"Radiohead Rhapsody in Gloom"

  CREATIVITY & DISRUPTION

OK COMPUTER 20 Years Later

Radiohead's Rhapsody
in Gloom 

 BY ANDY GREENE VIA ROLLING STONE

  Released in the spring of 1997 – a time when music was fragmenting into a thicket of subgenres and the relevance of guitar rock seemed to be fading – OK Computer was the last masterpiece of the alt-rock movement, and a reminder that there's still room for rock bands to carry on the late-Beatles mission of using the studio to create grand artistic statements with heretofore unheard sounds. "It was the album where they threw everything out the window," says Yorke's friend Michael Stipe. "They re-imagined and decontextualized what it was to be a band. It was a yearning, emotive, grounded urge to create something real."

Thom Yorke has four words of blunt advice for his younger, twitchier self, that paranoid twentysomething humanoid who made his band's turn-of-the-millennium masterpieces. "Lighten the fuck up," Yorke says, laughing hard. Radiohead's frontman, who turned 48 in October, is long past his days of hiding in tour buses and venting pain and fear into spiral notebooks. Now, he dances onstage and DJ's in clubs. READ NOW THIS GREAT ARTICLE ABOUT "OK COMPUTER" ON 20TH ANNIVERSARY VIA ROLLING STONE.

 

 Thom Yorke & Co. reveal how endless tours and recording in a haunted mansion informed their 1997 classic 'OK Computer'.

Yorke has spent a lot of time confronting his old nightmares – and his old self – recently. It's the 20th anniversary of the band's breakthrough album, OK Computer, and he's been poring over his old journals, sketchbooks and demos from the era for inclusion on a deluxe edition of the LP. "It's been really, really, really mental going through it," says Yorke. "Going back into where my head was at – it's really bonkers." The stacks of paper – which include handwritten lyrics on hotel stationery, instructions for the use of an inhaler ("Try very hard not to panic") and drawings of airplanes, helicopters, cars, escalators and other modes of transport – reveal the innermost thoughts of a 27-year-old who was beginning to crack after living on a tour bus for four years in a row. "I was basically catatonic," Yorke says. "The claustrophobia – just having no sense of reality at all."

“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television”

 ― Radiohead

READ NOW THIS GREAT ARTICLE ABOUT "OK COMPUTER" ON 20TH ANNIVERSARY VIA ROLLING STONE.

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