Radiohead's Thom Yorke looked around, saw what a mess we're in, wrote about it on an album called OK Computer Economics with the truth: Radiohead's new album, OK Computer, takes all of their disenchantment and wraps it up into the first great album of the 21st century.
It's true, things can only get better.
To make music for the next century, what a beautiful thought. Futurism has been sold short; the city of the 21st century is feared as a polluted megalopolis, crowded with steel-eyed robot-people, protein pills and a near-rioting underclass. Humanity will be something weak and frail, slowly strangled by tangles of buzzing wires and irradiated by nuclear television and plutonium-driven satellites. Mis-applied technology will cauterise our souls and crush anything that does not bring a financial profit, like love, friendship, community and happiness. The future is brushed-chrome and ruthless. Multinationals dictate policy to countries, food is plastic and cancer-causing, and we pay to drink the rain.
But the fearful truth is that that is the 20th century, not the 21st. Anyone in love with humanity is currently in mourning for the present, watching it becoming infected by takeaway burgers, superpubs, shivering, oiled Page Three misses and strip-neon gamalls. Anyone who even semi-understands the political and economic workings of the Western world longs to turn away, furious and hungry for change; and determined to ramraid the untouched future in search of hope.
It is this disgust, tempered with a belief that every emotional extreme can lead to release and redemption, and that a kicking tune can save the world, that Radiohead have laid out in their new album, OK Computer.
"A lot of it's about disaffection," Thom Yorke, Radiohead's lead singer, explains. His blond scrub of hair has been shorn and dyed dark brown, but he looks, as described in one of his lyrics, "fitter, happier and more productive". "I switch on the TV, a there's all these irons and fridges coming at you. Watching a Tory MP electioneering, cheering wildly when someone threw eggs at him, but feeling I'd seen this once too often."
Yorke tugs what remains of his hair. "Economics. They fascinate me. Economics are the 20th century's greatest myth. There's been a lot of looking at headlines and feeling wildly impotent. Electioneering [one of the tracks on the album] is an incitement riot."
Yorke's anger is palpable on OK Computer. The first single, Paranoid Android, has him growling that "Ambition makes you look pretty ugly/ Kicking squealing Gucci little piggy." Even though Android is six-and-a-half minutes of tempo-changes, mournful, choral middle-eights and awkwardly angular guitars, it still went into the charts at No 3, confirming that Radiohead are now "shifting units" quicker than an army of removal men.
Radiohead's previous album, The Bends, was a benchmark in modern pop/rock. Before its release, music had painted itself into a corner. Songwriters tackling "big" subjects believed they had to prove they meant it, man, by being dysfunctional and on the brink of collapse (Manic Street Preachers, Nirvana). Anyone not on the edge of a nervous breakdown was left with two options: happy pop, or the knowing wink of kitsch and irony (almost every British band in 1994). The Bends, however, reintroduced intimacy, doubt, panic, anger and comfort, all written, played and sung by men who were stable and articulate.
Although it took nearly a year for word-of-mouth to do the rounds, The Bends became a lodestone for those searching for music that was aspirational and inspirational, gaining Album of the Year bouquets and a slew of imitators in its wake.
Work on OK Computer began in a near-deserted valley outside Bath. Frankly, your jaw will drop to the floor and fracture when you hear it. Airbag, FM rock chopped up with DJ Shadow beats and glorious whoops of "In an interstellar burst/I am back to save e universe!", and Karma Police (a White Album piano-roll which schizophrenically changes horses halfway through) keep up the pop quota. Elsewhere, Subterranean Homesick Alien and The Tourist sound like symphonic revelations, full of 3am haziness, and looking for the cool womb of space.
On all the other tracks, however, there's a claustrophobia that flickers and burns; spectral pressure that bends the metallic guitar-lines into wrought iron. "There was a very odd presence in the house we were recording in," Yorke says, his eyes careful neutral. "I just didn't sleep at all. I started seeing things, hearing things. There was a very claustrophobic ghost in the house... I mean, we made jokes about it, but there was fear everywhere, coming out of the walls and floors. It took me by the ankles and shook me until there was nothing left." He laughs. "There was really horrible wallpaper in my room. Maybe it was just that and my imagination."
Bands are usually consuming enormous quantities of drugs when they make albums as vast and kinetically charged as this. "We got quite drunk," Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's supernaturally gifted guitarist, offers. "Well, the others did. I only ever get dr k on New Year's Eve, and I'm awful around drugs. Anything that messes with my brain is a ferociously bad idea."
"You don't need drugs to make extreme music," Yorke chides. "Just reading the papers makes you feel extreme. Climbing Up The Walls, for instance. I used to work in a mental hospital around the time the Government was getting passionate about Care in the community, and everyone just knew what was going to happen. It was one of the scariest things that ever happened in this country, because a lot of them weren't harmless. It's like those huge 18th-century paintings, if you get really close to them, you ca see these little figures in the corners, these amorphous little monsters. And that's what some big towns are like now: the shadows contain amorphous little monsters."
"I think we have reached a peak here," Greenwood says later. "I sometimes find it hard to imagine we'll do anything better. Most bands start going rubbish around their fourth album, don't they?"
Even if his pessimistic prediction is true, Radiohead have left behind a back catalogue that soars and burns where others were content to plod through the 1990s. OK Computer sounds like sanity in a time when every other piece of news makes you want to shout "Stop the madness!". It's as heroic as Roger Ramjet trying to save the world with his bare hands. It's the first album of the 21st century.