Radiohead – ‘Pablo Honey’
There was a time when Radiohead were just another rock band. Before the dedication to experimentation, self-released albums, and massive acclaim that followed their every move, the band that started out under the cheesy name On a Friday were just a group of high school friends with a love of post-punk and shoegaze. When the grunge explosion of the early 1990s began to take over the rock world, Radiohead were in the perfect position to step in as one of the first bands of the genre’s second wave.
This is the standard narrative that follows the band’s 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey: a group of British Nirvana-wannabes write an album filled with gloomy alt-rock songs that conform to the modern trends of music. It’s one that makes complete sense when you listen to Pablo Honey casually and without context. It’s the most basic way to not only explain Radiohead’s first incarnation but also explain why Radiohead became Radiohead. Without the conforming sounds of Pablo Honey, the band would have nothing to fuel their radical shift away from the mainstream.
That narrative doesn’t give much credit to the band. For a group of musicians who were in their early 20s, Radiohead didn’t have the experience or knowledge to jump into the musical unknown. Instead, they were new signees to a major label who wanted to record an album as quickly as possible. But from the get-go, it was still clear that Radiohead were more than just another group of Pixies fans who got lucky.
The first sign that Radiohead were different came halfway through the first song on Pablo Honey, ‘You’. While the track peters along in a fairly standard fashion, a brief pause in the action allows Radiohead’s lead singer to unleash a harried howl that resonates in a way that seemed incongruous with his musical surroundings. This wasn’t growly or particularly pissed off: it was yearning and emotional in a way that most grunge bands would never allow themselves to sound. For anyone who picked up Pablo Honey on the fly, this was their first real introduction to Thom Yorke; it was a vulnerable handshake.
However, there’s more variety on Pablo Honey than initially meets the eye. While the combined guitar crunch of Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood is what immediately catches the ear, there are some signs of Radiohead’s eventual transformation lurking just below the surface. There are the discordant piano hits of ‘How Do You?’, the radical effects-heavy tones of ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, and the piercing high notes of ‘Blow Out’, all of which look beyond the world of grunge.
That being said, there is also an argument that this is a relatively derivative debut. ‘Stop Whispering’ is basically a Cranberries song, and ‘Thinking About You’ could be a Travis b-side. And there’s a bizarre strain of psychedelia in songs like ‘Vegatable’ and ‘I Can’t’, that seems to hint that Radiohead could have made a hard turn into Madchester territory had they been so inclined. Instead, they merely flirted with it from afar. Judging by the loopy and languid tones of ‘Lurgee’, the band could have also been a bunch of Ride followers.
Perhaps most damning of all, there isn’t much in Yorke’s lyrics that you can dig deep into. While he would get more poetic and opaque as he matured, the lyrics on Pablo Honey are mostly surface-level diatribes of angst, love, disillusion, and confusion. This isn’t the same man who would suck on lemons or hover above Mephistopheles in later years: this was a young punk who was writing lyrics that any kid of the early 1990s would write, right down to wholeheartedly proclaiming that he wanted to be Jim Morrison. That rehashed open-hearted Debbie Downer approach certainly doesn’t instantly enamour anyone to Radiohead with Pablo Honey.
Away from the album, something funny happened: the band’s first single took off. ‘Creep’ became bigger than Pablo Honey and bigger than Radiohead. At nearly every promotional appearance they were booked for, the band busted out ‘Creep’ for audiences who went wild. The rest of Pablo Honey was now null and void: Radiohead had a legitimate hit on their hands.
In ways, both obvious and subtle, ‘Creep’ was the reason why Radiohead decided to move away from grunge-adjacent alternative rock. But ‘Creep’ had another effect: it has doomed Pablo Honey to a footnote in the larger picture of the band. The song simply encapsulates the album, casting a shadow over the rest of the record.
Nevertheless, Pablo Honey isn’t a bad album. It’s an earnest album from a young band who largely didn’t know any better than to go along with the popular sounds of the day. But amongst a crowded scene of distortion pedal humpers, Radiohead at least had something on some of their fellow British bands like Bush and Battalion of Flies. It wasn’t immediately clear from Pablo Honey, but Radiohead was meant for something bigger than just post-grunge obscurity and one-hit wonderdom.
Pablo Honey is most often defined by what it’s not. But every band has to start somewhere, and there’s nothing particularly embarrassing on Pablo Honey, despite the way that Radiohead have almost completely erased its existence. It’s nothing more than a standard early 1990s grunge album, and some days, it feels like the most radical Radiohead album in their entire catalogue. For a band like Radiohead, conformity and basicness are so rare that it’s almost fascinating to hear them embrace those things on Pablo Honey.
