by Trevor Baker
“I was absolutely terrified of meeting him,” he said later, “because I projected so much stuff onto him when I was a kid.” But when they met it was Michael who was more effusive. “I’m really glad you could do this,” he told Thom. “I’m a very big fan.” Thom was stupefied. “I’ve never believed in hero worship,” he wrote in his tour diary, “but I have to admit to myself that I’m fighting for breath.”
REM acted like a crash course in ‘how to be a big band’ to Thom. He was astonished at how good they were at schmoozing without losing the plot. “It seems you have to be nice to people forever,” he mused. “I may as well get used to my cracked smile.”
But it didn’t take long before he realised that REM were just ordinary people. It helped him realise what other people felt when they approached him for an autograph. “Now Michael and I have quite a good relationship,” he said to Alex Ross in the New Yorker. “Making friends with your idol makes you realise how fucking important it is to stay on this side and never go to that side.”
It helped that REM were so supportive. Michael Stipe declared one night on tour that Radiohead were so good “it’s frightening”. On another date, Thom was mortified when a girl approached their table in a restaurant when the two bands were eating and asked for his autograph and not the REM front man’s.
He’d never liked supporting other bands as much as playing headline shows. He kept having to tell himself that he couldn’t expect the same reaction from the audience. As long as they were facing the right direction and they “had their eyes open” it was OK. But the REM tour was different. Everything seemed to be going well. After one show in Norway, he played the rest of the band a new demo he’d written on the acoustic guitar. It was called, he said in a tour diary at the time, ‘No Surprises Please’. Colin, he reported, “went nuts.”
By then the sheer effort they were making was starting to pay off. The Bends eventually went Top Ten in the UK and was selling steadily, by word of mouth, around the world. It was one of those albums that many people didn’t get at first, yet it sounded better with every listen. Even Paul and Sean admit that they didn’t realise what a great album it was initially.
“When we got the tracks, they were well-recorded but it was one of those things where you’re so close to it that you don’t really get it,” says Paul. “I thought it was good. I thought it was a step forward. I didn’t realise how big a step forward it was until I saw that record go out and work its way into the culture. ‘Creep’ was a hit but it was one of those hits where the first time you hear it you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy,’ but after a few times you don’t want to hear it again. I got to the point where I didn’t want to hear it again. But The Bends, when it came out and had worked its way into the culture for about a year, was one of the most successful records I’d ever worked on because it was just everywhere. You’d go to a party, you’d go to a club, you’d go to a restaurant, every party you’d go to it’d be playing because it was the record that everybody could agree was good.”
When The Bends came out, a small hardcore of fans rushed out and bought it straight away. Radiohead already had a fan base for whom it didn’t matter whether their songs got played on the radio, or their videos appeared on TV. They would search out and buy everything that the band put out. “The album came out and within two days everyone knew all the words of all the songs,” said Thom in a 1995 TV interview. “That’s why we do it, it’s wonderful.”
A year later, that hardcore was much, much bigger. The bedrock of support they now had made it possible for them to go on and be the experimental band that they were for the next ten years and more, without having to worry about what the industry or the media would think.
But towards the end of the last tour following the album, they all just wanted to go home. They were enjoying the live shows again but were finding the promotional treadmill draining. Some interviewers still knew little about them except that they were “that ‘Creep’ band”.
Luckily there was a much easier way of promoting their music. They’d always been highly ambivalent about music videos. Thom didn’t like the fact that they were blatantly just adverts. On MTV, ‘High And Dry’ would be followed by Coca Cola and Nike and there seemed little difference between them. But one great video could easily do the work of a year-long tour in terms of promoting the record. When they came to promote The Bends, they seemed to accept this. Arguably the first in a long list of great Radiohead videos was ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, a surreal vision set in a supermarket where Thom and the rest of the band were pushed around in shopping trolleys. It was the first single to be released in the States (the second in the UK where ‘High And Dry’ appeared first) and the video had a big impact on MTV. But it was the video for the third single, ‘Just’ that gave The Bends a massive boost when it appeared.
It was filmed outside Liverpool Street Station first thing in the morning and featured an apparently distressed commuter giving up, lying down in the street and refusing to move. To the consternation of passers-by, he refuses to tell them what’s wrong. When he finally gives in at the end of the video and tells them, they all lie down with him. It was shocking, clever and funny. Everything that Radiohead was about.
“The idea for the video was originally going to be for my next short film,” the video’s director Jamie Thraves explained to this author. “As I was listening to the song over and over, trying to come up with an idea, I was also thinking about my latest short, I was definitely treating the two things as separate entities but the song started to creep into my film and vice versa, then suddenly they fused together, it was a very exciting moment. Radiohead were brilliant and very supportive, they took a risk with me, they gave me complete freedom to make the video I wanted.”
This was the way Radiohead always worked. They treated other artists as creative equals. For Jamie Thraves it was a fantastic experience but, in some ways, the success of his video was a mixed blessing. It made his reputation but it also meant that, for years afterwards, he would be asked what the man says at the end of the song. Many people have suggested that the video doesn’t have any kind of ‘meaning’ as such but Jamie denies this.
