In 1997 the world of music was seven revolutions, tired of America and definitely due to some healthy ice age. The previous decade, for the abundance of sulfur and the magic blessed with it, was getting closer to the last platform, and it seemed that all of us – those who fell in love with it and those who patiently blocked their noses, needed a vacation. Some saccharine pop please. Two-three years of beautiful singers with no burning truth. Let the elevators sing a little. A little quiet, come on.
To tell the truth, in 1997 the nineties – as a phenomenon, as a proposition, as a manifesto of anomalies and hunger – were and are gone forever. That generation, nicknamed the “Generation X”, has exhausted its reservoirs of revolution. The grunge rose from the dirt and returned to the dirt. And the gangsta rap got up from the asphalt and went back to the asphalt. The Britpop got out of bed, yawned, and went back to dreaming. runs out. almost.
Because in 1997, the unreasonable, to the bone, was about to be pulled out one last huge work – an album full of funeral prayers, royal lamentations, witchcraft, or something else, elusive, that no one has been able to put their finger on for twenty-five years in a row. Here it is. Just before the end of the millennium – a last revolution before bed.
A black star over London
Nigel Goodrich was a recording technician at RAK Studio in London, in a small, stern two-story building in the color of sand. The year was 1994, Britain was in the throes of Britpop fever, and Radiohead had only one album on their resume – Pablo Honey, who did not exactly squeeze honey from the critics (well, ’94 – insulted with a pen …).
When Radiohead came to RAK Studios for the first time, bruised by the failure of the previous album, Godrich was still twenty and nothing. In those years, when recording hours were paid for with gold bars, the industry was very, very forgiving towards new bands, and Radiohead was getting closer to the end of the rope allotted to it. Luckily, they also had one hit on their resume – the one with two taps on the guitar before the chorus – which bought quite a pity for another try.
Goodrich was already then considered a prodigy of recording and sound, but was still a complete novice of the production world. He was appointed technician on several songs not included on The Bends, Radiohead’s second album, and between the drops, when the adults were not around, he allowed himself to work with the band on some experimental material and b-sides. for no reason.
The result was tried. Goodrich’s recordings did not sound like anything else. Certainly not like ’94 Radiohead. It was as if that musical mind, the cunning, the oblique, was created to produce Radiohead. Something in the sound he managed to capture, to polish out of the band, was downright outrageous. One of the songs he recorded back then, Black Star, was so beautiful, so disturbingly disturbing, that he managed to get into the album.
Black Star was a little song. Not excited. He did not announce loudly about the imminent birth of OK Computer. He probably found his way to The Bends because he was close to him in spirit: intimate, horribly melodic, cruel, and with some erased remnant of – hold tight? – American grunge.
And yet, in retrospect, that moment was crucial. From then on – Radiohead and Goodrich did not separate. He produced all of the band’s subsequent albums, became a forerunner, and most importantly – produced that huge album from 1997, the one that turned Radiohead from a magical band – into the most important English band of its generation.
Of course all this could not have been guessed back then, in ’94, when bands like Blair, Swede and Oasis conquered the charts with their nostalgic-ironic sound. Who then thought of lamentations and burials. And yet, quietly, quietly, in a sky laden with glittering Britpop stars, this star also ignited. You ignited – and no one knew.
luck
Everyone was talking about Radiohead after The Bands. That album was short of praise, bought the band a fan base that was willing to swear by its name, and put on its head the heavy, gray, non-fairy crown of “The Savior of English Rock” (English rock should be redeemed once in a while, before it became clear what).
In the Time.news of a great band, it is an elusive and dangerous moment – the last mile before the conquest of the mountain. Many bands do not recover from that moment, from the expectation that opens up over them, and it is possible that a very bitter fate awaited Radiohead as well, if not for Brian not being the great one – who turns everything with gold at the touch of his finger.
Ino, the godfather of electronic-British music, worked that year on a charity album for war victims (even those were more than enough in the nineties), and decided to apply to Radiohead to donate their own song. The band accepted the offer, entered the studio, and in a five-hour flash session (of course – Goodrich won the business) was born Lucky: OK Computer’s first song.
