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The Post-Rock Band

Forty years after the Beatles, Radiohead has reinvented the
idea of the rock group -- with as much John Cage as John
Lennon. By GERALD MARZORATI Photographs by JAN DAGO

Audio
Listen to tracks from Radiohead's new album.

adiohead is a
significant
band at a bad time
for significant
bands. Radiohead
took its name from
a song by Talking
Heads, which says
something about
Radiohead's
aspirations, and
something too Broad Band: Experimental noises abound on
about how self- Radiohead's new album. Photograph by Jan
conscious and Dago/Liaison Agency for The New York Times.
historically
freighted any
aspiring band cannot help being now. Radiohead is making music at
a moment when the epoch of bands would seem to be coming to a
close, a moment when what is novel in popular music is being made
not by groups of young men playing guitars and writing and singing
their own songs but rather by individual D.J.'s and one- or two-
person production teams using turntables and computers and
assorted electronic gadgets. It's a moment that has the feel of a
mainstream-music paradigm shift -- away from pop-rock and toward
hip-hop, dance music and what gets called electronica. It's a
moment nearly 40 years removed from the last big paradigm shift,
secured by the advent of the first significant band, the Beatles,
whom the members of Radiohead seem to talk about all the time.

Radiohead is a band that is dealing with the sea change in popular

music in ways wholly unlike Limp Bizkit and the other "rap metal"
bands whose albums have dominated the Billboard charts for the
last two years -- bands that have taken the worst aspects of hip-hop
(misogynist rap lyrics and monotonous beats) and fused them with
heavy-metal white-guy bathos. Radiohead is a quintet whose
members first met 15 years ago at the Abingdon School in
Oxfordshire, England. They are not angry or wildly disaffected but
serious, inward-turned and uneasy, in particular Thom Yorke, the
band's lead singer. Yorke possesses one of the finest voices ever to
grace a pop recording -- it circles operatically on its way to a
lustrous falsetto, and it is what ultimately makes a Radiohead song a
Radiohead song. Yorke is also the band's chief songwriter and
driving force, or as he has put it: "We operate like the U.N. I'm
America." Yorke would not speak to me for some time when I
joined the band on the road for several days last month in
Copenhagen, and he also chooses not to speak to his fellow band
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members from time to time, which tends to make them even more
uneasy. ("Thom can be rather . . . hard on people," is how Nigel
Godrich, the precocious young producer who works with
Radiohead, put it, choosing his words carefully, so as not to make
things harder for himself, I did not doubt.)

Three years ago, Radiohead confronted the looming end of album-

based, guitar-saturated, lyric-dense rock by counterintuitively
releasing "OK Computer," a 70's-redolent concept album stuffed
with grandly contoured melodies, rigorous guitar patternings, odd
time signatures, melancholy minor chords and atonal changes and
weighty dystopian lyrics summoning a world of technological
disasters, hypercapitalist conformity and things moving so fast that
there was no longer time to do things like listen to painstakingly
wrought, crepuscularly beautiful concept albums like "OK
Computer." (If Don DeLillo's "Underworld" were a rock album, it
would sound like "OK Computer.") The kind of aging white men
who edit music journals and write rock criticism and still listen to
albums under headphones (and many times over again) hailed "OK
Computer" as a masterpiece, and a lot of other people loved it, too:
it was nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy and has sold,
at last count, 4.7 million copies worldwide. At one of the shows I
saw the band play, it seemed half the mesmerized crowd (hipster
student types, mostly) were singing along to the strangest song on
the album, "Paranoid Android" -- a song that begins with the lyric
"Please could you stop the noise I'm trying to get some rest/from all
the unborn-chicken voices in my head," and climaxes six minutes
later with a brooding Russianate chorale.

Radiohead is releasing a new album this week, its fourth. And in the
music industry, which, in the wake of the success of "OK
Computer," has been scrambling to sign Radiohead-esque bands
(Travis, Coldplay, Muse and others), the new album has created that
amorphous though tinglingly palpable sense of anticipation no
album by a band has generated in years. (Playing no small role in
this has been Radiohead's aggressively passive rollout strategy: no
advanced single for radio and no video, though MTV is showing
brief video "blips" provided by Radiohead that feature sound bites
from the album.) Titled "Kid A," the new album is not a concept
album, but it is, like its predecessor, one for the headphones.

