The Genius Of Radiohead’s "Ok Computer" | Classic Album Under Review | Amplified

[Music] not only at the time did it seem like something kind of radically different but it now stands as like you know one of the most kind of you know valid and lasting musical monuments of that era and it was just so out of the ordinary there was no you know there was no bog standard four-time guitar chord you know boys rock it brought a radical edge to the mainstream to stadium kind of rock culture [Music] in the summer of 1997 amidst the election of new labour and the hysteria surrounding the death of princess diana a previously obscure indie band from oxford released their third studio album [Music] okay computer established radiohead as one of the most innovative and individual voices in modern music this is a review of that album and of the band who made it radiohead formed under the name on a friday at abington school on the outskirts of oxford in the mid-1980s after attending university and releasing several self-produced demos the band was signed to a six album deal with emi changing their name to radiohead after the talking heads song the group released their first full-length studio album pablo honey in 1993 the first single from the record cree was to become an international hit [Music] [Applause] the enormous success of creeps seemed however to sit uneasily with the song's author i think that tom york was someone who he got stung by an early bit of criticism by keith cameron a journalist who called them a lily livered excuse for a rock band and i think from then on he had this sense that he wanted to do more than just front a white boy middle class rock band and you can hear that in the way that pablo honey turned into the benz the benz came out in 1995 against the backdrop of the brit prop explosion the album became a huge success and marked the new maturity in radiohead songwriting the benz distinguished them from a lot of what was going on in brit rock at the time i mean it was just uh more interesting and um daring than oasis to me or blur or anything it just it sort of it very much carved out its own sound and distinguished radiohead from you know a lot of what was happening in britain in the mid 90s at that time there was this sense of ambition i think that they had which you know a lot of the brit-bot bands at that time didn't really have they had that limited quoasis kind of thing and radiohead did not want to get lumped in with that kind of sterility because the benz had sold so well they they just the record company didn't pander to them but they they gave them a little bit more leeway than than they might have done a band on their debut album so they they found themselves in this position where they knew what they liked doing in the studio and it was more that they had to engineer the way they worked uh the way that they recorded the way that they worked with producers and engineers um they wanted to make it so that the situation was engineered around them rather than them having to fit in with the prescribed views of how you do these sort of things by january 1996 the band was ready to begin recording their third studio album the freedom that the benz had won them was to ensure that it was not to be a traditional recording process okay computer was interesting because it was the first time i think the radio had got control over the recording process they they got their engineer in place producer in place nigel godrich who they've worked with a little bit before and they built their own studio and i think that was really important they took control of the means of production in many ways they had worked with nigel godrich on the benz on one track black star and they had um they'd really i think they said at the time that they it felt like the teacher had gone away for the day and they could they felt completely at ease in the studio to do what they wanted so they got nigel to build a um a portable studio that they could take anywhere that they wanted um and they found a mansion in bath which used to belong to jane seymour and they went and recorded there in the autumn of 1996 radiohead moved the production to saint catherine's court a secluded 15th century mansion nestling in a picturesque valley just outside bath and i think that's you know where the kind of ambiance of of saint catherine's court kind of came into play that didn't sound like a studio it sounded bigger than a studio it sounded like a church or a kind of you know a large sort of baronial dining room or something it had those kinds of acoustics and ambience after mixing the record in london the band were finally ready to release the first single paranoid android coming in at over six minutes long the song was accompanied by a rather unusual music video by swedish cartoonist magnus carlson [Music] long tracks are usually made up of smaller bits and in paranoid android there's three distinct sections really that come together any of them by themselves may not be particularly remarkable but put together it's it creates this real epic i think the first section is relatively straightforward the second section with the with that section that's probably as much as anywhere in the album where where radiohead and this particular album has its particular prog rock credential that's a section which uses a little trick that wouldn't be out of place in in yes or genesis in the 1970s [Music] there are moments of genuine bitterness you know the gucci big an ambition i think the key line in the thing is ambition makes you look very ugly and that is an indictment of the 80s and 90s of um you know the prevailing mindset of the time you know that's um being kind of you know commodified and this you know it's taken to be the kind of the given mindset i mean we are supposed to be ambitious and very very few people question that very basic