Lucky does not sound like an intermediate link. It was a song that was all OK Computer – emptied of youth, heavy as lead, and with some festive look of end. Its opening, with the space-epic sound, the entry of the minor chords, almost apologetically, already belonged to the world that Radiohead commissioned to create. Lucky also introduced the most compulsive textual motif of that album – accidents. Crashes, drownings, airbags, speeding – OK Computer was prone to accidents (Tom York said he wrote the texts inspired by the books he read then – Noam Chomsky, Hobsbaum, Philip Kay Dick, smiling things like that).
From that session, Radiohead came out with a sense of opera. Lucky first introduced some of the innovation that was stored in the band, or as Tom York put it, he was “the first mark on the wall.”
American suicide
OK Computer’s recordings were not made in one of London’s sleek studios. The band decided to lock themselves in a 500-year-old castle, somewhere in Somerset County, whose previous tenant – an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII – had chosen to spend her soul in. What not to do for a handful of optimism.
Radiohead worked feverishly there. Phil Salway had to drum hard just until he and Godrich managed to complete the drum layer for the opening song – Airbag, which was composed of symbols upon symbols of his drumming. When they succeeded, the rhythm sounded like a new no-man’s-land between man and machine. The bass composed by Colin Greenwood shone with great strangeness, and when Johnny Greenwood’s festive guitar played the first notes – more like a cello than a guitar – it sounded like an obituary for a star system.
Many of the songs on that album were bought in agony. Paranoid Android, for example – perhaps the most complex of the album’s songs – was initially a monotonous and unattractive song. The band managed to crack it at the end of a long night, on the verge of despair, after Tom York had already given up and gone to bed. Slavai’s drumming suddenly locked, Johnny Greenwood played, in fact for the first time, the beginning of the song, and York awoke from his sleep and shouted at everyone to shut up already with the noise. Maybe it’s rock’n’roll too – write the music that bothers you to sleep.
From time to time, Radiohead used the castle itself, its crooked spaces, the shades of echoes that were hidden in it, such as the song Exit Music (For a Film), which was recorded on a staircase, or the song Let Down, which was recorded in a ballroom.
At the end of seven months, in early 1997, the recordings were transferred to London for mix and mastering work and in May OK Computer went on sale. Capitol Records, Radiohead’s U.S. record company, said it was a suicide.
OK Computer
They are not necessarily wrong. OK Computer jumped to number one on the UK Albums Chart, reaching number 21 in the United States and selling seven million copies worldwide. It has earned Radiohead eternal status as one of the greatest bands in rock history. Some sailed and called it the biggest album of the 90s. Some sailed more. “Since 1967, when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band performed,” wrote journalist and author Tim Putman in 2007, “there has been no such consensus among critics, not only as to the great value of an album, but also as to its importance over the years.”
Still, listening to the album just seems to get more and more vague over the years. His anatomy, the role he took on, the toxins he stored inside – it does not seem easy to understand them today any more than they did then. There is no doubt that he managed to express something from the horror of the end of the 21st century. There is also no doubt that he managed to establish a first, terrifying interaction, between organic and live guitar rock and crude electronic characteristics. It certainly has a morbid, sobbing, submissive-screaming background tone. It invites, literally, a peek and pull out of a formidable concept that hides inside. But, honestly, does anyone know what to say?
If OK Computer was a revolutionary album, it would have caused a very strange revolution. She had no flags, no names, no generation of her own. She had no dress code, slang expressions. She had no definite fashion. Still, it’s hard to underestimate the importance of that album. It is hard to say that he did not divide a period into two. Hundreds of bands and artists were influenced by him, sometimes to the point of imitation, but he did not establish a genre or a musical movement. Not really.
Others may solve the OK Computer puzzle from a greater distance. From here it’s even harder, probably. In the meantime, one could at least say that it offers one of the greatest laments in the history of rock – a dying culture, a sinking golden age, an erased human type, or something else. But given the beauty that Radiohead has managed to produce from this nameless catastrophe, one can only bow one’s head in humility. And breathe.
Dedicated to the musician Or Shamir, 1978-2022, a black star in the sky of Jerusalem