"Kid A" has one genuine rock song,

Gerald Marzorati is the editorial
"Optimistic"; it's ja#nglingly
director of the magazine. He has
reminiscent of R.E.M., a band whose
written about Beck, Air and
music and artfully considered way of
other musical topics.
going about being pop musicians had a
considerable influence on Radiohead
early on. As for the other nine songs, many of them don't have
verse-chorus structures, most of them blur at their edges beneath
synthesizer- and radio-generated atmospherics and nearly all of
them have lamentatory or incantatory or imperative lyrics built of
fragments that might have been pulled from Tristan Tzara's hat. It is
not "difficult" music, though, as searching as much of it is, mainly
because the sonic textures Radiohead has worked up for the songs
are so evocative and absorbing. Sounds from the past (a churchy
harmonium, a bowed double bass, a florid, cascading harp) surge
and fade amid burbling electro-beats, taped and looped vocals and
computer-manipulated guitar and keyboard riffs: it's an aural
palimpsest, its delights surfacing slowly, and concentrated in the
rubs and the musically shaped spaces. For example, on the album's
title track, the name for which was lifted from a software program
of children's voices, a ravishing sound sculpture is constructed from
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an Old World music-box motif; a bit of jazzy drumming taped, cut

and pasted; a Gramophone-era vocal melody stretched and garbled
by a vocoder; and a watery foundation established by an Ondes
Martinot, the protosynthesizer used by the French composer Olivier
Messiaen, who is much admired by Radiohead's lead guitarist and
keyboard experimenter, Jonny Greenwood.

Jonny's older brother, Colin, is Radiohead's bass player and, even in

a band that unwinds back at the hotel by drinking a glass or two of
wine and worrying about the consolidation of the British publishing
industry, he stands out as the most intellectually minded member of
the group. (He read English at Cambridge.) When I asked him one
morning last month, while we sat and chatted in the gardens of
Copenhagen's Rosenborg Castle, how "Kid A" had come about, he
thought for a moment, cited a Leonard Bernstein dictum that all
music-making is about ambiguity and deletion, mentioned matter-
of-factly that during the "Kid A" sessions there had been moments
when the band seemed on the verge of breaking up, then finally
said: "The whole thing, really, comes down to finding a new sound.
You think about the Beatles, they sort of came up with a new
approach every album -- they listened to all this stuff then brought it
to bear on their work. And that's how we work, too. But of course
they were at the beginning, inventing how it could be done." He
paused, and then he said, "We are people who have worked together
for 15 years, a rare thing -- especially for men, when you think
about it -and it's getting harder not only for us, but it would seem for
music itself, to do something new."

he surprisingly strong sales of "OK Computer" may have been

driven to some small degree by the overwhelming critical
embrace of the album, but are more likely owed to the labors of the
band itself, which spent a year and a half on three continents touring
in support of the album. It is the way a band has always become big,
and it is a terrible grind. Of course, only a band with considerable
ambition would ever find itself out on the road that way. But Thom
Yorke doesn't like the word "ambition."

"We used to be more ambitious," he said when I brought the topic

up. "And what does that mean, anyway, ambition?"

'I think we I shifted a bit: hadn't the fame and fortune

that resulted from the saturation touring of
managed "OK Computer" brought Radiohead a
somehow to whole new level of freedom and control?
bend the
machines to our "You can say we've earned the privilege to
will,' Greenwood do things our way," he replied, "and I
would say to you" -- and he did say it, and
says.
you can imagine.

Then he laughed a little and seemed slightly embarrassed. Yorke

comes across as someone who has had to work up a certain hauteur
to get what he wants aesthetically and also to insulate that art-
minded aspect of him from all that encompasses the Biz. But there
is also a boyish sweetness to him, and that English decency Orwell
put such stock in, and that goes too for the other band members --
they hold doors and ask after the health and spirits of roadies and
sign autographs in the cool drizzle outside their hotel as if they liked
nothing more and apologize for everything. "Sorry," Yorke said to
me. Then he thought for a moment before going on to say: "We
knew a lot about bands, you know, about the endless touring and
things you need to do to be able to be a big band at the end of all
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that. But by the end, those last months on the 'OK Computer' tour --
it was just totally wrong.

