Thom Yorke enjoys taking his kids to Oxford University’s Museum of Natural
History on Sunday afternoons. They wander around the grand atrium, past the
skull of the humpback whale, the stuffed dodo and the creepy statues of
Great Men of Science. And, of course, Yorke’s kids love the dinosaur
skeletons.
Some 150 years earlier, a sickly, stuttering Oxford mathematician named
Charles Dodgson came to the museum with his college dean’s young daughter,
Alice Liddell; to entertain her he made up stories that he eventually
published under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, as Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. Yorke, who is 39 and has a three-year-old daughter and a
seven-year-old son, also occasionally writes about animals, though not in a
way meant to delight children. Myxomatosis, from the 2003 Radiohead album
Hail to the Thief, opens with the line “The mongrel cat came home holding
half a head…” Then there is Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, a track on the most recent
Radiohead album, In Rainbows, in which Yorke imagines himself at the bottom
of the ocean being nibbled on by fish and worms. Yorke howls the words
“weird fishes” like a demented schoolboy.
In another strange turn of phrase Yorke croons, “Your eyes, they turn me,”
creating an interesting tension by never adding the expected “on”. With all
of the references to freedom –“why should I stay here”; “everybody leaves if
they get a chance” – the song almost passes for a morbid parody of early
Springsteen. “Hit the bottom,” Yorke sings in the final lines, “and escape”.
Yorke arrives for the interview at the Old Parsonage, a centuries-old building
that’s now a hotel. His face is furrowed and unshaven, and though he looks
his age, perhaps older, he’s also the most boyish member of Radiohead:
small, fidgety and, this morning, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.
When the guitarist Ed O’Brien shows up later and sits beside Yorke, it’s
like a study in contrasts, stark examples for schoolchildren on how good and
bad boys should behave. There’s Yorke, squirming, hair a spiky mess,
occasionally putting his head down or wiping his nose with his sleeve, while
O’Brien, at 6ft 5in nearly a foot taller than Yorke, demonstrates
unnervingly perfect posture, barely even moving his head as he speaks in
precise tones.
We’re in a side room off the lobby. Flames crackle in the hearth. “Big fire,”
Yorke notes. “They should use a stove. More efficient.” Yorke’s left eye is
damaged from a series of operations he had as a child and is now stuck in a
permanent downward list. But today both eyes are nearly squinted shut – his
daughter has a cough, and he’s been up all night.
In Rainbows, Radiohead’s seventh album, was released in October, and any talk
of its content was overshadowed by its delivery. As everyone knows, the band
released it as a download on its website, where fans could pay what they
wished, from nothing to £99.99. Radiohead have refused to release official
figures, but even the estimates of the online survey group comScore –
estimates the band dismisses as low – would make the experiment a success.
According to comScore, a “significant percentage” of the 1.2m visitors to
Radiohead’s website in October downloaded the album, and while comScore
claims that only two out of five downloaders paid anything at all, the
payers averaged £3 per album – which, factoring in the freeloaders, works
out to about £1.11 per album, more than Radiohead would have made in a
traditional label deal. And that’s just downloads: released on December 31,
the CD version debuted at No 1 here and in the US.
The download plan was hatched by the band’s managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce
Edge (“when they were a bit stoned,” notes the guitarist and
multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood), during the long gap between Hail to
the Thief, which marked the end of the band’s major-label contract, and In
Rainbows. “Poor guys,” Yorke says, “they have a lot of time to think.”
Hufford and Edge have managed Radiohead from the start, when the band was
still called On a Friday; the download idea was partly a response to the
fact that every Radiohead album since Kid A in 2000 had leaked in some form
online.
“There’s a compliment there,” Yorke acknowledges, speaking in a low, unhurried
voice. “The fact that people want to get hold of what you’ve done. But if
it’s not the definitive version, if the ends are chopped off, if you haven’t
made the choice to do it yourself, it’s a bit unfair. Bad karma. So it felt
very liberating to take complete control… If I die tomorrow, I’ll be happy
that we didn’t carry on working within this huge industry that I don’t feel
any connection with. But the idea wasn’t to make a big, significant
statement. We knew it would be messing with things a little bit, but we just
wanted to get the album to people who’d been waiting patiently for four
years. I really thought it would be a splash in a little pond. I was
surprised at how much the media picked up on it.”
There were some complaints about the sound quality of the downloads, but
surprisingly – considering the sonic complexity of their records – none of
the members of Radiohead are audio geeks. “That sort of hi-fi sound-quality
thing really annoys me,” says Greenwood. “I was in London talking to a label
guy once, and I said hi-fi is just about middle-aged men trying to make
music sound as good as it did when they were teenagers, and it never will.
They’ll never be as excited as they were when they first heard that music
coming out of just one speaker. They’ll never get that close to it again.”
