Authors: Trevor Baker
“Nobody saw ‘Creep’ as a failure when it first came out,” says Nigel. “The
Drill
EP went in at 101 and ‘Creep’ went in at 88 so it was like, ‘Hey, we’re twenty places higher than we were last time!’ Nobody saw ‘Creep’ as a problem. The thing that deflated them and made the atmosphere get a bit darker was ‘Pop Is Dead’. ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ went in at 35 or 38 I think but then ‘Pop Is Dead’ didn’t make the Top 40. They did a tour in slightly bigger places and they weren’t full. Everybody had expected ‘Pop Is Dead’ to do better than it did and so they booked them into bigger venues and there weren’t quite so many people there and they all thought, ‘This isn’t quite as much fun!’”
To some insiders, it looked like there was a real risk that they would get dropped if things didn’t improve but the man who signed them, EMI’s Keith Wozencroft, denies that this was ever on the cards. “Parlophone and EMI generally were always known for sticking with their artists and growing over a long period,” he says. “I don’t believe that we would have dropped a band after one album, especially a band that were very good and had built a solid fan-base.”
EMI could also have argued that they’d advised against releasing a single that wasn’t on the album. It seemed like they were right but Radiohead’s managers Chris and Bryce always had their eyes on the long-term. Paul Kolderie believes that their contribution to the band’s success has been much underrated.
“The strategy that the managers were pursuing from the start was to hire an American producer and maybe focus a little bit more on America at the time,” he says. “They went to America first and kind
of worked it back that other way. The one thing I would say, and I think it’s really important if you’re going to write about Radiohead, is that the managers have been there from the beginning. When we first met them, Chris and Bryce drove me around and they told me their whole story of how they’d been in bands in the 1980s and they’d gone for the whole ride … they were hip to the game. They weren’t going to let Radiohead get screwed … they were letting me know right away. It was kind of like parents letting me know that if I was going to take [their] little girl out, I’d better behave. I’d better do a good job!
Everybody says you’ve got to have a great drummer to have a great band, and you do, but you’ve also got to have a great manager. It’s no accident that U2 have a really terrific, smart manager. Even The Beatles. Every band that’s successful has somebody doing that job because if they don’t, they’re not going to make it. They’re not going to have the direction and they’re going to blow it. It’s a marriage. Those guys couldn’t have managed just anyone but Radiohead could not have done it on their own either.”
But before anything happened in America, and while they were still despondent from the relative failure of ‘Pop Is Dead’, success came from an unexpected source. “Luckily that’s exactly the time when ‘Creep’ got big in Israel,” says Nigel, “so we went out there. And that was when it was still a really dangerous place to go. There was fierce airport security. Lots of people with guns on the streets. It was weird, you’d chat to teenagers at the shows afterwards and say, ‘What have you got coming up?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m joining the army. I’ve got to do that for six months.’”
As it was such a small country, individual DJs had a great deal of power in Israel. When their equivalent of John Peel got hold of ‘Creep’ and started playing it all the time, it became a big hit. In Israel, all of a sudden, they were pop stars.
“I think the fact that very few people played gigs there helped,” says Nigel. “All the gigs were sold out and we got treated really well. You can tell when a band gets successful because even the crew gets treated well. That came immediately after the ‘Pop Is Dead’ tour when everyone was down and [Israel] picked everybody up again. From there, there was a European tour and that went straight into a US tour. That was good for the band because it didn’t give everybody a chance to dwell on ‘Pop Is Dead’ doing a bit shit. It was
just a case of, ‘More stuff to do, forget about that, carry on!’”
Before the first gig in Israel, they were approached by a fan asking if he could play the bass on ‘Creep’. It was their first indication of a different kind of fan than they’d had before. They were taken aback but Colin cautiously let him take over at the soundcheck. He realised what it would have meant for him to be able to play bass on one of New Order’s songs. That night there was an air of hysteria in the crowd before they even went onstage. When Thom leaned into the audience halfway through a song, he had clumps of hair pulled out by over-enthusiastic fans and his favourite bangle broken around his wrist. It was unlike anything they’d experienced in the UK. They had 1,200 people at their biggest gig and they were told that there would have been more but Israel’s equivalent of Glastonbury was happening at the same time. ‘Creep’ eventually went to Number 1 in that territory and
Pablo Honey
peaked at Number 2. For Thom, it was simply proof that if people got to hear his songs then they would like them.
