Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  “I don’t think you have any idea how vital it is,” said Ed, “until you actually fuck it up, which we did big time on the first record.” Perhaps he meant the unfortunate segue from ‘Creep’ to ‘How Do You?’, but then the second song wouldn’t have fitted well anywhere.

  The glut of material caused another argument as they tried to decide whether to release a double album. With such a dramatic change of direction, some of the band thought that it would be too much to take. But then again they’d put so much work into the songs that for them not to see the light of day now seemed ridiculous. They’d worked on ‘Knives Out’, alone, for 373 days despite the fact that it was, as Ed wrote in his studio diary, one of the most straight-ahead songs they’d done in years.

  It was as if they weren’t sure they were allowed to do anything that simple anymore. For months they’d fiddled around with it, adding things, changing things, before, finally, deciding that it was fine as it was.

  Meanwhile, outside the studio, speculation was growing as to what they had been doing exactly all this time. Melody Maker even sent their News Reporter to Oxford to see if he could find out what they were up to by interviewing friends and neighbours. The attention bemused Radiohead. They’d never really understood the feverish reaction to OK Computer and they weren’t ready to deal with the extraordinary anticipation for Kid A. It was particularly worrying that the Melody Maker article promised that Radiohead were about to “return rock to us”. At this point, they still weren’t entirely sure how the record was going to sound but they had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

  When the record was finally done, the overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Immediately after the sessions were over, Thom was asked to record a duet with Björk for the soundtrack to her film Dancer In The Dark and that proved to be a very different experience in the studio. Suddenly the weight was off his shoulders. Björk was somebody who shared Thom’s approach to music. They were both perfectionists who approached things very differently to most musicians. But it wasn’t easy to blend Björk’s exuberant voice with Thom’s much softer tones. The result, ‘I’ve Seen It All’, is odd but also very haunting. Björk pitches her voice much lower than usual, almost whispering, while Thom murmurs alongside like a ghost. If nothing else it was a reminder that making music didn’t need to be the tormented business of so many Radiohead sessions.

  The opportunity to go out on tour should have been another relief but Thom wasn’t sure he was ready to be a travelling salesman again. Long before No Logo, he’d had problems with the sponsorship-festooned tour circuit. But Chris and Bryce suggested that they now had the clout to do things differently. They didn’t have to play the usual giant Carling toilets. They could do things their way, hire a massive marquee and play in their own space with the best possible sound and with complete control. Thom still wasn’t convinced.

  “If ultimately I had been left to it, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said in a TV interview. “And the others said: Go on, it will be great, you’ll like it!’ I had real horrors about the tent and everything, I thought we were crazy.”

  It was a pretty crazy idea. It must have been much more expensive than playing normal shows. It was more expensive, even, than the first shows they played after recording, a series of gigs in extraordinary venues across Europe. The first two dates were supposed to be held at Roman amphitheatres in France. The first one in Arles almost had to be cancelled due to torrential rain but they just about managed to get through it. The second night they weren’t so lucky. When they arrived in Vaison La Romaine, a bigger amphitheatre cut into the side of a hill with an amazing view of the French countryside, the sun was blazing. Then it started raining again. The water was flowing down the roads and flooding the stage, threatening the equipment. A previous year’s flood had killed eleven people so they decided that they couldn’t risk it. Their crew spent much of the night drying everything out with hairdryers before they headed off to Barcelona.

  But as the European shows went on, they were growing in confidence. When they played seven new songs, the reaction from their fans was ecstatic and the early reviews were equally positive. When they headed out in the big tops they sounded even better. Their complete control over the sound meant the dates, in London’s Victoria Park and at Warrington then Glasgow, were among the best they’d ever done. And the new stuff was greeted with far more enthusiasm than any other similarly enormous band could expect when unveiling a new direction.

  It helped that many of the fans already knew the songs, or versions of them. Things had changed since 1997 and OK Computer. Napster was a huge phenomenon and at least fourteen songs from the Kid A sessions had been illegally circulating on the internet, some for up to two years. The music industry as a whole was starting to tremble. Chris and Bryce were worried, too.