It’s been said that the pay-what-you-like plan forced people to make an
ethical choice about consumption – to stop and think: “What is this piece of
art, made by someone I feel some connection with, worth to me?” But, Yorke
says: “In a way, that was an afterthought. We knew that if we put it out for
nothing at all, it would end up costing us a fortune. But there’s always
been an integrity to the community of people on the net who follow what we
do. Ethical choice? I don’t know about that.” He smiles. “Maybe if they were
buying a goat.”
With the release of OK Computer, critics were quick to canonise Radiohead as
the great post-Nirvana rock band, an honorific that, a decade on, feels more
apt than ever, even as the group has continued to evolve in wholly
unexpected ways. The band’s songs, soaring and atmospheric, are spacious
enough to fill stadiums, and Radiohead have become one of the best live
bands of their generation. The experimental direction the music has taken –
the false starts and buried melodies, the messy electronica and avant-garde
dissonance – sounds like a future soundtrack to a documentary about
early-21st-century malaise.
After the Hail to the Thief tour ended in 2004, the band took a year off to
spend time with their families. Yorke, who has been with his girlfriend,
Rachel Owen, a fine-art printmaker, since they were both at Exeter
University, says little about his family life. When asked if his children
have discovered any music that annoys him, he thinks for a moment: “I like
the Chili Peppers. But I hear a lot of it in my house. They haven’t really
heard our new record yet.”
Intentionally? “Just because… I think my missus isn’t ready to hear it yet.
Having seen me go through the mill making it.”
She hasn’t heard it at all? “Not yet. She will. But it’s a difficult thing for
her to watch me go through the whole process. She doesn’t like it. She’s not
exactly ready to listen to the music.”
Would she rather you’d not make music and just be a happier person? “Yeah,
probably.”
So working on a record makes you a difficult person? “To live with? That’s
about 100% true. Yes. She does it, though.”
She’s an artist, as well. Do you ever ask for feedback on what you’re
working on? “It’s… yeah… Anyway. Next question.”
All five members of Radiohead are married or have long-term girlfriends, and
each couple has at least two children. “I think we’ve always been a band in
their thirties,” says Greenwood. “We’re like the Pixies in that way. They
were never teenagers. And it’s the same with us.”
Greenwood, 36, is the youngest member of the band, shy and gangly, with an
understated sense of humour and an eccentric taste in music, even by
Radiohead standards. (He spent six months in 2005 listening to nothing but
dub reggae.) His personality in no way jibes with his first appearance in
the public eye, in the video for the 1992 song Creep, where he’s strumming
his guitar with such angular violence he could be a cop holding down a
protester with one hand and swinging a truncheon with the other. His
brother, the bassist, Colin Greenwood, is 38, and with his mod haircut and
black leather jacket, he’s the only member of Radiohead who looks like he
could be in Oasis. In conversation he’s given to pausing mid-sentence and
staring off into space, eventually saying “Yeahhhh” in a way that never
makes it clear if he’s bored, trying to think of the exact word, or
enhancing his spaciness for dry comic effect. His wife is a novelist, and
Colin, an English literature graduate from Cambridge, makes reference to
everything, from Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde to Bill Buford’s
cooking memoir, Heat.
The drummer, Phil Selway, 40, is Radiohead’s sharpest dresser and, like all
sharp-dressed men with shaved heads, looks a bit like an assassin, though
he’s kind-eyed. Ed O’Brien, the guitarist, is 39 and recently married his
longtime girlfriend. In lieu of a stag night he went camping on the moors
with Yorke, the former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and the Chemical
Brothers. He’s the only member of Radiohead who no longer lives in Oxford,
where the band members all grew up and met at a boys’ school. He says his
wife would never live anywhere but London.
Yorke says staying in Oxford “is probably 50% inertia”. Later, over breakfast,
Colin Greenwood elaborates: “It’s sort of this unspoken thing with us, that
if we move from Oxford, we might lose our juju. In London, we might get
distracted by the lights and the big city. Look at Ed.”
Selway, who is also present, smiles and says: “He’s a shadow of his former
self.” “That’s right,” Colin says, “he’s just interested in superficial
things now, like his latest pair of trainers. Whatever Londoners do.” “Well,
they talk about their London ways,” Selway says. “When he comes to rehearse
with us,” Jonny says, “it’s like we’re these old codgers in the village pub
with the clock ticking madly in the corner and a couple of dead rabbits
hanging on the door.”
The mock-provincial attitude isn’t, of course, entirely mock: four-fifths of
one of the world’s biggest rock bands have chosen to stay in their very
small home town, university town though it may be. It’s especially curious
considering a thematic concern of Radiohead has always been the terrifying
aspects of modern life – yet here they remain, in a medieval city,
surrounded by the fossils of a long-expired empire.
