As Thom Yorke and his bandmates return to the studio to work on their ninth album, it seems an ideal time to dedicate the latest Uncut Ultimate Guide to the geniuses of Radiohead. How such an adventurous, uncompromising band also became such a successful one is among the best and strangest musical stories of the past two decades, and we hope we’ve done it justice.
Once again, we’ve come up with deep new reviews of every Radiohead album (and every solo album by the bandmembers), as well as finding the very best interviews in the archives of NME, Melody Maker and Uncut and reprinting them in full. Some are tense and troubled. Many others, though, reveal a band whose reality is at odds with the stereotypes: an endlessly droll and charming group of men, whose wry contempt for rock’n’roll cliché has informed most every move they’ve made in the past 20 odd years. “I’m not trying to define rock’n’roll,” Thom Yorke told NME’s Stuart Bailie in February 1993. “To me, rock’n’roll just reminds me of people with personal hygiene problems who still like getting blow-jobs off complete strangers. That’s not what being in a band means to me.”
Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to Radiohead, then. As Thom Yorke once sang, “It’s the best thing that you ever had/The best thing that you ever, ever had…”