Tag Archives: radiohead

#1352: Radiohead – There there. (The Boney King of Nowhere.)

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Now, I got Hail to the Thief in about 2010, I think for my fifteenth birthday. But I’d been knowing of the album’s existence since at least 2004. ‘Myxomatosis’ was the first Radiohead song I ever heard. A good little story, that one. You can read it if you want. But when it comes to ‘There there.’, things become a little more unclear. I’d definitely heard the song before I got the physical CD, but I can’t remember that one time when the song truly clicked. I have a vague memory of listening to it on the old, old family Windows XP computer and getting into it. I have another of watching its music video somewhere and getting into it. Which event came first, I can’t recall, I’m sorry. I have clearer memories of singing it in the shower alongside ‘Paranoid Android’ in my teenage days, seeing if I could get myself cleaned before I finished both songs. The track’s just always been around at this point, and I’m thankful ’cause I’ve got a deep appreciation for it.

Thinking about it, it would make sense that I saw the music video first before going ahead and probably pirating it to listen to on the computer. To sum it up bluntly and needlessly crudely, Thom Yorke fucks around in a forest and finds out. It’s better if you watch the thing. It’s one of those rare, rare occasions of a music video (that I’ve come across in my days) where the visual goes so well with the music that the combination of the two creates this overall heightened experience. But the song by itself is pretty great too. Starts off all ominous with those tom-toms and rim clicks and Colin Greenwood’s bass guitar. The feedback of Yorke’s guitar kicks into gear before he properly starts playing. “In pitch dark, I go walking in your landscape / Broken branches trip me as I speak”. Strong beginning lines to a track, for sure. Vivid and evocative from the jump. But it’s all about that A major chord that introduces the chorus where I always get hit with that warm feeling, and then Yorke hits you with “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.” Ain’t that the truth, usually? Such a universal sentiment delivered so earnestly. If the track isn’t an instant like for you at that point, it never will be.

The song continues to chug along. The second verse and chorus come round, now with added backing vocals both sung by Yorke – I think – in the left and right channels. Meant to represent that symbolism of an angel and devil on your shoulder, I’ve always felt, which I think is reinforced by that “Someone on your shoulder” line. Thom Yorke wails the song’s title, marking the point where the music takes a turn. Jonny Greenwood’s guitar comes in on the left-hand side, the energy ramps up, Thom Yorke turns into a tree, and you’re left wondering how you got to this point from where it all initially started. It’s not unusual for a Radiohead song to begin in one direction before seamlessly changing to another. But with ‘There there.’, you get a very notable example. There’s a reason the crowd goes wild when those tom-tom stands are propped up in front of Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood at their live shows. They know shit’s about to go down.

#1307: Radiohead – Sulk

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Now, I do know how Radiohead fans tend to feel about ‘Sulk’, which is that a large majority of them consider it to be one of the worst tracks on The Bends. Not because it’s bad. But when in an album including songs like ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Just’, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)‘ and others that I would have covered on here, it seems to pale in comparison. A comment I can remember being agreed was that it sounded like a leftover from the band’s debut album Pablo Honey, or could have fit better on that album. It’s too normal. Sounds like any other ’90s alternative rock song that bands were making at the time. ‘Sulk’, in general, in my opinion, is much, much better than… probably 10 out of the 12 tracks that make up Pablo Honey, so I disagree with that particular take. And, yeah, it follows a pretty normal song structure for Radiohead song. Doesn’t stop it from being pretty darn good, I tell you.

I got The Bends as a Christmas gift in 2006, my request inspired by the number of times I’d seen Radiohead’s music videos on MTV2 up to that point. I might have said it was a birthday gift in a previous post, but my “xmas list” sent to my cousin in my Outlook email says otherwise. Back then I was 11 and merely asking for albums just for the singles, which is what I got from The Bends and sort of left it on the shelf. I may have listened through on my PlayStation 2 when I was 12 or something too. It wasn’t really until 2016 when a new Radiohead album was on the horizon, that I was at my desk at work and decided to listen through The Bends from front to back and really pay attention to it. It was honestly though that one playthrough that ‘Sulk’ seemed like an obvious track that I should have been liking for years up to that point. I extend that notion to fellow album tracks, ‘Bones’ and ‘Black Star’. If I could do all this again, they would have their own posts too.