And Nigel agrees with Paul Kolderie that Radiohead’s success overseas was more than just a stroke of good fortune. “I think Chris and Bryce were very good for them,” he says. “They saw exactly what was happening and they thought, ‘Right, we’ve got to really push in another territory now, because we’ve done everything we can in the UK. We’ve got to go elsewhere and try and make it happen there to convince Parlophone that it’s worth doing another album. So after that they concentrated a lot of their time on America. It was only after ‘Creep’ was a hit there that they re-released it in England.”
‘Creep’ arrived in America when a DJ on San Francisco’s Live 105 radio station got hold of a copy on import and started playing it. The phones then lit up with more requests for the song and the station put it on heavy rotation. Within a few days, it had been picked up by other stations on the West Coast and on the highly influential KROQ station it was the second most requested song. This meant that their American record company, Capitol, got behind them in a far bigger way than EMI had in the UK but it also meant they expected far more. As far as they were concerned, there was no time to lose. Radiohead had to go out to the States straight away. From a gig in Paris they were driven to the ferry at Calais, then straight to Heathrow in London where they took a plane to New York. When
they got there, they were astonished to be picked up in a white stretch limo with a bar in the back. At the Capitol Building itself, the staff were all wearing Radiohead T-shirts. From New York they then had to take a coach to Boston. When a completely shattered Thom arrived in his hotel at 7a.m. in the morning, he switched on MTV and there was ‘Creep’.
All the attention, the praise and the hyperbole didn’t come without a price. They were expected first to schmooze the executives of various retail outlets and radio stations. Then they had a packed schedule of interviews where Thom would be asked over and over again about the girl that he’d successfully forgotten about years ago. In the end, he just insisted that people should decide for themselves what the song was about. Amusingly, in one interview he anticipated music file sharing by about seven years when he joked: “What’s vinyl? We’re experimenting with fax machines at the moment. I think that people should sort of just be able to fax songs as well as listen to them. You should be able to plug your fax into your hi-fi.”
At another interview with KRoq he was asked to sing a jingle about how “special” the radio station was to the tune of ‘Creep’. When he refused the DJ twisted his arm by asking, ‘You did actually sing on the song, right?’ In the future, nobody would ask him to do anything quite so ridiculous but Thom gave in. It was one of many “never again” moments that they went through on that tour.
Most of their interviews were even less entertaining and the gigs weren’t quite what they’d hoped for either. They were playing shows to a crowd who were only interested in one song. In retrospect, they’ve painted it as a grim experience and, in some ways it was, but it was also everything Thom had always wanted. Still, their marketing executive Carol Baxter later said, “I’ll never make my bands do this again.” But at the time Thom and the rest of the band did everything that was reasonably asked of them.
And Capitol knew what they were doing. MTV’s decision to playlist the video was crucial and ‘Creep’s popularity rocketed. They were invited to play MTV’s ‘Beach Party’ where they played the song while bikini-clad models jiggled behind them. It was, in a funny way, a highly appropriate setting for a song about feeling inadequate and resentful in the presence of beauty.
“I don’t think the irony was lost on people,” said Thom, “all these gorgeous bikinied girls shaking their mammary glands and we’re
playing ‘Creep’ and looking terrible.”
Luckily “looking terrible” was all part of what being “that ‘Creep’ guy” meant. They were even invited on to the popular
Arsenio Hall
show. Backstage, before they went on, Thom was so nervous he was actually shaking, but he gave an extraordinary performance of the song, rasping the words and coming across like a hybrid of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera.
The fact that America had accepted them when it had rejected other bands such as Suede was a massive vindication. This was even more the case when they re-released ‘Creep’ in the UK and promptly had a Top Ten hit as the radio stations who’d ignored it the first time were forced to admit they’d been wrong. It seemed like the weaker they got the stronger ‘Creep’ got. They would finish touring the song in one territory only for it to become a hit in another. While ‘Pop Is Dead’ had sank without trace in the UK,
Pablo Honey
was racing towards eventual sales of over two million copies (much of them in the US). But the live shows, half the reason they were in the band, were becoming increasingly demoralising.