drive that is supposed to inform our lives but i think that the kind of abrupt shift in gear when he says ambition makes you look very ugly um is one of the key points it's a very kind of it's official it's almost like the kind of the multi-tracks have been torn away at that particular moment and it's in a song that i think is in lots of ways you know full of irony for various layers and perhaps a little bit of kind of self-mockery it's it's a very straight moment [Music] the heavy heavy riff that johnny comes in on which is kind of in in line with the creep brief where he's trying almost trying to destroy the song because he doesn't like it trying to make it less soppy [Music] do [Music] all of a sudden it kind of explodes and settles down on this particular chord sequence [Music] reigns [Music] and here the rain is falling down and it's it's it's like this solitary individual in the middle of this kind of natural landscape i think it's middle section that johnny greenwood wrote with the melotron you know from from rain down from a great heart i think is just you know extraordinarily beautiful um and um you know it's a brilliant contrast to the sort of grungier sections that kind of sandwich it paranoid android was released in may 1997 in the wake of new labour's landslide victory in the national election despite being so long the song was quickly adopted by radio stations across the country and soon rose to number three in the uk charts shocking shocking record when that came out as a single it was six minutes plus i mean that was unheard of you know from punk the idea of doing a single that lasted for longer than three minutes was just a heresy you just don't do that that was what the old farts did elp yes they didn't even make singles you know and it was just a territory that no one wanted to go near it set the level so high that this album is going to have to do something really special to stay at that particular pitch when the album was finally released on the 16th of june the record's artwork was equally as remarkable as the first single had been i think there's a lot to be gained by attending to the artwork of this particular album um the idea of um artworks being a particular aspect of rock albums goes back a long way of course i think it's very important there are all sorts of little little it's like little collages of of images that are brought together i i said in the book i think there's a there's a small dissertation to be written on the color blue itself in in some of the artwork that you get with it the design of um okay computer and later kid a to a great extent is is very interesting it's what probably like scooty plitty would have called me aesthetics in some ways there's this deliberate use of lowercase the whole time um which is has become subsequently and perhaps was at the time a kind of sort of designery affectation that you'd get on the kind of logos of like offices in old street and places like that but um they use it in a kind of different kind of way a more sort of pointedly sullen deliberate sort of way and they don't and of course they also their sleeves are sort of liberal there's lots of abrupt interventions and there are scribbles and scrolls and the whole thing is deliberately kind of messed up and up with an untidy it was pretty weird at the time it didn't make any sense there's nothing to latch onto there are little tiny snippets to latch onto it's like someone's taken an album cover and put it in the wash or something and then it's come out sort of slightly blurred slightly dyed you recognize one thing you recognize a sweet wrapper you recognize the ingredients to a burger you recognize some signs from an airport and a little family the ideal family unit all that but it's all perverted it's all it's not as it should be it's the way it's out of context but like the lyric the way the lyrics work with the music it becomes a sort of cohesive whole actually funnily enough i think that the title okay computer belongs as much to the artwork really as to um something that pertains to the music itself a computer can't be okay a computer can either be a zero or a one it can't be a kind of moderate gray bit in the middle album opened with the arresting guitar sound of airbag a song that reflected the band's new electronic influences and more obscurely tom york's distaste for mechanized transport i just remember being so startled by it it just seemed to um take us into a new kind of era of rock i mean i remember people saying this is the first 21st century album and it just didn't sound like anything you know i'd ever heard before [Music] the band were quite keen to explore new music they they were obviously associated with dj shadow and they've obviously grafted a little bit of that influence onto the track in some ways it mirrors planet telex from the previous album which was again a dance meets rock kind of sound airbag was much more successful i think you've got this kind of drum loop this kind of sampling of of a drum groove that phil selway played which was then kind of used and looped in in the truck airbag is i think the most uplifting radiohead track in there in their whole canon really is it's absolutely a burst of life which is um quite an achievement because that i think that's what they wanted to do with the lyrics concern themselves with um the moment after a car crash escaping a car crash or being saved from a car crash tom's paranoia about cars is perfectly expressed in that and that's the subject he returns to throughout the album but not just cars but kind of modern transport kind of unease with uh being in metal boxes being shunted along highways [Music] there's this wonderful i'm back to save the universe which is repeated and that's i guess the sort of feeling that they're alluding to with with escaping a car crash or being saved by an airbag and