shiny unhappy
people*
interview
with the band by Andrew Mueller
// «Melody Maker», October 28, 1995
:: typed by qwerrie
*Only kidding. RADIOHEAD aren't solely responsible
for the Culture Of Despair. But they are prone to the occasional spot
of miserablist navel-gazing, and they have just been on tour with
REM in America. ANDREW MUELLER, who isn't alone in considering 'The
Bends' the best album of 1995, observed the two bands' mutual appreciation
society first-hand. Photos: PAT POPE.
"It's a very good idea," nods Thom Yorke.
"It's not the idea I'm arguing with. The idea, in itself, is fine."
Thom is sitting, shrouded in his enormous fake black fur coat, on
a luggage trolley in the foyer of Hartford's Sheraton Hotel. He's
just stumbled off the tour bus from Philadelphia. A bow-tied porter
hovers in the background, as if unsure whether to move Thom along,
or just ask him which room he'd like to be wheeled to. Bass player
Colin Greenwood is crouched in front of him, earnestly outlining his
plans.
"My question," continues Thom, at pains to sound
reasonable, "is where the fucking hell we're going to find 500 ping-pong
balls in this fucking place on a Sunday afternoon."-- There's a pensive
silence. Thom has a fair point. We could hardly find a beer in Hartford
at eleven o'clock last night.-- "We'll just have to think of something
else," says Thom, and chews on a thumbnail.
Washed and changed an hour later, we pile into
the minibus to the venue, and Colin explains the above exchange. Tonight,
Radiohead will play the last of their shows on REM's American tour,
and have been warned to expect some sort of practical joke by way
of farewell. Believing that revenge is a dish best served pre-cooked,
Radiohead have been plotting retribution in advance.
"Mike Mills," explains Colin, "told us not to wear
anything we want to wear again." "Paint," speculates Thom, gloomily.
"It'll be paint. Or custard pies. Oh, God." "So the idea with the
ping-pong balls," continues Colin, "was that we'd get the crew in
the lighting gantries in the roof to drop them on REM during their
last song."
A contemplative silence settles as we drive through
Hartford. If you've never driven through Hartford, the effect can
be duplicated in the comfort and safety of your home by going to sleep.
The venue, the Meadows Music Arena, sits like a crash-landed spacecraft
in a vast car park. Inside, things get stranger still. The lot of
the journalist backstage is not generally a happy one. Usually, you're
approached by laminate-laden jobsworths who ask two questions: 1)
Who the fuck are you?; 2) What the fuck are you doing here? This afternoon,
however, I am accosted by cheerful, helpful people saying, "Hi! Where
are you from?" and, "Hey! How are you?".
"Yeah," nods Thom, "it does seem more like a Christian
revival rally than a rock'n'roll tour at times, but they've been brilliant
to us, they really have."
In Radiohead's dressing room, Thom draws a smiley
face, and the caption, "Thanks for having us, you've been brilliant,
love Radiohead", on a piece of paper to be secreted among the sheets
on Stipe's lyric stand. Gratitude notwithstanding, a Plan B has been
hatched. The idea now is that, as REM close their show with 'It's
The End Of The World (As We Know It)', the enormous red lampshades
that dance across the backdrop will be joined in flight by Radiohead,
suspended from harnesses.
In the meantime, Radiohead soundcheck (they've
been getting an hour, every night - ask any band that's ever supported
another how often that happens). Teasing snatches of 'Radio Free Europe'
emerge between songs. They wouldn't dare, surely. Radiohead return
to their dressing room to be told that the harness jape is off - REM's
tour manager isn't having it. They'll have to settle for running across
the stage with monster lampshades over their heads. Phil tries one
on. He looks silly beyond description. "I can't see," he announces.
"Typical," snorts Thom, momentarily recalling,
as he sometimes does, the mock-nasty snarl of John Lydon. "Very bloody
Keith Moon, aren't we?"
He goes back to drawing things on his Mac laptop,
and waits in silence for showtime. Jonny tries to evade an interview
with the local radio station. He asks if I fancy doing it. "They'll
never know," he says. He explains that several foreign magazines,
especially in Japan and Taiwan, currently trailing Radiohead exclusives,
are in fact running with the thoughts of his mates, cousins or anyone
else who was sitting around his house when the phone rang. "Go on,"
he goads. "It's easy. How are you finding touring with REM? Do you
feel under pressure to follow the success of 'Creep'?"
