Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  On the other side of the table, Yorke, whose meal consisted of a bowl of bean soup, started complaining about pop-music conglomerates. He and the rest of the band had become politically outspoken, protesting globalization and corporate capitalism. The previous night, he had dedicated “No Surprises”—which contains the line “Bring down the government”—to George W. Bush. In the summer of 2001, Radiohead chose to play a number of open-air venues—such as Liberty State Park, in Jersey City—because these sites had so far escaped the tentacles of an aggressive promotion company called S.F.X., whose parent corporation, Clear Channel, also operated more than a thousand radio stations.

  “S.F.X. is a parasite that needs a host to feed on,” Yorke said.

  “It’s effective only as long as it keeps growing,” O’Brien added. “At some point, it will cease growing, and then its reason to exist will disappear.”

  “No,” Yorke said, “it’s a virus that’s just going to keep spreading forever.”

  Chris Hufford, one of the band’s managers, who has to negotiate with viruses on the phone, grew impatient. “This is reality, Thom,” he said. “This is the marketplace we’re in.”

  “No,” Yorke replied, “the marketplace is where we sell records. This isn’t the marketplace. It’s an area of, I don’t know, oversight.”

  “Come on,” Hufford said, “it’s capitalism, it’s what we have to work with.”

  “Bollocks!”

  “Capitalism!”

  “Bollocks!” Yorke yelled. He got up in a mock huff to go to the bathroom. Colin looked up from his steak and gestured toward the wine in the middle of the table. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed. “Booze in the afternoon!”

  That night, Radiohead got on a bus to go to their next gig, in the French village of Vaison-la-Romaine. They played a show at a magnificent Roman amphitheater there, and then went to Verona, in Italy, where they performed for a crowd of fifteen thousand in the legendary Arena, displacing scenery for Aida onto the piazza. Along the way, they made on-the-fly recordings with Nigel Godrich, their young, wizardly producer, on assorted Apple PowerBooks; appeared on a popular BBC radio show called Mark & Lard, where they were required to shout the phrase “Biggity-biggity-bong!”; greeted a radio-contest winner who hailed Yorke as “a genius” and “sincere”; and avoided some overzealous fans who hollered, “We have come all the way from Venezuela, give us your autograph!” even though they had French accents and were not from Venezuela. There were also quiet moments here and there, as when they sat in a hotel lobby reading the English papers, sun streaming on the marble, and seemed to be fulfilling Colin’s notion of the band as “the E. M. Forster of rock.”

  Radiohead began at Abingdon School, a private boys’ school outside Oxford. Abingdon has a history dating back to the twelfth century, but it is not a national bastion on the order of Eton or Winchester. Its students tend to come from the Thames Valley region, rather than from all over England, and many rely on scholarships. The members of Radiohead were born into ordinary middle-class families: Yorke’s father was a chemical-equipment supplier; Jonny and Colin’s father served in the army. They were, basically, townies—the kids on the other side of the ancient walls. Even at Abingdon, they felt out of place. The longtime headmaster of the school, Michael St. John Parker, cultivated a pompous manner that many alumni—not just Radiohead—remember less than fondly. Parker described the school spirit in these terms: “Competition is promoted, achievement is applauded, and individual dynamism is encouraged.”

  In schools of this kind, many students gravitate to the art, music, and drama departments, where the sense of discipline is looser. For Radiohead, the saving grace of Abingdon was an exceptional teacher named Terence Gilmore-James, who headed the music program. “I was a sort of leper at the time,” Yorke recalled, “and he was the only one who was nice to me.” Yorke was born with his left eye paralyzed; in his childhood, he endured a series of not entirely successful operations to correct it, and the oddity of his half-open eye made him a target for bullies. Tougher than he looked, he often fought back, but he preferred to disappear. “School was bearable for me because the music department was separate from the rest of the school,” he said. “It had pianos in tiny booths, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging around there after school, waiting for my dad to come home from work.” Other members of the band also studied with Gilmore-James and were encouraged by him. “When we started, it was very important that we got support from him,” Colin said, “because we weren’t getting any from the headmaster. You know, the man once sent us a bill, charging us for the use of school property, because we practiced in one of the music rooms on a Sunday”

