Radiohead – OK Computer

I first heard Radiohead in the Pablo Honey days. ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ featured on a favourite compilation tape of my young teen self – Loaded was the name. I thought the ‘Head were a garage band (back in the days when garage was a practise space and not an urban revolution).

Fast forward to 1997, The Bends had long wowed us and Thom and Co were as regular on the NME and Select pages as bad puns and unabashed flashinthepanery. Anticipation was thick and it was irresistible… We bunked off college to hear Jo Wiley play ‘Paranoid Android’ and sat in stunned silence afterwards. This was our ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Without the camp and with infinitely better lyrics. OK Computer was going to be life affirming.

I went halves on the CD and it became the soundtrack of every night, in our Exeter bedsits (bear with me, I’m just setting a scene, not complaining, I wouldn’t have swapped that time for the world).

‘Airbag’ opens with all the foreboding a guitar intro can create. Instantly there are hints that Thom had been hanging around with DJ Shadow’s gang. One listen and you can probably pinpoint the instant where another group of Exeter students were listening and formulating plans – Muse.

It’s hard now to listen and disengage personal memories from the album. It was a permanent fixture on my walkman. I was a devil for taking off in the night to go out walking on my own (down Tivvy Road, past Bang and Oulfsen, quick tobacco stop in All Days, up towards the prison…) and listening again now I can trace my exact steps.

Completely flu-ridden and miserable I made the trip (with comrades Damian, James and Simon) to the rival – hated – city of Plymouth to catch them live. Brassic, we walked miles through Basra-esque estates to find the venue. I’d made scones. We thought Thom looked thin. I can’t remember exactly what happened to the scones but I have a hunch they would have been eaten on the train.

That night Radiohead played – predominantly – OK Computer tracks. From the first note to the last I cried my eyes out. It wasn’t the flu – or the double drops of flu medicine – it was the sheer perfection of it all. It wasn’t even fun (Thom chastised the audience for dancing too wildly) and I was sitting down. It was just beautiful and all we talked about for weeks (fun indeed for our friends).

Listening again, it’s with ‘Paranoid Android’ that the hairs on the arm really are raised to maximum height. Everything is perfect, it’s synchronicity in song, it’s synchronicity within a band and it was absolutely perfect for the time and yet timeless. Superlatives just don’t come close. I feel like Murray Walker grappling for praise in a frenzy of hero worship, while still trying to do my job.

‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’, with its obvious Dylan reference, is the most “trad Radiohead” track on the album. Not out of place when slipped in amongst The Bends’ fare. Nearly two minutes in Yorke is able to flex his considerable vocal muscle a little, but for all the promise of the ace name, SHA (as all the hippest kids call it) isn’t lighting any fires by comparison with its album colleagues.

Of course ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ inspired by the original star crossed lovers (Romeo and Juliet, not Liza and David, you fool) is a study in heart-pounding, romance-bleeding beauty. Pleading mounts with every note and every line sings to the heart of, well, pretty much anyone who isn’t dead. A spine shaking bassline kicks in three minutes into the track and Thom’s bottomless pit of breath forces its way through you, violating your senses in the most glorious meltdown of tears and hope.

What are you doing to me, Radiohead?!

‘Let Down’ follows from ‘Exit Music’… and takes you skiing straight back down the slope you’ve just surmounted. Orchestral and melancholy, one part Spiritualized, one part prog and a whole lotta indefinableness to boot.

And then of course ‘Karma Police’. I am so glad I wasn’t in the business of reviewing when this was released as a single. How do you describe such a deadpan yet blistering indictment of the human condition? I can’t. I can’t do it. Managing to use the word Karma in a title and yet not come across spoilt and bratty (á la Lennon) or kitsch and shit (á la Culture Club) is a fine skill indeed. Menacing and cute both with a soul-enriching surge for the finishing flag.

‘Fitter Happier’. Hmn. The first time I heard this of course I thought it was fantastic, and not just because it sounded like Stephen Hawkings was saying something I understood for the first time. Damning and yet now, a bit clunky. Yes, it has its place and it’s made its point but listening now I realise that for more or less seven years it has been skipped in order to get back to the good stuff, the songs proper.

The death rattle spaghetti western opening of ‘Electioneering’ sets out its stall with a gruff-voiced Thom spitting lyrics of genuine rocktastic enthusiasm. Enthusiasm? Radiohead? It’s okay, it’s a return to gloom and quagmire immediately with ‘Climbing The Walls’.

Then when you’re still reeling from the effects of your heart beating at 3bpm, the nursery mobile chimes of ’No Surprises’ kicks in. Disenchantment is set to a beautiful, sweet and climbing score and, I think I can speak quite confidently here, vocalises the fears of pretty much every one under 30. Will this be me?

Don’t let up on us eh? Nothing feels better than a swift kick to the emotions when you’re already flatlining on the floor of your own mood. ‘Lucky’ really is a timeless track. Imagine you need to soundtrack a synopsis of the newsworthy disasters of 2004, it would fit right? 2003? yep, 2002? yep, 2001? yep… you get the idea. Soaring and full of movement, not shying away from the essence of Radiohead as a Guitar Band still but pushing the boundaries of that definition.

But to finish things off we’re magnanimously pulled back to partay mode with ‘The Tourist’, a light hearted homage to Y Viva Espana. Yeah, right, not on Radiohead’s watch…

OK Computer still stands as the epitome of what a band could do, reinventing the rock wheel by refusing to stop that wheel turning, by taking on board the best of technology, the excitement of new sounds (without turning it into Bowie’s Earthling) and by absolutely refusing to be bloody happy in the wake of phenomenal success. A signature album, a career-defining work and as close to a masterpiece as my 17-year old brain could have hoped to chance upon.