the airbag is synonymous with that rescue that that sort of release from death airbag is yes it's um a curious introduction and i think that it kind of sets the tone for the album which is one of deep deep sarcasm um you know in this case to this kind of you know ultimate sort of safety zone you know this more mechanistic convenience and um and it's just one of the interesting general factors of um okay computer that it's an album i mean if you think of like movements like punk and things like that quite often that was a roar of protest against a time of nothing really which is what the 70s was the time of desolation as a protest against a sort of poverty whereas um okay computer is a protest in a sense against a time of plenty a time of like great material wealth and just sort of trying to talk about some expenses this makes life too safe too comfortable too functional after the epic paranoid android the album moves into more traditional territory with subterranean homesick alien [Music] you i think he was in he ran over a pheasant or something when he was out driving one night and he was thinking about aliens watching from space oh an album that really there's very little that you would call optimism this is actually i mean there's a subtle difference between optimism and a certain kind of escapism i mean johnny greenwood was very much into the avant-garde and um he would probably be familiar with people like sun ra whose whole idea was that the only way to escape this absolutely desti ruined noho planet to find salvation in the cosmos you know to travel often i don't think that um tom bjork actually believed that but there's a song in which he appears to sort of have a wish for that kind of escape there's an implication that you can't really fight the world the world is the world is buggered [Music] [Applause] [Music] but it's just a lovely adolescent dream you know on the part of somebody that's absolutely disaffected and i think that's one of the songs that would we would have a sort of quiet sort of simple but um in some ways simple and some sort of profound appeal to its you know to the radiohead audience there's this beautiful dreaminess to that song which is very much like a tim buckley album called happy sad very warm um folky as well and of course the title chimes in with bob dylan's subterranean hemispheric blues so there was a nice kind of a folk element to that and after coming after paranormal android and it was a nice contrast i think to the first two tracks on the album with exit music for a film radiohead we're actually asked to contribute the music for the end of romeo and juliet and i think it's interesting that this is probably one of the very few if not the only occasions when they were actually asked to write to order for for a product if you like and yet they came up with probably one of the strongest songs on okay computer [Music] from your sleep [Music] your tears today we are scared [Music] the whole thing was supposedly written for the basler and romeo and juliet film um the moment where they've just woken up the morning after they've consummated their relationship um why didn't they run away tom things why didn't they just leave you know instead of hanging around and dying you know it would have surely made more sense to just get out of there um so he it's as if he's he could be in bed he could it could be literally the morning after he's in bed with this kind of lullaby there is a kind of a streak running through um okay computer and this is one very good example of it of the sudden very bitter very misanthropic sort of the moment and um [Music] you you could say it's actually one of the kind of more silly i mean if you were making a case against radiohead you could point to lines about i hope you all choked because it does seem like the kind of you know the sort of the kind of the student sitting on the stairs with his head buried in his hands at the party while everybody else is having fun and that you know who's kind of transmitting his kind of lack of social status into this kind of apocalyptic worldview in which all the people that ignored him at parties and all the girls never got off him you know then they'll be sorry when there's almost that kind of a hint of that kind of fantasy going on with the embedded artist it has that kind of orchestral presence and i think it's it's very heart-rending and i'm sure that's to do with the the way the chords are structured etc this is one of those tracks which which does raid your head in a short amount of time it starts very very quietly and at some point it absolutely soars it's one of those tracks that that goes further and further upwards but it starts from something very simple it's a simple minor key descending chord sequence [Music] [Applause] yes [Music] it's worth saying something about tom york's voice it's such a big part of radiohead and this album um he has i i i say in the book that it's it's his high range that does the damage if he were to sing happy birthday to you slowly at that in that range it's going to have an amazing effect i think tom's an extraordinary vocalist he's he's able to to convey very human things the way he's he's brave enough to sing things in the way that he is is actually probably his defining characteristic i think there's a reflection of the emotional honesty which i do think is at the heart of radiohead and the way he projects those songs one of my favorite moments on the album is when exit music stops and you've got that silence between that and let down [Music] [Applause] and then you've got that lovely sweet guitar refrain that comes in that that sets let down off trust me [Music] beautiful melancholy about it as well i think to have real beauty just to have something sweet isn't enough but something bittersweet like that and a song that's titled letdown is obviously