Radiohead: Band of the Year

(Spin Magazine, December 1997)

"The pupils of Thom Yorke's eyes zip from side to side like nervous insects. We're on the Eurostar train from
Paris to London, and Radiohead's singer is compulsively looking out the window at the pastoral French landscape.
He doesn't see the sheep and ther farms - he is keenly aware that those things out there will disappear very soon.
and then we will enter a tunnel and be deep, deep underneath the sea. This is significant for a man who once wrote
an album called The Bends.

When we go under, I ask Yorke if he's claustrophobic.

'Yes,'he says matter-of-factly. "Er, increasingly so, actually.'

A couple of days on the road have taught me that even when Thom Yorke isn't suffering from one of his various
phobias, he's still more than a touch intense. He moves like a shatterd little prince. He laughs a sudden, explosive,
truncated laugh. His hair is short, black, and spiky. His lazy eye flutters and droops, a handicap as well as the
punctuation point of his fractured charm. When he was a kid, they used to tease him about it. That may be why he's
so worried that people occasionally mistake him for an arrogant prick.

Life has been like this for Yorke: His problems have become his strngths, his obsessions have fed his repulsions,
and his fears have inspired his music. We're on this train because Yorke hates to fly, and he's positively terrified
of cars. Just yesterday, somone asked him why he has written so many songs about car crashes. This was Yorke's
answer:

'I just think that people get up too early to leave houses where they don't want to live, to drive to jobs where they
don't want to be, in one of the most dangerous forms of transport on earth. I've just never gotten used to that.'

Of course, because of his job, Yorke has to ride around in cars all the time. He even got inside one with a
remote-control driver to shoot the video for Radiohead's latest single, 'Karma Police.' And as he sat in the
backseat, lip synching, something went wrong, and carbon monoxcide fumes began pouring into the car. Yorke was
terrified. And as he started to feel faint, he thought, 'This is my life...'

Radiohead may be the most uptight paranoid art-rock band presently operating on the planet. But even as such,
they've been pretty lucky bastards. The group - Yoke, bassist Colin Greenwood, guitarists Jonny Greenwood and
Ed O'Brien, and drummer Phil Selway - began their career with a smash-hit song about being worthless. They
weren't even sure they like 'Creep', or the 1992 album it came from, Pablo Honey - expecially after the song
became a slack-rock anthem, the kind of timely hit that a band can come to regret, like a tattoo of your last
girlfriend's name. So in 1995, they made a much better, much weirder second album (The Bends) and a bunch of
very cool videos that evoked nothing so much as the finest Pink Floyd album covers. It wasn't a miracle that rock
critics started loving Radiohead - it was a miracle that 14-year-old girls didn't stop.

'I was surprised to see what the music meant to people,' Yorke says. 'We went from being a novelty band to being
the band that everyone quoted in the NME and Melody Maker 'Musicians wanted' columns. After a hit like
Creep, bands don't normally survive. It can kill you. But it didn't.'

Radiohead toured behind The Bends for a year and a half. When Yorke returned to the band's semi-sleepy
hometown of Oxford, he was full of new causes for alarm. He'd always been pretty familiar with the scary things
inside his own head, but international touring had bestowed upon him a whole new world of inspirational
hobogoblins. Now he knew he had to write songs about all sorts of horrible things. Domestic violence. Politicians.
Cars. Bacon.

So Yorke and Radiohead went to work on an album about global hideousness. He fussed and fretted and became
annoying to everyone he knew, but in the end it was all worth it. Because Ok Computer is a gorgeous and haunting
record. It's full of spindly guitars and freaked-out noise, poppy songs with Beatles in-jokes, and other numbers that
ramble on for minutes before they actually become songs, and it's especially full of mystery. Nothing is explained,
everything is suggested.

Ok Computer is rife with terror and cynicism, but it's not particularly ironic or self-conscious. Apparently, the only
thing that doesn't make Thom Yorke uncomfortable is the idea of making something quite beautiful, and sincerely
creepy.

'I think people feel sick when they hear Ok Computer,' Yorke tell me. 'Nausea was part of what we were trying to
create. The Bends was a record of consolation. but this one was sad. And I didn't know why.'

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