Top Of The Rock 'N' Roll Heap

By Josh Tyrangiel

Rock is used to front men like Bono (who wants to throw his arms around the world) and Mick Jagger (who wants to throw his legs around the world). But Radiohead's lead singer, Thom Yorke, would just like the world to behave. His best songs--Fake Plastic Trees, Let Down, Pyramid Song--are written from the perspective of a perfectly rational person who thinks the rest of the world has gone nuts. As rock mantras go, this has all the sex appeal of "Get off my lawn!" But millions have been moved to heights of ecstasy by Radiohead's calls for prudence, in part because Yorke usually provides a few reassuring words amidst his condemnation of technology, government and evil corporations, and in part because Radiohead can really bring the noise.

Still, for an elitist, fronting the best, most-identified-with rock band in the world presents an almost existential problem. In the past, Yorke and his bandmates tried to solve it by radically changing their sound on every album, until the albums got very dark and very weird. But the fans not only refused to be shaken off, they multiplied. So on Radiohead's new album, Hail to the Thief, Yorke finally reached the inevitable conclusion that the only original and obstreperous thing left was to stop trying so hard to be original and obstreperous. "Before we started this album, I was thinking, 'We're gonna have to make some huge sonic leap again, keep changing, keep ahead of the rest,'" Yorke says between bites of a vegan meal at Radiohead's west London rehearsal space. "And it did seem a bit silly to do it just for the sake of it, because that was never the point. It just took a while to get my head round not making any effort and just letting things happen."

Thus we have Hail to the Thief, the most relaxed and diverse album in the career of rock's most analytical control freaks. "We've made some cold records in the past," says drummer Phil Selway. "This, to me, is the first thing we've put down that doesn't sound like a white-knuckle riot. I can listen to this." Hail to the Thief is still a Radiohead album--brooding in places, soaring in others, with a slight undertone of apocalypse all around--but the songs are shorter and tighter, and there are several uninterrupted patches of actual warmth in the vocals. "I was enjoying singing again," says Yorke. "I just didn't like the sound of my voice as it was the last several years. It would echo around in a funny way, and it had this emotional range and baggage that weirded me out. It didn't feel like mine."

Naturally, Yorke believes this was largely the fault of a whacked-out world. After the release of 1997's OK Computer (voted best album of the 20th century by the slightly presentist readers of England's Q magazine), Radiohead appeared to become the band--and the brand--of a certain kind of contrarian chic. If you were smart, cool and worried about the world, nothing broadcast it quicker than some casually scattered Radiohead discs. Yorke blames the forces of commerce for making him feel like a cartoon. "Ultimately you get to a point--Coldplay's a good example right now--where no matter what you do, you become lifestyle music," says Yorke. "No one wants it that way, but it always happens if a record is successful. People identify with it, and it verges on becoming just a marketing campaign."

Yorke's response to becoming a marketing phenom was to hole up in a recording studio for two years to make a hermetically sealed album. Kid A in 2000 opened with the lyric "Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon," and then it got dark. Melodies were buried under horns bleating free jazz and drum machines vomiting arrhythmia. The lyrics were difficult to hear, and those that did make it through were not about sunshine and lollipops. The process of making Kid A, by Yorke's admission, was as disturbing as the material. Three hundred hours were spent on the construction of a single song, and Yorke, who had always been Radiohead's main lyricist and melody writer, seized control of some of the instrumental parts from his bandmates. He summed up the band dynamic at the time: "We're like the U.N. And I'm America."

Radiohead got two albums out of the sessions--Kid A and the equally dystopian Amnesiac, but when the group reconvened to discuss plans for Hail to the Thief in early 2002, it was decided that the creative process had to change. The other members of Radiohead--Selway, guitarists Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood and bassist Colin Greenwood--grew up with Yorke in Oxford. They loved him as a friend and admired him as a songwriter. But they wanted to make a record in time to catch the next Olympics. "On Kid A and Amnesiac we had far too much time to play around and rip everything apart," says Selway. "Consequently it was a very neurotic period, and that shows on the records."

To decrease the neurosis, O'Brien proposed a timeline: Radiohead would rehearse new songs for three months, play those songs on a late summer 2002 tour and then record them in a single two-week session. Yorke agreed and subsequently turned over three CDs of unstructured acoustic recordings of new songs to his bandmates. "He was really careful to give us stuff that was as neutral and as bland as possible," says bassist Colin Greenwood, "so that we would be able to work together on providing music."

