Thom Yorke (16 page)

Unfortunately, he knew that it would be difficult to make the typical session musician understand that. He’d been frustrated in the past by some professional session players who came in, did a day’s work and then left. He wanted something different. Jonny was in touch with the Head Of Music at Abingdon School who’d taken over from Terence Gilmore-James and he asked him whether he knew any good brass players. The new head suggested another occasional teacher at the school, Andy Bush, who was also a successful jazz musician.

“I think they’d previously used a fixer in London to book their string players and it hadn’t been an altogether happy experience,” Andy told this author. “I’m sure they got musically what they wanted but they didn’t enjoy the work-to-rule aspect of a lot of mainstream session players. Sometimes you get a situation where people turn up, they’re not really that bothered what they’re doing, you’re there for three hours and then you go away. It’s not very personal. They’d had their fingers burnt with people watching the clocks and getting their contracts out. They wanted to find a connection with someone who was more sympathetic to their way of working. And, hopefully, somebody who was interested in their music. Which I was and, accordingly, I booked guys who all really liked Radiohead even before we met them.”

Andy put together a group of eight players who were summoned
to Oxfordshire to help out. For all of them it was a bizarre but inspiring experience. They arrived and Jonny handed them the sheet music that they were supposed to play but they quickly realised it wasn’t really necessary. Saxophonist Steve Hamilton, who played on the sessions, told this author that they were allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

“Jonny Greenwood presented us with parts which were completely dispensed with after about five minutes,” he says, “and we just made it up as we went along. There was a core part that they wanted to hear but only very subliminally, I think. We just basically digested that and made up our own thing and made a bit of a noise.”

To start with, it didn’t quite work. The horn players weren’t used to performing together in such a loose, improvised fashion and it was hard to see exactly what Thom and Jonny wanted. It’s not entirely clear if they knew themselves.

“It wasn’t gelling,” says baritone sax player Stan Harrison, who also played. “It wasn’t unified. I said to Thom and Jonny Greenwood, ‘One way for you to solve this problem would be for you to conduct us. If you want us to play louder then make this type of hand motion, softer this type of hand motion, more frenetic this kind of hand motion. At least then we’ll have more of an idea of what the whole thing is supposed to feel like.”

They weren’t sure. The whole point was that it was supposed to be improvised and both Thom and Jonny felt slightly embarrassed about conducting a group of talented, professional musicians. [With admirable modesty] they were both conscious that their own creativity and imagination often outstripped their technical proficiency. Who were they to ‘conduct’ anybody? But when they accepted that the session needed some kind of direction, things took a sudden leap forward.

“Thom or Jonny said, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before, I don’t know,’ says Stan. “But we tried it and within seconds they were jumping up and down and spinning around. I think Thom was on my side and Jonny was on the other side. It was something that I wish had been filmed. It was just so much fun to watch. All of a sudden they were taking these conductor roles when ten seconds before they were so reluctant to do it and then they were going crazy!”

It was a hot day but, once he’d got started, Thom threw himself
into the role of conductor with an enthusiasm and energy that startled and inspired the horn players. “It almost felt like he was doing a Jackson Pollock,” says Steve. “He was jumping up and down, doing what he does onstage, but he was doing that almost in an exaggerated fashion. It seemed a little bit bizarre. Musicians are typically, by nature, a little bit reserved sometimes but it was actually completely spot-on. He got exactly what he wanted out of us by whatever he was doing. I’m not sure what he was doing! It did actually inspire us to really give it some. He was saturated with sweat just from jumping up and down.”

In fact Thom jumped up and down so vigorously that, he said later, he ended up breaking his foot. Nevertheless he was delighted with the result. He wanted them to create the kind of discordant, violent energy that he felt was trapped in a traffic jam and they got it absolutely right. On the finished version, you can almost hear the angry car horns.

“On the day I said to them, ‘You know when you’ve been in a traffic jam for four hours and if someone says the wrong thing to you, you’ll just kill ’em, you’ll fucking snap and probably throttle them?” he said to
Juice
magazine.

The horn players didn’t escape the band’s notorious perfectionism. Thom and Jonny were excited and enthusiastic about what they were hearing but they kept thinking that they might be able to get something better. “They kept coming up to us and saying ‘This is so good, this is brilliant, that’s the take we love,’” says Steve. “And then, ‘Can we do another one?’ It was the usual thing – ‘That’s perfect, let’s do another one.’”

