Radiohead Revisit OK Computer in Rare, Intimate Interview
As they prepare to release OKNOTOK, the 20th anniversary reissue of OK Computer, Radiohead have granted Rolling Stone a rare interview exploring the anxieties, obsessions, and “really fucking geeky” themes involved in the classic LP’s creation. In the piece, Thom Yorke—whose iPhone apparently has a sticker on the back reading, “Fuck what you heard”—reflects, with dry wit, on the tumultuous time. “I was basically catatonic,” he says. “Back then, the person I saw in the mirror kept saying, ‘You’re shit. Everything you do is shit. Don’t do that. It’s shit.’”
After releasing The Bends, the OK Computer era began with Radiohead’s tour supporting Alanis Morrissette. Jonny Greenwood says, “My main memory of that tour is playing interminable hand-organ solos to an audience full of quietly despairing teenage girls.” Adds Yorke, “People are sitting down to their chicken dinners. We were trying to get them to choke on the bones.”
Recalling OK Computer’s recording at St. Catharine’s Court, Yorke relays an anecdote about their apparently haunted living quarters. “Ghosts would talk to me while I was asleep,” he tells RS. “There was one point where I got up in the morning after a night of hearing voices and decided I had to cut my hair.” Yorke attempted to do so using “the little scissors on a penknife,” he explains, but it “got messy. I cut myself a few times. … I came downstairs and everyone was like, ‘Uh, are you all right?’ I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ Phil very gently took me downstairs and shaved it all off.” Of the link between his uneasy headspace and the album’s themes of technological anxiety, Yorke adds, “The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other. But I was using the terminology of technology to express it.”
The group also touch on the recording of last year’s A Moon Shaped Pool, which was mired in tragedy: Yorke had recently separated from his partner, Rachel Owen, who was battling cancer. (She passed away last December.) Ed O’Brien says, “We weren’t in a position to really talk about A Moon Shaped Pool when it came out. We didn’t want to talk about it being quite hard to make. We were quite fragile, and we needed to find our feet. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, if that’s all right. I feel like the dust hasn’t settled. It was a hard time.” Yorke says of the period, “There was a lot of difficult stuff going on at the time, and it was a tough time for us as people. It was a miracle that that record got made at all.”
The piece concludes with a glance at a possible next-step for Radiohead. “I’ve always been extreme about resisting us being a drum-guitar-bass band,” he says. “But if that’s what people want to try, I’m too old to be standing there with a hammer and saying, ‘We must do this, we must do that!’ I would like everyone to feel free. But, you know, it’s not easy.”
Read the full interview at Rolling Stone, and head here for all of Pitchfork’s 20th anniversary OK Computer coverage.
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