Thom Yorke (13 page)

For Thom, too, it was half-joke (“in as much as my jokes are ever funny”) and half-metaphor for loneliness and isolation. It was about the same craving for something extraordinary to happen that is the hallmark of the song ‘The Bends’. But the songs he’d written were, seemingly, much more outward-looking than the tracks on
The Bends
album, and much less introspective. ‘Electioneering’, for example, was about the cynicism and mendacity of politicians. However, underneath there was surely still an autobiographical element that Thom didn’t seem to be able to get away from. It was based partly on his experiences on tour, constantly saying hello to new people and feeling like a fraud.

“I went through this American tour where we just seemed to be shaking hands all the time,” he said to
Jam Showbiz
, “and I was getting a bit sick of it and upset by it. So I came up with this running joke with myself, where I used to shake people’s hands and say, ‘I trust I can rely on your vote?’ They’d go ‘Ha, ha, ha’ and look at me like I was a nutcase.”

One of Thom’s main aims when he was writing the lyrics of
OK Computer
was avoiding the trap of easy sentimentality. As a result songs like ‘Karma Police’, ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘Electioneering’ have a tone, superficially, of dark sarcasm. There’s very little ‘emoting’ except, perhaps, on the heartbreaking ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’. And even there the protagonists of the song, apparently running away in some kind of suicide pact, refuse to let the listener indulge in pity, finishing with the infamous line, later included in the album’s artwork, about choking.

Yet, somehow, as they recorded the album the songs were developing their own undercurrent of deep sadness. “
The Bends
was a record of consolation,” Thom said afterwards. “But this one was sad. And I didn’t know why.” Despite these dark thoughts, the initial stages of recording were a huge buzz. The ‘teacher’s away’ vibe that they’d felt when John Leckie disappeared during
The Bends
sessions seemed to be there to stay. They had Dan Rickwood with them as well as Nigel; they were all in their mid-to-late-twenties and all heading, initially at least, in the same direction.

The first two weeks were among the most enjoyable experiences Radiohead had ever had while recording. During that time they essentially finished recording the whole album and then, in their usual fashion, they set about pulling it to pieces. “It was heaven and hell,” said Thom.

The house, from being a friendly, welcoming place suddenly seemed weird and sinister. They started to notice strange things going on. “There was a very odd presence in the house we were recording in,” Thom said in an interview with
The Times
. “I just didn’t sleep at all. I started seeing things, hearing things … I mean, we made jokes about it, but there was fear everywhere, coming out of the walls and floors.”

Part of the problem was that the house was in a deep valley and it was incredibly quiet. Thom, who lived in the centre of Oxford, wasn’t used to the deathly silence. All night he’d lie there worrying about the sequencing of the tracks or about particular sounds. That might explain why he started crediting the house with its own, malevolent personality.

“The house was oppressive,” he said to Pat Blashill of
Spin
. “To begin with, it was curious about us. Then it got bored with us. And it started making things difficult. It started doing things like turning the studio tape machines on and off, rewinding them.”

But then Radiohead had never needed ghosts for things to start getting difficult. The closer they got to finishing a record, the more they started getting distracted by thoughts of what other people would think of it. Thom described the experience of making
OK Computer
as being like a man building a spaceship in the shed at the bottom of his garden. At first they were completely absorbed in the task at hand. They took great pleasure in every little effect, making Colin’s guitar sound like a car crash at the beginning of ‘Airbag’ or like a child’s toy in ‘No Surprises’. At some point, though, they came out of the trance and looked up, blinking, at what they’d created. How were they going to finish such an enormous project?

The songs they had were extraordinarily complex and multi-textured. The lyrics were loaded with references to aliens, death and violence. All those “positive” things that Thom said he’d been writing down seemed to have been either thrown away or spliced with irony or confusion. By October 2006, they were painfully close to the finish line but they couldn’t get it quite right and, as they
listened to it, they were concerned about what they’d created. It was, Thom sometimes thought, a little bit disturbing. “At the eleventh hour, when we realised what we had done,” Thom says, “we had qualms about the fact that we had created this thing that was quite revolting.”