bittersweet as well let down is a classic example of okay computer about where the music appears to be doing something that lyrics aren't it is a sexually despondent lyric and yet musically it's one of the most rousing tracks you know one level is an absolutely rousing song but it's almost it's kind of you know this this rapturous kind of cathedral-like tribute to utter misery [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the opening melody line has got something of the minimalists people like steve reich and philip glass about it so so it's a little system that's going on that goes like this and so on so it's a little system that's going on there that could go on forever there is so much feeling and beauty in the music on this record and i think you know on this song as much as anywhere else and i think johnny greenwood has a lot to do with that greenwood i just think he's a sort of instinctively a kind of a composer of genius if you like i think his musical contributions in terms of his his sort of guitar overlays and arpeggios and um the way that the guitars work with the keyboards on okay computer is is just staggeringly lovely really it's so beautiful and he's a virtuoso he's he's basically capable of making sounds that nobody else gets anywhere close to the sixth track on the album karma police also became the second single to be released from the record reaching number eight in the charts the single has gone on to become one of radiohead's most enduring songs one of the things that characterizes karma police is is the chord sequence at the opening which which can't really decide if it's in as it were c and a minor e minor and g and it's pulling between them this may well be something that somebody would work out just at the piano but there are things about this chord sequence which wouldn't make that much sense in terms of classical music but it works nicely as a sequence itself [Music] is [Music] i think karma police is one of those radiohead songs that expresses that kind of quiet desperation that radiohead do so well and obviously in some ways it's quite a bitter song it's almost vengeful um and it is about i think justification and seeing things through and overcoming things but there's there's a kind of quiet paranoia at work that that actually comes through towards the end people who do wrong one day their wrongs will catch up with them you know it's the very nature of karma but it's there is this task force of people that go around the karma police who can suddenly exact uh revenge or recompense upon these people who've done wrong [Music] this [Applause] this is what happens if you mess with us again very very sort of sinister it's almost like you know the idea of the army of me that there is this kind of mass of disaffected people that will somehow rather get their act together it's a kind of weird mixture of in some ways perhaps of like wishful fantasy and hopefully sinister intention the kind of chorus if you like james doheny is somebody i've read who spotted that as possibly referring to the track sexy sadie on the beatles white album you [Music] it's a standard pop song so far little ploddy if anything and then in the middle of the song it just lifts and you get this beautiful sequence uh tom york in its higher range this lovely thing for a minute there i i lost myself and the thing i always liked about it was the word phew he always he always says that word few for a minute there i lost myself [Music] for a minute though i lost myself i think of explosions in [Music] in life when we suddenly something comes out of the ordinary and explosions in in art and music that i think radiohead are very capable of and they do do that the way that songs break out from this calm um yeah i think of polanski films and things like that where things are or hitchcock and then suddenly you get this jolt um and i think that tom york is obviously a very sensitive man he's very renowned for that and i you know it chimes in with his kind of personality uh you know a line like that fitter happier it's interesting how in the sort of sleeves it's almost it doesn't pop quite part of the listings it it's almost as kind of adjunct to the rest of the album and it's a kind of litany of all of the things that you are supposed to do as a kind of well-functioning human being in this particular society fitter happier more productive comfortable not drinking too much regular exercise at the gym three days a week and also what the song does by listening in that kind of way in a very very sardonic way is to expose their inadequacy and um in terms of if you actually have any kind of notion in your head of what it might be to live in a radicalized society then these things aren't the things that will get you there these are the kind of values they've got to find a way of dispensing with with fitter happier i think tom's made it very explicit that he was actually looking at a lot of the kind of self-help manuals that that sell in abundant quantities to people who are looking for something that's missing in their life and i think the way in which he tackled that in basically preparing a wish list was very very effective if you believe there just might be something you can do in the next 10 days that would make your personal life your family life and your business life better can i see your hands please how many of you believe the choice is yours how many of you believe every choice has an end result there is something i can specifically do that will make my future either better or worse if you do all these things if you if you tick every box it's not necessarily going to produce any kind of happiness in your life that is a kind of a bitter piece really i think because it's made up of all these phrases goals wishes that the the ordinary vaguely successful vaguely affluent kind of student or 20 something would