“There was a marked difference between the US and the UK,” says Nigel, “which was that even though the audiences were smaller in the UK, everybody stayed for the entire gig, where as in America, certainly some of the co-headline tours, Radiohead would play ‘Creep’ halfway through the set and 100 or 150 people would go, ‘Hey, ‘Creep’, I like that one,’ and then they’d leave as soon as they’d played that song. They were a ‘pop hit’ band. They’d had the one big song and the follow-up in America didn’t do as well as ‘Creep’ – they released ‘Stop Whispering’ but it didn’t have the same impact as ‘Creep’, [so] there were quite a lot of people who only knew that one song.”
The band always felt that their success in America at the time of ‘Creep’ was somewhat exaggerated in the press. “Things became polarised between us being extremely famous, megastars in America and utterly unknown in England,” said Jonny in a TV interview. “It’s somewhere between the two really.”
They occasionally liked to point out that the first time ‘Creep’ was released in the UK, it ultimately went on to sell 20,000 copies over the course of their tour, which, while not a big hit, wasn’t bad. It didn’t quite justify the
Evening Standard
’s headline ‘British Pop Unknowns Storm The USA.”
The
Pablo Honey
tour lasted, in various guises, for the best part of two years and it almost broke them. For the first time since they’d been signed, they wondered whether it was all worth it. “Immediately towards the end of the
Pablo Honey
tour, it seemed like there was a little bit of fatigue and uncertainty about what to do next,” Nigel says, “but I think all they needed was a break. I think the long history helps at that point. When you get to that kind of point of feeling angry and frustrated and thinking, ‘Do I want to carry on with this?’ if you’ve been in a band for six months you go, ‘Bollocks, I’ll get another band.’ But if you’ve been in a band for eight years or whatever, there’s a little bit more to lose.”
The most frustrating thing about the
Pablo Honey
tour was that they had new songs, better songs, than the ones on their debut album and yet few people were interested. They’d had ‘High And Dry’ for ages and other songs were also falling into place.
“They’d been playing ‘The Bends’ from the ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ tour,” says Nigel. “In fact they might have even been playing it on the ‘Creep’ tour. That was the earliest one they ever played. I hung around the studio when they were demo-ing ‘High And Dry’ and I thought it was a really great song. That was the point when Thom went, ‘Now I just want to do what I want to do.’ Whereas
Pablo Honey
was more like, it needs to be a bit grunge to fit in with what the industry expects.
The Bends
was like: ‘No, I want to do it this way …’”
But, for a long time, nobody would give them a chance to do it their way. ‘Creep’ had created an image of the band – and of Thom in particular – that was almost more powerful than the reality. But if the success had its downside, in the end, its upside was much more significant. ‘Creep’ is still an incredible song. The problem with it now is that so much of its impact came from sheer shock value. It was a classic tune with an instant hook, perfectly tuned to the MTV era. This was captured by the famous Beavis and Butt-head sketch at the time when Beavis explained why the song needed “the bit that sucks” and, by inference, explained most of the great rock of the 1990s. With familiarity ‘Creep’ lost much of its impact, but go back to that extraordinary bit where Thom sings “Ruuuuuuuun!” and holds the note for so long that it sounds like he’s going to explode … and be blown away all over again.
On August 27, 1993, Radiohead were due to play the Reading Festival. Instead Thom Yorke woke up with laryngitis, his voice reduced to a feeble croak. Rachel phoned up Chris and Bryce to tell them that he wouldn’t be able to play, while he sat there gloomily plucking at his acoustic guitar, composing a new song. The melody that came out was characteristically pretty but the lyrics that followed were anything but. They were a bitter take on the last few months of Radiohead’s career, tearing into ‘Creep’, the song that had saved them, and dubbing it with an unforgettable metaphor, ‘My Iron Lung’.
It was an image Thom had stored in his head since he found a picture when he was at university of a child in an iron lung. These devices were respirators that were frequently used during the polio epidemics of the first half of the 20
th
Century. The unfortunate child would be placed inside a giant metal tube with only their head outside and a vacuum would be created inside the tube to cause the lungs to expand and suck in air. They saved lives but some people were stuck inside them for years.
