+

CHAPTER 5
SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK ALIEN
AND THE POETRY OF PERSPECTIVE

OK Computer

Another thing tormented me in those days: the fact that no one

else was like me, and I was like no one else. I am alone, I thought,
and they are everybody.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

The idea of the outsider, the individual who is physically part

of everyday society, but feels alienated and rejected by its norms
and rules, is core to the whole genre of alternative music from
which Radiohead came. Part of the appeal of performers such as Ian
Curtis of Joy Division, Morrissey of The Smiths and Kurt Cobain
of Nirvana is their essential otherness. They didnt sound or look
the way that normal pop stars were supposed to.
Of course, this outsider chic didnt begin in the aftermath of
punk. Its an artistic and literary model that goes back several hundred years; its possible to see Shakespeares Hamlet as a precursor
to self-absorbed indie kids who think too much, and cant properly
engage with the mundane unpleasantness of life around them. From
the mid-19th Century on, writers such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, T.S.
Eliot, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald created protagonists whose
identifying characteristic was that they simply didnt fit. But it was
the Second World War and its aftermath that spawned pop-existentialist heroes, such as Meursault (in The Outsider by Albert Camus)
and Holden Caulfield (in J.D. Salingers The Catcher In The Rye),
who would become archetypes for writers, artists, movie-makers,
musicians and countless angst-ridden teenagers who, like Hamlet,
wore customary suits of inky black.
Thom Yorke had felt like an outsider from an early age; his
size, his lazy eye, the numerous operations he endured, and the resulting bullying, meant that he saw life in a different way both
metaphorically and literally. Confronted with the meat-headed thuggery of his contemporaries, his attitude flip-flopped between abject
self-loathing and a feisty assurance that the problem was with the
world, not with him. As he said in 1996, Im surrounded by a world
of grinning idiots and I dont think I want to be another one.1
So there must have been some resonance when an English
teacher at Abingdon asked him to imagine himself as an alien that

59

Radiohead

had landed in the middle of Oxford. The task was almost certainly
inspired by the poem A Martian Sends A Postcard Home (1979),
by the poet, critic and academic Craig Raine. In it, the alien sender
of the card describes everyday, familiar objects in terms that are
bizarre, almost surreal, but all make some sort of sense.2 Books, for
example, are mechanical birds with many wings that cause the
eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. The poem in turn
spawned a short-lived school of Martian poetry that sought to use
extreme, often comical metaphors to shake English verse from the
grip of cosy familiarity.
The idea of turning the alien imagery into a song didnt occur
to Yorke until he was driving through the Oxfordshire countryside
one night, and struck a pheasant. Precedent might suggest that this
would provoke another anti-car lyric (see Chapter 3), but for some
reason he conceived the idea of writing about hovering extra-terrestrials. In any case, although clearly influenced by the Raine poem
(or at least the question it posed), Yorkes finished lyric doesnt occupy the point of view of the spaceman. Instead, the human narrator lives in an anodyne town where you cant smell a thing, and
imagines aliens hovering above, observing homo sapiens and, as
he put it in 1998, pissing themselves laughing at how humans go
about their daily business.3 If theres a direct influence here, its the
puppet spacemen who peopled the Smash commercials on British
television in the 1970s, chuckling merrily as foolish housewives
chose to peel, boil and mash fresh potatoes rather than enjoy the
delicious wallpaper paste on offer in handy plastic packets.
In the second verse, Yorke occupies a different archetype, the
human taken up into a flying saucer. This is an extremely common
occurrence in modern folklore, and is probably most familiar from
Whitley Striebers (supposedly factual) book Communion (1987),
in which the author describes being abducted by non-humans, presumably extra-terrestrials. Yorkes narrator looks forward to viewing the world as Id love to see it from the alien craft but knows
that if he ever told his earthbound acquaintances, hed meet with
scorn and disbelief, and finally be locked up; a return to the classic
existential, indie-kid outsider once more.
In many ways, the narrator acts out the desires of the other voices on OK Computer. Many of them appear to be suburban
wage-slaves, seething with indignation at their lot, and the madness

