ok computer

Radiohead expanded their sound and cemented their place in music history with this dense and emotional landmark mix of electronica and progressive rock.  During the tour for 'The Bends', they were asked to contribute a song for a charity album to benefit children affected by the Bosnian War.  They recorded 'Lucky' in one day; and, while it didn't get much airplay, it became a template for their next album.   With Thom Yorke on vocals, guitar, piano, laptop, and programming; Jonny Greenwood on guitar, keyboards, piano, organ, glockenspiel, and string arrangements; Colin Greenwood on bass guitar, bass synthesizer, and percussion; Ed O'Brien on guitar, FX, percussion, and backing vocals; and Phil Selway on drums and percussion; they went to work when the tour was over. 

Thom Yorke said at the time: "You know, the big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record, like lyrically," he explains, "but I really don't want to, at all. And I am deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. But I'm not able to put them into music yet. I don't want to force it because then all I'm doing is just addressing all the issues where people are saying that we're mope rock."


Ed O'Brien:  "Everyone said, 'You'll sell six or seven million if you bring out 'The Bends', Part 2 .  And we're like, 'Yeah, right.' But we're not going to do that. The one thing you don't want to say to us is what we should do, because we'll kick against that and do exactly the opposite."

'OK Computer' was the first album that they tried to produce all on their own, starting out at a converted shed near Didcot, Oxfordshire that they called Canned Applause.  
Colin Greenwood remembers:  "The only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves...We bought $140,000 dollars worth of studio gear to record the album with. We had this mobile studio type of thing going where we could take it all into studios to capture those environments. We recorded about 35 percent of the album in our rehearsal space. Which is built like a storage shed. You had to piss around the corner because there were no toilets or no running water. It was in the middle of the countryside. You had to drive to town to find something to eat. In a reaction to that stark, dreary place we recorded the other two-thirds of the record in this opulent country house."


Phil Selway:  "I think there's a real discipline that you have to learn when you produce yourself, which took us a while, I think," Selway said. "We pretty much had a scatter technique with our recording up to about Christmas time really. Consequently, we're jumping from song to song, and when we started to run out of ideas, we'd move on to a new song...The stupid thing was that we were nearly finished when we'd move on, because so much work had gone into them. As a consequence the most valuable lesson was that it told us you have to give yourself deadlines. You have to work within certain constraints...We're each very much responsible for our own part, but along with saying that, we listen to suggestions from the other members and then go and do what we want anyway. I think we are really lucky in that we give each other an awful lot of space to develop our parts, but at the same time we are all very critical about what the other person is doing."



Nigel Godrich:  "They hadn't really enjoyed recording previously, so they figured if we could make an environment where everybody feels comfortable, it would be a real bonus. I had a free rein in what equipment I wanted to buy, and apparently I was imposing more spending limits than I had to. They have a rehearsal space in the countryside in Oxfordshire, and we set it up there and did about half the album. Thom is always writing; he's very prolific. He has countless little bit and bobs up his sleeve. Then we felt we deserved a treat and should go somewhere nice, so we went to Jane Seymour's house near Bath, which was an amazing experience."

"Electioneering", "No Surprises", "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and "The Tourist" were finished by the time they decided to leave Canned Applause for a tour of the US; during which they condensed "Paranoid Android" from a fourteen minutes to six and a half.  They also were commissioned to do a song for the film 'Romeo + Juliet'.  They composed  "Exit Music (For a Film)" after watching footage of the movie.  It helped shape the direction of the rest of the sessions in Bath.  

Jonny Greenwood:  "I did the string parts for this album. I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like "Eleanor Rigby", which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past thirty years. We stole a lot of ideas from film music, and composers like Penderecki, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. We used violins to make frightening white noise stuff, like the last chord of climbing up the walls."

The title 'OK Computer' was the working title for the song "Palo Alto" that wasn't included on the final album.  Yorke says: "It refers to embracing the future, it refers to being terrified of the future, of our future, of everybody else's. It's to do with standing in a room where all these appliances are going off and all these machines and computers and so on, they are all going off and the sound it makes...It was sort of an unhealthy relationship because we weren't very tolerant of it and we weren't prepared to wait around for the computer to catch up. It was like a bit of a... um well, very much a love-hate relationship... um, you have all these amazingly cool things you can do with a computer and yet get bored with them so fast. We just walked back into the next room and bashed it out instead, so you know, there was a lot of that going on."

'OK Computer' went to forty-two in Spain; forty in Switzerland; twenty-seven in Germany; twenty-one in the US; seventeen in Austria; seven in Australia; three in France and Sweden; two in Canada and the Netherlands; and number one in Belgium, New Zealand, and the UK.  It has sold four and a half million copies worldwide and certified triple platinum in the UK, double platinum in the US, and platinum in Australia.  











http://www.radiohead.com/













Paranoid Android




Karma Police




No Suprises 








 'Meeting People Is Easy'  is a rockumentary by Grant Gee that followed Radiohead on their tour supporting 'OK Computer'. 






'OK Computer'
full album:




All tracks written by Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway.


1. "Airbag" 4:44
2. "Paranoid Android" 6:23
3. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" 4:27
4. "Exit Music (For a Film)" 4:24
5. "Let Down" 4:59
6. "Karma Police" 4:21
7. "Fitter Happier" 1:57
8. "Electioneering" 3:50
9. "Climbing Up the Walls" 4:45
10. "No Surprises" 3:48
11. "Lucky" 4:19
12. "The Tourist" 5:24