0.36.1 - Anyone can play guitar
I've been trying to think about the best way to approach talking about Radiohead, and I've settled on this after three days of false starts. Radiohead are amongst my favourite bands of all time, a group of musical performers whose twenty year career provided a contemplative soundtrack to my own path through adulthood. There's a point I recognise in my life when my reading habits moved outside of the range of the Fantasy and Sci-Fi and comedic* novels I'd consumed voraciously in my youth and I started reading what I guess I'd consider 'serious literature' of my own choice, for - if not fun exactly - the intellectual stimulation, the prompt to think, to draw your own conclusions, to engage with the text on a level deeper than just what could be seen on the surface. In the realm of music, I thought such pieces existed also, but assumed they existed in genres both dusty and inaccessible; Opera, freeform Jazz, modern Classical**.
My experience with Radiohead became the inflection point through which I learned that serious music, that thought-provoking, challenging but equally compelling song construction could come from anywhere, in any form, that it could be lurking right outside the door, cloaked in your enjoyment of a band's early work.
Of course, Creep was what started my journey. I was a gangly nerd, equal parts intimidated by and attracted to the other late teenagers I was hanging out with. Friends of mine were in relationships, the initial stages of the chain reaction which would eventually see basically every sixteen to seventeen year old 'indie' girl and guy in our small town eventually end up dating each other at some point, like a time-dilated version of Dawson's Creek with a cast of 30 or so, but I hadn't yet got over myself despite being asked out a couple of times***. To say I related to the lyrical content of Creep at the age of 17 would be to vastly underestimate the deep connection I had. I didn't need to hear much else; I bought Pablo Honey purely for the opportunity to listen to Creep on repeat when I was inside my feelings, which was often.
Then a funny thing happened.
Rare was the modern band which met the exacting standards set by my parents to be considered "good music". Even rarer was the phenomenon of me finding it first, but The Bends existed as a singular point of perfect union between our tastes, and one which I introduced into the household. Like so many of my musical discoveries, MTV and the video for Just put it back on my radar; a new song, with a weird music video/short film**** by the band that did Creep and it kind of kicks ass? My attention was firmly captured, and the first copy of The Bends in our household lived in my teenage bedroom. Normally, a discussion with my Dad which began ""What's this you are listening to?" would be quickly followed by either explaining how the band are just recycling ideas from bands from my Dad's youth but less well, or being told it was juvenile crap and I was embarrassing myself listening to it (which sometimes was definitely true). The day that conversation took place while I was listening to The Bends, it ended with me copying the album onto a blank CD with my Dad's double-disc hi-fi system so he could listen to it.
It could have ended there, but the power of OK Computer, even with it's trend towards what Radiohead's music was becoming still carried enough populist appeal to maintain the momentum carried forward by the success of The Bends. Radiohead releasing a nearly 7 minute meandering composition which changes tempo and key and energy throughout could not blunt their momentum. Somehow, Paranoid Android as the lead single gave Radiohead their highest charting song in the UK, peaking at number 3 in the charts. I think about that fact a lot, and what it says about the ways in which music criticism and consumption and understanding inside the popular consensus has changed in the last thirty years. It seems unthinkable now that something so avant garde, experimental, challenging would attract enough airplay, gain enough traction to even bother the music charts unless forty-five seconds of it ended up soundtracking a viral TikTok trend.
Between The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead demonstrated an almost impossible level of musical craft, walking the tightrope between commercial success and musical exploration, and being lauded for it. OK Computer was nominated for (but did not win) every album prize that exists in the world in 1997. Every music critic announced it as an album of incredible significance in the modern musical canon, and I can't find fault with that argument. For me, it was simply my favourite album released that year, the same year that Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers and Homogenic by Bjork and the self-titled Portishead came out, all titans in my music collection, but they could not hold a candle to the musical goliath that OK Computer was in my mind.
By the time the millennium rolled around, I was sharing a house with my now sadly departed friend Dave; Dave and I shared many interests, but chief amongst them was music; we watched late night shows about the making of music videos and played original Playstation RPGs with the sound off on the TV, and Massive Attack or Portishead or Radiohead playthrough our speakers. Dave was the one who came home with Kid A; he worked in the town centre near the record store, and ducked out early to buy it before the shop shut. We ordered takeaway food, we poured beer, we sat in our shared front room and listened to what we thought would be the continuation of the incredible combination of commercial music and art.
I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of tonal whiplash of expectation vs reality harder than I did when we first listened to Kid A. That evening is burned into my memory; it's a foundational experience. I kept expecting it to change, for the sequencer heavy electronic soundscapes to somehow naturally give way to something more accessible; for the distant and inscrutable lyrics to start coalescing into something I could hang on to for dear life as the album bucked wildly as it tried to throw me off. The relief I hoped for never came; Kid A was relentless in its own identity, unwilling to be moved away from it's specific style, its musical goals. I speculated that this must be some kind of intentional label FU, like a Metal Machine Music aimed to extract themselves from a contract they hated with the least commercial advantage to the record label they were trying to leave. The disappointment I felt was like a personal betrayal; I was distraught. And somewhere, in another timeline, that's where this article ends, with me saying how I loved Radiohead until they deliberately poisoned their own commercial following by making a weird, unlistenable electronic album and how I only ever listen to their early stuff, before they lost their minds.