When the writing was complete, the group tried their songs out on actual human fans--a big step for them--and discovered that market testing music had its advantages. "Playing live just sort of reminds you that the recording process is artificial," says Jonny Greenwood, Colin's younger brother and Radiohead's resident multi-instrumentalist. "However quickly you record, the process elongates time. Obviously in a concert you never forget the length of a song. You always hear it in its entirety, and you know when it's boring or indulgent."

The band raves about its new creative process, and particularly about Yorke's willingness to go along with it. "Just from my point of view," says Selway, "Thom's attitude this time has been the polar opposite to Kid A." Yorke's bandmates are grateful that he's no longer such a pain; they're also thrilled to see him freed from worrying about the global implications of singing rock songs. "For a long time, the whole thing of having to sell my personality affected me," Yorke says. "It took someone like Michael to talk me through the really sticky bits until I could deal with it all as bullshit."

Michael would be Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The two singers struck up a friendship through mutual admiration in the mid-'90s, and Stipe, another introverted front man, has become Yorke's occasional mentor. "It's a very particular thing that we do," says Stipe. "It's different from playing guitar or acting or painting, and he just needed someone who had been through it to kind of bring him back down to earth and overstate the obvious, which is that you can't believe your own hype. His material explores darker aspects of walking the earth, and people project that on to you. It takes some work not to project it back."

Yorke does have some undeniably morbid tendencies. The first song he ever wrote, at age 11, was called Mushroom Cloud, and much of his Radiohead songbook chronicles the destruction of abstractly good things by abstractly bad things. Still, like all other cynics, he'd like to think he's a romantic. Radiohead has covered Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better and Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy in concert, and Yorke insists that the homage is sincere. "Even in the midst of the darkness of Kid A, I still thought we were doing big, romantic pop songs. I mean, it's all I want, really, to appeal on that level."

On Thief, Yorke appeals on that and many other levels, often within the boundaries of the same song. There There, the first single, is a classic yearning pop song (the chorus goes, "Just 'cause you feel it/doesn't mean it's there") that is also sonically adventurous (three sets of drums are banging simultaneously). It mixes romance and loneliness as well as any song since Losing My Religion. Myxamatosis opens with a cruel buzz that sounds like a horde of flies circling a corpse, but turns into something tender, with Yorke confessing, "No one likes a smart-ass, but we all like stars/That wasn't my intention/I did it for a reason." Even A Punch-Up at a Wedding, which is lyrically cruel (and really appears to be about a fight at a wedding), mixes anger with a pleasant groove.

Of course, all the songs are abstract enough that optimists and pessimists can find whatever they're looking for, even the optimists and pessimists within Radiohead. "The parts of the record I really respond to," says guitarist Greenwood, "are the sound of Thom shrugging his shoulders and saying, 'I'm gonna go home and look after my family and make sure I've got enough food for my family when it all kicks off.'" And then there's Selway: "It's a warm record. And there's a lot more warmth between the five of us as well. You can't fake how you're feeling when you're making music together."

Everything may be copacetic in the Radiohead universe, but the world outside still seems a dark place. The album title, Hail to the Thief, expresses Yorke's distrust of powerful institutions, though he insists it's not a shot at America: "It's trying to express, without getting angry about it, the absurdity of everything. Not just a single Administration." Radiohead continues to fight the battles it thinks it can win. In addition to stumping for Drop the Debt and antiglobalization causes--the publisher of Naomi Klein's anti-big-biz manifesto No Logo concedes the band deserves a commission--Radiohead is informally boycotting all venues owned by Clear Channel, the American radio and promotion behemoth that has been accused of monopolistic practices. "Obviously we want to take on all the big uglies," says Yorke, "but we also realize we need to do it on our terms."

Happily, those terms will take Radiohead to some of the world's most beautiful places this summer. Clear Channel's reach does not extend into venues like the ancient stone arena in Nimes, France, so Radiohead has decided to protest corporate evil by swinging through southern Europe. "They'll be gentlemen of leisure," says manager Julie Calland. "They're calling it 'the wine tour.' You can almost see the old suitcases and linen suits." And you can almost see them enjoying it.