‘Sulk’ was apparently written in response to the 1987 Hungerford massacre that happened in England. You never would have guessed it. I certainly didn’t. Listening to this earlier live version of the track does seem to reveal that origin of inspiration a lot more. The final lyric being “Just shoot your gun”. Clearly, some changes in the words happened along the way. In its final iteration, it seems to be about the universal feeling of depression, the hold it can have on a person and a wish for it to subside. Just so happens that the band provide a really upbeat performance behind it. There’s a key change and everything that occurs at the instrumental break and lasts through the final chorus, where Thom Yorke sings a high B note without falsetto. It’s a pretty magical moment. Unfortunately though, the song as a whole came to be the one the band themselves disliked the most. This probably also plays into fans’ opinions on the song as well. As a result, it hasn’t been played live since 1995. I’ll have a lot of love for it for a long time.

#1297: Radiohead – Street Spirit (Fade Out)

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On Radiohead’s The Bends, there’s a theme about the fear of getting old that shows it’s face throughout the record. On ‘Bones’, Thom Yorke sings about not wanting to be “crippled and cracked”. On ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, he talks about gravity always winning in reference to aging women who went through plastic surgery in the 1980s. Thom Yorke would have been 25/26 when working on the lyrics for the songs that would make up The Bends. But even then, I think it’s fair to say he might have been going through some existential crisis of some kind at the time. I think as we all do when we get to that mid-20s period. And closing the album off is a song about a thing we all know is certain in life. Death. The track is ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, one of the group’s most sombre numbers which also happens to be one of their most popular too.

When it comes to me, well, I think I first came to know about the song when its music video played on MTV2, or one of those alternative music video channels, back in the 2000s. In between 2003 – 2007, when the band were on a bit of a hiatus, a Radiohead music video showing up on those places was a regular occurrence. Probably because the band were known to have some of the coolest of those types of media. The video for ‘Street Spirit’, with the whole manipulation of time thing going on in its scenes, was cool to witness to the small kid I was at that time. Thought it was so cool, in fact, that I tried to find the video online, which in a pre-YouTube world was very hard to do. Can only imagine what it must have felt like seeing something like it in 1996, when the song was released as a single. The track may be one of the band’s darkest. But man, if it isn’t catchy in its own uniquely bleak way. When that opening, circular guitar riff gets going, it’s very hard to stop listening to everything else that follows.

In the first verse, Thom Yorke depicts an image of a helpless figure feeling closed in by the houses that surround them. The second sees him referring to a machine that can’t communicate “the thoughts and the strain [he’s under]”. This got me thinking, maybe he’s talking about his guitar. Maybe he was really going through some things at the time. Or maybe he’s taking a point of view of a general machine used by an employee somewhere. After which he suggests we unite and be people of the world before we all end up underground. And in the third verse, he brings up imagery of cracked eggs and dying birds screeching through their lasts breaths. I did mention this song was bleak, didn’t I? Despite all this, the music is extremely infectious. You’ve got the riff I talked about in the last paragraph, but then there are the “Ah-na-na” vocals during the instrumental breaks. And then there’s Yorke’s actual vocal take, which just soars over everything. He changed up the way he sang from OK Computer onwards, so to have that Pablo Honey/Bends era style finish on this track is a massive way to go out. All very morose, but a lot of people love it, including myself, to the point that, if given an opportunity, there will sing it even louder than Yorke at a live performance. Like in the one below.

#1162: Radiohead – Scatterbrain. (As Dead as Leaves.)

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Mmm-mmm, Hail to the Thief. You know what? I’ll always root for this Radiohead album, even if it’s the one that the band and resident producer Nigel Godrich agree could have been worked on a little bit more. They recorded the songs in two weeks, in free spirits in a sunny LA after the stressful Kid A/Amnesiac sessions. They didn’t want to bring up any more bad blood that came from tracklist arrangements and production choices, so they put some light touches on and put all of them out there on an almost hour-long record, the final one on their contract with EMI. There are some great songs on there. A couple I’ve written about already. A few more I will do in the future. Those great songs, I reckon, are some of the best in the group’s whole discography.