Jonny's ambition is to leave America having said
"wanker" and "bollocks" on every radio station in the country.
TOUR MADNESS WITH THOM. PART ONE
"We did a session at this station in Dallas. Natalie
Merchant was playing as well, and we walked in and the first thing
this woman running it said was 'So, we hear Natalie Merchant's a real
bitch'. This is live on the radio. So we said, 'Well, we haven't met
her, but we hear you're a complete cow', and it went downhill
from there. 'Creep' was the only thing she'd play after that".
After much agonising, Radiohead decide not to
storm the stage looking like Devo after a gig in downwind Kiev. After
the show, REM and Radiohead convene their mutual admiration society
for one last session of handshakes, hugs, and conversations in dark
corners of dressing rooms. Every friend or relative of every member
of REM makes both bands stand together for souvenir shots; photographer
Pat Pope has been quietly advised that any attempt on his part to
get in on the act might result in an abrupt cessation of goodwill
to all people from REM's crew, so you'll have to imagine it.
Colin brings me a beer, because he is the most
relentlessly pleasant person in the world. So. Colin. How are you
finding touring with REM? Do you feel under pressure to follow the
success of 'Creep'?
"It's been brilliant," he says. "And it's been
really, really good for us. Especially Thom. This seems to have been
his year for meeting his heroes. Like, Elvis Costello came up and
introduced himself at this thing we did in Italy. That kind of thing
has helped him a lot."
Bill Berry comes over to say goodbye. He's wearing
a purple Radiohead tour T-shirt.
TOUR MADNESS WITH THOM. PART TWO
I catch up with Thom again in New York the next
evening. Radiohead are playing a secret gig at the Mercury on East
Houston. We head for a coffee in a place up the street. The waitress,
one of New York's hardened indie-Anglophiles, is wearing a Sleeper
T-shirt. She double-takes at Thom but evidently can't place him. She
carries on double-taking at him while we sit there.
"The thing that's really freaked me out doing a
tour with a band as big as REM," he begins, "is seeing how being so
famous can change the way that everybody, absolutely everybody, behaves
towards you.
There was an incident in Finland, where we did
this arts festival. We'd done one encore, and come on for another
one, and I noticed this girl down the front going 'Get off, get off"
to some bloke. And he was basically feeling her up, and this girl
was really frantic. But he was also the guy who'd jumped on to the
stage three or four songs beforehand. So the best moment of the show
for me was when he climbed on stage again and received my guitar in
his bollocks. Such a graceful movement. Made my day".
— Someone once wrote that the curse of being
Marlon Brando was that you'd never see people being themselves.
"Absolutely. It is really hard to be yourself in
front of somebody famous. I find it... Fuck, you know, I don't want
that to happen. But that's presuming we're even going to make another
record that people like."
— Colin was saying last night that you'd found
meeting a few of these people helpful. What happens? Do you have those
artistic conversations artists want people to believe artists have,
or do you stand there gawping like a fan?
"No, it's more... you're there, there's millions
of things you can ask, but the fact that you've met them becomes enough.
Even someone like Elvis Costello, you can still judge on first impressions
to some degree, and he was really nice, really trying to be nice.
I mean, he can obviously be extremely sour, just like I can be, just
like a lot of people under pressure can be, but he was nice. The music
business is quite a bitchy and competitive thing, and then after all
that to meet people you really admire, and suddenly that whole competitive
thing is gone, just not important. I found that helpful. Just being
able to say I've met him. That's enough."
— So you just talk shop like everyone else.
"I bloody hope not. Although, to some degree, you
find yourself in the same boat, having gone through the same experiences,
and they're quite a limited set of experiences, and they turn you
into quite a limited personality. So it's - I think - principally
a shock when you discover that there are other people who have gone
through that, are a few years ahead in the time machine, and have
come back and said, you know, it's all right, I'm still alive."
— That was the common take on 'The Bends', the
song, that it was railing against the way that stardom, rather than
the liberating force people imagine, is in fact incredibly limiting
and ultimately cretinising. It reminded me of Costello's 'Hand In
Hand' or Nirvana's 'Serve The Servants', that I've-got-what-I-always-wanted-and-I-don't-want-it
vibe.
