This is a good place to start. Radiohead’s current album, Hail to the Thief, is a distillation of the static that was buzzing in Thom’s head at the end of 2001. If all you’d heard of it was the title, you’d be forgiven for expecting an explicitly political tract. As is always the case with Radiohead at their best, though, it is and it isn’t.
“It’s not an America-baiting thing,” says Thom, as we watch Kent go by. “That’s not the point at all. And the title keeps coming from different places, anyway. First, it’s about that coup there, but look, there’s another one here, and another one over there. And you could also think of it in terms of access and influence. It sets me off in different directions depending on what day of the week it is.”
Hail to the Thief has an alternative name, The Gloaming. This is more in keeping with the obtuse titles that have graced previous Radiohead albums: 1993’s Pablo Honey (a reference to a sketch by phone pranksters The Jerky Boys), 1995’s The Bends (what Radiohead felt about their sudden rise to prominence in the early 90s), 1997’s OK Computer (an approval of, or submission to, the technology that runs our lives), 2000’s Kid A (possibly borrowed from Carl Steadman’s novel Kid A in Alphabet Land), 2001’s Amnesiac (answers on a postcard).
“I was unhappy about the potential consequences of calling it Hail to the Thief. Personal attacks, threats . . . people can get quite upset. So I wasn’t wild about that. But it’s more jubilant, and deranged, and doublespeak, like ‘collateral damage,’ or ‘regime change.’ The Gloaming was much too . . . aaah AAAAHH ahh.”
Thom delivers these last three syllables in a passable impression of a church organ.
“And that wasn’t the point either. The record definitely enters a dark place in the middle, but it isn’t the whole thing. When we were doing Kid A and Amnesiac, I had this thing that we were entering a very dark phase. I mean, you know me, I’ve made a career out of saying things like that. But it did strike me that things were going to kick off one way or another, and at the same time there was a rise, politically anyway, in ignorance and stupidity, and all that lovely euphoria after the Berlin Wall came down had disintegrated into this global political and economic anarchy.”
I’d wondered about the alternative titles also given to the songs on Hail to the Thief. They suggest a much gloomier record—the Hail to the Thief tracks “Backdrifts,” “Go to Sleep,” Where I End and You Begin,” “We Suck Young Blood,” “Scatterbrain” and “A Punchup at a Wedding” become, respectively, “Honeymoon Is Over,” “Little Man Being Erased,” “The Sky Is Falling In,” “Your Time Is Up,” “As Dead as Leaves” and “No No No No No No No.”
“I like that one. That would have been a good name for the record. Here it is, the new album by—guess who—Radiohead, and it’s called No No No No No No No.”
Little Man Being Erased would have been a very Radiohead title, as well.
“That,” beams Thom, “is my absolute favourite.”
THE SLEEVE ARTWORK of Hail to the Thief, created by Stanley Donwood, is a series of maps of major cities in which the streets have been replaced by coloured blocks, emblazoned with malevolent phrases. London, for example, has districts renamed Spiked, Take You Down, Quango, Skinned Alive and Shareholders. It could be an aerial view of the London of George Orwell’s 1984: the dystopian capital of Airstrip One, with Thom Yorke, his voice a lonely cry of aggrieved, affronted humanity, in the role of Winston Smith. “2+2=5,” the title of the opening track on Hail to the Thief, was the formula with which Orwell’s party invigilator O’Brien demonstrated to Winston his utter powerlessness before the malign forces that ran his life.
Now, stop me if I’m trying too hard, but . . .
“I did re-read 1984 a while before we did this record,” confirms Thom, “but I’d forgotten where 2+2=5 came from. The other bit in the book I thought about a lot was the fake war—we’re at war with Eurasia, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”
Did that hopelessness of Winston’s position strike a chord with you? There’s a line in “Scatterbrain”—“A moving target on a firing range”—that seems to sum up your view of most of humanity.