kind of want out of life and there's a real there is a i think york feels uncomfortable with that for some reason he's that's it's something that he's almost felt oppressed by i think in a way generously saturated fats a patient better driver a safer car baby smiling in back seat sleeping well no bad dreams no paranoia careful to all animals never washing spiders done up like hole keep in contact with those friends enjoy a drink now and then we'll frequently check credit at morrow bank rolling wall favors for favors font but not in love behind the voice there's some kind of studio computer sounds going on and there's the makings of a little tune there there are just two chords and just behind it you can just about hear at a track like this if an old film theme you might be able to hear something like that it's not a kind of french movie kind of music in the background there again the juxtaposition of these very kind of um uh unemotive words with this just hint of something quite emotional behind it it's a lovely juxtaposition and i think [Music] election year is a strange one to me it sounds the oldest of all the songs on okay computers it could come from the benz it doesn't want to sit down with the rest of the songs it's up it's it lifts you back up out of the weirdness of fear happier i guess [Music] on the surface it seems to be a bit of a jibe at the way that politicians conduct themselves and i'd heard the story that that tom actually on tour in america was was basically shaking hands and saying you know i can i guarantee your vote in the forthcoming election etc but i think what it actually embodies is his own his own anxiety about the the the position that he is in i think it basically seems to me more powerfully about his compromises as a rock star as somebody who actually is in the business of selling records and he's completely discomforted [Music] despite the fact that the song had been written many months before tony blair's new government came into office for many the sentiment behind it perfectly sums up the new labour project and its effect on modern politics you know there's a huge ward of cynicism in there you know in terms of what's happening with contemporary politics i think tom york at that stage was educating himself very well i mean he was reading stuff like hobbes bourne's age of extremes marxist view of the 20th century he was reading will hutton's the state we're in um learning you know as you should do when you're an artist like that and you're you know in the public eye i mean he takes his responsibilities quite keenly and carefully i think which is good i think a lot of a lot of the trouble with rock it's just in this uh it's in its own little bubble a lot of the time and what i like about radiohead and tommy particular that he makes it engage with the real world and contemporary issues and and i think that's one of the crucial things about okay computer people didn't quite understand what the concept was but they knew it was it was a critique in many ways of a lot that's happening in contemporary society in 1997 i think there were an awful lot of people at the time who were infused with this great sense of optimism and tony blair coming in getting rid of the tories quite a lot of people did buy into that that idea at the time and you know we're filled with that things and only get better optimism but really in that lyric tom york pretty much nails like a tiny bit i think that anyone looking back now would see that retrospectively it wasn't even that this a lot of people's scales fell from their eyes with tony blair but with tom bjork the scales weren't even in his eyes in the first place i'm in some ways you know climbing up the walls is the most opaque or or a bleak lyric on the album it's quite um unclear exactly what uh york is saying with this track it's certainly one of the the more kind of uh intense sort of passages on the record [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] there's a sense of domestic menace you know his preoccupation with demons there is something quite sort of um disturbing about this track and what is it that's climbing up the walls what is the eye in this track maybe it's from tom york's individual experience who knows um it may be something about our darkest nightmares lyrically it's a bit like it's like songs like every breath you take there's an element of that in there about the idea of in the insidiousness of the song the insidiousness of the narrator is is really kind of quite a nasty song [Music] but it kind of climaxes in in this unholy and scary um sort of tempest of of of strings and other um treated effects [Applause] [Music] the band talked about being influenced by penderecki [Music] we're at a time in popular music where more and more artists are using orchestras in a very conventional studied way and i think what was great about that track was that it actually uh mixed the influences so although the violins were there they were all um tuned to different different kind of textures and and the time signatures were all messed about the arrangement if you like is something that's quite in addition to the song it's not just it's not just a kind of um emphasizing of a bass line or a chord sequence it's a real kind of integral part of the track as it were in january 1998 radiohead released the final single from ok computer no surprises i think no surprises again works very effectively it's kind of an anti-nursery rhyme in many ways because in some ways the musical elements are very uh reassuring they're very they're very pretty um but the lyric is much darker when we come to talk about no surprises i wonder whether radiohead would have remembered a track by the smiths called girlfriend and a coma which was a kind of ultimate example of morrissey's kind of perversity in a way where there's this incredibly jolly