this is just too much..thom modeled.. :o

 

 

Wow... kinda scary... And if you want a good example of just how fake those photo shoots actually are, just look at how much they photoshopped his eye.

^^ wow,i never noticed!

 

And of course jonny is an incredibly good guitar player,i mean my brother only the ohter day told me how he loved a radiohead song,which turned out to be 'Just' because of a guitar riff in it,.and he normally doesnt like radiohead at all.

and it's the first time i ever saw him doing the back vocals with ed.:D

 

You realise that performance is fake?

Decade of dread

 

DREAD. NOT IN THE REGGAE SENSE, but the old-fashioned sort. The objectless anxiety, the black tide, the dust in the blood, the "airborne toxic event" of Don DeLillo's White Noise. It's now almost ten years since Radiohead transformed popular music with OK Computer, perhaps the darkest, queasiest, most viscerally troubling record ever made. If it's hard to listen to, it was bloody hard to make, and in the aftermath Thom Yorke went off into himself and started putting together the pink noise bleepathon released last month as The Eraser.

 

It's easy enough to account for the anxious aura of OK Computer. The abduction theme in the Dylan-influenced Subterranean Homesick Alien (originally to be called Uptight) apparently came to Yorke after he hit a pheasant on a lonely road and found himself out in the dark, uneasy and suddenly reminded of a school essay on how he might react if confronted by an alien. The epic Paranoid Android also seems to invoke something of Dylan's Hard Rain, an end-of-everything scenario that seems to come from somewhere between American Psycho and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But what about "the dust and the screaming" in that track? To me, it seems almost prescient of 9/11, imagined five years before the event.

 

 

There is, though, much more to OK Computer than the lyric sheet. With it, Radiohead largely abandoned the anthemic guitar rock of Pablo Honey and The Bends in favour of something much more stripped-down and basic. It's no surprise that when jazz musicians started turning again to contemporary repertoires for "standards" material, it was Radiohead who began to feature in set lists - everyone from pianist Brad Mehldau to the much-vaunted E.S.T. This was not a token nod to the zeitgeist, it was because the songs seem open-ended, harmonically and rhythmically ambiguous, templates for improvisation rather than conceptions realised. It would be hard to imagine Mehldau sitting down to pick out the ambiguities in Coldplay's Yellow. They'd be hard to find.

 

Radiohead's own conversion to free-form post-Miles Davis electric jazz didn't come until somewhat later, with Kid A, but it's all anticipated on OK Computer. The album's third single Karma Police doesn't even have an identifiable chorus and its structure has very little of the AABA form which you expect in a popular song. It's also less clear with every listen whether "for a moment there I lost myself" is an expression of fear - absence, distraction, abduction again - or an expression of momentary relief, possibly for all the same reasons.

 

As the tenth anniversary of OK Computer looms, dread meets dreads downtown. In the wake of their successful - and very funny - Dub Side of the Moon, the Easy Star All-Stars have created a track-by-track reggae version. If Humphrey Lyttelton seemed an unlikely Radiohead collaborator on the Kid A sessions, how about Horace Andy, Toots and the Maytals and Sugar Minott? There's nothing particularly new about taking familiar songs and shifting the beat to the one and the three. Jack Bruce has even threatened to do it with the iconic Theme for an Imaginary Western. Or in reworking a classic album, track by track: guitarist Charlie Hunter, formerly of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, did it with, or to, the Wailers' Natty Dread. Here, though, the tables seem to be turned.