In September 1993, when ‘Creep’ was re-released in the UK and Thom was fully recovered, Radiohead didn’t even bother to stay in the country. They went back to America where Thom spent much of his time at the back of the tour bus working on songs. By now the band weren’t talking to each other much. When he went back to ‘My Iron Lung’, Thom decided that the melody was much too pretty for the lyrics. With perverse glee, he added a second half to the song, which was as brutal and unrestrained as the words. It was, many people noted later, the same thing that Kurt Cobain had done with
In Utero
– mixing the sugar of his melodies with broken glass as if to deliberately sabotage any possibility of mainstream success.
At the end of the year, when Radiohead finally made it home for a sustained period for the first time in two years, Thom bought “the house that ‘Creep’ built” on the strength of the royalties that were
now coming in. But he was shattered.
“As soon as you get any success, you disappear up your own arse and lose it forever,” he said in an interview with Stuart Baillie of
NME
. “When I got back to Oxford, I was unbearable. You start to believe you’re this sensitive artist who has to be alone, this melodramatic, tortured person, in order to create wonderful music. The absolute opposite is true. All these things happen to you anyway, you don’t have to sit there and make them happen. Otherwise you’re not a human being.”
The pressure on Thom as “that ‘Creep’ guy” was very different to what the rest of the band experienced. “Ed and Colin and Phil have stayed refreshingly the same,” says Nigel Powell, “because they’ve had less of the limelight, they’ve all dealt with it very well. They’re all still as charming and humble as they need to be. Thom, maybe, his moods got slightly amplified by all the attention but it’s not like his personality changed overnight.”
Colin later described the period at the end of the
Pablo Honey
tour as a kind of “break down” rather than a “break up”. They weren’t falling out. It was just that after two years on the road there was nothing left to say.
They’d been waiting for months to get back into the studio but when they got off tour they were in no fit state to record. Luckily the success of
Pablo Honey
had bought them time. They were also able to call on the services of one of indie’s key figures, producer John Leckie. He hadn’t been that impressed with
Pablo Honey
but the demos they sent him of early songs like ‘High And Dry’ and ‘The Bends’ were a different matter. He was fresh from the gruelling, massively extended recording sessions for the Stone Roses’ tardy second album but if he was looking forward to an easier challenge, it wasn’t to be. At the end of February 1994, Radiohead went into RAK studios in west London but almost immediately things turned sour. They weren’t listening to each other.
“We had one song that had loads of strings and heavy guitars. It was very epic and sounded like Guns N’ Roses’ ‘November Rain’,” Ed O’Brien said to Steve Malins of
Vox
. “By this time, Thom was trying to shut off from everything. There was a lot of pressure for us to make a loud, bombastic record and all I ever wanted to do was the exact opposite.”
Initially, of the tracks that would eventually appear on the second
album, they just had a demo version of ‘High And Dry’, which by then was stuck in a drawer somewhere, virtually forgotten about, and a very rough version of ‘Nice Dream’.
“We were really scared of our instruments,” Thom said in the same interview with
Vox
. “That might sound over-dramatic, but that’s how it felt. It must have been tortuous to watch. I know it was very hard on John Leckie, who didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We’d be going to him: ‘So what do you think? What shall we do?’ He was like: ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s up to you. You can do what the fuck you like, just do it rather than sit there thinking about it.’”
Luckily for them, John Leckie had seen it all before. He’d worked with everybody from solo members of The Beatles to The Verve and he knew he just had to wait until they were ready. The record couldn’t be forced.
“John Leckie seemed to be about the most relaxed human being you could meet,” says Nigel Powell. “At the time I questioned what he did because every time I’d pop round, I saw him at RAK Studios and a couple of other places, and it seemed like the only thing he did was sit at the back of the control room … while this other, small, short-haired guy called Nigel Godrich (who at the time nobody knew) was doing all the work rushing around setting up mics. But now, looking back, I can see what John Leckie was doing. He was just keeping it chilled. He’d be sitting at the back going, ‘Yeah, it sounds alright …’ He was making sure the hammer wasn’t down. He’d say, ‘It sounds alright. Maybe we can do one more.’ He was still driving the record on but he was trying to do it in the most relaxed way possible.”
But the label certainly weren’t relaxed. One executive supposedly left the studio after listening to what they’d come up with so far and raged, “Look, I don’t intend to take some fucking prog rock album. What the fuck is going on?”
