The song Thom Yorke considers a mirror of ‘Everything in Its Right Place’
There’s quality control, and then there’s being in Radiohead.
When it comes to Thom Yorke and his sullen chums, people talk about them like they’re capital A Artists. As if their attitude toward their music is to do whatever they feel like, safe in the knowledge that no matter what they throw together on a piano or guitar will be heralded as the second coming of Christ, and by a not inconsiderable amount of the record-buying public.
But from the sound of it, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sure, Radiohead follow their artistic vision and aren’t overly fussed about what is expected of them. When people expected ‘Creep’ 2.0, they instead decided to make Jeff Buckley meet The Afghan Whigs in the form of The Bends. When people expected The Bends 2.0, they went and made a prog opus in the form of OK Computer. Then Kid A was an experimental electro rock odyssey that the public seemed genuinely baffled by, and thus, that was the record they doubled down on and released a direct follow-up to in the form of Amnesiac.
The band have gone on in that vein, at least on record. They’re more amenable to playing ‘Creep’ than they have been in decades, but maybe that willingness to throw the fans a bone comes from how esoteric the records have gotten recently. You don’t make an album about a particularly old tree, the way Radiohead did with The King of Limbs, while caring all that much about what people expect from a rock band in the 21st century.
However, listeners have this idea that, to put it bluntly, the band have disappeared up their own arse. That, at best, the experimenting is more important than the music, and at worst, the idea of creating good music is somehow beneath them. That creating good music is an indignity compared to their true calling, which is Thom Yorke warbling over jazz piano chords while Jonny Greenwood tries to make his guitar sound like the mating call of an endangered turtle.
How do Radiohead know when they’re ready to make an album?
I won’t say that a lot of modern Radiohead doesn’t sound like this to my ears. However, even as someone who isn’t a diehard fan, I’d say the idea that they don’t care about making good music is ludicrous.
A cursory glance at an interview or profile of the band as they’re working on an album paints a picture of the exact opposite. A picture of a band who know exactly the kind of pressure they’re under to live up to their incredible back catalogue and yet know that they can push the envelope further and further.
In essence, they’re artists in the truest sense of the word. People who believe wholeheartedly in their work and won’t settle for anything less than something genuinely new and exciting. The biggest proof of this is how often they’ll stow amazing songs away for years, sometimes decades, until they can get them right. Look at the likes of ‘Lift’, ‘Morning Mr Magpie’, and especially ‘True Love Waits‘, where each took around two decades to surface despite the fanbase clamouring to hear their recorded versions. The band waited until they were just right, and it was absolutely worth it in the end.
This goes to show just how seriously the band take making quality music. After all, a song has to really hit for them to prioritise it over officially releasing a song that has already become a minor classic over bootlegs. A recent example of this came during the making of their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool. In an interview with Q, Thom Yorke talked about how the record only truly came together after putting the song ‘Daydreaming’ together.
“It was the equivalent of when we did ‘Everything in Its Right Place’,” he said, referencing the iconic opener of Kid A, “We got that and then we were, ‘Right, OK, this is it'”. This is arguably the biggest sign of the quality control inherent in Radiohead. If they were comfortable releasing any old bollocks if it was weird enough, we wouldn’t still be waiting on a new album of theirs nearly ten years on from the last one!