"You know," he continued, "we always had this idea that the good
thing about being in a band was people clicking, keeping one
another's interest going -- all the stuff you can't do in a bedroom by
yourself. And here I was spending days thinking: The hell with this
band. It was awful."

Yorke, who is 31, which is

roughly the median age of a
Radiohead member, was
seated on a sofa and sipping
white wine in the band's
dressing room following one
of the concerts last month in
Copenhagen, an early stop on
a brief European tour nothing
like the one to promote "OK
Computer." Because
Radiohead can stand neither
the acoustics nor the
atmosphere of big arenas,
each concert was being
staged in a huge, custom-
built tent carefully raised in a
big city park. This required a
Band on the Run: In Copenhagen, Jonny
crew of dozens not only to Greenwood and O'Brien; Yorke. Photographs
hoist and lower the indigo- by Jan Dago/Liaison Agency for The New
colored tent but to work the York Times.
custom sound and lighting
systems that were fitted
beneath them, and this crew, in turn, as well as the band and its crew
-- managers, the "guitar tech," and so on -- were fed through the day
by a catering team that also found time to shop locally each morning
for an elaborate, multicourse preconcert dinner each night.
Mornings and early afternoons were mostly free for band members
to read, exercise, stroll around. Late in the afternoon they assembled
under the tent for a brief sound check. Radiohead went on stage on
the early side by rock standards, around 8:30, following an opening
band (in Copenhagen, it was an arty Icelandic group called Sigur
Ros), and were done by 11. "Thom just didn't want be working all
the time anymore," Colin Greenwood said. "People still cling to this
idea that bands don't work hard -- maybe they can't acknowledge it,
since we are part of their leisure -- but it is hard."

Radiohead's two Copenhagen shows were workouts -- spirited,

exacting and at times wondrous, as when, say, Jonny Greenwood
"played" a transistor radio like a Stratocaster on one new song, or,
when he and the band's other guitar player, Ed O'Brien, during
another new one, knelt over sampling machines, capturing Thom
Yorke's voice and strange electric-piano chord changes and sending
them droning and echoing over the crowd like otherworldly
plainsong. "It's set up as an experiment in a way, that song," Yorke
said later. "I like that it cannot ever be the same any night by design.
I get bored. I'm bored with the rock thing. Aren't you?"

ne morning last month I drove through Abingdon, a

picturesque market town, and then past the Abingdon School,
with its brick-red Victorian buildings and beveled hedgerows and
schoolboys in their blazers and ties, gathered on a wide stretch of
lawn. Showing me around was Chris Hufford, a partner in
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Radiohead's longtime management team, Courtyard Management,

and as he talked of how his son had decided against attending
Abingdon -- Hufford and his associates have their offices in the
nearby village of Sutton Courtenay -- I couldn't take my eyes off
those public-school boys, baffled as to how the members of
arguably the most significant band of this moment could have been
among them not so many years before. At the Abingdon School,
Colin Greenwood studied classical guitar, Selway studied
percussion, Yorke wrote incidental music for a production of "A
Midsummer Night's Dream" and Jonny Greenwood manned a viola
chair in a local youth orchestra. What would become Radiohead
more or less came together, at Yorke's instigation, in a school band
room.

The success of Radiohead has brought with it the publication of no

fewer than three quicky biographies of the band, and in each, the
impetus for the band's formation, and, for that matter, the darkish
modalities of its lyrics and music, are traced to Yorke's childhood,
and a series of painful operations on his lazy left eye that not only
failed to correct the condition but also damaged his vision and left
his eyelid drooping slightly, for which he was ceaselessly ridiculed
by other boys ("Salamander," he was called at Abingdon).
Ultimately, though, Radiohead's roots are not that much different
from those of the countless bands before them: they liked hanging
out together, clique-style, shared a passion for particular recordings
-- especially those of American groups like R.E.M. and the Boston-
based college rockers the Pixies -- and thought playing music would
be a great means of cementing their bond and a way to make use of
it.

"The really weird thing is how serious I was about it," Ed O'Brien
recalled one afternoon in Copenhagen.

"We all were," Jonny Greenwood quickly amended.

The three of us were having a cup of coffee at a bar near their

Copenhagen hotel before they headed to the tent for a sound check.

