“Totally wasted”: The music video Thom Yorke was drunk out of his mind making
The one-hit wonder tag was ancient history by the time of Radiohead‘s third album. Shaking off their jukebox expectations that clung on to the bittersweet success of 1992’s ‘Creep’, by the end of the decade OK Computer had cemented the band as one of alternative music’s biggest names, scoring the pre-millennial anxieties of late-stage capitalism and globalisation with prescient chill.
An essential milestone in Radiohead’s creative trajectory was the haunting ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. The Bends‘ fifth single, its trance arpeggios and spectral vocals cut a deeply introspective and meditative mark among the ‘Cool Britannia’ pop hubris that dominated the charts—occasionally brilliant but frequently gash. Their highest charting effort on the UK Singles chart to date, Radiohead’s final unplug from ‘Creep’s stubborn iron lung was helped in no small part by Jonathan Glazer’s cerebral video.
It proved to be a watershed moment for both artist and director. “That was definitely a turning point in my own work,” Glazer told IndieWire in 2001. “I knew when I finished that, because they found their own voices as an artist, at that point, I felt like I got close to whatever mine was, and I felt confident that I could do things that emoted, that had some kind of poetic as well as prosaic value”.
With such acclaimed work behind them, it wouldn’t take long for Glazer and Radiohead to join forces again. Following ‘Paranoid Android‘s irreverent cartoon video, OK Computer‘s second single ‘Karma Police’ saw Glazer try to marry the song’s lyrical cynicism with a surrealist snapshot of automobile danger. Shot from the perspective of an unknown driver with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in the backseat, the 1976 Chrysler New Yorker menacingly pursues a desperate man who, after spotting the car leaking fuel, drops a match and engulfs the vehicle in flames. Yorke is nowhere to be seen by its end.
The minimal video won critical plaudits and still stands as one of Glazer’s most memorable projects, earning him the 1997 MTV Video Music Award for ‘Best Direction’ along with Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’. However, Glazer has always expressed professional dissatisfaction with the piece, claiming the subjective use of camera hadn’t been realised as expertly as later videos. “…I did feel like I achieved what I wanted to do in the ‘Karma Police’ video when I did UNKLE’s ‘Rabbit in Your Headlights’ video. It’s definitely a partner to the ‘Karma Police’ video, a couplet for me. I did the UNKLE video because I felt I had missed emotionally and dramatically from a simple craft point of view”.
Among director headaches, a torturous shoot that belied a simple concept, and actor Lajos Kovács constantly burning his thumb during the repeated match lighting takes, at the centre of it all was Yorke having a whale of a time. “‘Karma Police’ is still my favourite, because when I watch it or see clips it just reminds me how much of a laugh I had shooting that,” he told Dazed in 2013. “It was brilliant. Especially because I’m totally wasted in it”.
He hides it well, lurking in the back seat with sullen peril with ease, but little’s demanded of him. During the 1990s’ music video heyday, one hotshot MTV auteur’s groundbreaking new idea could be days of long shoots and special effects demands for a band that just wanna play music. You can’t blame Yorke for passing the time helping himself to whatever beer’s lying around, and he’d more than prove himself as a willing actor on later videos—holding his breath for nearly a minute in the water submerged ‘No Surprises’ or committing to ‘There There’s painstaking fantasy stop-motion process.
Sozzled and chilled in the back of a flaming classic car seems as pertinent an image can be to illustrate OK Computer‘s alienated detachment from a terrifying world. Foreshadowing the burning ‘This is Fine’ dog meme by some 16 years, ‘Karma Police’s clash of mortal danger and fugged indifference pangs with more relevancy today than it ever has.
