“I still think it’s a valid album”: The necessary failure of Radiohead’s debut album
Radiohead fans tend to be unwavering in their appreciation for them in a musical sense, what with their consistency as a rock outfit over the decades, but receiving such ubiquitous praise didn’t always bless them.
As strong as everything since their second album, The Bends, has been, there’s one anomalous record in their discography that people are still keen to bash for its underwhelming nature. We’re not talking about their hit-and-miss 2011 album, The King of Limbs, and we’re certainly not talking about the exceptionally underrated Hail to the Thief either, which despite all of my personal protestations, is still regarded as one of their comparative low points.
No, we’re talking about their much-maligned debut album, Pablo Honey, which regardless of having two hit singles in ‘Creep’ and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, offered very little in the way of disrupting musical trends, unable to make much of an impression on the indie rock world. It wasn’t the case that the strength of these two singles could help elevate the rest of the material on the album, and it was simply just too drab and uninspired an affair for it to have any lasting impact.
Retrospective analysis of the album hasn’t served it well either, with critics being even harsher on it in the modern era than they were at the time. Most people didn’t expect Radiohead to amount to anything after their debut album, so for The Bends to come out and prove everyone wrong was a pleasant surprise. The more the band pushed their sound forward and continued to release groundbreaking album after album, the more disappointing repeat listens of Pablo Honey became.
By most bands’ standards, it would be a passable album, but by Radiohead’s, it’s now perceived as a pallid and half-baked incarnation of who they would later become. However, while fans are cruel with their protestations about this debut offering, the band themselves are frankly disgusted at how it sounds compared to their best work.
In a 1997 interview with Guitar World, guitarist Ed O’Brien claimed that “there are lots of mistakes on it”, but instead of dismissing the album even more, he chose to see this initial misfire as a learning curve. “You learn from your mistakes,” he continued, “I still think it’s a valid album. It’s very up, quite hedonistic, ‘Let’s put on eight guitar overdubs and turn them all up!’ I think it’s one of those albums you might put on in an open-top car on a Saturday night going to a party, but I could be wrong.”
Thom Yorke and the rest of the band may turn their noses up when people ask to hear ‘Creep’ at their live shows, playing up to the idea that they want nothing to do with their debut album or its material, but O’Brien realised that it helped them to make better music down the line.
“We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren’t aware of on Pablo Honey,” he argued, “There was a need to put more and more guitar tracks on Pablo Honey, and you had to play all the time. Whereas the approach to The Bends was, if it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic […] what was the point in trying to add something more?”
