Radiohead
Biography 1991 - 1995
Radiohead formed during the late 1980s, originally
under the name On A Friday (referring to the only time
all band members were able to practice). After forming
in 1988, the band disbanded for a couple of years so
that bandmembers can devote on college and other work,
before  resurfacing
in 1991 with their first demoes. Their first one—the
Manic Hedgehog Demo (named after an Oxford record shop)
—brought the band to another gig in the Jericho
Tavern. In the meantime they had already been on the
cover of Curfew, a magazine based in Oxford.
Things moved fast. On A Friday were booked for gigs
frequently. Various record labels showed interest and
finally EMI signed the band. Now they had to concede
that the critic in Curfew had a point: their
name was at best mundane. They decided to swap it for
the title of a cod-reggea tune Radio Head on Talking
Heads' True Stories album and the record is
a band favorite. It would later be a major influence
on their own Kid A.
The debut release was a self-produced EP. "Not
a clever move" admits Chris Hufford. "A huge
conflict of interests. I think Thom was very insecure
of my involvement. I'd had that happen to me as an artist
when one of our managers acted as producer. There was
definately some friction on that front. Otherwise it
was a treat, we fired out the songs." The 4-track
Drill EP came out in March 1992 with Prove Yourself
as the lead track. It reached 101 in the UK singles
chart. It was time to find new producers. Paul Kolderie
and Sean Slade, who produced Buffalo Tom's "Let
me come over" and later helmed Morphine, came on
board.
Then the band came up with their "Scott Walker
song"—"Creep". Striking a highly
popular and sympathetic note of similar self-loathing
among fans, "Creep" was released around the
same time as other so-called "slacker" anthems
such as Beck's "Loser". The band weren't unanimously
pleased with "Creep" and, until recently,
refused to play it, believing that its meaning had been
misinterpreted and given too much weight by fans. Legend
says that Jonny's famous guitar crunches were supposedly
an attempt to ruin a song he didn't like. "Jonny
played the piano at the end of the song and it was gorgeous"
notes Kolderie. "Everyone who heard 'Creep' just
started going insane. So that's what got us the job
doing the album." The album was finished in three
weeks in an Oxford studio.
The single "Creep" was released in September
1992, while the album was scheduled for February next
year. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the band, a San Francisco
radio station called "Live 105" had just named
Pablo Honey its favourite record of the year
and quickly crossed over onto L.A.'s KROQ and other
West Coast stations. The single eventually peaked at
a modest #34 in the US, but Pablo Honey went
gold. A year after its original release, a reissued
"Creep" finally hit the UK charts, peaking
at #7. Pablo Honey was a solid, if unremarkable
recording, that lacks both the force and experimentation
of their later work. Regardless, their potential was
evident with songs like the aforementioned "Creep",
"Anyone Can Play Guitar", "Thinking About
You" and "You". Because the album kept
on breaking around the world, the Pablo Honey
supporting tour lumbered into its second year.
The band tried new songs on the road, which helped
in making their second album in 1995—the more
significant The Bends. It was unexpectedly and
suprisingly more mature than their previous, considering
the fact they had been marked as one-hit-wonders. However
the edifice marked "follow-up to Creep" cast
a long shadow over the sessions. "It was either
going to be Sulk, The Bends, Nice Dream or Just,"
remembers producer John Leckie. "We had to give
those absolute attention, make the amazing, instant
smash hits number 1 in America. Everyone was pulling
their hair and saying, 'It's not good enough! We were
trying too hard.'"
The solution was a change of scene: they quit the studio
and toured Australia and the Far East. "It made
them re-evaluate what they were good at and enjoyed
doing," claimed their manager Chris Hufford. "Playing
live again put the perspective back on what they'd lost
in the studio." The EP My Iron Lung (1994)
was released between the two albums while the band were
touring and saw them in a transitional stage between
the poppy simplicity of Pablo Honey and the musical
depth of their next album. Having worked the songs in
on the road, they returned to Britain and completed
the album in a fortnight. Drawing heavily on 1960s influences
as well as the then popular music exemplified by groups
such as the Pixies and R.E.M., the album was a significant
step
forward for the group with Yorke's vocal style to the
fore. Tracks such as "Planet Telex", "Street
Spirit (fade out)" and "Fake Plastic Trees"
were striking, original and indicators of the group's
subsequent developments.