  “It was funny,” Thom said in an interview with the New Yorker, “because when we were working on Kid A … our managers – you know, they occasionally go to the States, and they keep in contact with what’s going on – used to come to the studio and hang out and say, ‘Things are changing.’”

  But it turned out that the changes benefited them. For once they were at the right place at the right time. Fans had been given a chance to get used to the weird new sounds of Kid A before they arrived and so they were prepared. Ironically, it was reviewers at many of the music magazines who were caught on the hop. It garnered many good reviews but some hacks were just confused. Even songs like ‘The National Anthem’, which, with its hugely catchy bass line is now a live favourite, were greeted as weird aberrations. Part of the problem was that, in response to the leaks, EMI had decided not to send out preview copies to journalists. Instead they were invited to listening sessions where they were given one sitting with the album before going home and writing about it. In 2008 this is, sadly, normal practise but at the time it was very new and rather bizarre. “All the reviewers were saying, ‘Uh, this isn’t Radiohead, we don’t recognise it, it might be good later on, but right now I don’t get it all,’” said Thom.

  Listening to Kid A now, it’s easy to forget what bewilderment it caused when it first came out. Part of its success was that it redefined what people thought of as Radiohead’s sound. On YouTube now, under a performance of ‘High And Dry’, there’s a comment from a confused young fan saying that, although cool, the song doesn’t sound much like Radiohead. A whole generation has grown up for whom the band mean adventurous sonic experimentation and nothing else. But Kid A wasn’t Radiohead’s Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed’s famously unlistenable fuck-you to the music industry. The title track, admittedly, wafts and wanders a little. But ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, ‘The National Anthem’, ‘Idioteque’ and ‘Optimistic’ are proper pop songs with highly memorable hooks, albeit very different to the kinds of hooks they’d used before.

  After the hype following OK Computer, it was inevitable that many journalists would be preparing to cut Radiohead down to size again. When the record came out, though, it didn’t matter. It went straight in at Number 1 in the UK and many countries in the world, including, incredibly America, the first time a British act had done that for three years. They immediately went out there to play, starting at New York’s famous Roseland Ballroom. The response was phenomenal. “The day before we did the gig at the Roseland, people were queuing round the block three times to get tickets,” says Andy Bush. “It was like The Beatles. It was colossal.”

  The response in America for Kid A was the same as the response for OK Computer in the UK. OK Computer didn’t do all that well when it was first released in the States. It was adored by other bands but Radiohead didn’t get all that much press or airplay. Many DJs and magazines were determined, as British outlets had been after The Bends, not to get caught on the hop again. So when Radiohead flew out there for Kid A, they were like conquering heroes and they were even invited on to sketch show Saturday Night Live.

  Saturday Night Live is an American institution. It’s been running con
tinuously since the 1970s and it’s launched the careers of some of the world’s most successful comedians. On the surface it was all fun and glitz but underneath it was ferociously professional and efficient. Thom had been warned by Michael Stipe that it could be a difficult show to play. To make things more tricky, they chose to play ‘The National Anthem’ with the full eight-piece brass section.

  “It was very American,” sax player Steve Hamilton remembers. “Very intense from the crew’s point of view. You’d have ten minutes here then one minute rest and then another ten minutes, so it was a little bit uptight but I don’t think that came across to the band or to us that much. [Actress] Kate Hudson was presenting the show and she was practically naked so I think everyone was happy!”

  “I was struck by how self-effacing the Radiohead guys were in the face of a deluge of hysterical enthusiasm, from the audience, from the presenters, from the floor managers, the whole thing,” says Andy Bush. “There was a little bit of that lovely dour British thing going on. The Brits can’t quite hack the Americans whooping it up. It was funny. The audience were just going ape and as soon as it was over Thom and the guys were just sitting around impassively like nothing had happened.”

