‘The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time’: The story of Radiohead’s experimental short film collection
Radiohead has one of the greatest back catalogues of British rock in the last 30 years. I’m saying that as someone who’s not hugely into their work, and their high points are still basically undeniable. No band could make The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows without being taken as one of the most important bands of their era. However, not content with having some of the best albums of their time to their name, the greedy piglets also have just as many visual hits.
Think about it: In their prime, the band had an absolutely flawless run of music videos. Some 30 years after its release, ‘Just’ still has people wondering what in God’s name that man said to make everyone lie down with him. ‘Paranoid Android’ has an animated clip straight out of Adult Swim’s most technicoloured nightmares. ‘No Surprises’ is an exercise in profound discomfort that Thom Yorke probably still has Vietnam-style flashbacks about.
Even away from the music video format, Radiohead still found a way of pushing the envelope. Meeting People is Easy takes the tired format of the tour documentary and basically makes an art film out of it. Making an almost impressionist statement about the way the touring cycle dehumanises those who go through it.
This all makes a lot of sense. Radiohead were capital A artistes who didn’t want to do standard rock band shit for the sake of doing standard rock band shit. So when the time came to promote their 2003 record Hail To The Thief, they decided to take what they’d learned from their previous attempts into visual art and make a set of short films to be broadcast on a loop on their own dedicated satellite TV channel.
What did Radiohead do to promote the record?
While the TV channel idea sounds cool, simple it was not. As Thom Yorke put it in blog post on Radiohead’s website, the TV station idea fell apart in a haze of “money, cutbacks, too weird, might scare the children, staff layoffs, shareholders”. However, production had begun on a variety of strange short films, so they decided to keep making them, and turn their broadcast from TV to this strange new invention called “the internet”. Wonder if it went anywhere?
In May 2003, a new part of Radiohead’s official website was created called Radiohead Television, where the 24 short films they’d created would play on a loop. These included fairly standard stuff like music videos for the upcoming Hail to the Thief singles and live performances, including one classic case of Radiohead performing songs years before release. Nestled in among the videos was Yorke performing the song ‘Morning Mr Magpie’ acoustically, a song that wouldn’t get an official release until nearly a decade later.
However, things would also get weird. In a few segments titled ‘My Showbiz Life’, Yorke and guitarist Ed O’Brien answer inane questions about their personal life put to them by their own personal Max Headroom-type character, journalist Chieftan Mews. Except that when Yorke answers his questions, he does so with his voice pitch-shifted down to Barry White levels. O’Brien answers by braying like a donkey.
The other short films go on in this rather disturbing manner, coming across like the band and director Chris Bran had watched Chris Morris’ sketch-comedy-horror masterpiece Jam a few too many times. Which is no criticism, to be clear, the more people making art informed by that side of Morris’ work, the better. Once the campaign for Hail to the Thief was over, though, it soon became clear that the films could not stay on their website forever.
Instead, they were collected onto the DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, a curiosity that most Radiohead die-hards are still trying to get their hands on to this day.
