Ed: "Thom basically had this checklist, like a nineties checklist if you like, and he had written it out. There is a bit of him playing piano in the rehearsal room. He was very drunk one night, which you can tell by the sloppy playing on it, and he just played out this melody and stuff. He was very anxious that it wasn't him saying [the lyrics] - this voice is neutral. By the computer saying it, it doesn't become a bit of pretentious art-wank, it's something neutral in the way that the computer stumbles over words and doesn't get the pronunciation or the inflections right."
A mournful computer recites an ironic guide to modern living over sparse piano and strings.
Jonny Greenwood: "Thom put the words on his computer which has one of those vocal programs. We found it very beautiful when it spoke the words. It went from being gimmicky to something rather emotional."
Fitter Happier
"The others were downstairs, 'rockin'', and I crept upstairs and did this
in ten minutes. I was feeling incredible hystreria and panic, and it was
so liberating to give the lyrics to this neutral-sounding computer."
Fitter Happier: "I had about three months where I couldn't write anything, but I constantly had lists. Then I realised that it was the only way I was going to say what I needed to say. Sometimes, before you have a genuine feeling it is circumvented by the outside, your brain is apologising for things that haven't even happened yet. But me, I listen to the piano bit."
'FITTER HAPPIER'
A computer speaks a random spiel of modern-living buzzphrases to a
soundtrack of tinkling piano, screeching violin and, er, that's it,
actually. Weird.
Colin: "Thom didn't want to have to say it, so we were messing around with
a computer voicebox. We really liked the way the emotion still comes
across, so we kept it."
Thom: "The computer was the most emotional voice I have ever heard, at the
time."
Colin: "It sounds like Stephen Hawking is guesting on the album. Maybe he
should have been. I used to see him when I was at college, toddling around
in his wheelchair."
Key Lyric: "Concerned, but powerless..."
Thom: "Are the lyrics a reflection of my own life? Yes."
Ed: "It's about the lack of naturalness in modern life. I'd like to see
the lyrics printed as a full page advert in one of those dreadful magazines
like GQ or FHM, cos some people might believe all that stuff."
Colin: "Really, it's an exercise in finding meaning in things that seem to
be random and chaotic and out of your control. A bit like life, really."
Thom: "[W]ith the sleeve for 'OK Computer', we were both obsessed by the idea of noise, as we were when we were doing the music. But not just noise - background noise. Everything is background noise. Our whole lives, the way our minds work. And the whole album is about that - levels of mental chatter."
Q: "Hence the reference in 'Paranoid Android' to "All the unborn chiken voices in my head"?"
Thom: "Yeah. And the reason 'Fitter Happier' exists is cos of mental background noise. Some days you're in a disturbed state and it moves to the front."
Q: "And it's about what the mental chatter is, or suggested remedies for it..."
Thom: "All those things at once. It's not all suggestions, a lot of its observations. 'A pig in a cage on antibiotics' was just a really shocking passage I found in a book. It's by Jonathan Coe and it's called 'What A Carve Up' [published by Penguin]. It's a really funny book, but a lot of it's based on the way... farming has changed [laughs]. The way that insensitive farming happened. One of the characters in the book is this screaming, right-winged farmer with a brother who's an MP lobbying for the relaxation of restrictions on farming.
Q: "The artwork on the LP and some of the T-shirts on sale - they seem, to have quite a coherent set of concerns, ones that stem from 'Fitter Happier'. Was that an accident?"
Thom: "We actively chose to pursue the 'Fitter Happier' thing. The one that says 'Meeting People Is Easy', I like a lot. In that picture [the only bit of artwork reproduced on the CD itself], one guy's got a briefcase, one guy hasn't. Someone's being sold something they don't really want, and someone's being friendly because they're trying to sell something. That's what it means to me.It's quite sad, and quite funny as well."
Q: "It often seems that you're puzzling over a society in which people need outside advice about very primal things - how to remain healthy, how to interact with each other..."
Thom: "All the artwork and so on... we chose to pursue it after we did the track. More relevant is the reason I wrote the words in the first place. [pause] These were things I was being told to do. I showed it to the others and they liked it, and then Stanley - who does the artwork - was playing around on the computer and made it say it.
After that, it went from being a list of things that had a lot of emotional meaning for me and that was it, to coming to life. In fact, it was all the things that I hadn't said in the songs. Stanley was really just pushing into it, and I was as well in the end. It was like, 'I'm not going to hide this thing that I wrote, 'cause I'm really proud of it."
Q: "Are you at all amused by the fact that this is simultaneously your most out-there and you most succesful album to date?"
Ed: "Well, I don't think the record company expected it to do as well as it has. But I think that's more to do with music generally. Everything seems to have widened out. With this record, we were proud of it but Maybe it was a bit (pause) perverse in parts, When you put something like 'Fitter Happier' in... that had to go in, but it was a question of where you placed it. If that had gone at the start, it would have been, 'No man, you've gone right over the boundaries of (pause) what's decent'."
Thom: "The reason 'Fitter Happier' exists is 'cause of mental background noise. Some days you're in a disturbed state and it moves to the front."
Q: "And it's about what the mental chatter is, or suggested remedies for it..."
Thom: "All those things at once. It's not all suggestions, a lot of its observations. 'A pig in a cage on antibiotics' was just a really shocking passage I found in a book. It's by Jonathan Coe and it's called 'What A Carve Up' [published by Penguin]. It's a really funny book, but a lot of it's based on the way...farming has changed [laughs]. The way that insensitive farming happened. One of the characters in the book is this screaming, right-winged farmer with a brother who's an MP lobbying..."
Q: "And what about 'Fitter Happier'? It sounds as if you took it straight from the pages of a self-help manual."
Thom: "I bought a whole load of those how-to-improve-your-life books, and we'd been trying to use them in different ways. One said something like, 'You will never make friends unless you like everyone, genuinely'. Oh, well, I'm fucked then, aren't I? And the legacy of those books goes on. You still meet people who really believe that the way to succeed is to adopt that smile and that smile will sell: 'Unless you believe in the product, you will not sell the product'."
