Radiohead

Undertaking any comprehensive overview of Radiohead feels like a pretty redundant exercise.

Even limiting the focus feels fruitless when nearly every stretch of the career of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway has been so exhaustively dissected, discussed, debated, celebrated, and re-analysed.

Got a hunger for a deep investigation on any one song, lyric, or the greatness of Thom Yorke’s voice or dance moves? Google it, there’ll be more than enough to satisfy your appetite.

They’re not a group that can be evaluated by conventional metrics like sales and awards, though they’ve had a healthy share of both. You can hardly hand someone a Greatest Hits and make them an instant convert. You need to absorb Radiohead.

There’s a huge intellectual streak to their music, meaning you’ll rarely hear it at a house party, in a club, or on commercial radio. And yet, even the most casual music fan knows exactly who they are and can rattle off a few song titles.

They’re tricky to quantify because of their refusal to be categorised, defying every label and attempt to pigeonhole them with each audacious new release.

You can’t even call them a rock band, according to Jonny Greenwood, who in a 2017 Rolling Stone feature instead described Radiohead as: “just kind of an arrangement to form songs using whatever technology suits the song. And that technology can be a cello or it can be a laptop. It’s all sort of machinery when looked at in the right way. That’s how I think of it.”

Radiohead emerged during Britain’s mid-90s guitar-band boom but they’re not strictly a Britpop band, as The Bends was at pains to illustrate. They named their 2004 album Hail To The Thief after a slur against the Bush administration, but it’s not a textbook political record.

They’ve continually blurred the boundaries between genres, to the point of erasing them; their music is rich with ideas, colours, and character. How do you accurately describe 2011’s sampled and looped The King of Limbs or the symphonic arrangements of 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool without a mountain of adjectives and comparisons to Radiohead’s previous output?

Their music provokes euphoria yet trades in terror. A songbook that traverses sign-of-the-times dread in a variety of apocalyptic flavours - technological calamity, political nightmare, ecological disaster, emotional obliteration. However, the ways they musically express that subject matter is often a sublime experience, gifting us musical utopia in the face of encroaching dystopia.

Paradoxically, for such renowned risk-takers and sonic revolutionaries, Radiohead’s inner circle has remained consistent. Their creative partnerships with producer Nigel Godrich and resident visual auteur Stanley Donwood have been long-lasting threads to Radiohead’s fabric, and the band’s line-up (with the exception of adding second drummer Clive Deamer in 2011) has been identical for over 30 years.

Not even the way Radiohead have been referenced in pop culture has been entirely consistent. Put down as “maudlin music” in 1995 teen film cornerstone Clueless but elevated to arthouse infamy the following year in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

Their appearances in film and TV are sometimes logical - providing a moody score to Westworld and A Scanner Darkly - other times unlikely, like appearing as themselves in one of South Park’s most memorably morbid episodes.

Time and again, they’ve challenged the sound and definitions of what being a huge act is. There are generations of artists who’ve followed in their wake who, consciously dipping from the Radiohead gene pool or not, have benefited from their pioneering.

An influence that isn’t bound by genre or geography, inspiring everyone from Arcade Fire and Danny Brown, through to The Strokes, Skrillex, Kathleen Hanna, and beyond. Heck, even Sir Paul McCartney is intimidated by Radiohead’s far-reaching impact.

But even with such diverse seals of approval from their peers, Radiohead downplay all audience and media deification.

No matter how regularly they rank at the pinnacle of ‘All Time’ and ‘Best Of’ lists, it’s hard to imagine them boasting about it, or exploiting their fame to wing a restaurant booking.

Masters of sidestepping the spotlight, they’re arguably the most anonymous celebrities ever. Consider how little we know about their personal lives in relation to how large their legacy looms.

So, if it’s so difficult to say anything profoundly new about Radiohead, why is the conversation around them still so vital?

Go to the r/radiohead subreddit or any comments section today and you’ll still find devotees unpacking interpretations and speculations, stoking the debate as fiercely as ever.

And look, let’s face it, the only caricature stronger than the pale-white Brits being miserable harbingers of gloomy art-rock is that of their fanbase: intellectual snobs and insufferable nerds who are all-too-quick to mansplain (and yes, they’re mostly dudes) Radiohead’s untouchable brilliance in painstaking minutiae.

