Radiohead (1995)

Originally published in MOO Magazine (September 1995)

When Radiohead released it’s debut, the Smiths/U2 influenced Pablo Honey, in 1992, the American youth was busy learning about teen spirit and a new form of music known as grunge. The far-from-grunge Radiohead, from Oxford, England, struck a nerve with the newly discovered disenfranchised youth its ode to loserdom, “Creep,” “I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here,” sang Thom Yorke, the shaggy-haired, blonde trussed leader of the Brit-rock band, and with those very words, no matter what their backgrounds were, the kids understood loud and clear that they weren’t the only ones.

“‘Creep’ was a slogan really, wasn’t it in a way,” Radiohead drummer Phil Selway rhetorically asks. “Suddenly everybody tapped into some generational thing at the time, which I don’t think ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ does. It hasn’t set out to do that at all. It’s not the cartoon song which, in a way, ‘Creep’ was.”

Selway is discussing Radiohead’s first single, “Fake Plastic Trees,” from its second full-length U.S. release, The Bends. In a much more focused follow-up, Radiohead has shed some of its influences and non-purposely created an album that defines the band on its own terms. Principal songwriter Yorke writes as though he were the child sent to boarding school 300 miles away from home and forced to endure teasing and bullying by his peers. He uses his lyrics to escape to a world in which he wishes things were different, wishes that somebody could understand the thoughts inside his head of which he can’t make sense.

It is this sense of alienation that brought the members of Radiohead together. There was a common element among the band members: loneliness. Often, others saw this as a vulnerability, and Selway says that when Radiohead first toured the United States in support of Pablo Honey, there was a lot of outside influence being injected into the band. “At the time ‘Creep’ was taking off, there were a lot of things we had to learn quickly, because suddenly we had a hit single on our hands. We had a lot of people who formed opinions about where the band should be going,” Selway says. “I think there was an awful lot to come to terms with – this massive leap for us. Once you actually come across to the States, then you are suddenly very reliant on each other, you’re a long way from home. It’s a far more intense experience touring over here.”

The British music tabloids spoke heavily of Radiohead’s exhausting tour schedule for Pablo Honey and speculated that it was this exhaustion that kept the band from recording a second album upon the band’s return to England. Selway explains that the band did in fact return to the studio after its first world tour, but the creative juices weren’t flowing as rapidly as the band would have liked.

“We were playing out of a gig context for the first time in two years … We went into the studio last March and things became slightly bogged down at that point,” Selway pauses, the words almost difficult for him to say. “I suppose we were kind of overwhelmed about being back in the studio again; it wasn’t a natural environment for us. We felt pretty much in control of our live performances. There seemed to be a bit of mystique around the studio, it was like exam time again.”

The band began to consider that the music it was creating would be the music that it would have to live with, would have to perform night after night, for the next two years, Selway explains, and that caused the band to think twice. “That really tripped up the album at that point because we were trying to construct this type of Radiohead sound that wouldn’t work.”

Removing themselves from the stifled studio environment and performing live dates that were previous tour commitments, the members of Radiohead found a new collective breath and were able to return to the studio and hammer out the rest of what would eventually be known as The Bends in a matter of weeks.

The timing of The Bends release this past spring couldn’t have been planned any better. Not only has the whole grunge thing fallen by the wayside, but the current resurgence of punk rock has mellowed out for the time being. “We’ve always had a funny relationship with scenes,” Selway explains. “We’ve either just completely missed them or, well, we’ve never really been part of a scene anyway. So, when we were recording the album, I don’t think we sat down thinking, ‘What’s going to be in in next year and should we try to avoid it?’ You have to start from the basis of the songs you’ve got and doing the best arrangements, the best performances of those songs.”

Of course, Brit rock seems to be one of the current trends. Oasis, Bush, The Stone Roses and Elastica have all had albums that have shown up on the modern rock charts. Selway admits that the British bands are getting some of the attention they’ve been lacking for the past few years, but is quick to remind that Radiohead did enjoy success with Pablo Honey and “Creep” long before most of these bands (with the possible exception of the Stone Roses) had even formed. “People have had an awareness of Radiohead which isn’t connected to any British resurgence at the moment.”