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WE'RE ALL TUNED IN << back l page 2
Maybe what keeps Radiohead on the charts is the band’s ingenuity in songwriting as lyrics seem to be a mixture of overheard conversations, techno-speak, and fragments of a harsh diary. In the song Backdrifts, truly, always personal, music remains as subjective as it always has been:
We're rotten fruit We're damaged goods What the hell, we've got nothing more to lose One gust and we will probably crumble We're backdrifting
This far but no further I'm hanging off a branch I'm teetering on the brink of Honey sweets so fall asleep I'm backsliding
You fell into our arms You fell into our arms We tried but there was nothing we could do Nothing we could do
Keepin on with the album’s theme of madness and conflict, “We Suck Young Blood” is described by Thom to be “really sick and sort of like sexual in a really perverse way and all that sort of thing.” “Very LA as far as I’m concerned,” he says, explaining that “I think that was the reason we went to Holly/LA. I mean, ‘We suck young blood’ that was our take on Hollywood really, basically.” But while it doesn’t sound very light hearted, Philip says that “it was done in a very light-hearted spirit.”
Known for their experimental take on music, the lyrical uncertainty and unsettling feel to “The Gloaming” showed, once again that Radioheads have this amazing capability of pushing music past its limits. “Musically, that was all born out of an experiment that Johnny started,” explains Thom. “He did it with a tape loop and he wanted to cut it as, on a record, as a locked groove. I don’t know what he was going to use it for really, but I heard it when he and Colin started working on it and I just thought it was the most amazing thing that Johnny had ever written and I just said ‘I’ll have that,’” he shares. “And took the hard disk away and used to drive round down country roads during dusk basically…listening to this thing.” “Strangely it was actually put together without computers,” explains Jonathon. “It was all done from, I don’t want to get overly technical, but it was all done with pieces of tape. So the rhythms you’re hearing are in a way quite mechanical so that’s why it’s so unsettling maybe.” “We heard it on a CD,” says Ed, “but it was one of the few tracks that came from, you know, in a sense your laptop and we sort of re-visited it back in our studio after we’d been in LA. After we’d done a lot of live stuff…it was really refreshing to hear something…that was digital,” he says, referring to the earlier days of Radiohead. “It was the end of a session, end of the week and it was another tone, it was another mood, another…and it was different it was like we’ve got to make this work in the record. It takes it to another extreme in a way.” And extreme is what Thom attests to, as far as “The Gloaming” goes. “It had this melody that was coming out underneath and it was very much about imminent sense of darkness and thinking about the future and I guess it’s got a lot of dread in it really and a lot of sort of totally out-of-control feelings, you know. I mean my favourite line in the whole record is ‘the genie let out of the bottle’ thing because that kind of really sums it up for me”
Adding depth to the emotional take on Hail to the Thief is the love song-y I Will, which is interestingly, according to Thom, “…is also sort of the angriest thing I’ve ever written as well, you know, that sort of anger that you can’t even begin to express.” “Scatterbrain,” on the other hand, is considered by Thom to be “the loneliest song on the record” where the music is very, very soft and reassuring, a result of the warmth played by the instruments, though the song is about a wild storm, making it seem like “you’re listening to it from outside the window.”
Also taking on a tone of enhancing social awareness, Radiohead’s Myxomatosis is a song about current politics. It was born out of the idea of “getting to the centre (and) you start to see the centre and like a tornado there’s nothing there,” Thom explains.
i sat in the cupboard and wrote it down neat they were cheering and waving cheering and waving twitching and salivating like with myxomatosis but it got edited fucked up strangled/beaten up used in a photo in Time magazine buried in a burning black hole in Devon
and i don’t know why i feel so tongue-tied
i don’t know why i feel so skinned alive.
This song, whose title refers to a usually fatal infectious viral disease of rabbits and hares, used by Australia and the UK in the 1950s to reduce the rabbit population, because rabbits were causing significant damage to crops “was very specifically provoked by the Drop the Debt thing,” says Thom. “It just stuck with me how utterly powerless people are to really represent what goes on. If people elsewhere see fit, if they see a nicer more convenient story to be written another way, they can write off the wishes of millions of people in a split second editorial decision which I feel is immoral in a lot of different situations.” Combined with the queasy, single keyboard lines and the detail in a combination of other sounds, Myxomatosis sounds like “playing something in the spirit of how you think they might have made records in 79, 80,” says Ed.
Despite 2 Grammy Awards, numerous nominations and the tremendous amount of success Radiohead has acquired over the past ten years, the band stays true to their roots as they remain doing what they do best – making and playing music not for anything else but for the love of it. Thom is reminded of this in the song “Go to Sleep,” which for Collin, summed up the album. “’Go to Sleep’ was like, it was literally whatever was coming out of my mouth and I just had a look at it at the end and to me it was nonsense all the way through,” says Thom. “That was one where it was all, I thought at the time, complete nonsense and then turned into this really amazing thing that to be honest wasn’t me really, didn’t feel like me at all. I didn’t feel like I’d done it, which was great. That’s how I remember when I first started writing songs, when we first were in the band as well. That’s what I remembered doing,” he says wistfully. “I think you get all this baggage over the years that comes up through all the analysis and stuff and you start, like, worrying about the consequences of what you might say and this track or that track,” explained Radiohead’s frontman. “Whereas this time it was like ‘Weeell, whatever, I’m not interested in what the consequences of this are, you know, this is just what I do today.”
Thom’s sentiments stick to the mind of any artist, musician, person. “What I discovered in making this record is that along the way things form themselves and you know the way things sound it can form itself. You may have dreamt of how you wanted it to sound and then one day you walk into the studio and there it is but you haven’t you’ve not been standing there with a hammer trying to beat it out of the desk or whatever or your guitar. It’s not necessary.” As Thom, Ed, Collin, Jonathon and Phillip continue to create music that is a fusion of a variety of genres, continues to push music to its limits, and experiment with a variety of styles that would surprise audiences and critics as they are caught off-guard, listeners could look forward to another decade – and most likely even more – of some dynamic, intense and passionate music from Radiohead.
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Set to release their sixth album “Hail To The Thief” on Parlophone on June 9, Radiohead’s “Hail To The Thief” will be preceded by the single “There There” on May 26. Featuring 14 tracks recorded in Oxford and Los Angeles, it was produced by Nigel Godrich and Radiohead, and mixed by Nigel Godrich. For more information, log on to www.radiohead.com.
© Valerie V. Mayuga, 2005
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“There’s lots and lots of
different interpretations,” says Thom of the song Backdrifts. “I mean the lyrics
are incredibly ambivalent,” he explains. “‘Backdrifts’ to me ended up being, if
we’re talking lyrically, very much about the slide into, the slide backwards
that’s happening everywhere you look.” Reflective of the album title, Hail to
the Thief, Backdrift speaks of a choice between the desire to escape from
something or wanting to shout about it. “You know, there was a time when
everybody sort of felt like maybe the world was progressing, maybe we were
getting better at understanding other people and ignorance,” explains Thom. “But
perhaps there was a higher level of tolerance and compassion and so on and then
suddenly someone literally flicked a switch and the light went on and everyone
just scurried for the dark and that to me is the best sort of, quite a good way
of describing the general atmosphere of that song.”