How The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ inspired Radiohead, according to Thom Yorke
The music of The Beatles changed the landscape of rock and popular music indefinitely. Even today, there are few artists in operation who do not owe something to the revolutionary sounds of John, Paul, George and Ringo. One of the most important things that The Beatles pioneered was the idea that an album could have an overarching narrative, as opposed to being a disparate collection of songs. This technique for album construction, spearheaded by records like Revolver or The White Album, went on to inspire countless future generations of songwriters, particularly impactful on the art rock heroes Radiohead.
From their inception in 1985, Radiohead were never particularly concerned with the tropes of the musical mainstream. Consistently, the band have subverted expectations, embraced revolutionary music-making techniques and established an incredibly devoted fanbase in the process. Within the world of modern rock and alternative music, Radiohead are a completely unavoidable outfit, with the Thom Yorke-fronted band proving to be incredibly influential on a wealth of later artists and songwriters.
Despite the fact that their music is constantly on the cutting edge of art rock, Radiohead often took inspiration from the rock and pop icons of years past, including The Beatles. Of course, there are few artists in the modern age who are free from the impact of the Fab Four, but Radiohead were particularly fond of the group’s dedication to album construction. Radiohead have clearly mastered the art of the album, as signified by groundbreaking releases like OK Computer, Kid A and The Bends, among others.
Seemingly, Yorke and the band owed a lot of that influence to The Beatles. During an interview with Select back in 2000, Yorke reflected on the importance of album construction, discussing how good songs can often throw a spanner in the works when compiling an album. “Even though they’re really great songs, and I’m really proud of them,” he shared, “they just didn’t fit, which is quite a weird feeling because you think an album should be just basically the best songs. That’s not necessarily true.”
“You can put all the best songs in the world on a record, and they’ll ruin each other,” he continued, citing the later work of The Beatles as a prime example. “On the later Beatles albums,” according to Yorke, “when they got really, really good at putting things next to each other, like on The White Album, it’s just amazing. How in the hell can you have three different versions of ‘Revolution’ on the same record and get away with it? I thought about that sort of thing.”
Yorke is certainly not the only person who recognises the genius of 1968’s White Album, which saw The Beatles embrace an incredibly broad range of genres and influences. The record is one of the earliest postmodern masterpieces in popular music, so it makes sense that Yorke took a lot of inspiration from the album when putting together LPs for Radiohead.
When listening to the compelling and regularly melancholic sounds of Radiohead, you might not automatically make the connection between the group and songs like ‘Back In the USSR’, but that just speaks to the all-encompassing power of Liverpool’s favourite sons.
