The 1990s girl group Thom Yorke called “the Antichrist”
The 1990s were a particularly lucrative time for guitar music in the United Kingdom. Brit-poppers like Blur and Oasis ruled the airwaves with their radio-friendly take on the genre, while shoegazers such as Slowdive and Lush persisted as the scene that celebrates itself. Meanwhile, alternative rock thrived under the watchful eye of Radiohead, who infused it with a new sense of experimentation and electronic intrigue.
Radiohead made their debut towards the beginning of the decade with Pablo Honey, which featured their enduring hit ‘Creep’. From there, they would spend the rest of the 1990s reinventing alternative rock, bringing melancholy to the mainstream in the face of the more upbeat Britpop, and, eventually, fusing the realms of electronic production and guitar music.
Between Thom Yorke’s haunting vocals, experimentation with strange samples, and a potent sense of nihilism, their off-putting sound somehow garnered a cult audience that still exists to this day. Radiohead are considered one of the most important alternative rock bands of all time, still maintaining an influence on indie rock artists today.
The decade was a haven for the independent and the alternative to come to the fore, but that didn’t negate the success of those artists who existed in the more traditionally mainstream realm of pop. While Ride and Radiohead played around with distortion and doom, bands like Take That and the Spice Girls focused on the opposite, creating a sound as clean and cheery as possible.
The two spheres co-existed, finding different fandoms and different forms of success, earning completely different legacies, but that didn’t stop Thom Yorke from sharing his dislike for his popstar peers. The Spice Girls, in particular, seemed to irk the Radiohead frontman with their image and their polished form of pop.
During an interview with Rolling Stone in the late 1990s, Yorke was asked for his thoughts on the Spice Girls, which prompted a particularly impassioned response from the frontman. He deemed the girl group “the Antichrist,” emphasising his dislike by suggesting that he would be willing to move to get away from them.
“I don’t want any part of it,” he stated, “and if I had kids, I wouldn’t want them to have any part of it, either. I’d move to an island where you can’t get hold of any Spice Girls stuff.” It seems like an exaggerated response to a band that most people would consider to be harmless pop, but it makes sense – the Spice Girls were making music that stood completely at odds with Yorke’s creations.
While Yorke was penning songs about topics such as isolation and technology, often critiquing our society and the capitalism that dictates it, the Spice Girls were the height of commercialism. Between sickly sweet songs about positivity and girl power, marketable personas and encouragements to “spice up your life,” the pop icons weren’t exactly Yorke’s cup of tea.
Still, they made their own impact on the musical landscape of the 1990s and on the pop realm specifically. Their energetic pop sound, alongside their glamorous individual styles, marked them out as icons of the era and as one of the greatest girl bands of all time. Though Yorke might not have been their target audience, even proclaiming that he was willing to banish himself to a desert island to get away from them their contributions to pop are undeniable.