It’s an incredibly harsh verdict. It’s typical that the first person to come out against the view that
OK Computer
was the best album of the 1990s and, perhaps, of all-time, was the man who wrote it. But then again, if you listen closely you can hear what he meant. If
The Bends
had been about illness then this album sounded ill. It was woozy, disconcerting and claustrophobic. “I think people feel sick when they hear
OK Computer
,” Thom said later. “Nausea was part of what we were trying to create.”

It made the final weeks of the recording incredibly difficult. The doubts he had about the album, not about whether it was any good but about whether it could be polished and put out as a normal product, made sequencing and mixing it a huge headache. “Making this record was really good fun but finishing it was a fucking nightmare,” he said in a German TV interview. “Everything was really spontaneous and then we had to mix it and everything went wrong.”

For two weeks before mastering the record, Thom got up at 5a.m. every day and agonised over the track sequence, playing the songs in different orders on his Minidisc player. “I couldn’t find the resolution that I was expecting to hear,” he said. “I just went into a wild panic for two weeks. I couldn’t sleep at all, because I just expected the resolution to be there … and it wasn’t.”

By now the rest of the band knew very well that they just had to let him get on with it. He kept compiling discs for them and they would politely take them and then throw them in the bin later. “They knew I’d fucking lost it!” he said later.

And yet there is a resolution in
OK Computer
. Like
The Bends
, it’s another concept album where the ‘concept’ is almost subliminal, conveyed by the strange textures of the music as much as by the words. It’s that “fridge buzz”, the static of the end of the 20
^th
Century, transformed into something beautiful and moving. The most obvious resolution is the one that they say they didn’t even notice at the time. It starts with ‘Airbag’ and a man pulling himself out of a car crash and it finishes with ‘The Tourist’ and somebody
pleading to slow down.

For the recording sessions, there was to be no definitive, obvious end. In January, Jonny had simply had enough. While Thom was still worrying about whether ‘Fitter Happier’ should come at the beginning of the album, halfway through, or maybe at the end, he walked into the studio and told them that they had to stop. Thom was still uncertain whether
OK Computer
was really finished but, at the same time, it was a huge relief that somebody had called a halt. He wasn’t sure what they’d done, or whether he’d still be “electioneering” after radio programmers got to hear it. Just as after recording
The Bends
, he thought that nobody would be interested in shaking his hand anymore. And maybe that was no bad thing.

“When we finished it and were putting it together, I was like pretty convinced that we’d sort of blown it, but I was kind of happy about that, because we’d gotten a real kick out of making the record,” he said to
Launch
.

That was initially many other people’s reaction, too. When Capitol got hold of the initial mixes, they immediately halved their projection of how many copies it would sell. And, just as with
The Bends
, the final mixing process proved more difficult than expected. Once again they sent Sean and Paul at Fort Apache tapes but this time they weren’t the only people the band tried. “They were sending the tapes around,” says Paul. “We did a mix of ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ and I remember thinking, ‘This is weird! Is this their new record? I don’t get it!’ It was very murky and kind of a mess.”

After the satisfaction of finishing the record, Thom felt slightly sick that it was no longer in his hands. From purely having to think about whether he liked a song – and whether the rest of the band liked a song – he was suddenly back to having to think about whether the outside world would like it.

“Suddenly you’re presented with it as a finished thing and you have to start thinking about the bullshit that goes with it,” he said in a TV interview. “You have to start thinking about the British press and you have to start thinking about how something you may have meant completely genuinely will be taken as something else. It’s out of your control and you have to say goodbye to it.”

Nobody was more shocked than Thom when they saw the reviews. They almost all acclaimed it as a masterpiece. Suddenly, from having been ignored and occasionally derided in the UK, they were
being hailed as the world’s greatest rock band. Thom was even more surprised at how many people seemed to have really listened to it and picked up on all the little nuances of texture that they’d put so much time into perfecting. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but be cynical after the experiences they’d had in the past with the press.

“In terms of people saying it’s the album of the year, people say that all the time,” he said to
Launch
. “In Britain, it’s great – in the space of two weeks, our album was the ‘Album of the Year’ and so was Prodigy’s. Two weeks from now it will be another album. It’s just what people say.”