Meanwhile the rest of the band kept coming in and complimenting them on what they were coming up with. “It was a pleasure working with them,” Steve says. “They were so complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Oh, it’s so good, thank you for coming down and doing this.’ It was almost embarrassing how often they said how good it was. Well, actually it isn’t that good! We’re just mucking around on our instruments.”

But they were all impressed by the creative relationship between Thom and Jonny. “Thom didn’t communicate that much with us,” says Steve. “It was more like he was driving the ship and Jonny was first officer relaying the artistic information to us. I remember it being very intense but I’ve never done a session where you could
really just do whatever you liked within quite a broad framework.

I remember getting in the car with one of the other players afterwards and the typical thing with musicians is that you give them a gig and they moan about it. We said, ‘It’s really bizarre, there’s nothing to moan about.’ They were really nice. They cooked us a really nice dinner and the music was good and they were really complimentary!”

With its weirdly catchy bass riff, played on record by Thom, ‘The National Anthem’ proved that they could make electronic music that had the same bite as rock. Months later, when they played it live for a French TV station, they showed the session musicians how much they’d appreciated their contribution.

“One nice thing they did in Paris, they presented us all with a platinum disc of
Kid A
,” says Steve. “Bands very often don’t bother to do that sort of thing and they did it personally. I remember being quite chuffed about that. They called us into a room when we were doing [French TV channel]
Canal Plus
and Thom said, ‘I’d just like to thank you for all your hard work and present these to you.’ It was very sweet. I was quite touched. Bands don’t tend to do that anymore.”

By the end of 1999, Radiohead had finished six songs and it seemed like they were all moving in the same direction. Thom was pleasantly surprised to be able to sit back and listen as Jonny took over the demo he’d done for ‘How To Disappear Completely’, writing a string arrangement, conducting an orchestra and playing the Martenot. This record – to be called
Kid A
– was the album where Thom had dominated proceedings more than any other but it was a relief when he realised that the rest of the band were with him.

“Thom drove the album,” said Ed afterwards to
Q
. “It was an eye-opener for me. He has a great art school ethic. He did art at university and he has that kind of drive: OK, I’ve done that. Now I’m going to move on. I think I can be vaguely objective about this, and I think Thom is in the line of the John Lennons, the David Bowies, part of that heritage. He has an incredible gift.”

By now, all of Radiohead were experimenting with sampling, cutting-and-pasting rhythm, as well as finding new roles for themselves within the band. They had one more big bust up, on February 1, but by Spring 2000, all of a sudden, they had thirty songs. Many of these, typically, were tracks that they’d rejected back in Copenhagen and Paris when their confidence was at a low ebb. They listened to songs like ‘Morning Bell’ and ‘Spinning Plates’ and suddenly realised how good they were. According to Thom, they listened to them and said, “That’s fucking amazing, why the hell did we stop working on that?” Part of the reason why things suddenly accelerated was because many of the songs only needed minor tweaks. Often when they’d got close to finishing something, Thom had veered off to start something else. “I was doing that for about six months,” he said to
Hot Press
, “because I really didn’t want to finish things and have to put them out to people and have to deal with all that crap that I’d essentially forgotten about.”

They’d had weeks and months of doing almost nothing but, eventually, Thom realised that was part of the creative process, too.
It was much easier to deal with in their own studio where there wasn’t an accountant hovering in the background worrying about how much it was all going to cost. As with
OK Computer
, though, the hardest part was still to come. They had to choose what songs to put on the album and what order to put them in. It sounds simple but Thom always found it unbearable.

“The track listing is always the hardest part for me,” he told
NY Rock
. “It is so difficult and almost painful. I can only use the old metaphor about songs being like children. My songs are my kids and some of them stay with me. Some others I have to send out, out to the war.”

This might seem extreme but the rest of the band agreed about how important it was to get the track-listing right, even if they weren’t as obsessive about it as Thom. “I can assure you: it’s hell,” Colin said. “We have meetings that take hours – often from 4p.m. until midnight – only about the order of the songs.”

“I don’t think you have any idea how vital it is,” said Ed, “until you actually fuck it up, which we did big time on the first record.” Perhaps he meant the unfortunate segue from ‘Creep’ to ‘How Do You?’, but then the second song wouldn’t have fitted well anywhere.