“It goes back to the Jubilee 2000 thing for me,” says Thom. Thom was, for a while, involved with Jubilee’s lobbying to get first world governments to write off the crippling, unrepayable debts owed them by third world governments. “I realised how out of control the disintegration was. When I started with Jubilee 2000, I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever got involved with. Potentially, we could show what’s been going on for what it is. But it never happened, because the G8 were very smart, and they and the IMF and the World Bank kept passing it to each other, and eventually I found myself thinking, ‘Now I get it. It’s never going to happen.’”
Did it put you off trying to accomplish anything outside music?
“No. I’d like to be involved, but it’s difficult to know where to go with it. There were so many disheartening things about it, the fact that so much lip service was given, and you still end up with the reality that the IMF and the World Bank are there to keep everyone under their thumb, as they have in Argentina. They affect millions of people, yet they’re completely unaccountable. I’d like to get involved again, but I find it difficult not to say that we should disband the IMF and the World Bank, to put it politely. Because that’s what I believe. Some people say you have to work within the structures, which is fair enough, because they’re the ones with the money. But if you do that, they’re just going to spin you a line. You get some money, but it’s money to make you go away.”
Was that experience reflected in the songs on Hail to the Thief?
“Oh, completely. I guess the whole record was a response to those experiences. Becoming a dad amplified it as well, because you start thinking not only am I powerless, but there’s an extremely dangerous set of things being set up for my son’s future that I can’t sort out for him. That’s quite a simple thing that’s very, very difficult to deal with.”
In “Sail To The Moon,” there’s that line “Maybe you’ll be president/ But know right from wrong/Or in the flood you’ll build an ark/And sail us to the moon.” Feel free to tell me it’s none of my business, but seeing as your son is called Noah . . .
“It wasn’t intended,” Thom smiles, “but it ended up being a song for him, yeah.”
While we’re up this way, why Noah?
“That’s what he looked like. That’s what you do. Bugger the consequences.”
I suppose he’ll get used to the ark jokes. And the “It’s up to you, Noah Yorke,” ones.
“Oh, yeah,” grins his father, who has lived down worse taunts. “He’ll be fine.”
IN THOM’S LIST of thank-yous on the sleeve of Hail to the Thief, after friends and family, there’s a nod to Spike Milligan. Radiohead dedicated The Bends to the late American comedian Bill Hicks, another funny, outraged iconoclast. Hicks and Radiohead seem a congruent fit. Both are intelligent, informed, acutely sensitive to hypocrisy—as Thom says, “Bill Hicks was able to make things that were incredibly frightening funny, and by doing that make them seem okay.” Milligan, whose best-known work was hyperactively absurd, seems a less obvious choice of hero for Thom.
Why him?
“He did a TV series called Q, which someone bought for me at a car boot sale, and I watched that a few times. There’s this one about a dalek coming home for its tea . . .”
The Pakistani dalek?
“Yeah. The Pakistani dalek family. And every time I watched it, I thought, fucking hell, this is a person on the edge. There was another one where they wheeled in a staircase, and he just walked up and down it wearing costumes. He was so inconsistent, so incredibly spontaneous, and at the same time really fragile. There was also this book, Depression and How to Survive It, which he wrote with Anthony Clare. That had a really big effect on me.”
In what way?
“There’s one amazing bit where they’re talking to people about whether there’s a positive side t
o depression. These aren’t people who are chronic, where it’s really out of control, but a lot of them say yes, there are positive sides. You see things in a way that other people don’t, and you feel things a lot harder than other people, and that’s good, it’s almost okay. It was good to hear people say it like that.”
Has this been a constant thing with you, or has there been one particular period when it got really bad?
“On the OK Computer tour, we were in a situation where people were trying to persuade us to carry on touring for another six months, we should have said no but we didn’t and I went bonkers.”
When you say bonkers . . .
“Oh, bonkers. Not violent, but . . . enormously, uncontrollably depressed, delusional.”
In what way?
“All sorts. Seeing things.”
That’s usually a sign that you should take some time off . . .
