‘Airbag’: the Radiohead song that proved life-affirming for Thom Yorke
Paranoia and distrust over the ubiquitous reliance on the automobile and our collective mortal gamble with every turn of its ignition are themes Radiohead have explored more than once on their B-sides ‘Stupid Car’ and ‘Killer Cars’. It’s a suspicion that’s entirely rational. According to data from the Department of Transport, someone was killed or injured on UK roads every 17 minutes between 2014 and 2023.
Frontman and songwriter Thom Yorke’s aversion to vehicles struck back in 1987 when he got involved in a serious car accident. He and his girlfriend were lucky to survive, saved by the explosive cushioning airbag that had only become a standard safety feature a few years prior. Despite his girlfriend suffering severe whiplash, Yorke stepped out of the wreckage relatively unscathed, flooded with the panicked adrenalin of having wavered on a life-ending knife-edge.
Ten years later, the traumatising events of Yorke’s dice with death hovered all over one of Radiohead’s most inspired cuts. Opening OK Computer, ‘Airbag’ explores society’s illusion of safety and the unquestioning reliance on technology for our perceived security.
‘Airbag’ forms one strand of OK Computer‘s conceptual shift away from The Bends‘ visceral self-examination toward a pre-millennial anxiety fraught with private terror at a world stricken with technocratic unease and social alienation.
Sonically, their third album was a giant creative leap forward, too. Recorded in Bath’s St Catherine’s Court mansion, ‘Airbag’ took cues from DJ Shadow‘s slack turntablism and chopped up three seconds of Phil Selway’s drumming to craft its distinctive stuttering beat. Dolloped with electronic effects and dub-style breaks, OK Computer‘s opening track established Radiohead’s bold artistic hinterland with its stirring experimentalism within the first few seconds of hitting play.
Yorke’s conclusions on the fateful crash are still shrouded in ambiguity. “Has an airbag saved my life? Nah… but I tell you something, every time you have a near accident, instead of just sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of the car and run down the street screaming, ‘I’m BACK! I’m ALIVE! My life has started again today,” Yorke told Select in 1997. “In fact, you should do that every time you get out of a car. We’re just riding on those things – we’re not really in control of them.”
Perhaps Homo sapiens just shouldn’t be confined in enclosed bubbles of metal at speeds of 70mph? It’s a question OK Computer returns to on its finale ‘The Tourist’, a shimmering waltz pleading for the neoliberal world to just stop and smell the flowers a little, but its “Hey man, slow down” lyrical refrain offers a fittingly circular arc to their third LP’s report on a world too busy for its own health.
“Every age has its crazy idiosyncrasies, crazy double-think,” Yorke concluded in a conversation with Q in 1997. “To me, for our era, it’s cars. I always get told off for being obsessed about it, but every time I get in my car. I have to say to myself that I might never get out again. Or I might get out, but I won’t be able to walk.”
