by Trevor Baker
“Keith Wozencroft thought that ‘Inside My Head’ was a hit,” says Sean. “It wasn’t.” Thom was starting to think the same thing. When they tried to record ‘Inside My Head’ and the other song, ‘Million Dollar Question’, it just wasn’t happening.
“I was really stuck and it wasn’t going very well,” says Paul. “They weren’t playing very well and nobody really wanted to do these songs, everybody was just going, ‘Uuuuughh.’” ‘Million Dollar Question’ was a long way removed from the kind of stuff they’d been doing as On A Friday. It didn’t have much of a tune. It simply rattled and clattered along without pausing for a chorus. At best it was the kind of thing that would make you think, Well, they might be good live. ‘Inside My Head’ was much better with an impassioned, almost gruesome vocal from Thom and some vicious guitar from Jonny, but it wasn’t exactly going to change the world.
To loosen everybody up a bit, Paul suggested that they play the Scott Walker cover that they’d done when they were rehearsing. At least he thought it was a cover. “Before we started the record, we went to pre-production and they just started playing this song and Thom mumbled, ‘That’s our Scott Walker song’,” says Paul. “But I thought he said, ‘That’s a Scott Walker song.’ There are a lot of Scott Walker records – I don’t have them all. Slade actually looked over at me and said, ‘Too bad their best song is a cover!’ So when I told them to play it. I said, ‘Play that Scott Walker song that you played the other day.’
The song, of course, was ‘Creep’.
“They only played it once,” Paul says. “One take and then everybody went to lunch. Then when they came back from lunch I said, ‘Let’s work on this.’ When they finished the take, there was a moment of silence and then everybody in the studio applauded. It was one of those weird moments where you’re like, ‘Wow, what just happened?’ So I worked on that for the rest of the day and I called Wozencroft and told him to come up from London because we had another song. But he was suspicious because we were only being paid to do two songs. I don’t blame him. It sounded like we were trying to get more money out of him. So he was a little suspicious.”
“When we went to Keith at EMI and told him that we’d got this song that was an actual hit, as opposed to the two songs that we’d been assigned to do, he thought we were just trying to make more money,” agrees Sean. “Because we were getting paid on a per-song basis that if we just added song number three that was our sole motivation. That wasn’t the case at all. It was just that we were frustrated with the two songs that had been given to us.”
But Keith drove up to Chipping Norton studios after work to listen to what they’d done so far. His radar was typically sharp and he agreed that it was better than the other two songs they’d done. “When [Keith] took it to the office and played it for people,” says Paul, “everybody was jumping up and down. The first thing we did was kind of an audition – we didn’t really have the job producing the record. So pulling ‘Creep’ out of them was the thing that made them say, ‘OK, we’ll hire these guys to do the rest of the record.’”
EMI agreed that they should go into Chipping Norton studios to make their debut album. It was a step-up from the Courtyard but, once again, nobody in the band was fazed. “Paul and Sean were both very chilled Boston Americans,” says Nigel Powell, “so they made it easy for them. Chipping Norton’s a nice place. It’s a very bright, happy studio to be in.”
“It was a pretty famous residential studio in the 1980s,” says Paul. “It was built in the late 1970s and they did Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ there and Cutting Crew’s ‘I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight’. It was a well-established, quality studio with 24 tracks and all that.”
It was, in other words, very much a major label environment. Later on, Radiohead would become slightly sick of such places. “It’s just very depressing,” said Jonny in 1997. “You turn up at most studios, you still have the body odour or the copies of Playboy of the previous band, and you just want to start from scratch.”
Back then, when they went into Chipping Norton, however, they were just delighted to be there. In some respects, with EMI looking over their shoulder, it was like being back at school, but they were still grateful to have been signed at all and they weren’t about to make a fuss. And they had the confidence of youth on their side.
“They were not intimidated by it at all,” says Paul. “Jonny’s just completely a musician and all of them were good players, so their instruments were under control and the technology they left to us.”
But, in a way, both sides were making it up as they went along. Paul and Sean came from a very indie background. They were used to making raw alt-rock records in a fast, no frills fashion and, perhaps luckily for them, that style had suddenly become the biggest thing in rock. Nevertheless, Sean says it was never explicitly suggested that Radiohead should be the “British Nirvana”.
“I never thought about it like that,” he says. “It wasn’t calculated. The main thing was that they seemed to be interested in that kind of sound. They were into Sonic Youth, the whole idea of the extremities of the noises you could get out of an electric guitar and an amplifier. We’d done Dinosaur Jr and Buffalo Tom, both of which used excruciating guitar volumes as part of their musical expression. The other thing about making that record was that, even though it was for EMI, the approach that we’d taken up until that time was to make records very quickly. We did it for a number of reasons. We were used to working on low budgets. There was a certain aesthetic to it where you went in, you played, banged out the tunes and that was your music. That was what happened. I know that Paul and I have been criticised for that approach, but that’s the way it turned out.”