“The truth is I actually do have something the man said,” he says. “I don’t think the video would work without there being something. I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife. From the get-go the idea always included the subtraction of the man’s last words creating a conundrum, some characters are undone because of their desire to know the unknown and anyone who watches the video is taunted by that same desire. I did not imagine the video generating the speculation it has though. The funny thing is, I’m actually quite bad at keeping secrets; I usually blurt things out without meaning to. The truth is I’d like to reveal the answer because I’d like to share it, it’s a burden of sorts, but I know that if I reveal the answer the video would be dust, so I have no choice, it’s almost a curse really. I feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. The reaction to the video was brilliant afterwards. People continue to ask me what the man says at the end which amaze me. I went through a small phase of getting a bit annoyed but I don’t mind anymore, I quite like it, I have my rehearsed lines, ‘Don’t make me tell you, you don’t want to know, please believe me.’”
And, as always, if Thom believed in something he was prepared to go all the way to make it work. On the day of the set, despite the band having a supporting role in their own video, they threw themselves into it with abandon.
“Everyone talks about the man and what he says, or doesn’t say, in this video,” says Jamie. “Very few people actually discuss how great a performance it was from the band and Thom in particular. Radiohead performed the complete track a 100 times over but they always kept it fresh and exciting each time. The band had all agreed that they were really going to go for it. Thom had just started doing his twitchy psycho thing at a few live gigs, they wanted to commit it to celluloid, it was mesmerising to watch. It was a 360º set; there was only room for the camera
man, grip and focus puller so I tended to watch everything on a monitor outside the room. Every time the song ended, no one said anything for a second or two, it rendered everyone speechless. When I walked into the set, I remember there would be this strange kind of charge in the air and there’d be Thom still twitching.”
This may have been part of his problem with the whole concept of music videos. He resented putting so much effort and energy into what he saw as essentially another branch of a sales job. But Radiohead’s best videos were works of art in their own right. Jamie still won’t reveal what the man said and apparently Radiohead have agreed to keep the secret, too. All he will say is that “lip reading won’t help you.”
Gradually, bit by bit, Radiohead were becoming as big as they were at the peak of ‘Creep’s success. The Bends ultimately went gold worldwide and, just as they had with ‘Creep’, the band found themselves in the bizarre situation of being invited, albeit cautiously, into the mainstream. One particularly strange experience was being asked to play teen pop magazine Smash Hits’ ‘Poll Winners Party’. Naturally, with an audience of young children and their anxiously watching parents, they chose to play the raucous, disturbing ‘My Iron Lung’. “Little children were crying,” said Thom, “and you should have seen some of the parents, it was wicked! It was great. I was really proud we did it.”
A year after The Bends came out, it went back into the Top Ten in the UK for no obvious reason. It was the definitive word-of-mouth success. But one problem with Radiohead’s slow, gradual progress was that it meant they kept touring. There were always new fans who wanted to see them. During the last months of the tour, they desperately wanted to go home but as soon as they did they found it difficult to adjust. It was difficult to return to reality when Thom got home.
“A lot of it’s down to the fact that towards the end of a tour, it’s just drink yourself stupid all the time,” he said to Select magazine. “And then you go home and carry on. ‘Wahey! The end of the tour’s coming up. Wahey! The tour’s finished!’ It just carries on, and you don’t really know what to do afterwards.”
He occasionally regretted the fact that, early on in their career, they’d played up to the middle-class, tea drinking image. He knew it wasn’t an accurate representation of what they were like. Most of the lyrics of The Bends, Thom said later, were written when he was drunk at the back of the tour bus during the long, post-Pablo Honey tour when nothing seemed to make sense.
“The reality is that we were probably doing as many drugs as everybody else,” he said in an interview with Vox. “I wouldn’t go on a chat show and talk about it, because it’s purely recreational. I love getting stoned, it’s the best thing in the fucking world.”
They would sometimes record while stoned, which could be helpful, but which also, perhaps, contributed to their painfully slow progress and occasional outbreaks of paranoia. When they came to record their next album, the revered classic OK Computer, any additional source of paranoia was the last thing they needed.
12
OK COMPUTER
In 1996, when they started working on their third album, OK Computer, Thom had been doing Radiohead as a ‘full-time job’ for five years. It sometimes made him feel like he was losing touch with the real world. For large chunks of the year he found himself in an environment, on tour or while carrying out promotional duties, where he felt like a salesman or a politician. Even when he got home, he sometimes had to remind his friends that he was the same person. And, sometimes, they had to remind him. These were the experiences, combined with the 20th Century’s background drone of computers, TV and radio – what he called “fridge buzz” – that would help shape the next album.
Radiohead started by promising themselves that, whatever else happened, they would do things differently this time. There would be no long, sterile sessions stuck in a recording studio glaring at each other. They wouldn’t go running to the producer every time they ran out of ideas. John Leckie had taught them that a producer wasn’t there to tell them what they should or should not do. They had to work things out for themselves.