  Radiohead’s sound owes much to Gilmore-James, who immersed his students in twentieth-century classical music, avant-garde music of the postwar era, classic jazz, and film scores. Once, he had the school orchestra perform Richard Rodney Bennett’s score for Murder on the Orient Express while the film was playing. He left Abingdon in 1987 to devote himself to the legacy of his father-in-law, the Welsh composer Mansel Thomas, whose music he was editing for publication. “I watch over Radiohead much as I watch over my children,” he said in a phone call. He spoke with the fastidiousness of a lifelong teacher, and yet his tone was enthusiastic rather than dogmatic. “They were all of them talented boys, in the sense that they had more than average abilities to think for themselves. I was of a different generation, and I did not always grasp what they were after, but I knew that they were serious. And they were delightful to be around, always getting carried away by their latest discoveries. Whenever I see them”—his voice became firm—“I tell them that they must continue to pursue their own original line.”

  In the schoolboy cadre of Radiohead, Yorke was the bossy one from the start. His very first words to Selway at rehearsal were “Can’t you play any fucking faster?” The band’s early songs were all over the map, sounding variously like the Smiths, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Talking Heads, whose song “Radio Head” gave the group its name. (At first, they performed under the name On a Friday, but they wisely changed their minds.) The strongest influence came from the Pixies, the great but never world-famous Boston band whose gritty songs, shaded soft and loud, also inspired Nirvana. Even as the boys wandered off to university, they got together over weekends, practicing, arguing, and searching for a style. In 1991, Hufford, the co-owner of an Oxford sound studio, came to hear them play, at a place called the Jericho Tavern, and was fascinated by Yorke’s dire energy onstage. He and his partner Bryce Edge produced a demo tape and signed on as managers. Colin, who was working at a record store, gave the tape to Keith Wozencroft, a sales rep for EMI, who moved to A&R shortly afterward and began to tout the band. They signed with EMI later that year.

  “I was getting ready to quit EMI when these lads appeared,” Carol Baxter, Radiohead’s international record-company representative, recalled. “Bunch of disturbed consumptives, I thought. But they were ambitious and smart. At first, I had to hide my Radiohead paperwork behind the Tina Turner and Queensryche files, because my boss thought I was wasting my time. Then the call came in, from Israel, actually, saying that the band had a hit.” Tim Greaves, Radiohead’s longtime tour manager, commented on the band’s overnight success. “The funny thing about Radiohead early on was that they were more famous abroad than in England,” he said. “They’d go around in a van, playing in sweaty little clubs. Then they’d go to Israel and they were rock stars. Same in America. Then it was back to England, back to the van, back to the clubs. They had a good early introduction to the relativity of fame. Fame for this band is a holiday that lasts a few weeks.”

  Radiohead’s ticket to fame was a song called “Creep.” It became a worldwide hit in 1993, when grunge rock was at its height. The lyrics spelled out the self-lacerating rage of an unsuccessful crush:

  You’re so fucking special

  I wish I was special

  But I’m a creep.

  The music was modeled on Pixies s
ongs like “Where Is My Mind?”: stately arpeggios, then an electric squall. What set “Creep” apart from the grunge of the early nineties was the grandeur of its chords—in particular, its regal turn from G major to B major. No matter how many times you hear the song, the second chord still sails beautifully out of the blue. The lyrics may be saying, “I’m a creep,” but the music is saying, “I am majestic.” The sense of coiled force is increased by several horrible stabs of noise on Jonny Greenwood’s guitar. Radiohead have stopped playing “Creep,” more or less, but it still hits home when it comes on the radio. When Beavis of Beavis and Butt-Head heard the noisy part, he said, “Rock!” But why, he wondered, didn’t the song rock from beginning to end? “If they didn’t have, like, a part of the song that sucked, then, it’s like, the other part wouldn’t be as cool,” Butt-Head explained.

