the bends

 

Radiohead came like a comet, creeping away from one hit wonder into a cynical polystyrene weirdness with this brilliant existential decompression.   The group had found a measure of success with the single "Creep" from their debut album 'Pablo Honey'; but were discouraged as the tour went on and on, delaying the recording of their new album.  Guitarist Jonny Greenwood looks back:  "It's funny: on one side it sped things up for us, because it meant that Radiohead became...we never felt that Radiohead was successful,..we felt Creep was successful, but it got our name put about, so that sped things up for us. But at the same time it meant that we recorded our second album about a year late, The Bends, most of it was written within months of recording our first record, and we had to tour and tour and we couldn't stop to record. So that slowed things down for us."

John Leckie and Nigel Godrich were instrumental in the production and engineering of the sessions that began at RAK Studios in London and continued at  The Manor in Oxfordshire and finished up at Abbey Road Studio in London.  The recording featured Thom Yorke on vocals, guitars, piano, string arrangements, songwriting, artwork, and illustrations;  Jonny Greenwood on guitars, organ, keyboards, synthesizer, piano, recorder, string arrangements, and songwriting;  Colin Greenwood on bass guitar and acoustic guitar;  Ed O'Brien on guitars and backing vocals;  and Phil Selway on drums, percussion, and acoustic guitar;    with   Caroline Lavelle on cello and John Matthias on violin and viola.   

Philip Selway considers:   "I think when we started work on The Bends it was kind of like pausing for a breath. So much had happened over the course of Pablo Honey, from the recording to the tour and all that, and then “Creep” doing what it did. It felt as though things moved very quickly for us. The band went from touring around the UK in a small spitter van to these large tours in the States in a matter of a couple of months. So it felt like we had to play catch-up. It felt quite intimidating in a lot of ways. It was undoubtedly exciting, though, as well. But when we started to record The Bends, that felt like clear time again. We were riffing and writing around Oxford, so we were back at home and actually felt like a very recognizable process. It’s something we’ve done for years, getting together and shutting ourselves away in a rehearsal room and writing and arranging material. That felt as though, from my point of view anyway, that we were reconnecting with ourselves after having been in very, very unfamiliar territory...We were still wet behind the ears at the time, and perhaps actually having that kind of reassurance in working with somebody who was that musical and had that breadth of experience and actually wasn’t going to be phased by anything, that gave us a very secure basis to work from. It took a little while to get there. The initial sessions probably were a little fraught from our point of view, but we got there, and John guided us through that process. So he was fantastic to work with...We had high expectations of what we could do at that point. I think we were still relatively inexperienced in the studio, so our studio chops probably weren’t quite up to it at the time. And I think we wanted to be ambitious with the record. So you get all those things, and probably the initial sessions we were just feeling frustrated with ourselves, and it showed in what we did at the time. But it was part of the process. We needed to go through that to get to the good takes on the songs...We started recording at RAK Studios in London. That’s where the first sessions were, fantastic studio, and Nigel was one of the in-house engineers there. He had come up through the kind of trainee system there, so he was a very, very knowledgeable engineer by that point, and experienced...[When] we went to a studio called the Manor, which is not far away from where we lived in Oxford. We’d upped stakes from RAK Studios and just went off tour and just played material live in New Zealand and Australia and a couple of festivals on the continent in Europe. And so it kind of felt like replaying the material as a band over those shows, and going back into the Manor studios, I think things really fell into place quite quickly...At the time, it felt like a very, very long process. But looking back on it, it was actually probably about four months of recording, which is not really that much actually."

Tensions during recording continued to build until they had to break for a tour in Mexico.  Ed O'Brien says:   "It was like that typical Radiohead thing, things had been brewing.  We're not really confrontational with another. Things had been brewing and they basically came to a head. We were all completely knackered on this Mexican tour bus, 12 of us, with six bunks and they were about 5ft 6inches long, so you're getting no sleep. It was just ridiculous. It was something we'd been spending eight or nine years working towards and it was like, we'd never been totally honest with each other in terms of... We're not into bonding, we're friends and everything, but because of maybe our upbringing or the school that we went to we don't tell each other our problems. We deal with them ourselves. It's the only way you can deal with them."