Despite that it was not a Britpop album, it was associated
with the movement and in early 1996 — widely praised
a year after the album's release — Radiohead took
part in Cool Britannia, battling famous acts like Oasis,
Blur, Pulp and Suede. Now, The Bends is considered
by many critics and fans as one of the best albums of
the mid-1990s.
1996-1998
Radiohead began writing OK Computer in early
1996 at their rehearsal studio, Canned Applause a converted
fruit shed with the latest recording equipment. By July
they had recorded four songs with producer Nigel Godrich.
Having learned from The Bends, they decided to
break the songs in live before completing the record.
By July 1996, Canned Applause was set up for recording.
It was the first time the band had attempted to cut
album tracks outside of a conventional studio environment.
Despite the experimental and unconventional setting,
four songs from Canned Applause found their way onto
the album. The songs were "Subterranean Homesick
Alien", "Electioneering", "The Tourist"
and "No Surprises".
 At
late July and August, they returned briefly for touring
to present and try the new songs. In September they
moved to St. Catherine's Court – a mansion owned
by actress Jane Seymour—where they recorded the
rest of OK Computer, without pressure. They made
much use of the various different rooms and atmospheres
throughout the house, and the isolation from the outside
world encouraged time to run at a different pace, making
working hours more flexible and spontaneous. A couple
of songs—"Exit Music (For a Film)" and
"Let Down"—were recorded live. By Christmas
1996, the album was finished, and in February and March
was mixed. "The biggest pressure was actually completing
it," remembers Ed O'Brien. "We weren't given
any deadlines and we had complete freedom to do what
we wanted. We were delaying it because we were a bit
frightened of actually finishing stuff."
In 16 June 1997 OK Computer was released and
received even greater acclaim than The Bends,
featuring prominently in many "best album"
polls, then and now. It found Radiohead introducing
uncommon musical elements, experimenting with ambience
and noise to create a set of songs that many consider
to be a high point of late-twentieth century rock music.
It received a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album
and was followed by their big "Against Demons World
Tour". Grant Gee, the director of the "No
Surprises" video, accompanied the band on their
tour and filmed it, which resulted in the "on the
fly" documentary Meeting People Is Easy,
which showed the band starting from their first and
foremost glorious tours and finishing in their late
burn-out dates in middle 1998.
Colin Greenwood said about the album: "I think
the overall mood on the record is starker than The
Bends. I think that there is a consistent sound
to 80 percent of the new album. I think we made things
a little bit more extreme on this record. The important
thing for us on this record was that we produce it ourselves.
We had to learn how to make decisions amongst the six
of us. There was the five people in the band and the
engineer /mixer Nigel Godrich. We  learned
a lot from doing it on our own and in retrospect, we
are very proud of this record." The band released
two EPs No Surprises/Running From Demons (1997)
and Airbag/How Am I Driving?(1998), which differ
only by a couple of songs. The more notable is the second,
which has few songs that could best be described as
a bridge between the progressive alternative rock of
OK Computer and their subsequent experimental
work.
OK Computer and The Verve's sublime final effort
— Urban Hymns — were regarded as
a boost to the already dying Britpop movement, despite
the fact that both records departed from the style.
Nevertheless OK Computer is regarded by some
as one of the greatest rock albums and still tops various
charts. It defined Radiohead as top superstars and elevated
them to the pantheon of the greatest bands of 90s, among
such seminal acts as R.E.M. and U2.
1999-2001
Exhausted by their fame and on the verge of burnout
following the end of OK Computer tour in middle
1998, the band spent the next year in relative quiet.
