Wayne Coyne’s favourite Radiohead song: “I didn’t like them when they first got big”
As the frontman and creative force behind psychedelic freaknauts The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne knows a thing or two about music beyond the mainstream. His ability to acknowledge the outliers in the world is perhaps what drew him to Radiohead.
So when he was asked for his favourite Radiohead song, you might have expected Coyne to reach into Radiohead’s weird outer excesses: the glitchy King of Limbs? The mainstream-rejecting Kid A? Or maybe the music industry revolution that was In Rainbows? In reality, he went for none of those.
The first revelation is that Coyne wasn’t mainly a Radiohead fan at first – despite seeing them at their arguable peak. “I didn’t like them back when they first got big,” he says. “I saw them just before OK Computer. They struck me the way a lot of British bands will when they do a tour of America. They’re very professional, they do their thing, the lights are all on cue, but it seems very much like, ‘We’re playing 100 shows and that was number 80.'”
However, by 2003, Coyne’s viewpoint had changed drastically. After appearing on the same Glastonbury bill as Radiohead, he was lucky enough to witness a legendary set from a band at the peak of their powers. He called it their greatest night: “That was the Hail To The Thief record. They were completely different. They were funny and they had some fuck-ups and they were just not so furious and it wasn’t just play it by the numbers. It was literally one of the greatest shows we’ve ever seen.”
Perhaps that night influenced Coyne’s favourite Radiohead song: the anthemic ‘There, There.’ Driven by pounding drums and furious lead guitars, it came at a time when the band had moved away from guitar-driven rock and more towards fidgety electronic beats. But Hail To The Thief represented a shift back to those guitar roots. “That record, I think,” he explained, “you know, coming out of what seemed to be their ‘Let’s get rid of the guitars’ phase – and I like all that too – but there’s something when they came back to the punk guitar stuff,” says Coyne. “They found another level of that.”
‘There, There’ is a classic Radiohead song. In many ways, it captures a unique moment for the band, when they were halfway between those rock roots and their new-found electronic edge. And ‘There, There’ is a perfect distillation of that. Driven by screeching Jonny Greenwood guitars and Thom Yorke’s ominous, paranoid lyrics (“We are accidents, waiting to happen”), it ranks as one of Radiohead’s loudest, dirtiest, and greatest releases.
Coyne can’t quite put his finger on why exactly ‘There, There’ sticks out to him as their best. But perhaps that’s the power of music. He says there’s simply something about that song that appeals to him – even if it hasn’t openly influenced his own work. “Of the 50 Radiohead songs that you would listen to, that one would go by and I’d say, ‘Fuck, that’s cool.’ I was just drawn to it. I would talk to other people and they’d say, ‘Yeah, me too.’ It just has an urgency.”