Greenwood: "I went off to college, and it was for me, like, O.K., I
hope this week isn't too rough, because I have to get back home for
band practice this weekend. I mean, the band's been what I do --
been my life -- since I was 13."

O'Brien: "At Abingdon we'd rehearse, tape the rehearsal, listen to

the tape of the rehearsal, rehearse some more. . . . "

Greenwood: "Yeah, we'd hardly ever play for anybody."

O'Brien: "Nobody liked us, except us."

Greenwood: "That's true."

O'Brien: "I'd play tapes of us for people when I went off to college -
- I mean, the band was my raison d'tre -- and they'd give me that
look that said: Keep studying."

Greenwood: "We were so serious."

O'Brien: "We'd sit together in a pub or something in Abingdon,

which can be an incredibly boring place to be at that age -- maybe
we're 16 or 17- and we'd lay out the plan of what we were going to
do."

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Greenwood: "I mean, when you really think about it -- "

O'Brien: "Uh-oh. I feel a Charlie Watts-ism coming here -- "

Greenwood: "Actually, I think we just wanted to make a record."

O'Brien: "More than that."

hile Thom Yorke was at Exeter University in the late 1980's,

where he studied art and literature, he wrote a song called
"Creep." It's about a drunken guy, troubled by his self-image, for
whom the sight of a young beauty brings on a crisis of confidence,
and worse. Late in the summer of 1992, when Radiohead was in a
studio to work on a single, it got recorded, almost as an
afterthought, and the producers applauded. A four-song EP, their
first recording after signing a deal with Britain's Parlophone label,
which is part of the globe-spanning EMI Group, had been released
at the end of 1991 in Britain, and gone nowhere. "Creep" pretty
much went nowhere in Britain, too.

But the story of "Creep" does

not end there. A music director
at a San Francisco college
station found the single in a
Berkeley record shop's import
rack and added it to his
station's playlist. Within weeks
it was an underground rage up
and down the California coast.
"Creep" was included on Band Stands: Yorke still communes with the
Radiohead's first album, fans, after 15 years. Photograph by Jan
"Pablo Honey," released in Dago/Liaison Agency for The New York
February 1993, and "Creep" Times.
drove it into the charts. A new,
bowdlerized radio-edit version of "Creep" was produced for
American modern rock stations, excising the emotive use of an
obscenity, and the single went into deep rotation. By the end of the
summer of 1993, "Creep" was a national alt-rock smash -- the next
new slacker anthem, following Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
and Beck's "Loser."

Radiohead toured America, and everywhere kids in flannel shirts

screamed for "Creep." But often they would leave once the band
played the song. And then a follow-up single went nowhere. And by
the end of 1993, Radiohead was being written off.

Kids still yell for "Creep" at Radiohead concerts, which is an

indication of how important a hit single can be in building a fan
base. Radiohead won't play "Creep" anymore, and when I brought it
up with Yorke, he lit into American radio, and how modern-rock
D.J.'s tormented him with questions as to whether the "Creep" was
him, and what had his parents or somebody done to him, did he
think, to make him turn out this way: the pop-analysis inquiries of
the grunge era. "You can't imagine how horrible that was," he told
me. "And the thing about being a one-hit wonder: you know, you do
come to believe it. You saw you don't but you do. It messed me up
good and proper."

Kid A" came together not far from Abingdon, in a gathering

of old stone barns that the band has converted into
Radiohead Central, with recording studios, workstations, meeting
areas and bedrooms. "Kid A" did not come together easily, however.
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In making the previous albums, it worked like this: Yorke would

have some songs roughed out, and these would be added to songs
left over from previous sessions, and the band would gather and
rehearse them, each member going off into his corner for a day or
two and working up his riff for a song or, perhaps, an entire idea for
an arrangement. There would also be time during these rehearsals
for listening to recordings each of the members happened to be
intrigued by then.