“One of the things I’m eternally grateful for,” said Thom in a TV interview, “is that he made it so the studio no longer seemed like some kind of science lab. John took all the mystery out of recording and made it something you could enjoy, just like playing.”
What they needed, they thought, was somebody who knew how to press the right buttons. In Nigel Godrich, the engineer from The Bends sessions, they’d found just the right person. He’d become a friend during the long, fraught time at RAK and The Manor. He was the same age as them so they didn’t see him as an authority figure. Having him around would remove the temptation to ask somebody else what they should do. Also, their most enjoyable experiences during The Bends sessions had come when the pressure was off and they were recording B-sides. One of those tracks, ‘Black Star’, was so good that it made the final cut of The Bends.
Nigel Godrich also shared Radiohead’s antipathy towards studios. “I hate studios myself,” he said in an interview on his website (www.nigelgodrich.com). “The idea of going somewhere where you know 200 million people have done the same thing – it’s like using a public toilet. You don’t feel like it’s your space.”
They really thought that if they just avoided the elementary mistakes that they’d made with Pablo Honey and The Bends, then the next album could be a much less painful experience. They’d already had a taste of how simple recording could be when they came to do ‘Lucky’ for the Bosnian War Child charity record Help.
They’d been playing it for months on tour and, when they were asked to contribute a song, Jonny suggested it. Thom wasn’t sure. He wasn’t a fan of many of the other bands on the Help album and he didn’t like the back-patting element that’s always present with charity records.
“We did it because we were asked to do it and because Ed studied the Balkans,” he said. “We just felt it was a good idea to just make the gesture. We realised that there would be a lot of back-patting but we knew it wasn’t going to end up like Live Aid. To be honest, we were really itching to record the song anyway and we just didn’t see why we shouldn’t put it on this record.”
When they went into the studio with Nigel, they were conscious that they didn’t have long. The idea of the charity album was that every song would be recorded and mixed in one day. It didn’t seem like a massive task. When they were on a roll, as the song ‘Lucky’ put it, they were perfectly capable of blasting songs out. But when they got there, they found that the first part of the day was taken up with talking to press and TV. Thom kept looking at his watch, thinking anxiously to himself, Erm, shouldn’t we be making this song at some point?
But, when they came to do it, it was almost effortless. The song was what you might call one of Thom’s many “crash ballads”, the story of somebody crawling out of the wreckage of an aeroplane, and it just came pouring out. “It just happened,” he said, “writing and recording it, there was no time, no conscious effort.”
To be able to record a song like that, without the stress of constant revision and critical analysis, was a rare joy for Radiohead. By this point, Thom was looking back to their earliest days of recording, just him and Jonny and a four-track, as some of his happiest moments. Although in those days he’d dreamt about being given the keys to a professional studio, he hadn’t realised how debilitating they could be.
“We didn’t want to be in the studio with A&R men coming around, nice air-conditioning, staring at the same walls and the same microphones. That was madness,” he said to the Launch website. “We wanted to get to another state of mind – one that we understood.”
Their trust in Nigel Godrich was such that they handed him $140,000 of EMI’s money in order to buy them a state of the art mobile studio. Nigel had the rich-kid-at-Christmas role of going out and buying whatever he thought they would need. It was an approach that had been pioneered by Thom’s early heroes U2 on their The Unforgettable Fire album.
It meant that they could record in different locations without having to start again with new technology every time.
Initially it even seemed like the whole of their next album would be almost as simple and easy as ‘Lucky’. In an interview with a Canadian radio station in early 1996 Jonny thought the album was almost finished already.
“We were aiming to be kind of self-indulgent and spend a year recording,” he said, “but we did four days in a studio and we’ve already got three songs so I think it’s going to be horribly quick again.”
“I remember going to early sessions for OK Computer, which they did up at the Fruit Farm near where I live,” says Nigel Powell, “and in the first weeks I heard versions of ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’ and I thought, ‘This is going to be easy, they’ve got half of it already.’ Then nine months later, they’d recorded four other versions of ‘No Surprises’ and somebody had gone, ‘Shall we listen to that first one again?’ and they listened to it and went, ‘Actually that’s really good isn’t it?’ That’s the way they seemed to approach things.”
While at their rehearsal space, an old apple storage barn at the fruit farm called Canned Applause, they spent much of their time playing with tape loops, perfecting the background buzz that would form such a major part of the eventual album. For the first four months they mostly just rehearsed, practising until they got things right. They could have just used samplers but they preferred the more organic, analogue sounds of the tape spinning. Then, with four songs almost finished, they decided to do the same thing they’d done during The Bends sessions – perfect the tracks on tour. This time they played the European festival circuit and then went out as support act to Alanis Morissette. It was an odd choice of tour, although highly lucrative given how successful she was at the time. With the enormous sales of her debut album, Jagged Little Pill, she was either a warning or an example of what Radiohead could become if they wanted it badly enough. Thom wasn’t sure if he did.