Fine old cannibals

FOR some people it will eclipse November's election of the new president of the United States. It will certainly dwarf the start of Manchester United's Champions League campaign later this month. When Radiohead release their new album in October almost four years will have elapsed since their last collection, OK Computer, emerged. And absence from the record stores, in this instance, has certainly played a few tricks with some minds. OK Computer was voted best album of all time in a few millennium list polls. And the band's studied disdain for the cloying infrastructure of the record industry has elevated them, in the eyes of their supporters, to the status of demi- gods.

Not that their inscrutable frontman Thom Yorke is about to puncture the myth, you understand. At a concert at London's Royal Festival Hall in July - Radiohead's first in England for 18 months - Mr Yorke blithely introduced some of their new material. "It's about cannibalism and amnesia," he said. Presumably, he didn't add that the latter would come in handy if you've experienced the former. Humour is something Radiohead don't do. Then, after blasting through the 1994 hit My Iron Lung, he sneeringly exclaimed: "Whew, Rock", clearly indicating that he feels the group are now about something rather more complex than heads-down, no-nonsense boogie. And when he struck a mock Jerry Lee Lewis pose at the piano, the audience of true believers howled with a degree of sycophantic laughter far beyond the gesture's comic merit. The fans wanted to show they were on his side, were in on it, in on the joke.

Plenty of "alternative" rock bands are serious. This year's rising darlings Coldplay make sincere, earnest music, but appear almost naively accessible and unpretentious by comparison. Travis, 1999's surprise success story, aren't silly and move millions with their songs. Yet they have been known to smile, to try to communicate. Radiohead seem to draw artistic satisfaction from not communicating, from wilfully scrambling the radar.

Their record sleeves and videos are cryptic, self-mythologising, deliberately uninformative. Whereas back in the dim, distant mid-90s Oasis and Blur happily leaped into the tabloid arena, embracing celebrity (and dying, it might be argued, by the same sword), Radiohead have remained cleverly, coolly aloof. Of their new album, Kid A, Melody Maker has said, straight-faced: "It's obsessed with withdrawing from modern life". Did I mention that the title track is about heads on sticks?

With 1997's OK Computer, the group moved into the big league of enigma. That many of the aforementioned polls had it as album of the century (bumping anticipated favourites such as The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, etc, into secondary roles) is perhaps a touch ludicrous. Radiohead make fascinating, fervent music, most of the time. OK Computer is inventive and passionate. But their canonisation as The Greatest Rock Band In The World Ever!! was down to the fact that their army of fans - chiefly intense, underemployed students - were among the few who could be arsed to fill in forms and vote for them en masse. The legion of Beatles lovers, one presumes, includes many who have grown up and got a life outside indie-dom and high- fidelity trainspotting.

Most of Radiohead have just turned 30. The five - Yorke, Ed O'Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass), Phil Selway (drums) and Colin's brother Jonny (guitar/keyboards) - met at school and gelled as Radiohead in 1991.

Their first radio broadcast came when Prove Yourself was voted Gary Davies' "happening track of the week" on Radio One. The debut album Pablo Honey made the top 30 and Creep, a massive American hit, became an anthem for losers (and a top 10 hit) here upon its re- release in 1993. "I'm a creep," sang many with empathy, "I'm a weirdo " In 1995 The Bends, featuring singles such as High And Dry and Fake Plastic Trees, won a Brit Awards best band nomination, and in 1997 OK Computer gathered gargantuan reviews. A subsequent world tour was hugely successful and culminated in Yorke playing with Michael Stipe and others at a Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington. In just a few years the Oxfordshire outfit had gone from indie also-rans to arthouse giants, a status sealed when they followed in the footsteps of Bowie, U2 and others by buddying up with instant-cred-granting boffin Brian Eno.

It can't just have been the mesmeric, beguiling videos by hip, ascendant directors. (A compilation of these was dryly entitled "Seven Television Commercials": phrases like "lost child" and "thin ice" litter the box). How did Radiohead slowly, stealthily, go supernova while their peers burned out and faltered?

Music journalist Paul Lester wrote the band's first ever cover story, for Melody Maker, in 1993 as they toured the US. Creep was then a monster there but the band were "just another indie band" back home. While recalling that the quintet were all extremely friendly, he allows: "There was something hunched and tortured about Thom even then. There was a lot of meet 'n' greet stuff with US record company "suits", and he wasn't keen on that at all. The rest of the group were Chomsky-reading chessplayers".

As to why Radiohead broke through so dramatically, Lester reckons: "In 1995, The Bends was the polar opposite to Oasis's What's The Story. As Oasis, Blur and Pulp blew it, and The Verve were about to split again, Radiohead were left in a good position, carrying their copies of Kafka, Orwell and Dostoevsky."

Then again, a photographer who's worked with the band many times says that he usually chats to Thom about power tools and gardening equipment.

If Radiohead have acquired, or nurtured, some of the mystique previously glowing fuzzily around Pink Floyd, it's all the more remarkable given that Floyd operated at first in a progressive landscape. Radiohead's wash of punk-prog and pomp is completely against today's grain of dumbing-down and retro-resuscitation. Like Led Zeppelin in the early 1970s, they've cultivated the art of growing ever more commercially significant while seeming to disappear off the pop-culture map. They don't "do" hit singles, or chat shows, or celeb-gossip "romances". Their gigs are rare, special "events", and they're anything but controversial. They never trace the lowest- common-denominator path to the front pages, and don't hang out at the ultra trendy Met Bar in London.

Is Yorke, then, a genuine guru, a shaman, a rock god of the kind we thought vanished when laddism and blokishness supplanted charisma a decade ago? While he's either smart or disingenuous enough to make no great claims for his own standing as a prophet or seer, his admirers find limitless depth to his pained, disjointed lyrics. (They'll have a field day with his duet with Bjork, soon to appear on her Dancer In The Dark soundtrack).

I'm not scoffing here: onstage, he trembles with conviction, his voice doing demonic and celestial things. His themes seem to cover paranoia, self-loathing, a distrust of the crushing, corporate, consumerist world.

Karma Police is perhaps his most telling song title. His shy scepticism echoes JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield's fear of phoneys. Fifteen to 30-year-olds of every generation can and want to relate to that ideal of no sell-out. When the alternative choices of worship are Oasis urging their female fans to bare their breasts or Spice Girls mutating into hideous fusions of Lara Croft and Margaret Thatcher, this is a good and necessary thing.

Yorke doesn't make explicit statements, and thus allows supporters to project their own angsts and frustrations on to the band's fatalistic yet motivational music. Politically, he vaguely backs worthwhile causes and charities, but there's a sense that he - sensibly - floats. Perhaps he's just as self-obsessed as the rest of us: his neuroses invariably strike a chord with the bedsit listener.

And yet at the aforementioned London gig, for every earnest young man sitting on his hands, there was an office girl whopping and hollering and dancing badly, a couple smooching. Celebs at the aftershow party ranged from Robbie Williams to Beth Orton, from Neil Hannon to David Thewlis. It's safe to say Radiohead have crossed over, and that their "miserablism" has either been embraced or - in an amusingly absurd way - catastrophically misunderstood. In the happy-clappy shiny shallow pop world, we probably need them either way. An antidote to the paper-thin fluff which pervades trash- culture, a pea under the mattress in an age where ad men are called "creative".

But a definitive pigeon-holing of Radiohead remains, thankfully, elusive.

The opening song on Kid A, released in early October, repeats, like a mantra, the phrase, "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon". You know, it's just conceivable they have a sense of humour www. radiohead.com

Copyright 2000
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