Thom Yorke admitted that after the tour the band was
really on the verge of splitting up. He also added that
he fell into depression, but managed to recover. He
especially stressed on his friendship with Michael Stipe
(R.E.M.'s singer), whose persona turned to  be
inspiration on Yorke in both spiritual and songwriting
ways. Some of the strongest Radiohead tracks on post-OK
Computer albums were noted by Thom as inspiration
by Michael's words or by latter's tireless support to
his younger colleague.
The band only appeared at the Amnesty International
Concert in Paris (10 December 1998), and Thom Yorke
and Jonny Greenwood performed at the Tibetan Freedom
Concert in Amsterdam, where a new song, "Pyramid
Song", made its live debut. After O'Brien's collaboration
for the BBC drama series "Eureka Street" in
middle 1999, the band finally returned to the studio
to record Kid A. Radiohead refused to make a
follow-up of OK Computer in the same musical
vein and choose to be even more ambitious than before,
creating a defiantly experimental electronic album with
minimal guitar work, that complemented the lyrical and
musical hooks of their earlier work with a more minimalist
style.
The record was finished in April 2000 and with no singles,
yet with promos, the album was promoted mainly on the
Internet. This is where Radiohead's infamous relationship
with Napster came into play. Three months prior to the
release of Kid A MP3 tracks of the entire album
made their way onto the file sharing service. As Richard
Menta of MP3 Newswire detailed in his essay "Did
Napster Take Radiohead's New Album to Number 1?"
[1], millions of fans had possession of this music by
the time the CD hit stores. The record industry assumed
the album was now doomed to failure since fans already
had the music for free. Instead the opposite happened
and the band, which had never hit the US top 20 before,
captured the number one spot in Kid A's debut
week. With the record's absence of radio airplay, big
time marketing, and any other factor that may have explained
this stunning success, Menta declared this was proof
of the promotional powers of file trading and of word-of-mouth
generated by the Net.
Even Oasis' chief Noel Gallagher admitted that Kid
A's great marketing scheme was its lack of any promotion:
"If you refuse to talk about your own album, that
just stirs the pot and makes everyone else start talking
about it." While others agreed with Gallagher's
assessment, it ignored any potential effect of Napster
despite the fact it distributed Kid A to a huge
number of music fans. Whatever the reason for the record's
success on the charts, Kid A took the band from
indie faves to burgeoning supergroup. The album's arrangements
have been likened to a meeting of Pink Floyd and Aphex
Twin. Kid A was released in October 2000. The
band cited Alice Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Paul Lansky
as influences, as well as the entire back catalogue
of Warp Records. Kid A received Grammy Award
for Best Alternative Album as its predecessor, which
fired them to superstardom. The band were accused by
some critics for creating a radio-unfriendly record,
however most of the band's fans nailed it as a masterprise.
And despite, that it's far from their earlier and one
of the most acclaimed material, now Kid A is
considered as one of the greatest electronic albums
made by a rock band and one of Radiohead's finest records.
The follow-up Amnesiac, which was released in
June of the following year, comprised further tracks
from the same recording sessions as Kid A. Conceived
as two separate sequences of songs, the two albums are
similar in style and are linked by two different versions
of the same song: "Morning Bell." While explaining
the decision to release two albums rather than one,
Thom illuminated his artistic and musical intentions
and further clarifies the relationship between the two
records: "They are separate because they cannot
run in a straight line with each other. They cancel
each other out as overall finished things. They come
from two different places, I think ... In some weird
way, I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid
A, a form of explanation." He continues: "Something
traumatic is happening in Kid A, and this is
looking back at it, trying to piece together what has
happened. Go back and listen to Kid A after listening
to Amnesiac, and I think you'll hear it."
About the differences with the previous record he says:
"Kid A was kind of  like
an electric shock. Amnesiac is more about being
in the woods, in the countryside. I think the artwork
is the best way of explaining it. The artwork to Kid
A was all in the distance. The fires were all going
on the other side of the hill. With Amnesiac,
you're actually in the forest while the fire's happening.