"It's like you hear something and you say to the others, Let's aim for
that -- that sound," Jonny Greenwood explained. "And then you
might aim for that, knowing your style and limitations will keep you
from ever getting there -- John Lennon said this -- but they will, as a
result of where you've aimed, maybe get you somewhere new and
great." (Greenwood mentioned that his obsession with Miles Davis's
"Bitches Brew" had set the tone when they were working on "OK
Computer." )

O'Brien had convinced himself, even before work began on the new
album, that Radiohead should do a sort of back-to-roots guitar
record, closer in feel to the band's second album, "The Bends."
However, when he and the other band members gathered to rehearse
and begin recording in a Paris studio in January of last year -- the
new Oxfordshire complex was still under construction -- they
learned that that was the last thing Yorke had in mind. He just didn't
think guitar bands were "relevant" anymore, he told the other band
members. He was interested most in new, more contemplative forms
of hip-hop, like that produced by San Francisco's DJ Shadow; and
Yorke had taken with him to Paris recordings from the early 90's by
Autechre and the Aphex Twin, weavers of rave-scene chill-out
sound tapestries. The other band members didn't get it.

"It was rather incredible to see," Nigel Godrich, who went to Paris
with the band, recalled one evening a few weeks ago, sitting behind
a control board at a studio in St. John's Wood. "I mean, Radiohead is
a remarkable guitar band. But what Thom wanted now was a sound
that doesn't tend to get made by bands."

The band left Paris having gotten nowhere and reassembled in

Copenhagen a few weeks later. It got worse. The new songs Yorke
had, dozens of them, were mostly sketches. Godrich recalls Yorke
not talking much to anyone. O'Brien found the two weeks there
"horrendous." In April, the group tried it again, in an empty mansion
in Gloucestershire. There were tense meetings. What basically got
decided was that the band would not split up. Phil Selway,
Radiohead's soft-spoken drummer, told me : "I think what was
happening back then was that for the first time we didn't have
anything to push against as a group, and so we pushed against each
other."

Not until early this year, with Radiohead regrouped in the new
studios, did Yorke's idea for the album begin to sink in with
everybody else. The band members became more comfortable with
setting aside their instruments; at one point last winter they actually
split into two groups in two different rooms, one of them charged
with making and recording noises and musical snippets without
using guitars or drums, the other with reworking this material
technologically with studio gizmos and computers. The
understanding grew that there would be tracks on which one or
more of them would not appear. In a sense, the very notion of being
a band member was evolving: what would count most now were

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taste and ideas. "We were working more like producers than
musicians," Selway says.

By spring's end, they had enough material for two albums. That
freed up time for another round of anguishing meetings about what
tracks should make it onto the album, and in which sequence they
should be arranged. "Nigel says working with us was like working
with five method actors," Colin Greenwood says. Then, talking
about the album itself, he went on to say, "I think we managed
somehow to bend the machines to our will -- that's what we did
together, as a band. We approached them our way, navely, without
reading all those instruction manuals -- we don't have the patience
for that. It's as if in this way we created a kind of false sense of the
nostalgia some people get by using older synthesizers from the 70's
and 80's."

Strangely, this does come through: Radiohead used up-to-the-minute

methods to make a kind of artifact of the future's past- a work that
weirdly harks back to right now and the looming exhaustion of the
band paradigm.

efying record-industry conventional wisdom, the band's current

European tour will be all but over before the album's release, and
there will be no American tour at all. Radiohead will appear on
"Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 14, and play one concert at the Greek
Theater in Los Angeles later in the month. The only radio show the
band will visit is "Morning Becomes Eclectic," the art-pop drive-
time show on the Santa Monica public-station KCRW. Radiohead's
renunciation of the standard album-release strategy is talked about
by industry people as the most understatedly ingenious publicity
ploy since the Beatles' cover for the "white album."

Tony Wadsworth, president and C.E.O. of EMI, caught himself

when he began to tell me recently about how commercially savvy
the band is. But he did venture: "These five guys are at a point
where they are not going to do a thing they don't want to do --
they're not going to be traveling salesmen. They want to find other
ways of doing what has to be done to get their records into as many
hands as possible."

The members of Radiohead talk about releasing more music from

their recent sessions as early as next spring, either in album form, as
an EP or online. They have also begun to discuss taking their tent
tour to the United States next year. For the moment, they are not
talking about not being Radiohead. "I think it will be our personal
lives someday that get us drifting away from each other, not
aesthetic disagreements," Colin Greenwood said. "I think we'll
know the moment when it really comes, as opposed to all the
moments when it almost really comes," said Ed O'Brien. Thom
Yorke said: "I think we will exhaust all the ideas the band has. And
then we'll exhaust the band."

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October 01, 2000

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