It might be best to get out of the way what this book is not going to be. What interests me least about Radiohead are the lives of five people, and I promise no fresh revelations or insights based on interviews. Interviews seem to me a stupid and lazy way of getting at a fake idea of truth, their prevalence copious evidence that writing about music has gone down the tubes. Radiohead is already interviewed to death, and five minutes on the internet will throw up archives of conversations. They seem as respondents bored by direct questions, not surprising in that they channel a lot of their energy and imagination into music. I’m not particularly interested in audiences either: ‘academics can be fans and fans can be academics’, says Simon Frith, and again the internet has made all of those views massively available: a sociologist of the future will attend to how discussion about Radiohead circulated. And I maintain that in order to write about music you need to understand how music works. This book is thus a throwback to what was called New Criticism or Music Analysis: ways of writing which, just for the hell of it, start from an assumption, transparently untenable, that attentions both to intention (the artist) and to affect (the audience) are based on fallacies. This view may seem haughty, but it seems the safest place to begin, especially since writing about something very recent is always a gamble, a game with rules not yet agreed, debate with little consensus, procedure with no hardened method. I like the idea of criticism, and consider the views of creativity being somehow above criticism, of artists directly in communion with their fans, of criticism at best some necessary evil, to be wholly misplaced.
It might help to imagine a world where everything you possess has been stolen (not hard in East Oxford), blown up, or banned, and all that’s left is this one record. The old British radio programme Desert Island Discs starts from this conceit, and its desert, the condition of being deserted, need not be untrue or unkind: the composer György Ligeti found it easy to imagine, since he had lived much of his life in exile; for the poet Philip Larkin, too, one imagines that thinking in terms of final things came easy, although he was extremely fearful of being left alone. Put simply, the only thing you’ll need in order to read what follows is OK Computer.
When I had the chance to write this book, I quickly picked OK Computer for several reasons. At the time of writing, the band was very popular, and I hoped some of that popularity would rub off onto me. Christopher Ricks has a peculiar but understandable line on the shared medium of writing, over and above life and death: ‘why am I attending to Tennyson, instead of his attending to me …’ In this case, however, there’s simply no question that I need this book far more than Radiohead do, and I’m gushingly grateful to them for this record and the chance it’s given me to go on about all sorts of things. Some of these have very little to do with Radiohead, and may tax the reader unfairly: it arises from what Philip Roth once called a ‘feel for the complexity of things’, a sense that ‘the simple things you see are all complicated’, in Pete Townshend’s line or that, to adapt Christian Metz, ‘music is difficult to explain because it’s easy to understand’. Something like that. Secondly, this particular record has swiftly, in fact with suspect rapidity, reached ‘classic’ status. Its presence, its survival in the future and the way it contains or evokes the past: all of these ideas seem interesting to me, more interesting than biography or the excitements of experience. Finally, I was keen to choose a record from the 1990s, since I think—and I’ll be labouring this point very soon—there was such a thing as the CD album distinct from, but very much underpinned by, the vinyl album. I consider OK Computer to be a good demonstration of that category.
The book is organized according to those concerns. The first chapter considers OK Computer as an album in the 1990s, and what that might have meant; it also starts to pin some detail onto those backgrounds. The second chapter is where the listener may find most immediate interest as each track is considered in some detail; it also includes consideration of some general themes which may or may not lend a sense of unity to the tracks when seen as a whole. The final chapter looks to the album’s future, and what might determine its longevity or demise; this is where broader issues are raised, although the focus is kept as much as possible on OK Computer itself.
This book was supported by the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University. My parents were always supportive, and it’s a sadness beyond expression that my mother died while the book was being written. I have so few friends that it’s tempting to list them all, but I shall leave it at thanking them for their kindness. The Critical Musicology group in Britain has been a great inspiration for many years; of their number, Allan Moore has done more than anyone to sharpen my listening to records and in writing the book I realized how indebted I am to Allan’s Rock: the Primary Text. Ian MacDonald’s book Revolution in the Head showed, at a crucial time, that it was possible still for readable writing to go together with precise and musical close-listening; while it’s getting impressively difficult to say anything about music that isn’t already to some extent covered in Simon Frith’s Performing Rites. On thinking about music politically, David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee are ever-present as inspirations and the best and toughest of arguers. Along the way, you’ll see how much I owe to some correspondence with Andreas Broman in Sweden and Dave Laing in London. David Barker in New York commissioned the book. The dedication captures the reason I live in Oxford, where, although you can’t smell a thing, some organizations have supplied much musical pleasure: the Zodiac venue, Nightshift magazine, Avid second-hand record shop, Blackwell’s bookshop, and Oxford Contemporary Music.
This book is dedicated to the staff and students in the Music Department at Oxford Brookes University since I arrived there in 1990.