“Freaked us out”: The Radiohead album that accidentally predicted 9/11
Radiohead are known for having some nutty fans who, as well as professing how game-changing the group really were, seem to draw up the most bizarre theories about their music, and while they are geniuses who have their finger on the pulse with many societal issues, it sometimes verges on the band achieving the impossible.
Take, for example, how many fans have speculated that 2007’s In Rainbows was intended to be a companion piece to their 1997 classic OK Computer, which was taken to the point that if you intersperse every track from the earlier album with one from the later release, you’ll hear the double album as it was originally intended. It’s barmy, and feels akin to the Dark Side of the Moon and Wizard of Oz allegations that have often been reported.
Similarly, if you play one copy of Kid A for 17 seconds before pressing play on a second copy at the exact same point, Radiohead fans will tell you that you get a remarkable duophonic effect from doing so, and that the band intentionally left this Easter egg there to be found by fans. It isn’t true, of course – what you’ll actually hear is two copies of the same album playing horrifically out of sync with one another – but, you know, Radiohead fans will be Radiohead fans.
Understandably, there would come a time when this constant postulation would take its toll on Thom Yorke and co., who were growing tired of just how imposing the theories of their fans were becoming, almost being forced to live up to the insurmountable task of being visionaries when the their own interpretations of their work were far simpler than what their fans perceived them as.
By 2004, Yorke was well and truly fed up with being labelled as an oracle with powers of premonition and told the British newspaper The Observer in an interview that he had been on the receiving end of fans labelling Radiohead’s music as depressing. Yorke revealed that he had developed a way of dealing with such projections, saying that “you have to take a deep breath and just go, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting!’ and then forget about it.”
He would then continue by saying, “I think that has always been the hardest bit: having to finish a song and accept the fact that people probably won’t get it.” While he would have this to say about being misinterpreted, he did acknowledge that there equally were interpretations of Radiohead’s music that he enjoyed listening to, stating that “it’s quite amazing when things take on extra meaning,” but following it up with the caveat that “you have absolutely no idea when it’s going to happen or where it’s going to come from.”
However, as previously mentioned, Radiohead have been described as having the ability to see into the future in their lyrics, with many fans saying that records such as OK Computer and Kid A have moments where the lyrics become eerily prescient years after the fact. Often discussing political fallout, global warming concerns and creeping technological advancements several years before they were hot topics in the public sphere, there was good reason to see the band as soothsayers.
“Really powerful music can presage things that then happen,” explained Yorke, giving his perspective on their reputation as having this ability, before saying that “like any art form, there’s that element of seeing into the future, no matter how dimly and naively.”
He also found himself spooked by the scary similarities between features on 2001’s Amnesiac and one of the year’s most harrowing global catastrophes. “I’ve had it with artwork as well,” Yorke told the newspaper. “Amnesiac came out in the summer of 2001 and almost every other image on the album is two towers collapsing. That freaked us out a bit.”
The event that Yorke is making reference to here is the September 11th attacks, where almost 3,000 people lost their lives when two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York in a terrorist attack. While Yorke could not have possibly seen this coming, and would have been aiming to make an observation on the collapse of society in the artwork, he himself was not responsible for the photographs, illustrations and collages featured in the album’s inserts, as they were all provided by the band’s longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood.
Some of Donwood’s paintings were also used for the artwork that accompanied the previous album Kid A as well, including a piece titled Trade Center. Before speculating that Donwood has also been blessed with the ability to see the future, he has also commented on how his work prior to 9/11 was totally different to how it is now, telling The Guardian in 2021 that “it wasn’t possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.”
