5 ORBITING RADIOHEAD’S GRAND TOUR
On a hot day in May 2001, the city of Bilbao was shaken by a velvety roar, not unlike the sound of a jet plane waiting on a tarmac. At one end of Calle de Iparraguirre, which cuts across the town, the silver shell of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum was glistening in the sun. For a moment, it seemed as if the noise were coming from there—as if the building were about to lift off and rocket elsewhere. In fact, the source of the disturbance was a local bullring, the Vista Alegre, where a German experimental DJ named Christoph de Babalon was testing his gear. He was the opening act for Radiohead, a five-man British group that had the reputation of being the most artistically formidable rock band since the Beatles. Radiohead fans were gathered at the entrance, staring up at the sound and asking what it meant. One had on a Kafka T-shirt, and others wore shirts with a Radiohead logo, which can only be described as a demon in tears.
A side door led to a concrete corridor, where the bulls run on an ordinary day. From there, planks reached out to a temporary stage. Christoph was in the center, eyeing his mixer and his CD players. With ice-blond hair and black sunglasses, he looked like a young Bond villain, but he turned out to be a friendly, chatty sort of sonic terrorist. “I am familiar with dark, small clubs,” he said after the sound check. “Now it is like I am in a gladiator film.” He mentioned some of his musical influences, which included avant-garde figures like Merzbow and the composer Morton Feldman. “Sometimes I work with beats, sometimes with layers,” he said. “Tonight I do layers.”
Christoph went to his dressing room, and the stage was empty for a while. Two shirtless old men sat on stone steps, looking as though they had not moved since Franco died. Radiohead’s gear basked in the sun. On the left-hand side was a rack of guitars—twenty-three in all. Up front, in an area set aside for Ed O’Brien, one of three guitarists in the band, was a tangle of pedals, samplers, and inch-thick cords. In the center of the stage, to be shared by Colin Greenwood, the bass player, and Thom Yorke, the singer, were various keyboards, a piano, and an upright bass. Equipment for Colin’s younger brother, Jonny Greenwood, stood on the right: more guitars, more keyboards, a xylophone, a transistor radio, a sci-fi stack of analog synthesizers, and a modified ondes Martenot, one of the earliest electronic instruments. The ondes Martenot is controlled by a ring that slides along a wire; fewer than a hundred people have mastered it, and Jonny is one. The only really conventional-looking apparatus was the drum set, although you could tell by some distress on the edges of the drums that the player, Phil Selway, had attacked the sides as well as the skins.
Backstage, the members of Radiohead were eating dinner. Colin Greenwood hovered over the catering table, inspecting an array of Basque dishes. He is typical of the group in that he looks nothing like a celebrity who has sold fifteen million records. He is a pale, slender man with jet-black hair and large, kindly eyes. He is easily distracted and delighted by the world around him, favoring the words “mad,” “brilliant,” and “amazing”—the last spoken with a long, liquid stress on the second syllable. He has a habit of suddenly burying his face in his hands, as if he were sinking into despair or falling asleep; after a moment, his face lights up again. Lavishly well-read, he can talk at length about almost any topic under the sun—Belgian fashion, the stories of John Cheever, the effect of different types of charcoal on barbecued meat—but he gets embarrassed by his erudition and cuts himself off by saying, “I’m rambling.” He is not above wearing a T-shirt that says “Life’s a beach and then you shag.” You might peg him as a cultish young neo-Marxist professor, or as the editor of a hip quarterly. But he is a rock star, with several Web pages devoted to him.
“It’s full on out there, isn’t it?” Greenwood said, looking toward the bullring, which was filling up with fans. “I’m scared.” He occupied himself by talking about Faust’s Metropolis, Alexandra Richie’s thousand-page history of Berlin. Outside, Christoph began to play for real, and was received in bemused silence.
An hour later, Radiohead hit the stage with a confidence that had been invisible before the show. The sound was huge, but it was awash in colors, contrasts, and detail. It was grand in effect, cool in tone, dark in mood. The set combined music from the band’s breakthrough albums of the mid-nineties—The Bends and OK Computer—with more recent material from the albums Kid A and Amnesiac. The older songs had choruses that the fans knew by heart, but the newer ones, which some rock critics had described as “anticommercial,” made the crowd dance harder. (In a demolition of conventional wisdom, Kid A, a hypnotic blend of rock riffs, jazz chords, classical textures, and electronic noise, had gone to the top of the Billboard chart the previous year.) “Idioteque” set off fierce rhythmic clapping, even though it was dominated by jagged beats, computer-music samples, and squawks from the analog synths. It must have helped that the singer, when he was done singing, launched into a demonically silly dance, kicking his legs as if someone were firing a gun at his feet. It may also have helped, on an unconscious level, that love-drunk chords from Tristan und Isolde lurked at the heart of the song, courtesy of Paul Lansky’s 1973 computer composition mild und leise.
In the middle of the set, Radiohead played a song called “Airbag,” which typifies the band’s crafty balance of art and pop. Jonny started off with a melody that snaked along in uneven time—one-two-three-one-two-three-one-two—and swayed between A major and F major. O’Brien added leaner, brighter curlicues on guitar. Selway came in with a precise but heavily syncopated beat. Then Yorke began to sing, in a well-schooled, plaintive voice, an oblique account of a near-fatal collision: “In the next world war / In a jackknifed juggernaut / I am born again.” At the mention of war, Colin let loose a jumpy bass line, giving a funky spin to the hymns in the treble. The music cut through a jumble of verses and choruses, then held fast to a single chord, as Yorke fell into sync with O’Brien’s chiming lines. Just before the end, Colin grinned, leaped in the air a couple of times, and seized hold of his brother’s tune, the one that had set the song in motion. The doubling of the theme, a very Led Zeppelin move, had thunderous logic, as if an equation had been solved. The interplay was as engaging to the mind as anything that had been done in classical music recently, but you could jump up and down to it.
In the old days, rock bands had a haircut, a lingo, a house style. The disconcerting thing about Radiohead is that its members aren’t much alike.They have in common the fact that they were born between 1967 and 1971, and that they grew up in Oxfordshire, England, where most of them still live, but beyond that their personalities diverge. Yorke, who writes most of the songs, is compact, boyish, and impish; he has a lethally quick mind and a subtly potent charisma. O’Brien, almost a foot taller than Yorke, has the jutting jaw and floppy bangs of an actor in a period war movie; he is suave and direct and seems to have rolled in from a different posse. Jonny Greenwood, a lanky figure with unruly black hair, is more cautious than his brother, Colin, but when he starts talking he excitedly involves himself in dense, Victorian sentences, biting clauses out of the air. Phil Selway, the oldest, is bald and sweet-faced, and talks in a gentle voice. He looks like the nice, ordinary one, but he often has a trace of a wicked smile.
How these five quirky Englishmen became the Knights Templar of rock and roll—the most closely analyzed, fervently admired, hotly debated, and slavishly imitated band of the modern era—is anyone’s guess. They are not too sure themselves. “Everyone comes to us with their heads bowed, expecting to be inducted into the mystery of Radiohead,” Selway said. He made a King Tut gesture with his arms. “We were hoist on our own petard with that. At a certain point, around 1997, we were simply overwhelmed and had to vanish for a bit. This was our honest reaction to the situation we were in. But some people thought we were playing a game, or had started taking ourselves too seriously. Really, we don’t want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism.”
What happened to Radiohead in 1997 was that they caught a wave of generational anxiety. The album OK Computer,