By contrast, EMI’s Keith Wozencroft says now that it was always clear that
The Bends
was going to be a great record. “Songs like ‘Street Spirit’, ‘Nice Dream’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ etc were testament to that,” he says. “I don’t recall ever hearing any comments along those lines. Also, it wasn’t a prog record anyway.”
But, whether or not the label meant to pressurise them, there was a definite sense that they needed to produce another ‘Creep’. John
Leckie says that EMI wanted them to write another hit single before they did anything else. “It kind of affected the first few weeks of recording,” he said to
Melody Maker
. “Because every three or four days, the record company or the manager would turn up to hear these hit singles and all we’d done was got a drum sound or something.” Thom ended up simply refusing to take the label’s calls, causing even more concern, but John dealt with that as well.
“He viewed everything with a lack of importance,” Thom said to Nick Kent of
Mojo
later. “And thank God he did! He’s been doing it for so long he realised sometimes a producer is simply someone who just creates the right atmosphere for things to happen. In a way, he was like a caring uncle. He might see you as his little nephew who’s in a right fucking mess – but he still lets you get on with it.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Thom also said in a TV interview. “When we went in to do this album, we were in a pretty bad state really, fragile to put it mildly, and he was able to make the studio a place conducive to work. A lot of producers tell you what to do and you scurry around and go, ‘OK’. We’d run around the studio and go ‘What do you think John?’ and he’d go ‘I don’t know, you decide, you’re the band! I’ll tell you when you’re going wrong.’”
But, in America, Capitol wondered if they’d already gone wrong. There were rumours that they wouldn’t even release Radiohead’s second album. It seemed like the band had had their day in the sun with ‘Creep’ and they might have run out of steam. The problem was that the lack of communication on tour continued into the studio. Thom needed somebody to bounce ideas off but the tension was crippling. He’s described the decision-making process in Radiohead as, “like the UN – and I’m America” but this was one moment when the rest of the band rebelled. They couldn’t take anymore.
At that point, they had a world tour booked. It had originally been intended to promote an album that they’d barely started recording. Thom wanted to cancel it and stay in the studio until they’d got things right but Jonny, Colin, Phil and Ed suggested that they go anyway. John Leckie agreed. It was clear they were getting nowhere. A couple of months break would do them good.
“Towards the end, we had all these tour obligations and I thought, ‘Fuck it, no, I want to stay in the studio for three months’, Thom said later. “Everyone said no, you’ve got to get out of here and they were absolutely right.”
However, when they hit the road, the atmosphere became unbearable. Their friendship had always felt like an accident of circumstance. Initially they’d chosen to hang around with each other because they were musicians, not because they had much else in common. They’d always dealt with things in a very English way, holding back and swallowing their feelings. There were no arguments, there was no strife as Jonny told
B-Side
magazine. It was just that they’d forgotten that they used to be friends.
“‘Strife’ implies arguments and things being thrown,” he said, “but it was worse than that. It was a very silent, cold thing, away from each other. No one was really talking to anyone, and we were just trying to get through the year … there were never rows or anything, which is worse in a way. Everyone withdrew away.”
Halfway through the tour, in Mexico, something snapped. They hadn’t been sleeping. There were twelve people crammed into a small tour bus. Thom had suddenly decided that they weren’t a good live band anymore. Their first gig was in a tiny, filthy club that was very different to the venues they had been playing. It had a low stage with tables placed in front of it as a barrier between them and the small crowd. They had to clamber out of a small window at the back to get offstage. A few months before they would have found it an amusing, exciting experience, but now they were too tired, sick and bored of each other to take anymore.
“It all just came out,” Thom said to Andy Richardson in
NME
. “Years and years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we’d met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don’t want to talk about.”
They could have broken up right then but instead everyone knew exactly where they were for the first time in years. At the end of the tour, they went into another studio, the Manor in Oxford, in the knowledge that everything that could be said had been said. The barriers were down and
suddenly
the record began to take shape. They realised that if they were getting upset about the way the record was going, it was only because they all cared about it so much.
“If someone disagrees with Thom, he only gets upset because he trusts them,” said Jonny much later in a radio interview. “It’s not like he’s saying, ‘No, it’s great, I’m not listening to you.’ He goes,
‘Maybe you’re right, maybe it is no good.’ It’s upsetting. Sometimes your judgement’s wrong and sometimes it’s right.”