With Kid A, when you sequenced certain tracks
together, this play started appearing." Indeed,
while Kid A is a more soulful, melodic, and inviting
record, albeit slightly dark, Amnesiac is instantly
unsettling and more uncomfortable to the listener. Nevertheless
the album was received very well and nearly reached
Kid A's sales. While most fans tend to like Kid
A more than Amnesiac, the latter should
be considered as the next successful and experimental
chapter of Radiohead expedition in the musical world.
After the release of the album, the band staged their
own mini-festival in Oxford's South Park, featuring
Sigur Rós, Supergrass, Humphrey Lyttelton (who
played trumpet on "Life in a Glass House",
the closing track on Amnesiac), and themselves.
It was at this concert that the band finally played
"Creep," after having refused to perform the
song for many years. Initially the band wanted to release
"I Might Be Wrong" as their new single after
"Pyramid Song" and "Knives Out",
but soon the idea expanded into a full-fledged live
record. In the fall of 2001, they released their first
live album: I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings,
featuring performances from Berlin, Paris, London and
a couple of other concerts and also including one unreleased
track, "True Love Waits".
2002-2004
The recording process for their next record, Hail
to the Thief, was remarkably different from those
for the previous three studio albums. They were comparable
more to the pace of the Bends sessions, rather  than
the usual holing up in a studio for months. The band
elected to take their new material on the road in Portugal
and Spain during July and August of 2002 prior to recording
it. With the songs fleshed out and finalised during
the tour, the band completed the album in a Los Angeles
studio in a fortnight. In 2003 the band released their
sixth album, which was rooted in less overt experimentation
than its two immediate predecessors but was still a
long way from their earlier guitar-driven material.
The album's title raised controversy in the U.S., being
interpreted as a reference to the 2000 U.S. Presidential
election. The members of the band deny this claim. In
the June 2003 issue of Spin Magazine, Thom Yorke was
quoted as saying "If the motivation for naming
our album had been based solely on the U.S. election,
I'd find that to be pretty shallow." Instead, Yorke
claimed that he had gotten the phrase from a radio program
about the also controversial 1888 U.S. presidential
election. That being said, he couldn't deny that the
phrase "Hail to the thief" was additionally
used as an anti-Bush slogan by protestors at the end
of the controversial 2000 election campaign that put
him into the White House. On the day of his inauguration,
Bush was greeted in Washington by thousands of protestors
with banners, who shouted "Hail to the thief, our
commander in chief!".
Two months before the album release, an unfinished
version of the album was stolen, apparently from the
recording studio where they were working, and uploaded
to the internet. Unfortunately for them, the original
album recordings also met the same fate, but the band
remained adamant, didn't pull the album for an earlier
date, and released it on the announced day: June 9,
2003. Even though the album was leaked, its sales overgrew
those of their last two records both in its first week
of release and overall. Hail to the Thief displayed
influences from Radiohead's last three records, containing
some electronic and ambient pieces and some new experimental
sounds. It is generally considered to be a more guitar-based
record than Kid A and Amnesiac. It
was greeted warmly by both fans and the press. In contrast
to the band's mood following the release of OK Computer,
subsequent interviews and performances showed a band
contented with themselves and their record: they were
responding kindly to any interviews, while Yorke and
his bandmembers were grinning and dancing on stages.
Thereafter, Radiohead embarked on a vast international
tour, lasting
about a year. It saw the band visiting Australia and
Japan for the first time since their OK Computer
tour in 1997–1998, more than 6 years previous.
Many Australian fans were deeply upset by the cancellation
of the last show merely hours before its scheduled start
due to problems with Yorke's throat. Many fans had come
to Melbourne all the way from Brisbane to attend the
show. Radiohead headlined the main (Pyramid) stage on
the Saturday of the Glastonbury 2003, to huge crowd
acclaim and positive press reviews. The same year, Jonny
Greenwood, with the help of his brother and Colin Greenwood,
recorded and produced the soundtrack to the avant-garde
documentary movie Bodysong. About one year
after the release of Hail to the Thief, Radiohead
released a new EP entitled COM LAG (2plus2isfive),
while on their 2004 tour in Australia and Japan. With
10 tracks, COM LAG is longer than the average Radiohead
EP. It features live takes, remixes, and different versions
of Hail to the Thief-era songs, as well as
a handful of acoustic and electronic numbers. The band
finished touring and promoting Hail to the Thief
in mid-2004 with an acclaimed performance at the Coachella
Festival.
