OK Computer is the third album from a group that's slowly emerging as the best "rock group" of the '90s. That group is Radiohead. All five of the group's members (Thom Yorke, vocals, guitar; Jonny Greenwood, guitar, keyboards; Ed O'Brien, guitar; Colin Greenwood, bass; Phil Selway, drums) — who got together in the late '80s — hail from Oxford, England. The band's debut, Pablo Honey, contained the slacker-Gen X anthem "Creep", which has been covered by both Chrissie Hynde and rapper Chino XL. Pablo Honey went gold and begat 1995's The Bends, which was, in a word, amazing. Combining Yorke's folky vocals, paranoid lyrics, and a three-guitar slash-and-burn, The Bends yielded the hits "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High And Dry" and went platinum-plus.
Now comes OK Computer, which was produced by the band itself. Haunting, evocative, chilling, and deeply melodic, OK Computer is edgy rock 'n' roll smoothed out on the folk-rock tip. I love it. The first single, "Paranoid Android", is all over MTV, and Radiohead is becoming large, with k.d. lang and Michael Stipe among their biggest fans. I spoke Thom Yorke (chief songwriter and Martin Short clone) about the group's new sound, the Tibetan Freedom Concert, and the price of fame.
If there's a sound that I would associate with you guys, it's that sort of an attack coming out.
And then we didn't do it with this one, yeah.
So this record was a step away, obviously.
Yeah. I suppose we're still embarrassed about being called a rock band. I think the perception was that we were all set up to do the big, third, crossover, Bends sound-alike album. We were in Toronto day before last, and there's this new building that won an award, this shopping mall, and it's literally designed like a cathedral. Inside it was all glass and steel, pointing in. The sound of the acoustics was the sort of thing that I was hearing in my head when we were recording. Everything was bouncing off. So it's quite pretty, but it's actually quite frightening as well. Every track has that in it. It's quite pretty, but then it's really quite violent. "Airbag" is quite violent.
That's the whole gesture of an airbag, especially since now they're recalling them all in this country.
Yeah, because they go off at random.
They go off and they just kill you before you have a chance to die.
That's great, though, isn't it? So you go out and you buy a really, really expensive Mercedes, and then you're driving along with it and it just goes, POOF!
Kind of James Bond, you know. Having never interviewed you or ever met you, and having all my information about you from visuals and from records, I think most people would probably think that you guys are a bit uneasy with the whole process. There's a nervousness in the group, in the videos. There's just sort of a jitteriness.
We've just come to terms with being jittery, if you know what I mean, but we're still jittery. The difficult thing is just having to deal with the personality cult or trying not to deal with the personality cult. Or are you going to be asked: "Are you friends with Michael Stipe?" "Aren't you friends with Michael Stipe?" It's none of your fucking business. We worked together a lot before being a band, before we signed on the dotted line. We just got used to it. We got used to the intrusive stuff. But I think, when it comes to recording, one of the things I just get happiest with is the fact that it doesn't creep into our work.
The business.
Yeah. So that's the thing. That's why we look nervous all the time, is because we're not letting it creep into our work. I didn't do this interview for Melody Maker, and there's a big fracas about it because the editor threw a wobbly because I wouldn't talk to him. The reason I wouldn't talk to Melody Maker is very simple. It was because it was affecting my work. They got inside my head by claiming I was the next Richie Manic.
From the Manic Street Preachers? The guy who walked away?
Yeah. Anyway, so that's what they thought I was going to do, and it got inside my head, so that's why I didn't want to talk to them again. My whole thing about it is, if it's going to affect my work — the way we can work together, how we see each other — then fuck them.
It has to be based in something of this fear that you're going to go off and do something strange. It gets back to that whole perception that you guys are just kind of like...
Yeah. Well, I could. We all have ejector seat buttons that we can push at any time. The button is the way I deal with it when I can't deal with it.
Has fame and success been difficult for you to deal with?
It just goes away pretty fast. Change the color of your hair and nobody remembers who you are, so it's great. So it's not really been an issue recently — not for the past year or so, while we were working on the album. It wasn't an issue at all, because no one who talked to us knew who we were, so, brilliant.
It's always been interesting to me to notice how rock bands or white bands deal with fame compared to how R&B and hip-hop groups do. Because the hip-hop community openly courts money and success and all the trappings of it. Their way of self-destructing is to get themselves shot. You will never hear of a rapper OD'ing or killing themselves, but they will put themselves in the line of fire. Whereas rock bands, when they self-destruct, they self-destruct. When Kurt Cobain died, I remember talking to black kids in my neighborhood. That was the most alien concept in the world — how could some rich white boy not want it? How could you not want to be rich and famous?
If that's why he died.
Yeah, but that's how people see it. It's just always been interesting to me that there's still this schism, that people are always having to apologize for the trappings of it.
Yeah. It's kind of like the noble savage thing. I just think that what is wrong with the music industry is the fact that all the musicians who are able to just block that off are musicians who get better and do really beautiful pieces of work. All right, people want to know about the person who wrote the music. But then there's the trappings; being surrounded by all these fucking harpies, witches, warlocks, and fucking weirdos everywhere you walk, who are saying whatever they think is the appropriate thing to say to you. You are going to fucking lose it. You either can go elsewhere and choose your friends, or you're doomed. But also, I think that you can't go it alone, either. The rock act or the rap act are essentially both parties doing the same thing: one passively, one actively. The shopaholic is the same as the suicidal, white, middle-class boy. They're both doing the same thing. They're filling a hole. The guy with the guns or the guy sleeping with the women with the funny G-strings, he's doing the same thing as the guy shooting it into his veins. It's the same shit. Different kettle, same shit. But basically the tortured artist is the biggest, worst myth of this century. It's a waste of time, because it doesn't exist. Because the point is that you can't do it alone. You have people around you, and there's a whole industry involved, and to carry on denying it, it's bullshit. I had that all the way through making this record. It doesn't exist anymore. You're just simply part of a machine. You either go with it or you self-destruct.
And you can insulate yourself.
Yeah. It's necessary in terms of the terrifyingly huge wheels that are turning. You either just pretend it's not there, and whack something else into your veins to make it go away, or you deal with it.
Accept what your situation is, and then work within those rules.
Yeah. All my favorite artists have been able to do that to some degree, yet that was a real revelation to me, when we were doing this record.
I always think it's very difficult to have a conscience and stay in this business, or in business in general. So how do you make your place? Or do you?
You have to just do it on a personal level and go from there, really. We're signed to a very large corporation, which, luckily, recently sold off its missile manufacturing, but did actually make good money that way. My hands are dirty.
You just deal with it the way you just deal with it.
Yeah.
You pick your levels of hell.
Yeah. You start from the ground and work up.