Dave, however, heard something I did not. It was through Dave that I learned to appreciate Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, but those conversations hadn't happened yet between us, but he could see in the album the things that I couldn't, and while we agreed it was a radical departure for Radiohead to release Kid A, we differed on what the outcome of that decision would be. So, in our house, for months after, Dave would play Kid A in communal spaces. Not obnoxiously, not deliberately, but I'd be cooking in the kitchen and he'd have it on while reading in our front room. He'd listen to it while hoovering the downstairs carpet in our shared house (something which happened very rarely, which is why it stands out in my memory so clearly). We'd trade off albums while playing Soul Calibur against each other and some of the times, Kid A would be slotted into the rotation. Drip by relentless drip, over week and months of exposure, my closed-minded position started to open. I'd wake up with the bassline to The National Anthem ringing in my head; I'd sing 'I'm not here, this isn't happening' from How To Disappear Completely and then spend ten minutes trying to remember where I knew that lyrical phrase from. When we listened to music together, sometimes I'd be the one to put Kid A on.
When Amnesiac arrived a year later, I was ready; Kid A had conditioned me into a more accepting mode; I'd had my moment of understanding. I'd learned slowly, agonisingly that thoughtful, challenging, 'serious' music could appear unexpectedly and that persevering, choosing to engage with it would unlock a depth of appreciation for having done the work to get there. These two albums are to be as indelibly connected as The Bends and OK Computer, as an initial musical statement, and a refinement and exploration of what came before. Amnesiac is my favourite Radiohead album; its the one I go to by default; I find it nearly impossible to recommend to people, like telling them that they should start with season 4 of a long running TV show. The arc of understanding, the slow immersion into what Radiohead are doing is what's required for the uninitiated. Push too deep too quickly, the pressure change might cause air bubbles to form in your bloodstream; cramping, blackouts, even sudden death could follow. The wonders below are a sight to behold, but no-one should be expected to concentrate on them their first time down there.
By the time I had finished devoting myself to the consumption of Kid A and Amnesiac I knew that very little would stop me from continuing to follow whatever Radiohead put out for the duration of their career. Hail To The Thief was an album for the moment, post 9/11, mid-War In The Middle East, what we foolishly thought might be the ongoing years of the worst presidential reign in history. I struggle to decide whether I think this album dates itself, or if I am just conspicuously aware of the time at which it was released, but musically it acts as the harmonising moment, the binary concoction of what Radiohead sound like - The guitars are back, but in harmony with and alongside the sequencers and samples and the vocals swim back and forth between the desperately ethereal and the furiously present.
At this point, you should take it as understood that I had no further doubts, nor did I fail to enjoy any of Radiohead's subsequent album releases. I have my favourites, and there are some albums which I feel more comfortable pointing non-Radiohead fans at, but I find all of their offerings valuable in their own right. I have feelings about In Rainbows, King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool, but they are not complex, or worth digging into here. Individual songs from those albums carry their own specific resonances with me (for example, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi***** has its own memory attached to it, as does Decks Dark) and you can add me to the long list of people who never really knew what to do with or how to feel about King of Limbs, an album I didn't feel a visceral rejection of or a need to push to understand like I did with the mid-canon albums, but rather an album that felt like it did not command me, compel me to listen repeatedly as the other albums have.
I think music fans, Radiohead fans, can be viewed with disdain from afar by those not as steeped in musical culture. I've heard any number of criticisms, from "I used to like them before they got weird" to "No-one really likes this kind of music, they just say they do to sound clever" to "They're just boring and weird and people are too scared to say so", and dear reader, there but for the grace of God go I. But I didn't spend the time, expand my own personal definitions of what music I enjoy, engage with the ideas of what music can be and what it can express, to make myself sound clever, to try and make myself superior to people. I did it because a friend of mine persisted in the face of the obvious for long enough to help me do the same thing.
Push past rejection; look for the value, the grace, the beauty in things you might miss moving only from one surface level opinion to another. If more people could do that, maybe we'd all get along a little better.
** Opera is the only one of these forms I have absolutely no love for, for the record, and not for lack of trying. You would think the musical theatre/narrative focus thing in my brain would vibe with it, but it seems I just can't get past the warbling in Italian.
*** There's no more fundamental a series of regrets that I revisit more than the number of times when I, a dumb teen-and-twenty-plus year old, blatantly missed or ignored or flat out rejected advances from women I knew. I was such an idiot, my god.
**** I have a huge issue with people covering Radiohead songs because they are universally bad, but I've a sideways admiration for the Marc Ronson cover of Just just because of what they did with the music video.
***** I just want to take the time to shout out this YouTube video of someone in a cafe with a loop machine doing a one man version of Weird Fishes which is, I think, the only good Radiohead cover I have ever heard.