60

OK Computer

that surrounds them, but unwilling or unable to make the necessary

leap. The voice in Subterranean Homesick Alien is that of the little boy who points out the emperors nakedness. This time nobody
believes him; but hes right, and this gives him a sense of moral
leverage over the people who just keep their heads down and wait
for the next pay cheque.
Of course, Radiohead werent the first band to use science
fiction imagery in popular music. Novelty records such as Flying
Saucer by Buchanan and Goodman (1956) and Telstar by The
Tornadoes (1962) responded to the contemporary excitement over
the space race. By the late 1960s, a whole space rock genre began to coalesce: Hawkwind are the band most associated with the
phrase, although some of Pink Floyds music from the same period
has been included under this heading. While space rock often used
imagery borrowed from science fiction, its as much to do with the
mental spaces that were opened up by the use of LSD and other
psychedelic drugs. Some of the shoegazing bands with which Radiohead were associated in their early days shared many musical
characteristics with the early space rockers, especially the use of
soaring, phased guitar lines; the conceptual angle was picked up by
bands as diverse as Funkadelic and ELO, both of whom used flying
saucers as part of the stage sets. A number of other performers made
their own supposed interplanetary associations a key element of
their public identities: jazz bandleader Sun Ra was, according to his
publicity, born on Saturn; the cult musician Lucia Pamela claimed
to have been the first person to record an album on the moon (1969s
Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela); David Bowie also toyed with
a number of astronaut and alien alter egos (see footnote 2).
Many of these performers used astral imagery as a means
of expressing huge, unwieldy concepts; in Subterranean Homesick Alien, on the other hand, the evident banality and insignificance of the situation is key. The narrator hasnt really been abducted by space monsters; hes just bored out of his mind. Despite
Radioheads reputation for glum self-loathing, they were clearly
having fun here. As with the previous track on the album, the
spirit of Douglas Adams is at work. Arthur Dent, the hero of The
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, is rescued from the imminent
destruction of Earth by hitching a ride on a Vogon spaceship; another key character is Ford Prefect, a correspondent for the eponymous

61

Radiohead

guide, who observes Earthlings while pretending to be, not from

a small planet near Betelgeuse, but from Guildford (a dull city not
far from London). The title, too, indicates that nothing should be
taken too seriously. It clearly refers to Bob Dylans Subterranean
Homesick Blues (1965), but as with that classic of surrealist rock/
pop, the link between title and lyric might be a little tenuous.4 In any
case, the original title for the Radiohead song was Uptight, a word
that reflects the seething inner life of the narrator, but not the warm,
almost drowsy feel of the music.
Its as if, while creating the lyrics, Yorke has taken an initial
idea, then played with it over and over again until most traces of the
original concept (the Martians view of Oxford) have become vague
smudges. The music followed a similar path. Originally performed
by Yorke and Jonny Greenwood alone, on acoustic guitars, the arrangement on OK Computer came about when the singer forced
himself to listen to Bitches Brew (1970), the seminal jazz-rock album by trumpeter Miles Davis; this was despite his notorious initial
belief that the record was nothing but nauseating chaos.5 Apart
from the prominent electric piano, there seems to be little obvious
musical link between the two works, with Subterranean Homesick
Alien still clinging to the indicators that tie it to classic rock. The
chiming 12-string guitars have something of The Byrds about them;
the piano run beginning at 1:52 sounds a little like Riders on the
Storm by The Doors. Its more the feel and structure of the piece
that echoes Davis, with smooth, bubbling runs disturbed by brief
flashes of violence (in the case of Subterranean, by the urgent uptight! choruses). Jonny Greenwood suggested that by attempting to
emulate a particular sound, and failing, something else interesting
might happen:
Sometimes a guitar plugged into an amplifier isnt enough. So
you hear sounds in your head or you hear sounds on a record
and you say, I want it to sound like this, and sometimes it
wont, for whatever the reason. I cant play the trumpet so its
not going to sound like Bitches Brew But at least you can
try and emulate the atmosphere. You aim for these things and
end up with your own garbled version.6

62

OK Computer

This, then, seems to be the Radiohead formula: take a halfremembered creative writing assignment inspired by a surreal, science-fiction poem, a 27-year-old piece of jazz rock created by a man
in insane sunglasses, attempt to copy them both, and fail. And yet,
at the same time, it works.
This really was turning out to be a mighty peculiar record.

N o t e s:

Krishna Rau, interview, Shift, June, 1996.

Of course, the idea of an outsider bringing an ironic perspective
to society also goes back several centuries: for example, Thomas
Mores Utopia (1516); Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels (1726);
and Thomas Bages Hermsprong (1796). But the concept really
came into its own with the advent of science fiction as a specific
genre. The movie The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) has the
alien Klaatu astonished at the barbarism of humankind; Walter Teviss 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth (filmed by Nicolas
Roeg in 1976, with David Bowie) similarly presents earthbound
madness through extraterrestrial eyes. A further refinement of the
idea comes in Mark Haddons The Curious Incident Of The Dog In
The Night Time (2003) which has a first-person narrative with the
alien perspective of an autistic teenager; avoiding the cracks in
the pavement is a classic autistic behaviour.
3
Doheny, p. 64.
4
And the aliens arent subterranean, of course. They stay in their
spaceship, which is presumably above the ground, rather than under
it.
5
Paytress, p. 40.
6
Randall, p. 147.
2