But two weeks after the album was released, Radiohead played Glastonbury. It was their first public performance of
OK Computer
in the UK and their agent had spent a year negotiating a headline slot. Many people were still highly suspicious of them. Their aesthetic didn’t exactly fit the peace, love and hippies vibe of the festival. And it didn’t help that, for the first time in a decade at Glastonbury, it had rained solidly and the field in front of the main stage had turned into a swamp. Two stages actually sank and some people caught trench foot, a condition more commonly associated with World War I. Thom must have thought back to his old Headless Chickens, hippy-bashing song ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’.

When they started their set, everything seemed OK. Two songs in and they’d already won the crowd over. Then Thom’s monitor blew up. He stared out at the dark mass of the crowd in a blind panic but soon he couldn’t even see them. The lights had gone wrong and were glaring directly into his face.

“I was going to kill,” he told
Q
later. “I was going to kill. If I’d found the guy who was running the PA system that day, I would’ve gone backstage and throttled him. Everything was going wrong. Everything blew up. And I was the one at the front standing in front of 40,000 people while that was happening. You’re standing there: ‘Thanks very much for fucking my life up in front of all these people.’”

They played six songs unable to hear themselves properly and unable to see a thing. Thom turned to walk off, feeling that probably the most important gig of his life had been ruined. Then he had second thoughts. He screamed at the lighting guy to turn the lights around so that they were pointing at the audience instead of him. To his complete shock, there was an expression of rapture on the faces
of most of the sodden, muddy crowd. The band carried on, confused but determined to finish the set. Then, when he walked off at the end, Thom decided to find out what had gone wrong but before he could find the soundman he bumped into Rachel.

“I thundered offstage, really ready to kill,” he told writer Andrew Mueller for the website,
www.thequietus.com
, “and my girlfriend grabbed me, made me stop, and said, ‘Listen!’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was amazing.”

From feeling like they’d royally messed up, Thom had to accept the word of thousands of fans that it was one of the best gigs they’d ever done. “I said to them afterwards, ‘That was the best I’ve ever seen you,’” says Mark Cope, “but not one of them really enjoyed it. It’s horrible to play a gig like that and not enjoy it. It’s strange. But I think they learned from that. What’s really good is that they’re very humble. They still don’t believe that they’re as good as they are. That’s one of the things that’s kept them going and kept them in front of everyone else.”

That performance consolidated Radiohead’s position as the most acclaimed band in the country. If many music magazines had overlooked
The Bends
then they were rushing to catch up now. Perhaps there was a degree of over-compensating. For several years,
OK Computer
was acclaimed in various polls as the best album of all-time. This, typically, made all of Radiohead feel uncomfortable. But, then again, it is an extraordinary album. It combines gorgeously simple, nursery rhyme tunes like ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Karma Police’ with complex, disturbing prog-rock like ‘Paranoid Android.’

“When I heard it, after a couple of listens, it became one of those things where it was all I could listen to for a month,” says Paul Kolderie. “I’d run into people and be like, ‘What are you listening to?’
OK Computer
. Only. That’s all I listen to.’ Everyone would be like ‘Yep, that’s me, too.’ It was one of those things where, man, they just nailed it to the wall. If
Pablo Honey
’
s
a ‘one’ and
The Bends
is ‘ten’ then
OK Computer
is ‘100’. A factor of ten every time.”

The first single to be released from the album was the brilliant, decidedly loopy six-minutes plus of ‘Paranoid Android’. This time Thom was determined to underline the fact that the song was supposed to be, among other things,
funny
. The band were all big fans of animator Magnus Carlsson and his late-night cartoon Robin.
Robin was an odd, slightly random character who wandered through his brightly coloured life with odd, slightly random things happening to him. They approached Magnus to see if he’d make a video for ‘Paranoid Android’ featuring Robin. He accepted, locked himself in a room and listened to the song over and over again. “We had really good fun doing this song,” Thom said, “so the video should make you laugh. I mean, it should be sick, too.