But this was why EMI had hired them. That way of working was suddenly much more lucrative than it had been. There was undoubtedly a culture clash between their loose, raw style, the perfectionism of Thom and the controlling nature of EMI but ‘Creep’ proved that the partnership could work. Even when it was still a demo, most people who heard it agreed that it was a big step up from anything they’d done before. Colin said that it was hearing Thom’s demo of the song that made him decide that he had to take the band seriously.
“I remember an acoustic version of ‘Creep’ he sent me a cassette of from Exeter University,” he said. “I listened to it and said, ‘This is what I want to do. This is my destiny: to help disseminate this music and propel it directly into contemporary popular culture, because it’s so important.’”
It’s hard to tell how serious he’s being here. He later said that the lyric of ‘Creep’ made him ‘chuckle’ but he was undoubtedly impressed. They all were. All except Jonny. He found the song too weak and simplistic. When they played it, he would get frustrated and attack his guitar, blasting out squalls of angry noise. But, by the time Paul and Sean came to hear it, the rest of the band had already decided that it actually sounded a lot better with a bit of an edge.
“When we actually did the song, we were very matter-of-fact about it like, ‘Time to do the noise!’ says Paul. “It was one of the last things we did. The first take we did was perfect and it took him, like, a hundred tries to get the second one. Nowadays, of course, we’d have just sampled it but back then you couldn’t do that.”
It was a pivotal decision in the band’s career. “If the guitar hadn’t exploded where it exploded, there’s just no way it would have got on alternative radio,” Thom told Rolling Stone in 1997. “And we wouldn’t be anywhere.”
Thom always had reservations about ‘Creep’. It exposed the kind of feelings that most people have every now and then but nobody likes to talk about. To put it in a song for the whole world to hear made him feel highly exposed. By now he’d been going out with Rachel for some time, too, and the spark for the song – his obsession with some girl he’d never even spoken to – seemed ridiculous and embarrassing.
“That song was where he was at, at the time,” says Paul. “It expresses a real feeling but it’s kin
d of an ugly thing that nobody wants to get trapped in their whole life. It’s high school, basically, or college. He wrote it at college about a girl who wouldn’t give him the time of day and you’d like to feel that you’d moved on from that. It was sort of an adolescent expression. I wouldn’t say it was tongue-in-cheek. He was torn about whether to put it out because it just wasn’t him anymore, even at that point.”
It also expressed something very ugly. Although, on the face of it, it’s a twisted love song there’s a lot more hate than love. He almost seems to be blaming the object of his affections for making him feel like a ‘creep’. This view of the song is backed up by Thom’s famous – and famously regretted – assertion that he’d never met a beautiful woman he liked.
In an interview with Melody Maker, he said, “Confronted by a beautiful woman, I will leave as soon as possible or hide until they leave. It’s not just that I find them intimidating. It’s the hideous way people flock around them … Beauty is all about unearned privilege and power.”
Later, although he admitted that he’d said this, he took it back. “It’s as arrogant as you can possibly get,” he said to Q. “Rude. Silly. I do have a genuine, normal awe of beauty, a feeling that it’s completely unapproachable and intimidating and it’s at its most extreme in women.”
‘Creep’ expressed the same sentiment in a much more powerful way. It was about resentment. Fittingly, then, he would later come to bitterly resent the song itself. But before that it essentially saved Radiohead’s career and it certainly saved their debut album, Pablo Honey.
7
PABLO HONEY
Pablo Honey is now like the orphan of Radiohead’s career, almost disowned by its parents, yet it sold over two million copies and made them a genuinely big band. When second album The Bends came out, it was initially seen as a flop in comparison, selling far fewer copies in its first month. However, like all their records, it was a struggle to record it. The problem was that they simply didn’t have enough good songs. Thom refused to put forward many of his old On A Friday tracks. He was determined that they should move forward with the new, grungier sound.
“I’m not saying we were scraping the barrel, but we didn’t have a lot of stuff,” says Paul. “We didn’t sort through a lot of things and say, ‘This is what we’re going to choose for the record’, it was more, ‘OK, this is what we’ve got.’”
Also, the band weren’t as technically accomplished as they would become. Thom occasionally struggled to reach the vocal standards that he’d set himself and Phil wasn’t yet the drummer he would be later. “They were young. They were inexperienced,” Sean says. “Although Colin’s amazing, we had some problems getting tracks that had groove to them and that was part of their inexperience.”
“For a while [Phil] lagged behind,” says Nigel. “I do remember visiting the studio and Paul and Sean being locked away with long strips of tape dangling round their necks as they put together various drum takes. That kind of thing is pretty standard for making any record. Even if you’ve got Phil Collins behind you, you’re probably going to edit together a couple of drum takes to get the one that actually goes on the album. Phil was very sensitive about it, which made it worse. Honestly, he was a fine drummer, it [just] made him a bit nervous.”
However, Thom, too, would feel tremendously frustrated if he couldn’t get things right. “Thom’s a very emotional person and if you got him in the right frame of mind, the vocal would come very easily,” says Paul. “If he wasn’t in the right frame of mind, it would be hard. But he’s a fantastic technical singer. He had training as a child in choirs and stuff like that. But that’s the hardest part of being a producer – getting a good vocal out of the singer. When we did ‘Creep’, it just sort of happened. It was one of those things. There was something weird going on there. It was strangely effortless. It was one of those things you look back on and think, ‘Something was going on there.’ Because the rest of the album wasn’t that easy. It was hard to finish.”
