‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’: The Radiohead song Thom Yorke was most proud of
Every Radiohead album has felt like a new creative endeavour. Each member of the band has prided themselves on using every track as a unique opportunity to do something new, whether that means playing around with different time signatures or going above and beyond to create the right version of one song. Although Radiohead has moved on from their formative years, Thom Yorke singled out one of their earliest hits as a highlight of the group’s career.
At the very start of the band’s development, though, there was a good chance that no one would predict where they would end up. As opposed to the glitchy songs they would get into in the 2000s, the band’s early days saw them aping the same trends that artists like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were doing around the same time, as evidenced by the angst-driven song ‘Creep’.
While most of their debut, Pablo Honey, involved cribbing ideas from the early days of grunge, The Bends was the first time they started moving in a different direction. Creating songs that were indebted to the sounds of Britpop as well as classic rock, Yorke was also trying out spaces within his voice, making the most of his falsetto on ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and embracing his frontman tendencies on songs like ‘Just’.
As the album winds down, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ would become one of the band’s most celebrated odes to melancholy. Driven by a cascading guitar line, Yorke sings about everything fading away and losing all contact with existence, almost sounding like a ghostly spirit as he calls from deep within the mix.
While the band would continue on this emotional streak on their next album, OK Computer, their fourth outing, Kid A, would see them leave this organic approach to songwriting behind. As opposed to the guitar textures, songs like ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ were made to feel emotionally distant, as if the band had tried to simulate the feeling of robots trying to articulate feelings for the first time.
Even after their radical genre switch, Yorke still held ‘Street Spirit’ in high esteem, thinking it was one of the greatest songs they had ever recorded. Despite the innovations they were making every time they entered the studio, Yorke would later recall that the recording captured some of the band’s best work.
When discussing the most significant moments of the band’s career, Yorke thought that ‘Street Spirit’ stood as one of the highlights of their time together, saying, “That stands out for me. The whole reason to be doing this is to arrive at those moments. It makes it worth all the scratching around for months on end in notebooks and all the hundreds of thousands of ideas you compile on endless tapes. It’s the sole reason you spend your entire life in your bedroom playing to yourself. If I ever forget why I started this as a career, then that’s why I started”.
As The Bends slowly approaches 30 years since its release, Radiohead has taken their music even further, returning to their roots on In Rainbows before embracing the sounds of chamber music on the album A Moon Shaped Pool. Thom Yorke may never be satisfied playing the same style of music, but ‘Street Spirit’ is the kind of magical moment that comes only once in every career.
