It even made me reevaluate parts of The Bends. The band conjuring an epic from the lo-fi beginnings. The command of Thom Yorke’s vocal and the lyric. It started with an ambient drone or click or the sound through a rainy day window. Such was the beautiful power of this, that I had to take note. Then, in 1996, came the Help! charity album from the Warchild charity, the lead single being a brand new song by Radiohead, “Lucky”. For some reason I found The Bends to be lacking in ideas I still find it a bit of an uneven record, because for every “My Iron Lung” and “Just”, there’s a “High and Dry” or “Fake Plastic Trees”, songs I still find it hard to connect with). They responded by recording The Bends (1995), an album that universally won over indie kids and critics alike, (apart from this indie kid and writer. One song can be such a hinderance, it can kill bands. Still, even at last weekend’s brilliant Glastonbury headline set, you suspect some people get pissed off unless three songs in they’re not hearing Jonny Greenwood chopping his guitar into the chorus of “Creep”. I saw them support James in 1993, and even then they were hindered by people shouting, “Play Creep, you cunt!” (turned out that the heckler was a future bandmate of mine). And all this without Brian Eno getting the drummer to play underwater. A record that began their career as not just anthemic, stadium band co-existing with U2-potentials, but as an experimental, leftfield act, capable of shifting otherworldly soundscapes. While the world celebrates fifty years of The Beatles’ worst album (they haven’t got one really, but I like to bait) it’s worth remembering that their Parlophone label mates, Radiohead celebrate twenty years of OK Computer this June. Gray Taylor takes us on a whirlwind tour of the majesty of Radiohead’s OK Computer twenty years after its release.
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