  “Creep,” as Butt-Head must have noticed, was the first of many Radiohead songs that used pivot tones, in which one note of a chord is held until a new chord is formed around it. (In the turn from G to B, the note B is the pivot point.) “Yeah, that’s my only trick,” Yorke said, when this was pointed out to him. “I’ve got one trick and that’s it, and I’m really going to have to learn a new one. Pedals, banging away through everything.” But a reliance on pedal tones and pivot tones isn’t necessarily a limitation: the Romantic composers worked to death the idea that any chord could turn on a dime toward another. Yorke’s “pedals” help give Radiohead songs a bittersweet, doomy taste. (“Airbag,” for example, being in A major, ought to be a bright thing, but the intrusion of F and C tones tilts the music toward the minor mode. “Morning Bell” wavers darkly between A minor and C-sharp minor.) It’s a looser, roomier kind of harmony than the standard I-IV-V-1, and it gives the songs a distinct stamp. It also helps sell records: whether playing guitar rock or sampling spaced-out electronica, Radiohead affix their signature.

  Through the years, many bands have thrown bits and pieces of jazz and classical into their mix. The Beatles were by far the best at this kind of genre assimilation. Lesser psychedelic and prog-rock bands turned orchestral crescendos and jazz freak-outs into another brand of kitsch, but Radiohead’s classical sensibility isn’t pasted on the surface; it’s planted at the core. If you did a breakdown of the music, you’d find the same harmonic DNA everywhere. Another trademark is the band’s use of musical space. Riffs are always switching registers, bouncing from treble to bass, breaking through the ceiling or falling through the floor. In “Just,” from The Bends, the Greenwood brothers play octatonic scales—whole steps and half-steps in alternation—that extend over four octaves; the effect is of music looming miles above you.

  There are times when Radiohead seem to be practicing a new kind of classical music for the masses. In the sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac, which began in 1999 and dragged on for a year and a half, their sound became mesmerizingly intricate. On “Pyramid Song,” for example, a string section played glissando harmonics, a texture that Stravinsky’s Firebird made famous, while Selway laid on a shuffling rhythm that defies description, because, as he said, “there is no time signature.” On “Dollars and Cents,” O’Brien used a pedal to bend a chord from major to minor and back again. For “Like Spinning Plates,” Yorke learned the vocal line of an unused song backward and made up new words while driving around in his car. The guitarists set aside their instruments for a while and taught themselves to use heaps of electronic equipment. In “Treefmgers,” on Kid A, O’Brien generated something that sounded a lot like Jonny’s beloved Messiaen. Both albums also drew on jazz, especially on Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, and Miles Davis in his fusion phase.

  Behind this creative tumult, however, was an ongoing debate about the direction of the band. The five of them often have to thrash out issues among themselves: how to balance tours with family life; how to keep the media at bay; how, simply, to get along. In this case, Yorke was fed up with verse-and-chorus music, and not everyone else agreed. O’Brien thought that the band should return to classic guitar rock, which, by the end of the nineties, had become an endangered species. “There was a lot of arguing,” Nigel Godrich recalled. “People stopped talking to one another. ‘Insanity’ is the word. In the end, I think the debate was redundant, because the band ultimately kept doing what it has always done—zigzagging between extremes. Whenever we really did try to impose an aesthetic from the outside—the aesthetic being, say, electronic—it would fail. All the drama was just a form of procrastination. Next time, three weeks, and we’re out.”

  In the summer of 2001, Radiohead seemed prepared to change direction once again. Several songs on Amnesiac stood out for their straight-ahead pop appeal. “I Might Be Wrong” is all snarling guitars; “Knives Out” goes back to the clean-cut heartbreak of the Smiths. The narcotically beautiful “Pyramid Song” could almost be a variation on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”:

  I jumped in the river, what did I see?

  Black-eyed angels swam with me …

  We all went to heaven in a little rowboat

  There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt.

