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M U S I C BY R I C H A R D M A R T I N
Radiohead paints itself out of a corner with its new record, OK Computer.
The Art of Rock l l t l PREVIEW
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Radiohead's 26-
year-old guitarist,
Jonny Greenwood,
says he never was
part of Britain's
fabled rave scene:
" I was sitting
around waiting for
the Pixies and
Throwing Muses to
come over and tour,
and excitedly
talking at school
lunch breaks about
Kristin Hersh."
Jonny and Colin
Greenwood don't
inspire the British
tabloids the way
Oasis' Gallagher
brothers do. " I f s
more interesting to
have articles about
Noel punching Liam
than about Colin
cuddling me,"
Jonny says.
The English band Radiohead has come to be categorized with a term that many musicians would consider unflattering: art rock. It's a tag that's been affixed to everything from King Crimson to Queen to Talking Heads, and like it or not, i fs the label writers have pinned on Radiohead.
"What's art rock?" guitarist Jonny Greenwood shoots back across the phone from his home in Oxford, England, when asked how he feels about the description.
Well, it's fancy arrangements, strange guitar solos, dramatic singing—how does that sound?
"It doesn't sound like art, but it sounds like us," he says.
The 12 tracks on Radiohead's new record, OK Computer (Capitol), are, in fact, artistic, though they're more like sketches than completed works. Since the quintet—Greenwood, his brother Colin on bass, Thorn Yorke on vocals and guitar, Ed O'Brien on guitar and Phil Selway on drums-released 1993's Pablo Honey and scored a pre-"Loser" slacker hit with "Creep," it has nurtured a talent for stark, meandering and often beauti-ful pop songs.
Not pop in the Spice Girls sense, but in the sense of gripping melodic passages that stray from orthodox composition. This can lead to unfo-cused tracks that circle around like a poorly mounted gyroscope, but Radiohead's success asserts that the band knows its boundaries.
In fact, the group's second album, The Bends, contained no mega-hits, yet it broadened Radiohead's fanbase to the extent that OK Computer debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. charts and, more shocking still, number 21 in the United States.
Such anomalies have become com-monplace with Radiohead. After "Creep," many wrote off the band as
a one-hit wonder, but they were wrong. The first single from OK Computer is the 6 1/2-minute "Paranoid Android," and it has nes-tled onto modern-rock radio playlists alongside terse, ska-inflected songs that sound like corny ad jingles in comparison. And despite lacking the good looks and infectious hooks of other feted Brit-pop bands, Radiohead has become a favorite among rock celebrities; Michael Stipe, Marilyn Manson, Madonna and Bono all attended a recent New York concert.
Greenwood's assess-ment of that show hints at the secret to Radiohead's achieve-ments—its nonchalance.
"It sort of felt like they were all behind us and excited by what we were doing," he says of the star-studded crowd. "It wasn't just a photo opportunity...there was none of the schmoozing or publicity-seeking going on."
Rock stars, critics and fans alike have taken to the complex swagger of songs such as "Android," with its mellifluous intro, glam-guitar and a haunting wind-down that has Yorke crooning over choral backing before all hell breaks loose at the conclu-sion. Elsewhere on OK Computer, Radiohead goes on atmospheric excursions ("No Surprises" and "Exit Music [for a Film]"); and conjures U2's and R.E.M.'s once-pastoral rock ("Let Down" and "Karma Police").
According to Greenwood, his band's sprawling approach is born from restlessness with Brit-pop's status quo. "I think British music a
couple of years ago was awash in this tiresome irony," he says. "It wasn't correct to be serious about being in a band—which is rubbish."
Greenwood sees Radiohead as hav-ing more in common with acts that earnestly incorporate technology in their music, and, in fact, the electron-ically savvy collective Massive Attack plans to remix OK Computer to further stress this relationship. This might suggest the sort of overindulgence equated with the dreaded art rock, but Greenwood maintains that Radiohead simply jells as a band.
"I think we're very impatient," he explains. "It takes patience to do 12 identical-sounding, hard-rocking, ugly, distorted-guitar rock songs. Patience is something we don't really have."
Creeps No More: Radiohead broadens its sonic
palette.
The same goes for Radiohead's live performances, he says. While they might be expected to re-create spiny guitar solos and vocal layer-ing onstage, the five members instead sacrifice some of their albums' artfulness for old-fashioned spontaneity. "We're not ones for preparing and planning and rehearsing extremely hard," he says. "We enjoy fear and unpredictability. That's what touring is about. You know it's wrong when you have your set list on the back of a lami-nate and it's the same every night. I find that very depressing, and that's what a lot of bands do. So we just do the opposite." m
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