“No, actually. It was quite interesting. Sort of everywhere. Corner of the eye stuff.”
Would it be crass to suggest that this is similar to what you’re getting at with the idea of “The Gloaming”? You know, this twilight netherworld that you can’t quite see, but which you know is out there somewhere?
“No, I guess not. I guess not. You know that film Ghost? Terrible film, but there’s this bit where all these shadows come down and take that kid away who gets hit by a car. That’s what it was like. We lost contact with reality, and got to feel like everything that wasn’t related to what we were doing was annoying or irrelevant. We’ll never do that again.”
Have you read Spike Milligan’s World War II memoirs? They’re very good on people being yanked about by forces they can’t control. And they’re incredibly funny.
“No, I haven’t.”
Jonny had one in his suitcase at the Edinburgh show the other month. Borrow it from him.
“I will. You know, I think the appeal of Milligan is that he didn’t suffer fools, at all. Some people really hated him for that. But why should anyone bother? Life is short, and people are stupid. That’s definitely a depressive thing. You see the holes in things very quickly. Too quickly.”
THE COSTES HOTEL in Paris is everything Thom promised. The price of a room would leave some change from the Earth, but not much. The food is great, and all the better if you derive some perverse thrill from paying twenty quid for scrambled eggs. As for the staff, it is possible that at least eight of the dozen most beautiful women alive are currently waiting the Costes’s tables.
Those of us who came by bus park ourselves in the bar with a bottle of champagne. A woman in a peculiar dress comes over to tell Thom how much she liked the new album; Thom accepts the compliment graciously, and tells her, correctly, that she looks like Alice in Wonderland, and this goes over well. Neil Tennant drops briefly by the table, and when Colin Greenwood shows up—the only member of Radiohead who dresses at all like a millionaire rock star, or indeed at all like anything other than a dishevelled student—he’s disappointed to learn that he missed Yves St. Laurent. It’s that kind of hotel.
Thom’s one of the last to retire. He’s an even better talker with a few glasses of fizz inside him, and he’s funny, very funny, with his own failings the punchline to most of his anecdotes. Of Radiohead’s legendary appearance at Glastonbury in 1997, he remembers, “That show was a disaster. Everything that could have gone wrong did. I thundered off stage, really ready to kill, and my girlfriend grabbed me, made me stop, and said, ‘Listen.’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was amazing.”
A few hours earlier on the bus, Thom and Ed had sat down to write the setlists for their festival appearances, and for the performance for French television that Thom and Jonny would be recording in Paris. In between lobbying as forcefully as I dared on behalf of my favourites—I believe I may have saved “Exit Music” for some lucky festival-goers—I’d asked Thom if his position made it more or less difficult to articulate Radiohead’s hymns to humanity’s impotence. He’s a millionaire rock star, after all, and gets to run his life more on his own terms than most of us.
“It’s easier,” he decides. “It’s easier, because you have more time to think about these things, more time to listen to Radio 4 and worry. But it’s sort of my job. Just like you’ve got your job, mine is to be the Ides of March type person, and some poor fucker has to do it. Somebody has to put the jester’s hat on and make a tit of himself. ‘We’re all fucking doomed.’ It might as well be me.”
23
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR ROUBLE
Ambulance chasing with Highway Patrol, Moscow
MARCH 1996
THIS DISPATCH DATES from a distant—yet startlingly recent—age in which foreign television was a novelty, rather than something you could ingest about as much of as you could stand whenever you felt like it. Indeed, I only happened across this story, about a Russian show called Highway Patrol, because I saw something about it on a British television programme about how weird and remote and exotic foreign television was. My preparations for the story were quaintly pre-internet. I made a note of the production company as the British programme’s credits rolled, got their number out of the Yellow Pages, called and asked them for details of their contacts in Moscow—which they happily gave up, as journalists always should to a fellow hack—and sent some faxes to the pertinent numbers. I was planning to visit Moscow anyway, under my own steam, and thought that if I could sell this story somewhere, it would at least cover the hotel bills.
