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Radiohead seem to live, metaphysically, at least, in a fantastical place. A place of demure Martians and jagged, lonely mountains. A place where they sometimes don't even recognize themselves. And because they like to inhabit this kind of place, American concert arenas can be the stuff of nightmares. But that doesn't stop them from writing songs about homesick aliens and the coming ice age. Or from looking at people like they're dopey for thinking Radiohead's music is "experimental."
Radiohead, as we know them, shouldn't exist. They make melancholy music that can be as tough to digest as a butter-soaked filet mignon. Yet, somehow, it sells. Not like Britney sells, but certainly better than your garden variety concept albums about alienation. That's because they are seen as the real deal, as artistes.
Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway sat down with MTV News' Gideon Yago to talk about how none of this can last, why their music should be considered pop and how they'd like to throttle their 21-year-old selves.
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Gideon Yago: Do you ever worry that by experimenting so much, like you have on Kid A and Amnesiac, that you'll lose some of your fans?
Thom Yorke: Kid A and Amnesiac were not that much of an experiment. Really, they weren't. I mean it's not f---ing rocket science. It's not. Compared to the music we listen to, it's pretty f---ing mild.
Jonny Greenwood: It's all repetition again, and chords. I think if we wanted it to be obscure we could do a much better job of it, but that's never a reason to make music. [RealVideo]
Yago: It seems like Radiohead is the only major label band that's allowed to take these huge artistic and stylistic risks. Why is that?
Ed O'Brien: Well, not for any longer.
Yorke: We ended up on the wrong side of the fence when the bombs went off.
O'Brien: It's the economics of the fact that OK Computer sold 4.5 million records [worldwide] — it gives us some leeway. That's the bottom line. They wouldn't be giving us this amount of freedom if OK Computer sold 200,000 copies. No way.
Yago: But not everyone who sells almost five million albums decides to go into a studio and play around with noise and tone down the guitars.
Yorke: That's their prerogative. That's fine.
O'Brien: We dreamed about doing this. Even before we signed [to a label] we talked about it. All these things bizarrely came to fruition and it's, "Oh yeah, we can actually do this now. He, he, he." And we f---ing bought a studio and it's great. We piled up all the beeps. For years we felt guilty doing this stuff, or we didn't have the means to do it. But now we're like, "Why not? What the hell?"
Yago: You recorded all of the songs for Kid A and Amnesiac in one session, right?
Yorke: We did, although some people tend to think that Amnesiac was a panic reaction to Kid A, especially in Britain, which is hilarious.
Yago: Why were you in such a rush to put an album out eight months after the previous one?
J. Greenwood: It was going to be three months. It was finished, so why sit on it?
Yago: Why didn't you release Kid A and Amnesiac as a double album, then?
O'Brien: It wouldn't have worked. The tendency with a double album is that if there's quite dense material in there, you tend to skip it, you tend to move on. We realized that maybe at first listen it wouldn't come to you, but it warranted coming back to. It wouldn't have happened if we put it on a double album.
Yorke: It would have been a massive overload.
"My voice does not sound like that," creepy one-hit wonderdom and a stank studio ...
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