Pretentious for-or-against acolytes for whom no conspiracy theory is considered too wild. (Not even Chuck Klosterman’s theorising on how Kid A predicted 9/11)

There’s some truth to those stereotypes, and it’s something Pitchfork humorously nailed in their animated history of the group (which completely omits Pablo Honey, how’s that for an inside joke?)

But no matter where you stand on the band or their loyal followers, that intense devotion sort of epitomises how they’ve grown into something so much more than just the music.

For many, they were the key that unlocked an entire universe of musical possibility. From Polish composers and Krautrock, to Miles Davis’ electric jazz period and the glitchtronica of Warp Records, to Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein’s No Code… Radiohead was the constellation that connected these cultural waypoints - the great binding bridge between the mainstream and everything that wasn’t.

The idea of Radiohead is, in a way, more powerful than any of their records or the men making them. At this point, they’re more of a ubiquitous cultural force than a flesh-and-blood band - an everlasting, incorruptible symbol.

The legends and myths woven around them with each album and live show only seem to strengthen them against scrutiny. (The members of the band themselves, not so much, but we’ll get to that.)

And if you’re sick of hearing about how Radiohead are the ‘Greatest Band Of All Time’, imagine how they feel?

For a group that crafted one of the defining masterpieces on technological angst in OK Computer, one of the great ironies about Radiohead is how ahead of the curve they’ve always been when it comes to digital frontiers.

Followers not leaders, they willingly dabbled with the intersections between music, art, and the newest technology, long before they became trends or industry standards.

Never mind the gear that overruns their studio and stage set-ups, they were one of the earliest adopters of streaming (via an embeddable iBlip player for Kid A); DIY webcasts (the Scotch Mist broadcasts); apps (2013’s PolyFauna), as well as a host of fan-made, band-endorsed video content (2004’s The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time) and concert films (2010’s Radiohead For Haiti).

More significantly, Radiohead can be counted among the first artists to embrace the Internet, using their website to foster fan community and interaction.

Around 1999, their official site endorsed and acknowledged now-infamous fan pages like At Ease, Green Plastic, and Follow Me Around. In July the same year, Ed O’Brien began an online diary about the recording sessions for what would become Kid A and Amnesiac, which ran through to June 2000, providing a rare insider’s perspective on a group who had now famously guarded themselves from music press and media.

RELATED: Classic Album: Radiohead - Kid A

All five band members could regularly be found lurking on message boards, joining in discussions and responding to fans, albeit sometimes more cryptically than candidly.

Perhaps these online spaces better suited the sensibilities of the private, polite Englishmen, providing enough of a clinical buffer between them and their often-obsessive fanbase but room enough for zealous discussion to flourish on their own terms. It was prescient.

Nearly half-a-decade before the advent of Facebook and Twitter made one-to-one access de rigeur, they communicated with the wider world of the Internet via their blog Dead Air Space.

One such message, posted on 30 September 2007, sent the web into a frenzy: “The new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days,” Jonny Greenwood wrote nonchalantly.

It was the only advance warning the band, out of their label contract and interested to experiment, issued before releasing their seventh album In Rainbows, essentially inventing the ‘surprise’ album release in the process - a method that’s become industry standard for everyone from Beyoncé to Bowie.

In retrospect, Kid A had laid the foundations, skipping the traditional pageantry and marketing saturation of the ‘event album’, yet producing the same blockbuster results. It debuted at #1 all over the world with next-to-no promotion and zero advance singles.

That was partly thanks to the album leaking on infamous file-sharing service Napster three months before its release. But rather than hinder Kid A’s prospects, the peer-to-peer sharing only helped.

It didn’t go unnoticed by the band. In fact, as early as October 2000, a Q magazine cover story laid out what sounded like a seven-year plan:

"We'd really like to have more regular communications with people," explains Colin Greenwood, "as opposed to just having this massive dump every two-and-a-half years, and fanfares and clarion calls."

Ideas currently being examined include intermittent EPs and pay-as-you-go Internet serialisations. "We're trying to get away from the situation where every record we make is the be-all and end-all," asserts O'Brien.