2004-present
After the lengthy tour, the rest of 2004 passed with
band members devoting themselves to solo projects and
recordings with other artists. Chief artists Jonny Greenwood
and Thom Yorke were mostly at the fore. Drummer Phil
Selway, unlike previous years, also started doing collaborative
work. He was working with the longtime collaborators
Samaritans Health Organizations. Other bandmembers Ed
O'Brien and Colin Greenwood weren't making solo projects,
partly because both were becoming fathers: a son Salvador
was born to the former in early 2004 and at the time
the latter also was expecting a child. The band only
gave note of themselves as a whole, releasing the DVD
The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth Of All Time.
Greenwood, along with Phil, will have a cameo role in
the next Harry Potter movie - HP and the Goblet of Fire.
Jonny became a composer for the BBC, charged with creating
classical pieces. He and Thom participated in the Band
Aid 20 project, playing respectively guitar and piano,
collaborating with batch of famous artists. In 2004
was the UK Premiere of the highly anticipated dance
piece Split Sides. Radiohead’s and Sigur Ros's
collaboration with dance legend Merce Cunningham at
the Barbican Theatre from 5-9 of October. The piece
featured Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do as well as a 20-minute new
work by Radiohead. A roll of dice at the beginning of
each performance dictated which combination of choreography,
music, costume, design and lighting was actually seen.
There were 32 potential combinations, making each night
a completely different experience. The production also
featured Décor by photographer Robert Heishman
and Turner Prize Nominee Catherine Yass. The show was
also seen in Norway on 21 May.
Thom and Jonny presented some new work with the London
Sinfonietta Orchestra on 27 March 2005 and 28 March
2005 at the Ether Festival in London. Thom sang from
some lyrics sheets the ocean themed debut song "Arpeggi",
including the lines "in the deepest ocean",
"the bottom of the sea" and "sunk without
a trace", which can also be found at the official
site. "Where Bluebirds Fly", a b-side of the
"There There" single, was also debuted as
an orchestral piece. Thom was joined by female vocalist,
Lubna Salame. Until that point, "Where Bluebirds
Fly" had never played live before, only being used
as the band's intro music at their live shows from 2002
onwards. Jonny presented his new work "Piano For
Children", performed by the Sinfonietta, also.
The performances were attended by Nigel Godrich, Ed,
Colin, and Beck.
After a year out of the spotlight Radiohead returned
again to recording sessions. In early March, Thom Yorke,
on the band's official messageboard, mentioned that
the band had started work. In late March Jonny Greenwood
confirmed that the band are rehearsing and are working
on new material in their Oxford studio, where they recorded
their first album. "We're rehearsing at the moment,
and again it's fun. We all want to push forward, and
when you have five people who are all like that, you
couldn't ask for a better thing." According to
Jonny the recording process of LP 7 will be interrupted
by his engagement with BBC in late 23 April 2005 with
the BBC Concert Orchestra in London. Following Jonny
and Thom's performance at the Ether Festival, Ed O'Brien
revealed that Radiohead have already spent about four
weeks in the studio recording a new album. According
to Ed, another small tour, like the band did in Portugal
and Spain in middle 2002, to try out Hail to the Thief
material, could be possible if the recording process
takes a long time. Jonny has hinted that he would like
to do a fanclub tour.
On 15 April Thom Yorke at the Trade Justice Movement
performed a couple of new tracks, which he called "House
of Cards" and "Las Flowers (til the Hospital)".
On 17 April, he revealed that the band are working on
the new track "Arpeggi", which debuted live
at the Ether Festival. Thom said the song is nearly
finished, but couldn't say if it will appear on Radiohead's
upcoming album. According to Thom new record is surely
going to happen—the only question is "when?".
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