track and morrissey saying the words girlfriend in a coma i know it's really serious [Music] the music is doing is telling a completely different story to the words so here you have a set of words which if you were to read them on the page might might give you quite a creepy sense of of um again paranoia suicide those kinds of thoughts but in music which is fragile and beautiful and tender almost child-like [Music] foreign [Music] it's the best opening line it's like a heart that's full up like a landfill is a landfill and a heart the heart is the hot the the middle of the human emotion the human body and a landfill which is where you put rubbish it's on the edge of a town it's not it doesn't have any purpose other than to get filled with crap and and to compare those two things in the opening line of the song that's genius that's just brilliant [Music] foreign [Music] the single peaked at number four in the uk charts however despite its success there is still some debate about the song's meaning lyrical subject matter which is which is hinting at the notion of suicide as a merciful release i don't think that you know tommy on reddit had ever intend anything that's after suicide solution any of those heavy metal songs and i don't think that anyone's going to top themselves after ready ahead but it's it's more about something more subtle it's more about the fantasy of absenting yourself from this world from which you feel absolutely disaffected and um couching that in kind of very sort of dramatized terms people really do go to sleep they really sleepwalk through their lives and and this song i think really says that you know that that if you if you're not prepared to risk alarms and surprises you're not really living and um i'm with him on that you know i think i think you do have to you have to kind of you know you have you have to take you have to take those risks life life is the fully lived life is full of alarms and surprises the penultimate song on the album lucky began life in 1995 when it was released as part of the help album a compilation record designed to raise money for the war child charity i mean lucky in a sense it's the sort of birth of okay computer because it was this track recorded quite quickly with nigel godrich for the war child album and it was such a good experience for the band that it got them thinking about new ways of recording they wanted to take more control over their own work they decided to include it and kept going back to it thinking well we need to make it different and i think that old aesthetic of you don't put previously released things on your album was at play there but actually they found that they could do nothing with it that it was a finished piece and there was nothing more they could do to improve it [Music] [Applause] [Music] lucky's about the same sort of thing as airbag where you just escape death or someone rescues you you know the airbag saves you or you're pulled out of the wreck of a crashed plane or something like that if you're involved in a terrible crash an airplane or a car crash but you've survived then what's what do you what do you think about that what does one feel about that is it the great relief of being alive or is it about the horror that's at one side if there's anything that you might resemble a glimmer of hope then i think that lucky all the in this very twisted and heavily qualified way is is that [Music] is [Music] okay computer's going to be quite an album to finish and i think radiohead did the the sensible thing which was to go out with a relatively calm distance reflective kind of track it was one of the pre-st catherine's caught tracks that they did in in the the fruit shed in in oxfordshire and you know it was kind of it went on the shelf and then you know then it wound up on the record so i mean it clearly wasn't something that they necessarily set that much store by but when they listened to it again it seemed to uh provide the perfect ending for the record as i understand it johnny wrote it about being in the beautiful square in france and actually observing tourists being bustled around and not actually taking the time to engage with what was going on around them and then it kind of builds to this um really quite kind of sort of desperate plea for you know to slow down let's slow down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] slow down you would years and i think that it is a again a deliberate sort of sop against the society that in all kinds of ways you know through excessive mechanization through kind of like increased you know veracity of economic growth is moving far too quickly where the hell am i going you know i mean it forces all of us to ask that question because i think most of us are running to stand still in in the early 21st century you know we are we really do not take time out to ask ourselves you know where we're going or why we're going [Music] okay computer was released on june 16th 1997 its critical reception was unprecedented and remains almost unrivalled in modern music i mean i think from the point of view of someone who'd been writing about music for i don't know how long i've been you know 15 almost 20 years maybe you know i'd given up on um the prospects of an album coming out that just totally blew you away the critical reception that okay computer received um in when it came out in 1997 really was quite extraordinary quite exceptional it was instantly making people's critics top ten top five all-time least or even higher the acclaim didn't surprise me i have to say i just i think like everybody i mean like everyone who reviewed it you just had to sort of you had to kind of bow down before it radiohead toured okay computer relentlessly and earned high praise as a live act the record success was sealed with the group's legendary performance at glastonbury 1997. i think