." Jonny Greenwood puts it a little more succinctly: "We just get bored sometimes."
At first, the group followed trends, echoing the roar of Seattle on its tentative first album Pablo Honey (1993), and mastering the genre on the more assertive The Bends (1995). On its critically acclaimed third album, OK Computer (1997), Radiohead began to write its own rules, creating rock mini-suites like Paranoid Android, and writing lyrics that captured the numbing ambivalence that many people feel about living in a microprocessed age. The album wasn't just a hit with critics; it was a colossal popular success, thrusting Radiohead out of the alt-rock fringes and into the klieg lights of the mainstream. In Britain alone, OK Computer sold 1 million copies. (It sold 4.5 million worldwide.) Those figures, and the band's promise to depart radically from the blockbuster formula of OK Computer, made Kid A the most eagerly awaited British rock album in years.
The end product won't please all Radiohead loyalists. If the last album was about technology using up humans, the new one is about humans using technology. Kid A relies heavily on samples and computers. On several tracks, Jonny Greenwood plays a contraption called the ondes martenot, a primitive electronic instrument that sounds like a singing specter. Kid A's sound is decidedly experimental, but the songs all have a Eureka! quality about them: they seem unthinkable, but once thought, they seem only natural.
Yorke, the group's central songwriter, is obsessed with the disillusioned and the disoriented: a plastic surgeon in a fool's war with gravity, a crash victim who finds his near-death experience makes him feel alive, an earthbound stargazer who dreams of abduction by alien spacecraft. His voice is often sampled, distorted by synthesizers, his lyrics broken into elegiac fragments, shards of thoughts, mantras of melancholia. "I woke up sucking on a lemon," Yorke sings on Everything in Its Right Place, and the phrase is repeated again and again in a plaintive sample. Throughout Kid A Yorke returns to the theme of restlessness, rootlessness and confusion. On the ethereal jazz breakdown, In Limbo, he croons: "I'm lost at sea ... I've lost my way." But as Kid A nears its conclusion, Yorke's disembodied state gives way to all-too-solid flesh. "This is really happening," he sings on the hypnotically frantic Idioteque, his voice quivering. Denied feelings are still felt; emotions have consequence. Then, on Motion Picture Soundtrack, Yorke sings the CD's haunting last line in a falsetto ringing with resignation: "I will see you in the next life."
Many of the lyrics on Kid A were the result of improvisation, Yorke going with his feelings, saying whatever came to his mind and that flowed with the music and the beat. For a few songs, he says, he cut his lyrics up and selected lines out of a top hat. He employed this serendipitous strategy partly because he was suffering from writer's block and partly because he was inspired by the example of a musical colleague. "When Michael Stipe [Yorke's friend and the lead singer of the American band R.E.M.] was doing his last record he was saying how he was walking into the studio with nothing prepared and doing it there and then," says Yorke. "And I just thought that was really brave and crazy. But I wanted to sort of give it a go."
It's sometime after 1 a.m. and, in a closed-off basement bar in the Malmaison Hotel in Glasgow, Radiohead is unwinding. Ed O'Brien, 32, has turned in early, but drummer Phil Selway, 33, is at the bar, talking proudly about his new baby boy Leo (and the fact that his wife has another child on the way). Bassist Colin Greenwood, 31, sits in a nearby booth, discussing British novelists Martin Amis and Niall Griffiths (Greenwood holds a degree in English from Cambridge and O'Brien, Yorke and Selway are also college graduates); a few steps away, his younger brother Jonny Greenwood, 28, orders another drink from the bar, and asks why his older brother is still up, given the fact that Colin has been suffering from the flu. But it's Yorke, 32, who seems the most animated. For its own amusement, the band has been shooting video footage of its live shows and Yorke has just finished screening some of what was shot. "The video footage looks brilliant! f______ brilliant!" he tells Colin.
It took some time for the members of Radiohead to adjust to their new sound. O'Brien says the group felt they had exhausted the traditional rock guitar sound and needed to find something new. They had some past examples of audio adventurism in mind: R.E.M., the experimental German group Can (Radiohead covered Can's song The Thief in its Glasgow concert), Miles Davis and his landmark jazz-rock fusion album Bitches Brew (a favorite of Jonny's), electronica acts such as Autechre and Aphex Twin. They were looking to emulate the daring of those acts, but also to create something fresh that didn't sound like anything that had come before — a tough trick to pull off.
At times, band members wondered if the group hadn't run its course. O'Brien documented the band's travails in recording Kid A, in an online diary at the band's website www.radiohead.com. On Aug. 6, 1999 he wrote: "It's taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom, and it's what we always wanted, but it would be so easy to f___ it all up." Later he got into the details: "The running order for an album is so important ... I don't think you have any idea how vital it is until you actually f___ it up which we did big time on the first record." And in a recent entry he had finally come to terms with his work: "I f___ing love this record now ... and that's not me attempting to whip others into a kind of mass marketing 'Aren't we great?' frenzy."
After recording stints in Paris and Copenhagen, the band finished up Kid A in a newly built studio not far from its hometown of Oxford. All the members of Radiohead grew up around Oxford, where they attended Abingdon School, a private all-boys school a few miles down the River Thames from the city. It was there they discovered a shared love of music and began performing together. "When you're a teenager, being in the suburbs is really important because you've got f___-all else to do," says O'Brien. "All we had growing up was playing music." Nigel Hunter, Yorke's art teacher at Abingdon, says the aspiring rocker was strong-willed even then. "Thom was a highly intelligent bloke," says Hunter. "He was very independent. He wasn't someone who was swayed by a crowd."
His band shares those qualities. Radiohead's songs don't fit comfortable formats and the band hasn't yet made a proper music video for the release — only an arty series of 10-to-40 second spots that feature animated bears, stick figures falling into volcanos and the like. Yorke calls the blips "anti-videos." Also, in another unconventional move, the band is preparing to release another CD as early as the first months of next year. "We've finished all the tracks," says Selway. "It's just a matter of determining the running order."
Some of the songs that the band is now playing in concert, like the shadowy, piano-haunted Egyptian Song and the driving Knives Out, will probably be on the follow-up to Kid A. "We don't have a grand scheme," says O'Brien. "A lot of people think we're incredibly cerebral and we've thought this all out. A lot of the time I feel like we're just bouncing off what happened last." Fan anticipation for Kid A was so fierce that every track was leaked to Napster, the online music-sharing service, weeks before the album's release. The band wasn't angry about the electronic bootlegging; Yorke, for one, was overjoyed. "The cool thing about Napster is it encourages bootlegging, it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do," he says. "I think anybody sticking two fingers up at ... the whole f___ing thing is wonderful as far as I'm concerned."
It would be easy to anoint Radiohead as yet another in a long line of saviors of rock. But rock doesn't need saving because, as Neil Young said, it can never die. What Radiohead has done is provide new testament to the music's adaptability: rock is no dinosaur lumbering in the shadow of passing meteors; it's a warm-blooded thing, still changing, still evolving. Perhaps Yorke's last line on Kid A isn't some mournful pledge but a gift: if Radiohead is this good in this life, we can't wait to hear it in its next one.
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