The glut of material caused another argument as they tried to decide whether to release a double album. With such a dramatic change of direction, some of the band thought that it would be too much to take. But then again they’d put so much work into the songs that for them not to see the light of day now seemed ridiculous. They’d worked on ‘Knives Out’, alone, for 373 days despite the fact that it was, as Ed wrote in his studio diary, one of the most straight-ahead songs they’d done in years.

It was as if they weren’t sure they were allowed to do anything that simple anymore. For months they’d fiddled around with it, adding things, changing things, before, finally, deciding that it was fine as it was.

Meanwhile, outside the studio, speculation was growing as to what they had been doing exactly all this time.
Melody Maker
even sent their News Reporter to Oxford to see if he could find out what they were up to by interviewing friends and neighbours. The attention bemused Radiohead. They’d never really understood the feverish reaction to
OK Computer
and they weren’t ready to deal with the extraordinary anticipation for
Kid A
. It was particularly
worrying that the
Melody Maker
article promised that Radiohead were about to “return rock to us”. At this point, they still weren’t entirely sure how the record was going to sound but they had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

When the record was finally done, the overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Immediately after the sessions were over, Thom was asked to record a duet with Björk for the soundtrack to her film
Dancer In The Dark
and that proved to be a very different experience in the studio. Suddenly the weight was off his shoulders. Björk was somebody who shared Thom’s approach to music. They were both perfectionists who approached things very differently to most musicians. But it wasn’t easy to blend Björk’s exuberant voice with Thom’s much softer tones. The result, ‘I’ve Seen It All’, is odd but also very haunting. Björk pitches her voice much lower than usual, almost whispering, while Thom murmurs alongside like a ghost. If nothing else it was a reminder that making music didn’t need to be the tormented business of so many Radiohead sessions.

The opportunity to go out on tour should have been another relief but Thom wasn’t sure he was ready to be a travelling salesman again. Long before
No Logo
, he’d had problems with the sponsorship-festooned tour circuit. But Chris and Bryce suggested that they now had the clout to do things differently. They didn’t have to play the usual giant Carling toilets. They could do things their way, hire a massive marquee and play in their own space with the best possible sound and with complete control. Thom still wasn’t convinced.

“If ultimately I had been left to it, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said in a TV interview. “And the others said: Go on, it will be great, you’ll like it!’ I had real horrors about the tent and everything, I thought we were crazy.”

It was a pretty crazy idea. It must have been much more expensive than playing normal shows. It was more expensive, even, than the first shows they played after recording, a series of gigs in extraordinary venues across Europe. The first two dates were supposed to be held at Roman amphitheatres in France. The first one in Arles almost had to be cancelled due to torrential rain but they just about managed to get through it. The second night they weren’t so lucky. When they arrived in Vaison La Romaine, a bigger amphitheatre cut into the side of a hill with an amazing view of the
French countryside, the sun was blazing. Then it started raining again. The water was flowing down the roads and flooding the stage, threatening the equipment. A previous year’s flood had killed eleven people so they decided that they couldn’t risk it. Their crew spent much of the night drying everything out with hairdryers before they headed off to Barcelona.

But as the European shows went on, they were growing in confidence. When they played seven new songs, the reaction from their fans was ecstatic and the early reviews were equally positive. When they headed out in the big tops they sounded even better. Their complete control over the sound meant the dates, in London’s Victoria Park and at Warrington then Glasgow, were among the best they’d ever done. And the new stuff was greeted with far more enthusiasm than any other similarly enormous band could expect when unveiling a new direction.

It helped that many of the fans already knew the songs, or versions of them. Things had changed since 1997 and
OK Computer
. Napster was a huge phenomenon and at least fourteen songs from the
Kid A
sessions had been illegally circulating on the internet, some for up to two years. The music industry as a whole was starting to tremble. Chris and Bryce were worried, too.

“It was funny,” Thom said in an interview with the
New Yorker,
“because when we were working on
Kid A
… our managers – you know, they occasionally go to the States, and they keep in contact with what’s going on – used to come to the studio and hang out and say, ‘Things are changing.’”