  This is very much Yorke’s song, and it sounds best when he performs it alone, on an upright piano. You notice that he sings from the chest, breathing through his phrases. You also notice the unusual makeup of his piano chords. Laced with suspended tones, they hang ambiguously in the air, somewhere between serenity and sadness. “I bought a piano after OK Computer, at a time when picking up a guitar just didn’t do anything for me at all,” he says. “I bought a really flashy piano that I couldn’t play at all. In true rock-star style.” In fact, he gets a warm, mellow tone out of the piano, caressing rather than pounding the keys, keeping his wrists high.

  Yorke is the essential spark of the Radiohead phenomenon. Like all greatly gifted people, he is not always easy to be around. When a stranger approaches him, wanting unscheduled attention, he can fall unsettlingly mute. He is, by his own admission, temperamental and chronically dissatisfied. But his fault-finding circles back to the music, which is why the other band members go along with it. When he is happy, it feels like history in the making. Curled up on a dressing-room sofa after a show, he comes across as warm, alert, and faintly mischievous. “It’s nice when people talk to you as if you’re a human being, rather than as if you’d just landed from another planet,” he said. “We’re fallible, this is fallible, sometimes we’re shit, sometimes we’re not. We want to kind of mellow it all out a bit. Just chill the fuck out.” He grinned quickly, perhaps realizing that the last phrase was a contradiction in terms.

  At the beginning of June 2001, Amnesiac went on sale in the United States. There was low-level Radiohead mania around New York. Helen Weng, an eighteen-year-old from Long Island, waited at the Union Square Virgin Megastore with her friend Melissa Torres to buy Amnesiac at a midnight sale. In her bag, she carried a letter from Thom Yorke, written in his own hand, with advice on how to make yourself happy. “It’s good to know someone else has had the same feelings,” she said, clutching the paper. Over at Fez, Justin Bond, the cross-dressing star of the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb, sang “Life in a Glasshouse,” from Amnesiac, even though the record was not yet in the stores. He attributed it to “Rodeohead, a very exciting young English rock ensemble,” and rendered it as a demented torch song, which it already mostly was.

  Much modern British pop has failed to translate to the American public. Steve Martin, a publicist for Radiohead, puts it this way: “Americans don’t go for ‘cheeky.’ We like earnest.” Radiohead may be cagey, but they are never cheeky, and they are massively earnest. They have worked hard in America, logging time in the middle of the country as well as on the coasts. They are noted in the music business for being polite and unproblematic. A French hotel reservation of theirs extravagantly requested “extra towels.” One hotel doorman described them as “nice, sharp-witted, entertaining young men. Not trash-headed and stupored, as you might expect.” Despite the fatigue of their previous big tours, in 1997 and 1998, they were game
for America.

  “Sure, the last tour was bloody awful,” Ed O’Brien said, “but that was where we were at mentally, not a reaction to America. This place is just too huge to generalize about. When I was in college, I took six months off to ride around in Greyhound buses, and I got a sense of it.” He was eager to play at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, in the foothills of the Rockies. “Basically, we’ve had a fantasy scenario of reenacting U2 live at Red Rocks,” he said. “We watched the video a million times when we were kids and know every frame. ‘This song is not a rebel song!’” He lifted his fist and let out a soft roar. Fans who worry that Radiohead are losing touch with rock and roll can always look to this man, who enjoys the role of the guitar hero, even if he also sometimes kneels down in front of his samplers and molds the music into a smear of color.

  Radiohead checked into a Denver hotel on June 19. Fans descended on Red Rocks the following morning, squatting on a half-mile flight of steps that leads to the arena. Down at the bottom was a group of college students, from Pepperdine and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Their names were Elke Goldstein, Amber Hollingsworth, Matt Duffy, and Kendall Lux. “Radiohead is music for miserable people who were dropped on the floor when they were little,” Amber explained. “I don’t know about that,” Elke said. “I mean, that’s the reputation, but are we miserable?” Munching on carrots, they did not look miserable.