Radiohead's Band Biography to date:
It was sometime in 1982 when Thom Yorke, at the age of 14, asked Colin Greenwood to join him for a new band with Ed O'Brien. Thom and Colin were in a school punkband called TNT. Another friend from the Abingdom public school became the drummer of the band, Phil Selway. Jonny Greenwood - Colin's brother - wanted in too. The band were originally reluctant to let Jonny join, afraid that his youth was going to cramp their style. Fortunatly, they saw the error of their ways!
The band made it's debut at the Jericho's Tavern as "On A Friday" in their hometown, Oxford a few years later, in 1987. Their first demo was made in 1991. A classmate of Thom and Colin, John Butcher brought the tape to Courtyard Studios. The studio was run by two former musicians Bryce Edge and Chris Hufford. Chris Hufford: "The demo had some good tunes but it was all obviously ripped off mercilessly." He might have ignored it were it not for the 15th track. "It was a weird looped-up dance thing which was very different. I asked if they had anything else. After about six months John Butcher brought in a another tape with Stop Whispering and What's that you say on it. These were great songs. Now they had an identity."
Another tape later, the Manic Hedgehog Demo (named after an Oxford record shop) brought the band to another gig in the Jericho Tavern. In the meantime they've already been on the cover of "Curfew", a magazine based in Oxford. Things went fast. On A Friday were booked for gigs frequently. Various record labels got interested and finally EMI signed the band.
After a show at The Venue they had their first review. Reviewer John Harris: "News of their signing had spread and there was a real sense of expectation." In the set at the time were "Prove Yourself", "Thinking About You" and "I Can't". Though he submitted a positive review, Harris wasn't wholly impressed; "Musically they were all over the place. They started with something Rickenbackery that sounded like All Mod Cons-Period Jam, then they'd flip it with something that sounded like the Pixies."
The review prompted discussion in the band. On A Friday had been chosen when they were a weekend outfit of jamming schoolboys. Now they had to conceede that the critic had a point: their name was at best, mundane. They decided to swap it for the title of a cod-reggea tune on Talking Heads' True Stories album, Radio Head.
Hufford and Edge had become their managers. Their relationship was immediately put under strain. The debut release was an EP produced by them. "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 Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, who produced Buffalo Tom's "Let me come over", were hired to produce the two songs for the next single, Inside My Head and Lurgee. Both the band and the producers weren't too happy with the songs Parlophone had chosen. "Inside my Head wasn't very melodic, didn't have any of the stuff we thought the others had, so we were rather disappointed", says Paul Kolderie. "And the one day in rehearsal, they burst into this other song, which I guess they'd just written. When they finished it, Thom mumbled something like, "That's our Scott Walker song"...except I thought he said "That's a Scott Walker song". Now I was pretty familiar with Scott Walker, but Jeez, there's a lot of albums and I could have missed something! We walked out of the rehearsal that night and Sean said, "Too bad their best song's a cover".
That song was Creep. Legend has it that the band weren't unanimously keen on Creep. 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."
Pablo Honey was completed in three weeks. Creep was released to coincide in September 1992, while Pablo Honey was scheduled for the new year. Creep came out to an audible shrug; one or two good reviews, almost no airplay and just enough sales (about 6,000) to get it to number 78 in the UK charts. Pablo Honey was released together with the third single Anyone Can Play Guitar.
Meanwhile, unbeknown to the band, a radio station in San Fransisco, "Live 105" had just named Creep its favourite record of the year and quickly crossed over onto L.A.'s KROQ and other Westcoast stations. The single eventually peaked at a modest 34 in the US, but Pablo Honey went gold. Exactly a year after it's original release, a reissued Creep finally hut the UK charts, peaking at number 7. Because the album kept on breaking around the world, the Pablo Honey Tour lumbered into its second year.
The tension lingered into the recording of the second album, produced by John Leckie. 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," Leckie remembers. "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 scenery. Radiohead quit the studio and toured Australasia and the Far East. "It made them re-evaluate what they were good at and enjoyed doing," claimed Hufford. "Playing live again put the perspective back on what they'd lost in the studio." Having worked the songs in on the road, they returned to Britain and completed the album in a fortnight. Releases while the The Bends was still being completed, the first single from the album, My Iron Lung (taken from a live show recorded at London's Astoria), peaked at a disappointing 23. It wouldn't be until the fifth single from the album, Street Spirit, 18 months later, that Radiohead would hit the top 10 again. America was even more resistant.
Recorded over a year, OK Computer became another extended struggle to perfect their methods of working. They liked the simple way they'd recorded Black Star (on the Bends) and Lucky (for the Bosnian charity album HELP) with engineer Nigel Godrich and asked him to build and man a mobile studio for them. Work began at the Fruit Farm, a converted apple store the band used as rehearsal space, then moved on to Jane Seymour's Elizabethan mansion outside Bath.
Having learnt from the Bends, they
decided to break the songs in live before completing the record.(check
out the live versions of "No Surprises" & "Paranoid
Android" in the RA section). Between the release of the
Bends in march 1995 and the completion of OK Computer early 1997,
Radiohead toured America no less than five times. Radiohead's new
material was premiered on a 13-date American tour supporting
Alanis Morissette. OK Computer was released in June 1997.
It remains the only album I have ever bought on it's release date
without having even heard a single track off of.
Radiohead have been kind of quiet lately. Rumours run riot about the release date of their next alnum, which, personally I can't wait for. The story will, no doubt, continue. Hopefully forever. What can we expect next? Who knows, the "Meeting People is Easy video may give us some idea but we'll just have to wait and see what Thom et al. have in store for us................