How a Jeff Buckley concert changed Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’
Jeff Buckley has a voice that could haunt a vacant house. With stunning bravura, he flits between bellows that could stir honey into tea from a thousand paces and the sort of hush that wouldn’t even blow the pappus seeds off a dandelion, and there is no noticeable middle ground between the two states either, they bleed into each other like the seamless melt of sugar into tea. This naturalistic tap into pure emotion is a force to behold and a near-impossible feat; with it, he inspired a generation to pursue things rather differently.
When he snuck into Britain amid the explosion of beer-swilling louts in 1994 and offered up a dose of soulful introspection, he shook things up for those picked last at football so to speak. Word spread to one of the saddest people of all, the king of the creeps, and the last bastion of hope for the outsiders: Thom Yorke. He was losing faith amid the dreaded Britpop war too and Buckley’s soulfulness signposted another direction.
At the time, Yorke’s disillusionment was compounded by the fact that the production of Radiohead’s latest record had all the snap and electricity of a day-old popadom and an Amish lightbulb. The dreaded questions of artistic direction awaited. Thankfully, Buckley would provide the answers. After all, we are dealing with the Grace star who said, “If you feel blocked, do no turn to others, but look inside, in silence, for the enemy of your progress.”
Perhaps the enemy for Yorke and co was a lack of fortified conviction when everything else seemed to be moving away from reverence faster than the wake after a clown’s funeral. Buckley would soon provide a surge of inspiration. As Yorke’s friend Dougie Payne of Travis told us: “When [Radiohead] were recording ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, they were having trouble with it, and they couldn’t get it to work. So, they went out to see Jeff Buckley play on the tour when it was just him and his electric guitar.”
After the mind-wallop of the show, “Radiohead went back to the studio and Thom completely changed the way that he was singing and used that falsetto. You can kind of see the comparisons now. And that says a lot for how inspiring the show was.” Payne adds: “I was very touched because after that, Thom did one of those Q&As with a magazine and he was asked what his most valuable possession was, and he said, ‘My voice’, and I loved that because it’s such a vulnerable thing to say. And it’s also a guy realising that he has this magic thing that can just touch people.”
Whether it was the message it was extolling or the sound it was singing, this notion of the voice being the zenith of all bestowments was a championing moment for exposed vulnerability being presented as strength. Buckley’s brilliance produced a cornucopia of moody music unleashed. What started with him merely taking to the stage with a pint of Guinness and a Telecaster, resulted in Radiohead going back to the studio and trying “an acoustic version of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. Thom sat down and played it in three takes, then just burst into tears afterwards. And that’s what we used for the record,” Colin Greenwood recalled in an Uncut interview.
Buckley’s humble tour was the boot-quaking paradigm of that for a handful of vital people in the 1990s and it proved equally important. Love it or loath it (either is valid), you can’t ignore that ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ proved so pivotal there is a moment of diegesis in the landscape of music marked by everything that came before it, and everything that came after. And seemingly Buckley wove it into place with the same mystic fingers of fate that seemed to be behind his own beauteous music.