Thom admitted later that he was “unbearable” during the Pablo Honey recording sessions. The rest of the band knew about his perfectionism and hyper-critical approach, but it was the first time they’d had to deal with it in such an intense, confined period of time. In contrast to every other album they’d record, they were on a tight schedule. There wasn’t too much time to worry about things. They had three weeks. They just had to blast it out and if they weren’t entirely happy with something, too bad. And, partly as a result perhaps, they had a huge amount of fun on some of the tracks. They weren’t quite the straight-laced puritans of legend.
“[First track] ‘You’ was one of those instances where we were stuck,” Paul remembers. “We couldn’t quite get it off the ground. I remember a friend of theirs’ showed up with some hash and … we had the greatest time. All of a sudden, Ed’s guitar started making sense. He played this cool part that went all the way through it and all of a sudden that tune got going that day. I’m not saying drugs are a good thing but sometimes they will inspire you!”
Another time, on ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, they decided to find out whether the sentiment was actually true. “Every single person in the studio got a track on that,” says Paul, “even the cook. Everybody we could find, the gardener, the assistant engineer. Everybody had to play a guitar part because the whole concept was that anyone can play guitar. It was funny to see what everybody’s approach was. Some people did more of a straight guitar part; Sean went for pure noise and ripped the strings off the guitar. It was kind of a Rorschach test for personality. Jonny got out a coin and used that. I think I tried to play a rhythmic thing. You can’t hear anyone particularly, it’s just a big mishmash of stuff. That was a really fun day. We weren’t really approaching it technologically. It was just an Eno-esque approach to having fun with it. We weren’t jaded old fuckheads who go, ‘Let’s fuck off to the pub, I hate this!’ We were really into it. We knew we had a good band and we were trying to do a good job. Those guys are smart and they learned so much from that experience, being in a good studio, seeing what worked and didn’t work.”
The experience of recording Pablo Honey was a steep learning curve for Thom and the rest of the band. That, too, made it a frustrating experience. Thom was starting to write better songs but they were on a tight schedule and an even tighter budget and there wasn’t time to work these new tracks out and put them on the record. Some songs like ‘Prove Yourself’ had seemed like Radiohead’s best work when Paul and Sean first heard them, but they were rapidly superseded by newer, better tracks.
“I think that was one of the first songs we heard from the demo. At first it was one of the best things we’d heard but as the record went on we thought ‘It’s alright,” says Paul. They knew they were starting to get somewhere when Thom finally managed to get the high-pitched vocal on ‘Vegetable’. “We were struggling with it and one night Thom finally just got it right. That was one of the hardest ones for him to sing. I don’t know why. We had a break-through one night when we nailed that one. It was like a hump that we had to get over.”
But there were other tracks that, even at the time, nobody liked all that much. A particular bugbear was the noisy, abrasive track that appeared after ‘Creep’, called ‘How Do You?’.
“There were some songs that the band didn’t like right from the beginning,” says Nigel, “Even today, on the last couple of albums, I’ve talked to Jonny and he’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re just trying to decide what songs to put on the new album. Just playing the game of ‘Spot the ‘How Do You?’’. Nobody enjoyed that song. They realised that wasn’t their finest hour.”
“To me that song is a fun track but the British press tore us to shreds over that one with ‘fake punk’ and the like,” says Paul. “It’s just a short, little crazy song. I think we put it after ‘Creep’ to get the album moving again. It would have been better if we’d moved it away from ‘Creep’ because it was too jarring for people, I guess. I remember the press gave us enormous a
mounts of crap about that one. They weren’t having it.”
In a throwback to their earliest demos ‘How Do You?’ was a song with a very Oxford subject matter. Nigel says that’s why Thom decided to keep it on the record. “I think Thom liked the lyrics to that one. It was about Kevin Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s son (who lived in Oxford) and Thom liked the angriness of the lyrics but I don’t think the music really kept up.”
The last track they recorded was also the last track on the album, ‘Blow Out’. It was a fittingly chaotic end to what had, at times, been a chaotic process. They were adding the final touches when their friends, Oxford band The Candyskins, arrived. The studio was packed and noisy and, somehow, in the chaos the monitor speakers perched on top of the console fell on to the control board with a massive crash. A whole row of switches were completely sheared off.
“It didn’t blow up the board but it messed up a lot of the console,” says Paul. “We had to call the engineer and he was shocked. It was kind of a chaotic session because we had other people around and the board was kind of crippled. It was fun. That was I think about the last thing we did on the record!”
But although the band and producers had, mostly, got on well during the sessions, the next stage began to strain their relationship. All the way through recording, Thom had been able to cling to the belief that, if things didn’t sound quite right, they’d be able to sort it out when they came to mix it. In practice, it wasn’t quite like that. When they heard what was coming out of the mixing desk, they were all a little disillusioned.