By the time Radiohead entered the Guillaume Tell studio in Paris at the start of January 1999, Yorke had already begun to worry that OK Computer was not the radical new dawn critics had purported it to be. Worse, rehearsals for the new record were going terribly.
“After a while you just hear a sound,” Yorke explains now. “And it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not going to respond to it even though you think that’s what you should be doing and it’s what you’ve always done. When you get to that point, it feels like the ground is being pulled out from beneath you and you’re just falling through space. It’s a fucking nightmare.”
A change of approach was vital, and it was Yorke – still crippled by the writer’s block – who instigated it. Having begun to immerse himself in the avant-electronica of Warp artists such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, he began to bring in demos that were little more than drum loops or found sounds, and the band would have to build something around them. He insists it wasn’t just an arbitrary shift towards a more electronic sound. “I could so easily find myself beating myself up about having played guitar music,” he sighs. “‘Oh no, it’s all completely fucking shit,’ but ultimately people will think that within my neurosis about what we’ve done in the past I’ve gone off and said, ‘We must be electronic,’ but that wasn’t the point in what I was doing. I’m sure certain people will see it like that…”
Certainly, the rest of the band were unsure about this new approach. “When people say you’re doing something radical in rock or dance music I’m not sure how special that is,” confides guitarist Jonny Greenwood. “What we do is so old-fashioned. It’s like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing. As a motivation, it’s irrelevant. We don’t sit down and say ‘Let’s break barriers.’ We just copy our favourite records.”
Feed that into guitarist Ed O’Brien’s comment that he just wanted to make an LP of three-minute guitar songs and bassist Colin Greenwood’s confession that he doesn’t really “know anything about the Aphex Twin”, and you can see why there were tensions. But despite the fact that Yorke was obviously driving proceedings to a greater extent than ever before (even though he’s always been sole songwriter), everyone is at great pains to stress that Kid A isn’t just a glorified solo record. “It’s a return to when we were at school,” argues Colin. “And we couldn’t play our instruments very well and we just picked up what we could. It’s fine. Thom played some amazing bass on the record, everyone contributed and no-one took it easy, but there was a lot of pain in making it. Personally, I’ve come out of it feeling excited and grateful about the whole experience. The only reason you go through all this shit is because you’re looking for new things to inspire you.”
It’s a sentiment that Jonny echoes. “No, that’s not true,” he says of the ‘Thom’s solo album’ accusation. “You can argue that for maybe one or two songs in the whole sessions and that’s it.”
Despite their protests to the contrary, there were problems. Paris was a wash-out, and in March 1999 they moved to Medley Studios in Copenhagen. There, they began work on fragments of songs – and while the other band members struggled with the new methodology (Thom claims the songs on the new record weren’t written, they were ‘edited’), long-standing producer Nigel Godrich aired his doubts.
“I think he thought I’d lost my marbles,” states Yorke bluntly. “Because he didn’t understand why, if we had such a strength in one thing, why the fuck we’d want to do something else.”
What did you say to him?
“At the same time he trusted me to have an idea of what I wanted, even though he didn’t understand at the time what the bloody hell it was. But basically (for me), all it was, was frustration, not getting off on anything that we’d normally do. So it wasn’t like I was even trying to prove anything, it was just, ‘Well this isn’t fucking working for me. We have to do something else.’”
Little by little, the band settled back into their new working pattern. By April, though, they’d moved again, this time to Batsford Park in Gloucestershire – they had now accumulated upwards of 60 incomplete songs.
“The truth is,” explains Jonny, “that it was a difficult process to get going, but once we were up and running, it started going too well, and we were recording good song after good song, and it became difficult to stop, which is partly why we’ve got so much material recorded, and partly why it’s taken so long.”
Parallel to the album’s musical construction, Yorke also began to work on its lyrics. A dispatch on Radiohead’s website claimed he had “had enough of dwelling in (his) existential – and now highly profitable – angst”, the hint being that Kid A was to represent a more political direction. As it is, the lyrics – like the record as a whole – are tied in with the period in the immediate aftermath of OK Computer – and fear constitutes one of the main themes.
“It’s fear of dying, actually,” he smiles. “It’s a 30 thing. Most men hit 30 and think, ‘Oh my God, I’m not actually immortal.’ There’s definitely fear of dying on Kid A. I have this house down by the sea and the landscape around it is really harsh and I used to just go off for the whole day walking and just feel totally like nothing. It’s just corny stuff, and when you sit down and talk about it, it all just sounds like complete bollocks.”
So much for ditching the existential angst, then. Yorke might be an avid supporter of the Drop The Debt campaign, as well as Amnesty International and the Free Tibet movement, but it’s something he’s unable – or unwilling – to incorporate in his songs. By the time the band had finished Kid A in April 2000, the only political song he’d written for it (“You And Whose Army” – which the band performed at their Royal Festival Hall show in July) was destined not to feature – a move that only added to the insularity of the whole project.
That insularity was finally broken when Radiohead returned to the public domain in June this year with a series of gigs around the rim of the Mediterranean. Relaxed, and peppered with new material, these shows were positively received, and suggested that the band’s re-entry into the real world wasn’t destined to be too bumpy. The reviewers, your correspondent included, might have felt differently, however, if they’d realised how many of the songs unveiled (particularly, “Knives Out” and “Nothing To Fear”) weren’t actually going to make it onto the record.