It’s been a ride and a half up to the point you get to the album’s penultimate track ‘Scatterbrain’, but when it starts you’re greeted with a very calming drum track and descending guitar line by Jonny Greenwood. It’s also a welcome change of pace, considering it comes after one of the more menacing, fuzzed out songs on the record in ‘Myxomatosis’. Yorke said this song is a very hard one to describe, but mentioned that it was influenced by his favourite type of weather and an incident where the roof of a next-door neighbor of his flew up into the sky in a Wizard of Oz type manner. The lyrics do bring up a lot of imagery concerned with that sort of scenery. What I think the track is mainly about, is wanting to find some peace of mind in a world that’s going mad. And in 2003, with the Iraq War and all of that great stuff happening, things were going crazy and off the deep end for a while.

Think it’s fair to say that Thom Yorke’s vocal is the real highlight of the entire thing. While Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood’s guitars are twinkling away in the left and right channels, Yorke comes in with an earnest performance that reverberates into the distance. He’s really left out in the open here. But his voice will glitch out to add a little quirk to the very human aspect of it all. The track subtly builds as things progress. Greenwood comes in first on the guitar, O’Brien joins in at the start of the second verse. What I think is a Mellotron joins in for the second half of that verse, and then these parts drop out one-by-one at the song’s key change, where Yorke claims that there must be someplace out there where he isn’t in is head too much and can be in a state of content. The way the last guitar note trails off and the last rimshot echoes into silence leaves things a little unresolved, which I think works perfectly well, as that then leads into the final track and brings everything to a swift conclusion. But more about that song will be for another day.

#1051: Radiohead – Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2)

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A long, long time ago, wanna say 2009, I listened to parts 1 and 2 of Radiohead’s ‘Polyethylene’. The track itself is a B-side that was originally released on the ‘Paranoid Android’ single in 1997. But in 2009, it was made available again on the new “Collector’s Edition” of OK Computer. These editions, also made for Pablo Honey up to Hail to the Thief, were considered to be something of a cash-grab devised by the band’s former EMI label and have since been rubbished by the band and many fans too. I listened to the track that one time, so it was like virtually hearing the song for the first time when it was then released again on 20th OK Computer anniversary, OKNOTOK release that came around in 2017.

Like its A-side counterpart, ‘Polyethylene (Parts 1 and 2)’ is also formed by apparently taking two seemingly separate pieces of music and putting them together to make one whole thing. But in this case, ‘Polyethylene’ starts off as a quiet acoustic number before faking the listener out and turning into a energized and emphatic full-on band performance. For the first 40 seconds, Thom Yorke calms us with some sweet dulcet tones and a sole acoustic take. What he’s singing about here is debatable, the lyrics in this section aren’t too decipherable either. Nothing new when it comes to Yorke’s enunciation in certain songs. Yorke abruptly stops, and a descending electric guitar run opens up the second part of the track with the rest of the band falling in not too long after. That guitar line acts as the main riff for the remainder of the song, and after each repetition of it comes the huge impact of the electric guitars and crash cymbals coming in together. A huge release of energy every time.

Here, Yorke’s vocals are a lot more clearer, though the lyrics read off like a list of items and slogans that he may have observed and taken a note of, rather than displaying a narrative or having a coherent theme throughout. That doesn’t matter all that much though, ’cause there’s a ton of feeling in the delivery. Also, during the first few measures of the verses, Yorke is singing and playing the guitar in 3/4 while the drums continue in 4/4 to have this polyrhythmic effect going on. I want to believe that’s a nod to the Beatles’ ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ which also utilises the same feature for a moment or two. It’s known that that song was an influence on ‘Paranoid Android’, so why not this one too? I’ve come to really like ‘Polyethylene’ over the years, probably more than songs that made it onto their respective albums. Why it didn’t make it onto OK Computer, only the band will know, but with its B-side status the track lies low in the shadows, which makes it all the more special for those who go on to discover it.