In Rainbows was the result of that revolutionary approach and further fired a warning shot across the bow of music industry conventions with a component equally as important as its ‘surprise’ release - the ‘pay what you want’ model.

Radiohead may not have been the first to allow their audience to set the price tag, including the bargain price of zero, but they were certainly the first to popularise it.

In doing so, it sparked a debate about the value of music and, for better or worse, fundamentally altered the historic relationship between artist and audience, the ramifications of which are still reverberating today.

Radiohead proved that reclaiming the methods of format and distribution for one’s own creative and financial ends was entirely possible, predicting crowdfunding platforms and artist-to-fan services like Bandcamp and Patreon.

On the other hand, In Rainbows is also frequently blamed for normalising the expectation that music should come cheap, or worse, free.

When the streaming service boom followed, prioritising ease of access above ownership, Radiohead were early to scrutinise how streaming’s low royalty payouts and gatekeeping measures exploited musicians to the benefit of fans and labels.

Yorke slagged off Spotify as “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” in a 2013 interview with Sopitas.

Two years later, in an interview with La Repubblica, he was likening YouTube to Nazi Germany (“They steal art”) and lamenting how releasing his second solo album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes on BitTorrent had “not exactly” been a successful experiment. “But I'm glad I did it, for having tried to."

It’s the trying that’s key. They endeavoured, and continue, to make intrepid efforts to operate outside the system.

“If I die tomorrow,” Yorke told Rolling Stone in 2009. “I’ll be happy that we didn’t carry on working within this huge industry that I don’t feel any connection with.” Meanwhile, O’Brien trumpeted the “decentralising of power… Record companies can’t control us anymore.”

In retrospect, they may have flirted with the possibilities of a music industry reboot rather than fully achieved one, but Radiohead’s self-emancipation paved the way for others to operate on an unprecedented level of artistic independence. (Chance The Rapper, anyone?)

They bit back hard enough to loosen the capitalist-consumer stranglehold of the music business like no artist before, and very few since. They should be applauded more than booed for the new benchmarks they set, though you’ll rarely hear them claiming credit for it.

Times have changed dramatically since their birth, but Radiohead endures.

Contemporaries have come and gone, their idols disbanded or made for the great gig in the sky, the music landscape has undergone seismic shifts, but Radiohead remains as a cultural constant.

It’s poetic irony, really: a reliably revolutionary band who unfailingly choose to take risks over playing it safe. They’ve mastered lessons others are still struggling to learn, and every gamble thus far has paid off handsomely.

They’ve long since inked themselves into the history books, but even with nothing left to prove, they refuse to coast or repeat themselves.

“One of the most important ethics of Radiohead is that we’re not nostalgic,” Ed O’Brien told Q in 2000. “We never look back. We never talk about what we’ve done in the past. [Thom] has that kind of drive: ‘Ok, I’ve done that. Now I’m going to move on’.”

The frontman touched on this progressively minded attitude when he spoke to triple j’s Richard Kingsmill in 1998 about his willingness to ditch songwriting ideas.

“It’s more about what sticks with us, and what takes on a significance,” he said. “If you’re a writer you wouldn’t write the same book over and over again.”

This kind of restless innovation doesn’t just happen. It must be worked at, it takes discipline; it takes self-scrutiny - something the jittery Yorke and co. have in abundance. There’s no greater catalyst for Radiohead’s dramatic revisions than Radiohead themselves.

Art-rock saviours, architects of modern music, independent industry revolutionaries, the 21st Century Beatles -- Radiohead have never fully embraced any of the lofty mantles heaped upon them.

Maybe that’s why we continue to shower them with accolades and call them geniuses? Because we get the impression they’ll never accept such hyperbole as authentic. Rejecting our rhapsodising as fuss and nonsense.

Speaking to Q in 2016, the band's first interview for A Moon Shaped Pool, Thom Yorke said he was surprised people still cared about Radiohead. 

“We expected the opposite. I cherish the band, but I don’t expect anyone else to.”

Radiohead, the world’s most famous cult band, a group that rarely asks for adoration but so patently deserves it.