"Well, no... that song was really just a collection
of phrases going around in my head one day. The crazy thing about
that song is that there was no calculation or thought involved. It
was just whatever sounded good after the previous line. It was written
way before we'd ever been to America, even."
— It's an understandable response. All those
sleepy-eyed views from aeroplane windows, the alcohol drip-feed, the
fear that the surface everyone sees is all you've got left...
"Oh, absolutely, but that hadn't started at all.
I wrote it before we recorded 'Pablo Honey'. We hadn't been anywhere.
Is that the time?"
It is. Half an hour till showtime. I pay for the
coffees while Thom polishes his shades outside. The waitress, meanwhile,
has figured it out. Yes, I tell her, it's the guy who sang 'Creep'.
Radiohead, yes. Up the street, in half an hour. Sold out, I think.
Keep the change.
TOUR MADNESS WITH THOM. PART THREE
"We did this awful promo thing in Vancouver, just
me and Jonny. Jonny had his amps, I had my acoustic guitar. It was
a Friday night, and the audience was a mixture of people who'd left
work, and people who had been set up by the record company to come
to this vibey - that's my new favourite record company word - vibey
gig. And one table down the front just got louder and louder and louder.
I just stopped one song and said 'Look, we've gone all round the world
on this tour, but you are the rudest fuckers we've ever met'. There
was this complete silence, and then they started talking again, but
this time the rest of the crowd just moved in on them, and there was
this huge fight. There's me and Jonny playing 'Fake Plastic Trees',
and people throwing each other over tables."
Strewn around the Mercury after a typically incendiary
show are record company flyers for "The Bends'. The flyers trumpet
a few excerpts of the critical praise that "The Bends' has attracted,
from the delightfully ambiguous ("Radiohead toss and turn like the
best Pearl Jam and U2 anthems" - People) to the plain worrying
('Thom Yorke's voice is as enigmatic as Billy Corgan's" - LA Times;
"Jesus, thanks a fucking bunch" - Thom). Colin is more perturbed by
the line from Rolling Stone. "It's four stars in quote marks,"
he says. "Does that mean they just swore at it?"
There's a record company party across the road
which we get to after Radiohead have finished saying thanks to everyone
who's hung around on the pavement to tell them they're, like, really
awesome, and after Thom has accepted the apologies of a girl whose
heckling boyfriend came very close to having Thom's guitar shoved
down his neck. After everyone's shaken hands with everyone else at
the party and had a drink or several, we repair to the painfully fashionable
Paramount Hotel. Here, we stage a chaotic photo session, interrupted
by Jonny's incredulous readings from the in-house video library catalogue
("I'll give anyone five dollars to ring downstairs and ask for Honey,
I Blew Everybody"). Thom and I eventually head downstairs to a
table overlooking the foyer, a pop-art hallucination concocted by
Phillip Starck. We order several beers. Thom is on good form, having
enjoyed the gig and, unusually, the meet'n'greet afterwards.
"I was great, wasn't I?" he laughs. "A complete
tart. It is unusual, yes. I was nice to people tonight because I thought
we'd done a fairly OK gig, and I was really buzzing."
— What happened with that bloke down the front?
"He was just particularly rude, and he was pissing
other people off as well. It's one of those things. You can feel really
awkward really quickly. If someone is goading me, I do react aggressively,
because I am actually quite embarrassed. So we had a few words." -
Yorke peers over the glass balcony at a tottering mannequin, bulging
out of a dress that could scarcely be less comfortable if it was made
of nettles. - "Dear oh dear. It's the Versace jeans that cost £300
and still look like jeans, I like."
— I've never understood the point of spending
that much money on something you'll only spill coffee on.
"Makes you feel good."
— Yeah? How many bathmats died to make that coat,
then?
"Very good. Colin bought a suit for £900,
which I thought was pretty good going, but he only wears it now and
again. Doesn't want to get it dirty. I had a lovely pair of ?100 sunglasses,
but they got nicked."
— So have you made a load of money?
"Errr... Ed's the person to ask, because I find
it all ultra-confusing. One moment we'll have half a million in the
bank, the next moment we'll have nothing. Ed keeps saying, 'It's all
right, it's all about cash flow. It'll all come through in the next
six months'."
— You want to watch him. He'll be sipping mint
julep on his Brazilian plantation while the rest of you are busking
at Oxford station.
"Yeah... bloody hell."
