“Inexpressable substance”: Thom Yorke on his favourite thing Radiohead created
For most songwriters, any tune can seem like your child half the time. Even though people spend time in the studio making sure a song is as good as it’s ever going to be, it’s impossible to gauge what the public is going to think of it. While Thom Yorke tended to keep a lot of Radiohead’s best moments fairly close to the chest, he felt that this deep cut off of In Rainbows is among the crowned jewels of the group’s entire discography.
Before looking at their 2007 opus, it’s worth it to see where Radiohead were at the time. Aside from their massive smash in the early 1990s, almost anything off of OK Computer could justifiably be considered one of their classics, whether that’s the nursery rhyme of ‘No Surprises’ or their answer to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’: ‘Paranoid Android’.
Although Kid A may have taken some time for people to adjust, their pivot towards electronic music was still one of the best switch-ups in music history. So if a band could make a tune as organic as ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and then create synthetic textures like ‘Idioteque’, who’s to say they couldn’t put both of them together?
Whereas Hail to the Thief could suffer from being a touch bloated, In Rainbows has the least fat of any Radiohead project. Every single song on the record has important moments to them, and even if someone couldn’t get down on something as slow as ‘Nude’, chances are they could find something to love in a track like ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’.
Since the days of The Bends, Radiohead has known how to bring it home, and ‘Videotape’ might be the most emotional gut punch they have ever released. We had heard piano ballads from Yorke before, but hearing him sing about his life being preserved on video for someone else to discover as he passes into the next life is both morbid and touching.
Despite coming in with the song essentially finished, Yorke thought the key reason behind why the song worked was because of how the group stripped everything back, saying, “The others sort of took the reins on it. Turned it into this stripped-down thing. Personally speaking, that’s my favourite thing we’ve ever created because it has this inexpressible substance thing going on behind what’s the specifics of the song.”
And keeping everything very smooth really is the way to go for a tune like this. Most people have tried their hand at making something heartbreaking, but the reason why Yorke’s lyrics work is because no one knows if the narrator actually has anyone to discover these tapes, so hearing him completely alone is enough for someone to cry a single tear once they realise what’s going on.
Regardless of the emotional power behind the song, ‘Videotape’ put a firm stamp on what may have been the best career renaissance that Radiohead ever had. They had never really gone anywhere in the years since OK Computer, but this was the first time the group had a proper album to match their magnum opus.
