Moving on
Radiohead sends out new signals with 'Kid A'
By Greg Kot

Every generation of rock listeners projects its own version of commercialized cool: a big-selling band that doesn't act or necessarily even sound like a big-selling band. It's difficult for a self-conscious "art project" to go multiplatinum, to simultaneously hold the gaze of fickle MTV addicts and underground-music aficionados alike. But just as REM and Nirvana pulled it off a decade ago, and the Clash and Talking Heads a decade before them, Radiohead is now the mainstream band that fans of non-mainstream music root for.

Here's a British quintet that, to paraphrases REM's Peter Buck, represents the acceptable fringe of the unacceptable. Radiohead tries to operate like an underground band in an industry that would prefer it behave like a pop-star juggernaut befitting its increasingly substantial sales figures.

With the release of "Kid A" (Capitol), Radiohead's fourth album, the quintet has thrown down its biggest challenge yet to industry convention and its fans. Though the album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard pop album chart, it has done so without the benefit of a hit single or a video. Instead, the band has crafted a dense, beguiling, serpentine album that is best absorbed not in MP3-sized chunks but in one continuous listen, an impressionistic collage of lyrics and electronically altered sound short on the big guitars that established Radiohead's following with the 1993 faux-grunge hit "Creep."

It may have seemed that Radiohead was trying too hard to escape its not inconsiderable past, to bury the very things that made it great on the 1997 masterpiece "OK Computer" (predominantly Jonny Greenwood's futuristic guitar rumble and Thom Yorke's swooping lost-in-the-wilderness vocals), but repeated listens to "Kid A" convince me that it's not just a daring move but also an artistically brilliant one. Rather than try to top "OK Computer," the band has taken the experimental colorations of that album and opened up new worlds of possibility. From this vantage point, anything now seems possible for Radiohead.

"After the 'OK Computer' tour we felt we had to change everything," says bassist Colin Greenwood. "There were other guitar bands out there trying to do similar things. We had to move on."

Principally, the band was burned out trying to play songs the same way night after night around the world. Some of that exhaustion is captured on the tour documentary "Meeting People is Easy," which makes Radiohead look less like the most vital major rock band of recent years than the survivors of a plane crash.

"It was a snapshot in time, and it was a pretty depressing snapshot," Greenwood says, calling from the band's production office before a concert in Ireland. "Five days later, we were all having a beach barbecue in Australia and laughing. Our monitor engineer is getting all misty-eyed just thinking about it as we speak. The movie is a misrepresentation in totality, but it is a piece of the story."

The larger story was a band sick of hopping gerbil-like on the industry exercise wheel, even as the sales of "OK Computer" soared. The inner-tension nearly shattered the band.

"We were all terrified at the prospect of making another album, which is then preserved in aspic or amber as a promotional device for the already-booked two-year world tour, with merchandise deals and the TV rights sold to the relevant syndicate companies," Greenwood says.

Rather than break up, the band members began to let go of expectations about how a Radiohead album should sound.

"The first thing people ask is, 'Where are the guitars on the new record?'" the bassist says. "Well, we recorded guitars on all the songs, but they just didn't get there in the mix stage. 'Kid A' is an acoustic-based record that has been digitally manipulated afterward. There isn't an over-arching aesthetic criterion. It was more a case of a bunch of guys with microphones and tube gear going to interesting spaces, recording it, and seeing what happens. You use what works. It was a case of someone like (guitarist Ed O'Brien) playing a keyboard instead of a guitar, or Jonny recording strings with an orchestra at a 12th Century abbey."

The band blended these bits of sonic information with producer Nigel Godrich into a seamless tapestry, experimenting with more than 20 different running orders for the album. Several more "tradition-based" songs, according to Greenwood, were left off the album and saved for a later project to preserve the continuity and flow of "Kid A."

"The live performances of the record have validated the recording process," he says. "The songs are brought into a different state. 'Everything In Its Right Place' was basically Thom and Nigel manipulating Thom's Prophecy keyboard on Pro Tools (computer software), but in concert it's a band performance with Eddie and Jonny cutting up the keyboards and vocals by using loop pedals. It's a completely different process than making the record, but it's the same spirit. Instead of playing the song the same way night after night, there is a built-in looseness to this record that makes each live performance of it different."

Rather than viewing the making of an album as a goal in itself, Radiohead now sees it as a process; the songs aren't ever finished, but in a continuous state of being "remixed." The model for these experiments, at least from Greenwood's point of view, is the "Remain in Light"-era Talking Heads.

"It's not a traditional rock and roll band's approach," he says. At the same time, "I feel we'll always be a rock band and we'll be proud of being a rock band. We're not 'post' anything. We're not a pin-up poster-boy kind of band, and we're not a post-rock band."

Radiohead won't do a North American tour until next year, when it hopes to perform inside a custom-built tent in non-traditional locations.

"After our last experience of playing arenas named after airlines, we wanted to do something a little different, a little more human, and something that belonged to us rather than corporate sponsors," Greenwood says.

A new album or a pair of EPs will be readied for release in early 2001, "a combination of more traditional songs and different electronic sounds."

"It's about us realizing what is important to us about being in a band," Greenwood says. "We obviously want to play concerts, but it's also important to have time between performances to create, and to record when we're excited about things and not have to defer them so we can play an eight-month world tour. By the time the tour ends, the inspiration can be lost, and you can lose the whole point of being a band. That almost happened to us once, and we're not going to let it happen again."