In part, the band seems to enjoy the anonymity a place like Oxford allows. One
morning, when they assemble in a park for a photoshoot, a large group of
schoolboys out jogging doesn’t even give them a passing glance. But Yorke
often skips town in the summer, when tourists, who tend to be more gawking,
arrive en masse.
Later, Colin takes me on a walking tour. As we wander past the imposing walls
of Oriel College, he says he always avoided the university because the
students were “kind of boaty – rowers”. He then points out a staircase
leading up to Georgina’s, a coffee shop where he and Yorke used to hang out
in their school days. “We’d be with the other goths, talking about [the rock
band] Bauhaus in our mohair jumpers,” he says. “I haven’t been there in 15
years.”
We make our way up a narrow staircase and enter the studenty cafe, the walls
of which are covered with rock and movie posters. After ordering a hot
chocolate from a decidedly un-star-struck barista, Colin tells me that back
in the late 1980s and early ’90s he’d find out the location of illegal raves
from kids hanging out on George Street. O’Brien, who went to school in
Manchester – “really because of the Smiths” – partook enthusiastically in
the Ecstasy-fuelled Summer of Love, and Yorke also DJ’d while he was at
Exeter. He also had a sun-coming-up epiphany moment when a friend, as part
of his thesis, staged a mini-happening. Yorke, his girlfriend, Rachel, and
his friend Stanley Donwood (the artist who has designed every Radiohead
cover save Pablo Honey) were all given pieces of paper that instructed them
to be at a certain pub with sleeping bags. From there, they were driven out
to the country, then led by torchlight into a valley. They partied until
four, when everyone passed out. At some point, Yorke’s friend woke them by
shouting, “Wake up, time to die!” and led them to a lake where, in Yorke’s
memory, “he’d built this fire-breathing dragon that did this performance
thing when the sun came up. It was the most amazing night.”
“That was really the most influential period for all of us,” Yorke says. “The
Happy Mondays. The Stone Roses. At the end, Nirvana. It was an interesting
period of transition: lots of electronic stuff, lots of indie bands, and it
was permissible for it to be all mixed up.” Yorke is far less reverent when
it comes to classic rock. When asked
if he was curious about the Led Zeppelin reunion, he admits: “Not really. My
mate wanted to go. I said I was tired. Maybe if they play again. But to be
honest, probably not.”
Yorke says he’d be interested in a Talking Heads reunion. “Don’t think they
want to do it, though,” he says. “Gang of Four, they re-formed. That was
worthwhile. Kind of better. Darker.”
“Age has made them darker,” O’Brien agrees.
“Now that’s where you wanna go.”
“Yeah, that’s where you want to get to. ‘What have you been doing for the last
20 years?’ ‘Getting really dark.’ ”
Yorke laughs, delighted. “I’m being honest about the route I’m going down.
Death is imminent. I’m getting dark.”
The ease and immediacy of releasing In Rainbows came in sharp contrast to the
album’s protracted, painful birth. With Hail to the Thief, an album
Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich admits “was very unsatisfying for
everyone”, the band had fallen into a long, exhausting tour and press cycle.
During the post-tour break, Yorke kept busy working on his solo album. And
then in August 2005 the band tentatively reunited at its studio. But, says
Yorke: “Everyone had lost momentum. We’d all stopped to have kids. It sounds
stupid, but that’s the way it was. So when we got back into the studio, it
was just dead.”
A rambling January 2006 blog posted by Yorke on the band’s website read: “we
are being taken to task. we are having to shake the dust off… stop answering
the phones and thinking of excuses to leave the building. of course there
are the other distractions, sitting in the garden with your 12-bore shotgun,
large orchestras doing drum-machine noises, getting suits made, puppies,
canal boats, beer, modular synthesis, lego, tax investigations, global
warming and the end of life as we know it, traffic, deafness, insanity,
normality. whatever.”
Godrich and Yorke “have a particularly intense relationship,” says the former.
When I ask what they argue about, he laughs: “Pretty much everything. We’re
either at loggerheads, or we agree with each other completely and nobody
else agrees with us.
“My job involves a lot of psychology,” Godrich continues. “The dynamic between
people is very complicated. Ed is very much a diplomat. Jonny’s brilliant,
and what comes out of him comes out very quickly. And with Thom…” He pauses,
then says: “A lot of the time I think he’s the king of self-sabotage. So I’m
just trying to prevent him destroying things he doesn’t realise are
valuable.”
For In Rainbows, Godrich tried to shake the group out of its comfort zone by
recording for three weeks in a decrepit mansion built in the 1830s. The band
lived in campervans on the grounds of the estate, recording by day in the
library and staying up until 3am playing bad blues rock. Slowly, the album
began to coalesce. Nude, a song Yorke had first shown Jonny 10 years
earlier, came together as a lush, haunted ballad. The surprisingly sexy
House of Cards begins with the line, “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just
wanna be your lover”, before making veiled references to wife-swapping.
