The “blistering” band Jude Law would do anything to work with: “I would be honoured”
There’s an important point to start out with where Radiohead is concerned, and it’s one that Jude Law would probably agree with, which is that essentially, the band operates on a completely different plane to everyone else involved in guitar music.
It has been the case since 1997, when they released OK Computer, an album that everyone thought was amazing, but which has probably taken 30 years for people to fully appreciate. And the problem with that is that by the time you realise what Radiohead did, they’d already moved on and made Kid A, which is an astonishing album, and In Rainbows, which is somehow even better.
Perhaps in terms of artists, only Björk was similarly three decades ahead of her time back in ‘97, and that same year Jude Law was just beginning to make his mark on the acting world, thanks to his part in Stephen Fry’s Wilde, the biographical romantic drama about the life of British poet Oscar Wilde that, while not a box office hit, saw Fry Golden Globe nominated and Law attracting the attention of Hollywood.
Two years later, all bets were off when Law made The Talented Mr Ripley with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow. The sight of him bare-chested lying around on boats in Italy with murderous intent was far too steamy for him not to become a huge star, and that’s exactly what happened.
By 2001, when Radiohead released the magnificent Amnesiac, which featured songs like ‘Knives Out’, ‘You and Whose Army’ and the glorious ‘Pyramid Song’, Law was a fully-fledged Hollywood A-lister, starring opposite acting wunderkind Haley Joel Osment in Stephen Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster AI Artificial Intelligence, which was a huge double Oscar-nominated hit.
Over the next decade, Law picked up multiple awards for his work on movies like Cold Mountain and The Holiday, and he was spotted in the crowd at Radiohead’s 2008 gig in support of In Rainbows. He got to know the band and ended up indirectly working with them on a video for Greenpeace, which he narrated, and to which the band lent their song ‘Everything in Its Right Place’.
He would later tell The Guardian, “I’ve always adored Radiohead. I think they are just blistering with talent. I listen to their music regularly. They’re one of the great bands. I’ve worked with Vampire Weekend [reading a poem on their 2019 album Father of the Bride] because Ezra [Koenig] is an old friend of mine. If Thom Yorke and his band want me to do anything, I would be honoured.”
Both Law and Radiohead have continued into their 50s, the band selling out a tour this year in seconds and Law working on a third Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr, plus a TV mini-series called Wild Things alongside Andrew Garfield.
It tells the story of infamous tiger trainers Siegfried and Roy, who captivated audiences in Las Vegas with their shows that blended magic with animal tricks, before it all ended in tragic circumstances in 2003 when Roy Horn was attacked by a 400lb white tiger. The performer suffered massive blood loss, a stroke, a severed spine, and was confined to a wheelchair.
