“Out of phase”: Thom Yorke on his favourite ever piece of music
Although they certainly weren’t the first to do it, Radiohead are the greatest example of continued artistic evolution in music. Their arc is like no other, with a distinct throughline that has seen them refresh rock music for the digital age time and time again. The venerable status they have long held is an astounding leap from the space they occupied when they broke out, and their 1993 debut, Pablo Honey, was dismissed as just another alternative rock album.
Radiohead’s greatest trick was fusing scintillating guitar music, typified by Jonny Greenwood’s muscular riffs and experimental use of effects, with electronic music. In the mid-1990s, while Britpop acts took it back to the 1960s and 1970s with their mostly awful pastiches and over-emphasis on style, the Oxford quintet chose the bold move of veering off the beaten path. While their debut actually contains some golden nuggets, such as ‘Blow Out’, that confirmed they were not just another alt-rock band and pointed to where they would head next, it would be their 1995 follow-up, The Bends, that made it clear they were not just another rock outfit.
Produced by the great John Leckie, and engineered by Nigel Godrich — the group’s future constant collaborator — The Bends melded the strength of the group’s take on rock with their experimental and avant-garde proclivities. It then set the scene for 1997’s OK Computer. This art rock masterpiece signalled the essence of the dawning technological age with its use of electronics and other musical innovations, as well as frontman Thom Yorke’s lyrics about dystopia, alienation, consumerism and globalism. In many ways, it is the ultimate post-modern album, and the band hit their stride with it.
Following it, Radiohead delved deeper into electronic with 2000’s Kid A and have since continued to evolve with every album, creating three-dimensional, prismatic music that set the scene for the eclectic, well-versed sounds cropping up in studios and bedrooms worldwide.
Offering insight into how Radiohead embarked upon such a journey when speaking to The Observer in 2004, Yorke replied to a previous statement of his that posited that the most important aspect of music is the sense of escapism it offers. He then revealed how one electronic classic changed his worldview and that of his band’s, calling it one of his “absolute favourite pieces of music ever”.
In his typically in-depth way, Yorke said: “‘Escapism’ isn’t really the right word. I think that all the best music – Well, for example, just off the top of my head, one of my absolute favourite pieces of music ever is ‘Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid’. It’s an Aphex Twin/Squarepusher instrumental that has this frantic hi-hat thing going all the way through it, and then, at some point, everything switches tonally, and it all goes out of phase and seems to disappear down the speaker cones for a while.”
It was absolutely cutting-edge at the time, and it opened Yorke’s eyes to how forward-thinking Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and their ilk of electronic music were. From that moment on, he had to get in on the act. He recalled: “The first time I heard it, it was like someone had just reached over and switched a switch in my head, and I never, ever saw anything the same again.”
That’s what music should aim to do, Yorke asserted. In his eyes, a good piece of music is akin to knocking through a hole in a wall so you can see another place on the other side that you didn’t know existed. Consciousness has to keep evolving, he maintained, otherwise you get trapped in a repetitive limbo. Every great piece of art functions to stop this feeling, he concluded.
