‘Inside My Head’: The early Radiohead song about hating record companies
The relationship between rock stars and their record labels isn’t always smooth sailing. After spending years honing a sound and style in practice rooms and venues, bending to the will and wishes of organisations that see music as a business can be a difficult transition. In the early 1990s, Radiohead became the latest rock band to discover their distaste for the industry.
Originally named On a Friday, a reference to their weekly practice sessions that took place on Fridays, Radiohead spawned out of secondary school friendship. After spending several years practising on and off, the band eventually settled together in Oxford. While browsing the aisles of a record store, bassist Colin Greenwood stumbled upon a representative from one of the big five record labels.
Taking the opportunity in his stride, Greenwood gave the rep an On a Friday demo. This demo turned into live interest, which led to EMI signing the band as the newly-named Radiohead. It seems like the success story that every band hopes for, but Radiohead quickly discovered their dislike for the industry.
Not long after their signing, they channelled this hatred for record labels into a song with ‘Inside My Head’. The song accompanied the band’s far more famous debut, ‘Creep’, on selected releases. In its verses, the track almost evokes the stylings of grunge peers Nirvana before hurtling into a chorus reminiscent of surf-rock as Yorke wails the titular phrase.
The song finds Yorke in a state of claustrophobia, begging, “Quit smothering me, quit laughing at me”, and declaring, “You won’t let me go”. It’s easy to see how the song might have been directed at their sudden limitations after entering the record label landscape. According to the songwriter himself in a 1992 interview with Melody Maker, the track was about “getting in a car and smashing in the shop where I used to work. I fancied that so much!”
Yorke later explained the meaning behind ‘Inside My Head’ in more detail, prefacing a 1995 performance of the track in Toronto with a short speech. “You probably won’t know this next song,” he admitted, “It’s one of the first songs we ever wrote, like, when we became a professional band and we fucking hated record companies and everything…”
That youthful hatred certainly came across in the fast-paced instrumentation and anger-fuelled lyricism. It’s a sonic outlet for the feelings of resentment a young Radiohead needed to expel.
Listen to the track below.