  But although Thom might not have been matching the audience for enthusiasm and joy, it was still a great moment. To come to a place that was so far removed from everything that they were about and to take it over in the way they did was an incredible feeling. It was one of those moments that the kid who, half-sarcastically, half-seriously wished he was “special” had dreamed about. “The highlight of the whole Kid A thing was our Saturday Night Live performance,” Thom said later. “I was so proud of that. I was walking on water for a week after that – I felt so good.”

  “It was like we were going over there with them on the crest of their wave,” says Steve Hamilton. “We turned up and played a gig at the Roseland Ballroom first and they were Number 1. It was a real buzz. Everyone was so happy and delighted about it. You couldn’t have been there at a better time with them. You got the feeling that they were really enjoying themselves.”

  By now, it was as though the horrible, drawn-out arguments of the long recording process had never happened. They were back to enjoying what they were doing and enjoying each other’s company. They could look back on the recording sessions like a long war that they’d eventually won. “Pablo Honey was done in three weeks,” said Ed dryly in a TV interview. “The Bends was about sixteen weeks total recording time, OK Computer was six months and Kid A was … generations.”

  “Everybody was completely at peace with each other I think,” says Steve. “I’ve never seen any of them shout or argue. They all seemed like good mates. They didn’t seem like the kind of people who would have rows, apart from Thom maybe, they seemed very relaxed with each other. They were very complimentary about what we were doing. Which is rare! You shouldn’t praise musicians too much or they’ll ask for too much money.”

  The only disappointment was how quickly Kid A vanished from the charts. It didn’t have the longevity of OK Computer or The Bends. Few of the tracks were played on the radio and most of their fan base bought it in the first week. It didn’t help that they refused to release any singles or make any videos for it. They’d always had an odd, ambivalent attitude towards the art form. Despite the fact that they’d made some of the most memorable videos ever, Thom still referred to them as “commercials”. He didn’t think they represented the album as a whole.

  “Music videos just make me think of [Peter Gabriel’s] ‘Sledgehammer’,” he said to Jam, “and that was when it was innovative. It is like tap-dancing, [that’s] what I compare it to. It had its day, really … I think miming is absurd.”

  He resented the fact that they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making videos, as much money as they would spend on the album, just to get it on MTV next to all the other adverts. “The thing that really did my head in was going home and turning on the TV and the ads for fucking banks and cars being more like MTV videos than the MTV videos,” he said to Juice Magazine. “And it seemed like there was nowhere to go. Whatever the new aesthetic was would be in a fucking car advert a week later.”

  This was even truer than he thought.

  “I do quite a lot of music for commercials,” Steve Hamilton says. “And I’ve had quite a lot of briefs from people saying that they love that track and they want a similar sound. When I tell them that I played on it, ‘Wow! That’s mad, man!’”

  Instead of videos, then, for Kid A Thom and Stanley Donwood came up with one minute “blip-verts”, video clips featuring excerpts from the album. “Four minutes is too long for a car advert, so it is certainly too long for a record,” Thom said.

  They put far less conventional effort into promoting Kid A than they had OK Computer, but Thom was still a bit put out that it didn’t do as well commercially. He seemed to forget that their last album was helped on its way by a massive, two-year long tour that almost broke him. “Book me on a nine-month tour and I’ll be back home doing a Liam [Gallagher] within a week,” Thom warned in a TV interview. Still, there was a part of him that thought people ought to somehow get the music anyway.

  “I was a bit disappointed that, in Britain, Kid A didn’t stick around very long because of the likes of Robbie Williams and all that,” he said.

  Still, there was always Kid A: Part II – Amnesiac.

  16

  KID B

  In retrospect, Radiohead’s fifth studio album, Amnesiac, wasn’t a very good marketing move. It was the first album that Radiohead had done where they hadn’t leapt dramatically forward from the one before. Before its release, there were rumours that these were the songs where they’d gone back to the safe, familiar territory of rock guitars. Afterwards the fact that it contained great tracks like ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘I Might Be Wrong’ was rather overlooked in the disappointment that it didn’t have another ‘Paranoid Android’ or ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was, some said, simply ‘Kid B’. This suspicion was bolstered by Colin’s description of the selection process, which was widely misinterpreted.