This was my first visit to Russia, which itself seemed a fairly otherwordly proposition at that time. Less than five years previously, Russia had been the principal constituent of a seemingly invincible leviathan called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. By 1996, it was the Wild West, with the horses, Colt revolvers and ten-gallons swapped for black Mercedes-Benzes, AK-47s and furry hats, and that’s what Highway Patrol had been established to report on and profit from. Lurid and ratings-worthy though the content of Highway Patrol certainly was, the real story was being missed. While the attention of most Russians was consumed by the relatively petty crime running rampant on the streets and television screens, arguably the greatest theft in human history was taking place elsewhere, as a small clique of instant billionaires made off with the former superpower’s awesome natural resources. I’ve been back to Russia a few times since and have always been struck by the acutely personal disappointment and grief expressed by many Russians—that the unspeakable horror show that was their twentieth century should have no redeeming climax, that the whole ghastly grand guignol only ended, in effect, with someone stealing the set.
An infinitesimal proportion of Russia’s twentieth-century agony is chronicled below, and I should issue the caveat that readers especially sensitive to the suffering of children in particular should probably avoid the next few pages. I’m sure that I’d wondered, as all young reporters must, how I’d feel when I first saw death up close. This was when I found out, and what I discovered was an indifference that, initially at least, surprised me. I mean, I didn’t enjoy the spectacle, and I turned away as soon as I felt I’d seen enough to get the idea, but neither of the violently deceased corpses I encountered here—nor any of the (really not that many) others I’ve seen since—have since troubled my sleep or my waking hours. It took me a while to figure that out, but what it came down to, I think, was that it was already too late for them: there was simply nothing to be done. If—okay, when—the recollections rear up and start clawing, the ones that leave a mark are always those memories of living people, the outwardly unremarkable but essentially decent and kind ones, whose ambitions and hopes have been needlessly curtailed by avoidably stupid and cruel political or economic circumstances. For most of Russia’s history, that would serve as a description of most Russians.
IN MOSCOW AS everywhere else, midnight is where bad television goes to die. Freezing on a spring night in a cheap hotel, I’m keeping warm by getting up every few minutes and walking across the room to change channels. On channel one, capitalist p
ornography—a low-rent game show tottering on a set that wobbles perceptibly every time one of the contestants leans on their buzzer. On channel two, a dismal documentary involving a surely unnecessary number of pictures of tractors. On channels three and four, music videos in a proportion of roughly four parts ballsachingly awful Russian ballad singers to one part the only thing worse: Phil Collins. On channel five, grainy highlights of an ice hockey game, apparently filmed on an ageing Super-8 camera by someone who had one or two drinks before reporting to work.
And over on channel six, a ghostly pale face leers from the screen, its bloodshot eyes divided by a ragged gash running from forehead to nose. A trickle of dark blood dribbles from the cut into a froth-encrusted, furiously yammering mouth which emits a frantic, babbled commentary as the camera pans dispassionately around the room in which this apparition is sitting, amid the detritus of a quiet night in that has clearly gone badly, badly wrong: pizza crusts of various vintages in cardboard trays, empty bottles strewn across the mildewed carpet, two spent syringes in a vase full of dirty water and, slumped in the far corner, the scene’s other protagonist. His left eye has been neatly replaced by a bullethole, and the contents of his head splashed across the wallpaper behind him.
The camera dwells on the corpse just that little bit too long, the way you do when you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing, then pulls suddenly away, just like a human eye flinching from something unsightly. It rests again on the hysterical narrator, as he’s handcuffed by police and hustled from view. A date—today’s—appears along the bottom of the screen in type, followed by a time, about six hours ago. The picture fades to a shot of a sponsor-spangled white BMW estate leaving the site, and credits roll. So ends another episode of Highway Patrol, the most popular television programme in Russia, and one of the most watched in the world.
Rock and Hard Places Page 32