Thom Yorke’s most challenging period with Radiohead: “It was a long, torturous process”
The studio can be both the best and worst place for an artist to be in, depending on the day they’re having. While it’s nice to have a place completely secluded from any label executive looking over your shoulder, there are just as many times when artists see the studio as a virtual prison, forever being trapped in there until they walk out with something worthwhile. Despite his fantastic track record for making one classic after the other, Thom Yorke did admit that he was hurting when coming to the home stretch on Kid A and Amnesiac.
Then again, any massive reconstruction of a band’s sound wasn’t going to happen overnight. As much as Yorke may have liked the music Radiohead made on OK Computer, the overwhelming response to the album and the millions of copycats that followed led to Yorke wanting to run away from it as quickly as he possibly could.
So, the answer? Get as experimental as possible. While there had been flirtations with electronic instruments and even the robotic interlude on ‘Fitter Happier’, Kid A took that concept and let it play out for an entire album. It wasn’t what many fans expected, but even with the strange detour, ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ and ‘Idioteque’ are still beautifully melancholy looks at how Yorke saw the world at the time.
While many critique Amnesiac for being nothing but B-sides from the last album, that doesn’t mean it lacks any highlights. ‘Pyramid Song’ is easily one of the most inventive tracks written for the time, and while ‘Life in a Glasshouse’ had the kind of jazzy arrangement no one looked for, it was a definite way to break up the tension between the songs that leaned more towards ambient music.
Even down to the way that the album looks, Yorke felt that the entire record was like pulling teeth, telling Deadline, “I’m a musician. I don’t think I’m close enough to get that right, but at the same time, when I see something visually that is close to what I have in my mind, the circle is complete. For example, when we were working on Kid A and Amnesiac, it was a long, torturous process, but what was really interesting was I spent a lot of time working on the artwork with Stanley [Dodwood], and we had two studios operating most of the time.”
At the same time, it’s hard to really put into words what an album like Kid A makes people feel like. For all of the spellbinding music across its tracks, Yorke is also revealing the harshest sides of himself, and since he wouldn’t let it out through electric guitars, hearing him make artificial-sounding tunes was probably the best way to put a wall up between him and his audience.
In fact, that’s probably the reason why the cover of Kid A works so well. The entire premise might be about looking at what seems to be a mountain range, but given how perfectly they are constructed, never has the phrase “everything in its right place” sounded quite so ominous kicking off the record.
This was meant to deliberately throw every piece of Radiohead off its balance, but if OK Computer gave off the impression of panic in the digital age, this is what it sounds like when the fallout of that scenario happens. The cyborg side of things officially took over on this album, and everyone was going to have to deal with the consequences.