 

Radiodread works, first of all, because these are songs without edges. It also works because there has always been an apocalyptic subtext to reggae and dub, a dream of empires falling, thrones overturned, cleansing deluges. The blackest of the dubs here is the bonus track based on Exit Music (For a Dub), drawn from the music written for the final sequence of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Again, it's hard to gauge whether the lyrics fall down on the side of horror or peace. Rejecting the idea of adapting the original Shakespearean lines, Yorke wrote something bleakly beautiful, about absconding this time, rather than abduction, and filled with the same head-above-water desperation and stoicism that has become an iconic aspect of Radiohead songs and videos: "Breathe, keep breathing / don't lose your nerve. / Breathe, keep breathing / I can't do this alone". The song's repeated "we hope that you choke" refrain is Yorke's version of "a plague on both your houses", a sentiment that resurfaces on 2003's album Hail to the Thief. (Wisely, he wasn't told that a Bush daughter was in the crowd at a recent gig. That might have set things off.)

 

OK Computer isn't prophetic in the usual bland sense. It does seem ahead of the game in certain details, like that tiny prefiguring of the WTC attacks. It's a barometric record, seeming to pick up on minute changes in the atmosphere. Interesting how much of the record is written in the optative mood, in unresolved tenses, and in chord progressions that seem to hang tantalisingly - meat and drink to jazz players, but deeply uneasy all the same. Compare the work of the now ludicrously overrated Scott Walker. Even if the album has been in the making for 17 years, Scott's whispered "pow pow" on The Drift is a memory of watching the planes go in rather than a dream of it. His subjects - Mussolini and Clara Petacci murdered in Milan, Elvis's lost twin brother, the murder of Pasolini on the earlier Tilt - are all things that happened in the past, now safely objectified in cultural memory.

 

OK Computer was about threat, but it was also about promise, both future-tense things. It bravely drew a parallel between politicians promising the world when out on the stump and a rock band promoting its work on tour. In this vein, the album's "moving forwards" and "moving backwards" imagery is suggestive: manifesto and hard sell on the one hand, pragmatism once in office and growing dependence on the back-catalogue on the other. The cue for all the current interpretations of Radiohead comes from the band itself, which struggles harder to free familiar songs from calcification than anyone since Dylan and Prince, both notorious murderers of their own offspring.

 

One reason the bonged-up shuffle of Radiodread works so well is because OK Computer plays tricks with time. At every stage you get the feeling someone is slowing up the musical narrative in order to spare you from whatever nasty thing lies around the corner. The (literally) slowed up glockenspiel accompaniment to No Surprises, over which Yorke sings at normal speed, is as threatening as the music-box effects on the soundtrack to Dario Argento's Suspiria, except that film always delivers a fresh horror. There's even a plea to slow down on the closing track The Tourist. Written by Jonny Greenwood and apparently inspired by watching American tourists rubbernecking around a beautiful European square before piling back on the bus, it again seems to flash-forward to the human dots and commas tumbling out of the Twin Towers. A dog barks at a ghost, sparks fly, someone is "overcharged", which could mean almost anything, but he's moving at "1,000 feet per second". As Greenwood said, it sounds like an ideal song to end an album.

 

It turns out to have been a less than ideal, but all too accurate, way of looking forward to a new decade and a new millennium which began with fireworks and has continued with fireworks.

 

OK Computer is one of the very great records and one of the very few that will survive that appalling decade. Like DeLillo's White Noise, which beat Radiohead's album to the punch by a full ten years, it's an act of imagination that seems so closely tied to its moment in time that it transcends it. Both communicate an unimaginable future in whispers and warped chords.

 

You might say there's some pretty generic rock'n'roll stuff on OK Computer. You might equally say there's some pretty broad satire in White Noise (like a non-German-speaking professor of Hitler studies at a midwestern college). There's not much hope offered in the novel, but the album's ambiguous OK is both potentially dismissive - OK! OK!! - and reassuring: we are, after all, just OK, just getting by, getting through. So turn on, slow down, lose yourself and dream about being taken away from it all.

 

• Radiodread, by the Easy Star All-Stars, is released on 22 August. Radiohead play Meadowbank Stadium, Edinburgh, the same day.

 

http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=1171022006

^ I heard of the Radiodread album, sounds bizzare, but might check it out. Cheers for the article.

You realise that performance is fake?