Yorke insists the lyrics are not drawn from his personal life. “I wish!” he
says. “Well, no, I don’t wish. That key-party stuff was a big thing here in
the 1970s and ’80s. It always fascinated me.”
Radiohead’s music is often at odds with Yorke’s freaked-out lyrics, but he
says: “People come up to me after shows and say they love a song – ‘It’s the
one me and my missus f*** to!’ It’s like, ‘Don’t tell me that! You can’t
tell me that…’ ”
After figuring out how to release a record on its own terms, the band is
grappling with how to do the same for touring. Yorke has been vocal as an
environmental activist – in his personal life he has stopped flying
altogether; he and his family take train trips to places like Barcelona –
and Radiohead briefly considered simply staying home, because of the size of
the carbon footprint left by most rock tours. After floating – and rejecting
– the possibility of performing locally and beaming the show digitally to
theatres around the world, they decided to transport their gear and stage
set via ship and rail whenever possible. They even considered shipping
themselves to the US, but cruise ships are just as environmentally unsound
as jets, and the only other option was passage on a slow freighter.
The process of making an album never gets easier. Yorke hopes the band’s
newfound freedom will allow it to innovate in this area as well. “With the
download thing, I’d love to just put out singles, maybe before we go out on
tour,” he says. “Or maybe in the future we’ll work in twos and threes.
Radiohead is not a contract signed in blood. Every time we do a record, that
is not a validation of us carrying on. We’re certainly not jumping into
doing another nine months in the studio.”
Yorke is quick to make amends if he catches himself complaining too much.
“It’s not that f***ing difficult,” he says. “I went and worked on my
friend’s building site for two weeks over the summer, smashing bricks and
stuff. I needed to be told what to do. F***ing hell. That was difficult. But
it was nice smashing stuff up.”
Later, though, Yorke shrugs and admits: “For some reason, we think too much.
We’re Method actors. For us it’s always hard.”
First published in Rolling Stone magazine. ©2008 Rolling Stone. Distributed by
Tribune Media Services
Net prophets
Radiohead weren’t the first act to publish their work direct to the public
through the web. Musicians, actors and writers had taken the “internet
first” approach many times before.
Text was the easiest form of data to post online in the early days of the
internet, so it’s no surprise that authors started publishing books in
electronic form almost from the start. The science-fiction community was
reading electronic copies of works from the publisher Baen Books during the
1990s, but it was the dramatic entry of the horror writer Stephen King in
2000 that brought the medium to mainstream attention. His book published
that year, Riding the Bullet, remains available exclusively as a download.
Less successfully in the same year he started serialising his book The Plant
on his website, asking fans to pay $1 per chapter. By chapter four only 46%
of downloaders were paying, and he suspended the experiment at chapter six.
The website’s frequently-asked- questions section says only “Time will tell”
to the question of whether it’ll stay that way.
Last year, Amazon.com started selling the Kindle, an electronic gadget that
reads e-books. The company hopes it will do for book downloads what the iPod
did for music.
Before King’s attempt to get people involved in books through the internet,
David Bowie had done the same in music. He released the track What’s Really
Happening? from his Hours… album online with la-la-ing instead of lyrics in
1999, hoping listeners would write some and the winning version would be
included on his next CD. Alex Grant penned the winning words and attended
the recording, providing backing vocals as well.
Elsewhere in the arts The Full Monty writer Simon Beaufoy’s 2002 film This Is
Not a Love Song opened in cinemas and on the internet simultaneously —
anyone with a broadband connection was welcome to sit in front of their
computer and watch. The comparative rarity of computers with fast enough
internet connections to cope with a whole movie led to the project being a
limited success online.
Prior to this the BBC had revived Doctor Who for a few one-off web revivals.
These were effectively radio plays made with slightly moving pictures. The
seventh TV doctor, Sylvester McCoy, starred in Death Comes to Time; the
sixth doctor, Colin Baker, appeared in Real Time; the eighth, Paul McGann,
in Shada. Then a new doctor was cast and the series went into full
animation. Other online dramas have followed including online soap operas
and comedies, and the BBC made episodes of the second series of The Mighty
Boosh available online a week before their TV transmission.
Nevertheless, music remains the most commonly downloaded form of
entertainment. Bowie is credited with the first “cyber-song”, but Nine Inch
Nails released the first full album to come out online before hitting the
shelves in the form of 2005’s With Teeth. And earlier this year, the
violinist Tasmin Little became the first classical musician to release an
album online, free of charge.
Downloads reached a tipping point last year when Gnarls Barkley became the
first artist to reach No 1 in the UK singles chart through download sales
alone with Crazy. Radiohead may well be the biggest name to use a download
for the premiere of a new work, but it’s not going to be the last.
By Guy Clapperton