But it turned out that the changes benefited them. For once they were at the right place at the right time. Fans had been given a chance to get used to the weird new sounds of
Kid A
before they arrived and so they were prepared. Ironically, it was reviewers at many of the music magazines who were caught on the hop. It garnered many good reviews but some hacks were just confused. Even songs like ‘The National Anthem’, which, with its hugely catchy bass line is now a live favourite, were greeted as weird aberrations. Part of the problem was that, in response to the leaks, EMI had decided not to send out preview copies to journalists. Instead they were invited to listening sessions where they were given one sitting with the album before going home and writing about it. In 2008 this is, sadly, normal practise but at the time it was very new
and rather bizarre. “All the reviewers were saying, ‘Uh, this isn’t Radiohead, we don’t recognise it, it might be good later on, but right now I don’t get it all,’” said Thom.

Listening to
Kid A
now, it’s easy to forget what bewilderment it caused when it first came out. Part of its success was that it redefined what people thought of as Radiohead’s sound. On YouTube now, under a performance of ‘High And Dry’, there’s a comment from a confused young fan saying that, although cool, the song doesn’t sound much like Radiohead. A whole generation has grown up for whom the band mean adventurous sonic experimentation and nothing else. But
Kid A
wasn’t Radiohead’s
Metal Machine Music
, Lou Reed’s famously unlistenable fuck-you to the music industry. The title track, admittedly, wafts and wanders a little. But ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, ‘The National Anthem’, ‘Idioteque’ and ‘Optimistic’ are proper pop songs with highly memorable hooks, albeit very different to the kinds of hooks they’d used before.

After the hype following
OK Computer
, it was inevitable that many journalists would be preparing to cut Radiohead down to size again. When the record came out, though, it didn’t matter. It went straight in at Number 1 in the UK and many countries in the world, including, incredibly America, the first time a British act had done that for three years. They immediately went out there to play, starting at New York’s famous Roseland Ballroom. The response was phenomenal. “The day before we did the gig at the Roseland, people were queuing round the block three times to get tickets,” says Andy Bush. “It was like The Beatles. It was colossal.”

The response in America for
Kid A
was the same as the response for
OK Computer
in the UK.
OK Computer
didn’t do all that well when it was first released in the States. It was adored by other bands but Radiohead didn’t get all that much press or airplay. Many DJs and magazines were determined, as British outlets had been after
The Bends
, not to get caught on the hop again. So when Radiohead flew out there for
Kid A
, they were like conquering heroes and they were even invited on to sketch show
Saturday Night Live
.

Saturday Night Live
is an American institution. It’s been running continuously since the 1970s and it’s launched the careers of some of the world’s most successful comedians. On the surface it was all fun and glitz but underneath it was ferociously professional and
efficient. Thom had been warned by Michael Stipe that it could be a difficult show to play. To make things more tricky, they chose to play ‘The National Anthem’ with the full eight-piece brass section.

“It was very American,” sax player Steve Hamilton remembers. “Very intense from the crew’s point of view. You’d have ten minutes here then one minute rest and then another ten minutes, so it was a little bit uptight but I don’t think that came across to the band or to us that much. [Actress] Kate Hudson was presenting the show and she was practically naked so I think everyone was happy!”

“I was struck by how self-effacing the Radiohead guys were in the face of a deluge of hysterical enthusiasm, from the audience, from the presenters, from the floor managers, the whole thing,” says Andy Bush. “There was a little bit of that lovely dour British thing going on. The Brits can’t quite hack the Americans whooping it up. It was funny. The audience were just going ape and as soon as it was over Thom and the guys were just sitting around impassively like nothing had happened.”

But although Thom might not have been matching the audience for enthusiasm and joy, it was still a great moment. To come to a place that was so far removed from everything that they were about and to take it over in the way they did was an incredible feeling. It was one of those moments that the kid who, half-sarcastically, half-seriously wished he was “special” had dreamed about. “The highlight of the whole
Kid A
thing was our
Saturday Night Live
performance,” Thom said later. “I was so proud of that. I was walking on water for a week after that – I felt so good.”

“It was like we were going over there with them on the crest of their wave,” says Steve Hamilton. “We turned up and played a gig at the Roseland Ballroom first and they were Number 1. It was a real buzz. Everyone was so happy and delighted about it. You couldn’t have been there at a better time with them. You got the feeling that they were really enjoying themselves.”

By now, it was as though the horrible, drawn-out arguments of the long recording process had never happened. They were back to enjoying what they were doing and enjoying each other’s company. They could look back on the recording sessions like a long war that they’d eventually won. “
Pablo Honey
was done in three weeks,” said Ed dryly in a TV interview. “
The Bends
was about sixteen weeks total recording time,
OK Computer
was six months and
Kid A
was … generations.”