Thom Yorke adds:    "It all just came out; all the stuff that we'd always been fighting and I think, when we started our little band , when we were kids at school, it was never really about being friends or anything. We were playing our instruments in our bedrooms and wanted to play them with someone else and it was just symbiotic. We never really thought about it.  Years and years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we'd met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don't want to talk about and I think if we hadn't ever done that...I think that completely changed what we did and we all went back and did the album and it all made sense ... It's all a reflection of us.  It's cynical and nervous, and it doesn't make sense. And you get the feeling at the end of it that something's wrong, but you can't quite work out what it is."

'The Bends' rose to number eighty-eight in the US, seventy-three in Germany, thirty-five in France and Ireland, twenty-three in Australia, twenty-one in Canada, twenty in the Netherlands, eight in Belgium, and number four in the UK.  Colin Greenwood:    "The weirdest people in the weirdest places are united by that record.  We've heard so many stories about how its really popular with ravers, who play it during their post-rave comedown spliff. And The Daisies, who share the same management as us, got stopped in their van in London on the day of an IRA bomb. They were surrounded by armed police who wanted to know who the hell they were. Then they mentioned our name and this copper with a gun goes, 'Oh 'The Bends' is brilliant, and the mood relaxed instantly...Abroad we were asked endless questions about it, as if we really fitted the Britpop blueprint. 'The Bends' was many things, but it wasn't really, chirpy was it? lt was more like a darkness lumbering over the horizon with gun turrets strafing the Britpop hordes with misery. Er, sorry. Got a bit carried away there."







http://www.radiohead.com/



http://www.greenplastic.com/






"Just" went to thirty-seven on the US alternative chart and nineteen in the UK. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_qMagfZtv8




"High and Dry" went to seventy-eight on the US pop chart, sixty-two in Australia, forty in Ireland, thirty-one in Canada, eighteen on the US alternative chart, and seventeen in the UK. 




"Fake Plastic Trees" grew to sixty-five on the US pop chart, twenty in the UK, and eleven on the US alternative chart. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5h0qHwNrHk




"My Iron Lung" hit one hundred in Australia and twenty-four in the UK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRU-6vaKaf4




"(Nice Dream)"




"Street Spirit (Fade Out)" made it to fifty-nine in Canada, forty-seven in Ireland, twenty-six in the Netherlands, and five in the UK.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCJblaUkkfc





"Fake Plastic Trees"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eRp97ZRwmk




"Bones"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHsMcUm3NqI






'The Bends'
full album:











All songs written and composed by Radiohead. 

1. "Planet Telex"   4:19
2. "The Bends"   4:06
3. "High and Dry"   4:17
4. "Fake Plastic Trees"   4:50
5. "Bones"   3:09
6. "(Nice Dream)"   3:53
7. "Just"   3:54
8. "My Iron Lung"   4:36
9. "Bullet Proof..I Wish I Was"   3:28
10. "Black Star"   4:07
11. "Sulk"   3:42
12. "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"   4:12

hail to the thief

Radiohead plugged in their guitars and recorded live in the studio to express their fear and frustration with this dark and twisted reflection of our terrifying times.  After two albums ('Kid A' and 'Amnesia') of electronic experimentation, 'Hail to the Thief' finds the band returning to the celebrated sound of 'OK Computer'. 

Thom York considers:  "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear...part of the band, rather than one person with a computer and four people watching, as tended to happen with previous records...We were very much into getting the sound of people in a room on this record, and the sounds of things off-mic and all that kind of stuff...We had massive arguments about how it was put together and mixed. Making it was a piece of piss, for the first time it was really good fun to make a record... but we finished it and nobody could let go of it. 'Cause there was a long sustained period during which we lived with it but it wasn't completely finished, so you get attached to versions and we had big rows about it."

'Hail to the Thief' was recorded at at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood and Canned Applause in Oxfordshire with Colin Greenwood on bass guitar, string synth, and sampler; Jonny Greenwood on guitar, analogue systems, ondes Martenot, laptop, toy piano, and glockenspiel; Ed O'Brien on guitar, effects, and vocals; Phil Selway on drums and percussion; and Thom Yorke – vocals, guitar, piano, and laptop.  As with every one of their albums since 'The Bends', it was produced by Nigel Godrich and featured collaboration with artist Stanley Donwood. 