Thom's squinting over the balcony again, this
time at one of the alabaster goddesses that the Paramount seems to
pay to saunter languidly about the building.
— She's looking at me, Thom.
"Yeah, they all are... it's when they start coming
up to you and saying hello that you get completely freaked out."
— Happen often, does it?
"Nan. I mean, yes, it happens all the fucking time.
I mean, nah. The crew cop off a lot more than we do."
— Always the way. Though that can be an amusing
spectacle. If you're into squalor.
"That's the essence of good sex, isn't it? That
borderline between extremely cheap and extremely beautiful, that duplicity
about it. But someone coming up after a show and invading your body
space ridiculously, or... being in a lift! I was in the lift earlier
with my fur coat on, and this woman - she's obviously into teddy bears
or something - got in the lift, and started, like, stroking me, and
her opening line was 'Oh, we're in the green lift'. Maybe I should
wear my coat more often."
Thom smiles, which he does a lot more than he's
given credit for. He's relaxed into his role a lot more this year,
but the assumption that it's other people's love of his work that
spooks him most still seems a fair one.
"There's a few key words... sorry, you're asking
for my hard disk, and only RAM's working at the moment. They say it's
beautiful, and then they say nice stuff about the way I sing and the
atmospheres and things. I was trying to get away from that with 'The
Bends'. By printing them, I was trying to burst the bubble, saying
they're just words, it's..."
— They're important, though. You wouldn't write
them otherwise.
"The problem is having to deliver that sense of
importance all the time. That's where the problem lies, because then
you get into that Morrissey territory of contriving situations simply
to perpetuate the way that you think people think you are."
— How do you rate yourself as a lyricist? "Inconsistent.
Definitely inconsistent." What's the best one you've written? There's
a very long pause.
"'Suck your teenage thumb'," he decides.
" 'Toilet trained and dumb/When the power runs out we'll just hum/This
is our new song/Just like the last one/Total waste of time/ My iron
lung'."
(Odd looks from the waitresses. Thom continues).
"Some woman gave me 'Highway 61 Revisited' the other day saying "Thom,
you're a poet, listen to this'. I listened to it, and then I read
the sleevenotes and just burst out laughing. I mean hang on a fucking
minute..."
— That was Dylan, though. Stipe, too. Spurious
nonsense that sounds like it means the world.
"Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that your brain
functions more honestly in spurious crap than it does in... things
like 'My Iron Lung' happen every Saturday, say. The rest of the week
it's that spurious crap. When I was much younger, I did this four-track
demo, and this girl, a really close friend of mine, listened to it
and said 'Your lyrics are crap. They're too honest, too personal,
too direct, and there's nothing left to the imagination' and I've
had that in the back of my mind ever since. But now I'm starting to
reject that, and I want to write that spurious stuff that's coming
straight out of my head. There's a song on 'Blood & Chocolate', by
Elvis Costello, the one that goes on for yonks..."
— 'Tokyo Storm Warning'.
"Yeah. Gibberish! Complete fucking gibberish. And
it's wondrous. Because you open yourself up to that, because that's
the way human brains think. I just think Radiohead are in a really
dangerous position at the moment, where we could really end up supplying
that sense of pathos and angst all the time, and I think there's a
bit more to it than that."
— A closing line if ever I've heard one.
"Mmm. I'm dying for a piss, as well."
'The Bends' is not doing half the business, in
America or anywhere else, that the 'Creep'-fuelled, two-million-selling
'Pablo Honey' did. Thom reckons this "probably a compliment", and
certainly an aid to his continuing sanity. 'The Bends' is, however,
The Album Of '95 by a yawning margin - a glorious catharsis, a masterpiece
of atmosphere, sorrow and redemption. While we're on the subject,
'Lucky', from the 'Help' charity bash, mixes it with the year's best
singles.
The powers that be would rate "The Bends' a disappointment
(or, as Ed deadpans, with apologies to Spinal Tap's Ian Faith,
"Our appeal is becoming more selective"). Radiohead are happy with
it, and they're right to be; this sacrifice of quantity for quality
is entirely in keeping with their confident contrariness ('The Bends',
as an album, is nothing if not a process of revelling in life's Pyrrhic
victories).
"I was talking to someone about this the other
night," Thom had said in Hartford, "and we decided that the next record
should be a celebration. Because that really would be a challenge
for Radiohead."