 

yeah, but it doesn't change the fact jonnys funny as hell while singing.:D

this thread is rather quiet lately :sad:

agreed....

 

 

hm... uhmm... hmm..

 

anybody heard "all I need"? it's pretty damn good :)

i havent! does anyone have a link then?

agreed....

 

 

hm... uhmm... hmm..

 

anybody heard "all I need"? it's pretty damn good :)

 

yep, I've heard it. Fantastic song!

 

Cant wait to get the new album.......I hope it doesnt take to long now.

 

What about "Open Pick"? I love it.

open pick.....hmm i havent listened to that one in a fair while!

i love house of cards and 15step though!

I like down is the new up..i guess the name of the new album will be: down is the new up, because i see pics, tshirts, posters from that.

open pick.....hmm i havent listened to that one in a fair while!

i love house of cards and 15step though!

 

House of cards and 15step are also fantastic. I think I like all the new ones. :D

Hope all the songs they've played will be on the new album.

 

Videotape?

 

@Rad-Cold Where did you see poster ect. from down is the new up?

sorry if this has been posted here before , but i just love this picture

a DAS update:

 

_as i go to sleep in lausanne_

 

Form is emptiness;

emptiness is form.

Form is not other than emptiness,

emptiness is not other than form.

 

 

 

Thom

a DAS update:

 

_as i go to sleep in lausanne_

 

Form is emptiness;

emptiness is form.

Form is not other than emptiness,

emptiness is not other than form.

 

 

 

Thom

Lausanne is city in Switzerland too and i cant stop listening to SNL

interesting blog there from thom.....random thoughts

 

@verve i also love videotape it is rather beautiful.

 

oo speaking of other beautiful songs....there is 'gagging order and 'true love waits'...agree?

sziget festival setlist:

 

01 Airbag

02 The National Anthem

03 There There

04 15 Step

05 Exit Music

06 Karma Police

07 I Might Be Wrong

08 Nude

09 Paranoid Android

10 No Surprises

11 The Gloaming

12 How To Disappear Completely

13 Pyramid Song

14 Lucky

15 Just

16 Idioteque

17 Street Spirit

 

Encore:

 

18 You And Whose Army?

19 2+2=5

20 Bones

21 Fake Plastic Trees

22 Everything In Its Right Place

 

quite short if you ask me, lot of croatians went to the hungary and say it was too fucking perfect.

wow that's a nice list

sziget festival setlist:

 

01 Airbag

02 The National Anthem

03 There There

04 15 Step

05 Exit Music

06 Karma Police

07 I Might Be Wrong

08 Nude

09 Paranoid Android

10 No Surprises

11 The Gloaming

12 How To Disappear Completely

13 Pyramid Song

14 Lucky

15 Just

16 Idioteque

17 Street Spirit

 

Encore:

 

18 You And Whose Army?

19 2+2=5

20 Bones

21 Fake Plastic Trees

22 Everything In Its Right Place

 

quite short if you ask me, lot of croatians went to the hungary and say it was too fucking perfect.

im on Sziget too,Radiohead is the band im lookin forward to the most

 

oo speaking of other beautiful songs....there is 'gagging order and 'true love waits'...agree?

 

 

agreed! :)

Thats a good song list..

sziget festival setlist:

 

01 Airbag

02 The National Anthem

03 There There

04 15 Step

05 Exit Music

06 Karma Police

07 I Might Be Wrong

08 Nude

09 Paranoid Android

10 No Surprises

11 The Gloaming

12 How To Disappear Completely

13 Pyramid Song

14 Lucky

15 Just

16 Idioteque

17 Street Spirit

 

Encore:

 

18 You And Whose Army?

19 2+2=5

20 Bones

21 Fake Plastic Trees

22 Everything In Its Right Place

 

quite short if you ask me, lot of croatians went to the hungary and say it was too fucking perfect.

 

looks very good!!!!

Radiohead tomorrow in Avenches!!!! :dance: finally!!! :D

thom's PA.