Jonny Greenwood reveals: "We didn't really have time to be stressed about what we did. We got to the end of the second week before we even heard what we did on the first two days, and didn't even remember recording it or who was playing things. Which is a magical way of doing things...All our album titles have been an attempt to sum up the mood of the time within which the songs were written, like 'OK Computer' and 'Kid A', and this was another attempt to do the same. It's about whether you choose to, you know, confront and complain and deal with what's upsetting you around you, or just kind of go home with your family and hide and wait for it to change and wait for everything to be all right."

York was influenced by the war on terror:  "When I started writing these new songs, I was listening to a lot of political programs on BBC Radio 4. I found myself – during that mad caffeine rush in the morning, as I was in the kitchen giving my son his breakfast – writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that [the British and American governments] are so fond of. They became the background of the record. The emotional context of those words had been taken away. What I was doing was stealing it back...I desperately tried not to write anything political, anything expressing the deep, profound terror I'm living with day to day. But it's just fucking there, and eventually you have to give it up and let it happen...frustration and powerlessness and anger, and the huge gap between the people that put themselves in control and the people that allegedly voted for them...I was just overcome with all this fear and darkness. And that fear is the 'thief'." 

Ten weeks before the release of 'Hail to the Thief', early unmixed versions of the songs were leaked on the internet.  When it did come out, it made its debut at number one in the UK and number three in the US.   It also charted at number six in Austria, Poland, and Sweden; four in the Netherlands; three in Germany, New Zealand, and Switzerland; two in Australia, Finland, Norway, and Portugal; and number one in France. 






http://www.radiohead.com/














 'Hail to the Thief'
full album:


Hail to the Thief Full album High Quality by AceVideos

1. 2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm.) - 0:00
2. Sit Down. Stand Up. (Snakes and Ladders.) - 3:19
3. Sail to the Moon. (Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky.) - 7:38
4. Backdrifts. (Honeymoon Is Over.) - 11:58
5. Go To Sleep. (Little Man Being Erased.) - 17:20
6. Where I End And You Begin. (The Sky Is Falling In.) - 20:41
7. We Suck Young Blood. (Your Time Is Up.) - 25:11
8. The Gloaming. (Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold.) - 30:02
9. There There. (The Boney King Of Nowhere.) - 33:36
10. I Will. (No Man's Land.) - 38:53
11. A Punchup At A Wedding. (No No No No No No No No.) -40:55
12. Myxomatosis. (Judge, Jury And Executioner.) - 46:00
13. Scatterbrain. (As Dead As Leaves.) - 49:52
14. A Wolf At The Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.) - 53:05

in rainbows

Radiohead continued to break barriers with the distinctive distribution and innovative instrumentation of this captivatingly colorful landmark album. The recording of 'In Rainbows' started slowly after the year hiatus that followed the tour for 'Hail to the Thief'. When the sessions with producer Mark Stent began to drag, the band went on a three month tour and found themselves reinvigorated. When the tour was over they returned to the studio with producer Nigel Godrich. Sessions took place at a condemned mansion called Tottenham Court House, Halswell House in Taunton, Godrich's Hospital Studios in Covent Garden, and Radiohead's studio in Oxfordshire.   The album features the Matrix Music School children's choir and strings by the Millennia Ensemble. 

Thom Yorke admits:  "There's very little anger in 'In Rainbows'. It's in no way political, or, at least, doesn't feel that way to me. It very much explores the ideas of transience. It starts in one place and ends somewhere completely different. That was the only way we could fit it together, but it turned out to be a real upside in the end. The first half of it is pretty raw, pretty hectic. Even though you have 'Nude', what the lyrics are actually saying is pretty messed-up, nasty. After a while, everything calms down and you get it out of your system. You feel better; there's this feeling of elation. As far as the artwork goes, that was heavily influenced by the pictures NASA puts on their website. They have this great library of stuff online that we were looking at, and it coincided with Stanley Donwood's experiments, throwing wax around. It was just experimentation, but it gave a sense of release, letting go...There is a certain way of a life, a certain way of being, that is, one way or another, going to come to an end. Hopefully something good to come to fruition, or maybe nothing will. A lot of background to this, for me, is the environmental thing. I didn't want to put that anywhere in the music, but it's absolutely there all the time, in my consciousness."