glastonbury was probably quite an easy thing to to pit a hook to pin on the success of okay computer it was it was not an exemplary gig it was going hideously wrong because the monitors weren't working as well documented and um it was just a radiohead gig and it happened to be at glastonbury glasgow is always a special gig especially if you had lightning because it's a bloody massive crowd there's 200 000 people watching you maybe more you know who knows who got in over the fences um and it it it it's a defining moment bands like polk have gone on to say that they'll never ever better that moment but for radiohead it was in you kind of think yeah that could only happen to radiohead it all went a bit wrong it was it was one of the wet glastonburys which are always slightly more depressing um because you it's it's like the trenches um it's like wartime trenches at glastonbury when it's wet you you kind of lose your mind and everyone was kind of not quite obviously if you're in the crowd you don't know what's going on really ahead of playing the monitors aren't working so what you can hear it coming out speakers they just can't hear themselves so that tom can't hear his voice you know they can't hear the guitar parts or any of the instruments is just completely guesswork if you like but i think tom called out turn the lights on the audience or something so if you like the house lights were turned on and you could just see or he could just see this massive sea of people um and it just it went from it flipped it was it it went from being horrendous for them not so horrendous for the crowd it was a radio gig they you know they were seeing a good enough gig to being mind-blowing and they they they it was adversity it was triumph in the face of adversity they just pulled it off they just played you know the album had been pretty much circulating i guess for a month maybe yeah or it was on the cusp of release or people had it um so the songs were known they were singing along and they were everything started to work there was a sense of relation in the bands you could see it was like yeah we did it we triumphed we were gonna this could have been absolutely bloody awful but we pulled it out of the bag it was like a success really amongst all the praise and publicity surrounding the record one key question kept on being raised is ok computer a concept album the argument was principally over whether or not the record was about the dehumanizing effects of modern culture in a sense you could make anything a concept album just by putting the themes together as i say what i did with this album was was try and look for linkages between the songs setting out how some of the words in particular formed clusters of ideas and yes then one can end up with a particular set of obsessions that happen here i don't think in the end that's enough to really make it as a as a concept album if you ask tom york is his concept album of course he would say no because that very term pretend shivers down his spine and i mean it's not a concept on the sense that he's about a any one subject but it does feel like an album that takes you on a journey through you know two or three sort of key themes i do think it is a concept album in that it addresses across the songs essentially the existence of people nowadays in in modern society and their struggles to come to terms with that the best rock music in many ways i think is about people trying to place themselves or deplace themselves or in the society they find themselves in or that they want to escape from and i think okay computer is very much like that it's the sound of an alienated man i think who's looking around him and looking at other people and um it's a sound of a frightened person as well actually and i mean there's a lot of fear in late 20th century early 21st century culture and okay computer really does give off that so in but i don't think it's a concept album in that a to z kind of you know here is a narrative since the records released in 1997 it has gone on to top several polls and earn accolades from a wide spectrum of the music industry it has even been referred to as the final classic record of the past millennium they came almost like an avant-garde band who were playing stadiums and that was for me i didn't think i didn't really think you could do that that was possible really and wrote music anymore they were trying to push things as far as they could and i think they were honest about that i think the the emotions beneath the album are still really honest even though there's a lot of technical things which in the wrong hands could be experiments in technical prowess but i don't think that happens with okay computer almost like an album which in itself represents a whole culture that isn't really being emulated by any of their peers or contemporaries you know it's a sort of standalone voice but entirely an entirely appropriate one you know it's it's for its rebelliousness it's disdainfulness um and there are precious few people a either kind of emulating those things or doing them in such a kind of rich and variegated way musically in such an intelligent way that an album like okay computer is like a counter culture in itself

Channel: Amplified

Views: 19,215

Keywords: Amplified, amplified channel, music, documentaries, music documentaries, pop, film, music interviews, film interviews, radiohead classic album, radiohead classic, radiohead whole album, radiohead third album, radiohead, thom yorke, jonny greenwood, colin greenwood, phil selway, ok computer, tom yorke, tohm york, 1997, album, ok, computer, creep, ok computer 1997, radiohead ok computer, radiohead (musical group), paranoid, android, rock music, review, reviews, discussion, music nerd, amnesiac

Id: A0bC9PKB_Yc

Length: 57min 50sec (3470 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021