  “I’m not sure they are two records,” he said to JAM. “We had that group of songs to make one record, and the other ones are left over. We had, say, 23 songs and we wanted to have around 47 minutes of music, so we chose the best combination out of that number (for Kid A), and the rest are waiting on the bench, waiting to be picked for the next team line-up.”

  This, perhaps inadvertently, makes the likes of ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘Knives Out’ sound like the little kid with glasses who’s the last to get picked for the football team. The alternative version of events that Thom and Jonny offered was more flattering – these were simply songs that wouldn’t fit alongside the ones from Kid A.

  “Kid A pulled itself together very easily and really obviously. But Amnesiac didn’t,” Thom said. Even on Amnesiac, there were great songs that didn’t make the cut. Ed’s online diary had tantalised fans with repeated mentions of a track called ‘Cuttooth’ which, he kept promising, was almost finished. It was mentioned more times than any other song and it sounded like it was going to be the centrepiece of the record. The original version was over eight minutes long. In the end, it was cut down to just over five minutes and relegated to a B-side. Listening to it now, it’s an interesting glimpse of a different kind of album that Radiohead could have made. It sounds more like Xtrmntr-era Primal Scream than anything they put on Kid A or Amnesiac. It’s got a rumbling, aggressive, industrial quality. The song was partly cannibalised for ‘Myxomatosis’ on the later Hail To The Thief album, with Thom borrowing a couple of lines of lyrics.

  There was only one song that they added to the Kid A sessions for Amnesiac and that was the extraordinary, disconcerting ‘Life In A Glasshouse’. It was a seemingly autobiographical tale of somebody who feels that they’re always being watched by the press and, more specifically, the effect it has on that person’s partner. There were obvious parallels with Thom’s own life.
The song was written during the period captured in Meeting People Is Easy and director Grant Gee thinks his continuous scrutiny might have, consciously or unconsciously, helped inspire it.

  “Originally it had the line, ‘little cameras in every room/they’re watching me’, he says, “which was us because we used to go in and rig little tiny, £49 pinhole cameras in their dressing rooms whenever we could. And just record them in there so we wouldn’t have to be in the room. That was one of our innovations to overcome this problem of, ‘Hello! I’m just filming you! Pretend I’m not here.’ So we’d stick cameras with gaffa tape to the corners of the rooms.”

  Thom has said that it was inspired by an interview he read with the wife of a celebrity. Her house was staked out by the press and she cut up the papers with her picture on them and pasted them over the windows so the photographers were looking in at the images they’d already taken.

  When ‘Life In A Glass House’ was demoed, Jonny said that, “it could sound like a bad Cure song, it could be brilliant.” In reality, at this point in their career, there was no chance that it was going to sound like any kind of Cure song. They decided that, just like ‘The National Anthem’, it needed a jazz element but this time they went for a very different sound, enlisting the help of a pillar of the British jazz scene, Humphrey Lyttelton. Colin had once booked him to play at Cambridge University when he was Entertainments Officer, but by the year 2000 he was in his seventies. He was Eton educated, BBC through-and-through and best known for being the chairman of the whimsical Radio 4 panel show, ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’.

  Despite this he did have a lot in common with them. There had always been a Radio 4 element to their aesthetic and, like them, he combined indisputable poshness with an anarchic streak. In 1941 he fought in southern Italy and supposedly arrived at the battle of Salerno with a pistol in one hand and a trumpet in the other. His only hit, 1956’s ‘Bad Penny Blues’, was recorded with the maverick pop producer Joe Meek. When Radiohead contacted him to ask if he’d work with them, he listened to one of his grandchildren’s copies of OK Computer and agreed straight away. When he turned up to the recording sessions, the band were shocked to find that one of his band had only been released from hospital the day before after having open heart surgery.