Ed O'Brian considers:  "What I liked about arriving at this record, thematically, was the lyrics had changed. What's really strong to me about the record is, the lyrics are perennial in their scope...It's a very human thing. Music, at the end of the day, is communicating something: emotion, a feeling, a rite of passage, where you are in life. This record really does that. It's not a thing that's being written by someone who's in an exclusive position. It's something that's felt by everyone."

Colin Greenwood said at the time:   “If you’re doing anything that’s important or confronting, you’re going to get the fear. That validates it in a way. For me the big thing about having kids last year is that, as a parent, you’ve got to have something that you do that you’re happy about that defines yourself, because if you don’t have that you’re no good to anyone. In a good way it validates the passion you had for music."

Since their contract with EMI had expired, the band decided to make the unprecedented move to release 'In Rainbows' for download before it was available in stores. They also gave fans the choice of how much they would pay for it.  The physical release of the album came two months later, with the album going to number eleven in Japan; eight in Germany; two in Australia and New Zealand; and number one in Canada, France, Ireland, the UK, and the US.  'In Rainbows' entered the album charts in the UK and the US at number one and went on to sell more than three million copies.  It won Grammy awards for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Special Limited Edition Package.  'In Rainbows'  is the catchiest, most direct album they'd put out in years. Letting go of the outrageous runaway experimentalism, they let themselves be a band; and the results are wonderful:  the arpeggio of a house of cards jigsaw puzzle falling into place. We see their true colors.







http://www.radiohead.com/









Live From The Basement






'In Rainbows' 
full album:

1. 15 Step - 0:00
2. Bodysnatchers - 3:57
3. Nude - 8:00
4. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - 12:15
5. All I Need - 17:33
6. Faust Arp - 21:21
7. Reckoner - 23:31
8. House of Cards - 28:21
9. Jigsaw Falling into Place - 33:50
10. Videotape - 37:59
Bonus Tracks:
The Daily Mail - 42:41
Staircase - 46:18




'disk 2' was a bonus disk that came with pre-ordered copies of the album through the band's website.





1.   00:00  MK 1
2.  01:04   Down Is The New Up
3.  06:03  Go Slowly
4.  09:51  MK 2
5.  10:44  Last Flowers
6.  15:11   Up On The Ladder
7.  19:28  Bangers + Mash
8.  22:48  4 Minute Warning

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

kid a

released on october 2, 2000, kid a debuted at number one on the u.s. album chart and went platinum in its first week in the u.k. the much anticipated followup to their commercial breakthrough, ok computer was a complete departure not only from the sound of that album, but also from traditional melody. it experimented with electronica and sampling, while members of the band worked with different instruments. they changed everything about how they work due to the extreme depression and alienation lead singer thom yorke had developed toward the media and his success. eventually, they recorded enough music for two albums.








http://www.radiohead.com/











Radiohead: Kid A Canadian TV Special Presentation





Everything In It's Right Place


Radiohead - Everything in its Right Place from Cybertwigs on Vimeo.



'kid a'
full album:




1. Everything In It's Right Place (0:00)
2. Kid A (4:10)
3. The National Anthem (8:55)
4. How To Disappear Completely (14:45)
5. Treefingers (20:43)
6. Optimistic (24:25)
7. In Limbo (29:41)
8. Idioteque (33:13)
9. Morning Bell (38:21)
10. Motion Picture Soundtrack (42:57)
11. Genchildren (47:16)















part 1

Radiohead - Kid A (1/5) by jhgd12

part 2

Radiohead - Kid A (2/5) by jhgd12

part 3


part 4

Radiohead - Kid A (4/5) by jhgd12

part 5

Radiohead - Kid A (5/5) by jhgd12