Ten years ago, one of the most influential and innovative British albums of all time was released. Join us this week as we celebrate a decade of Radiohead’s masterpiece, ‘Kid A’.
The muted beats and bleeps lurking beneath the surface of Radiohead’s fourth album, ‘Kid A’, tell the story of a group of musicians on the run from a fame they weren’t built to handle.
Burnt out and fatigued by their Against Demons world tour across eighteen months during 1997-98, the band were searching for a new musical direction to help them emerge from a seething black hole.
That black hole was the endless carousel of gigs, press conferences and schmoozing that followed the massive success of 1997’s ‘OK Computer’. This semi-conscious hyper-reality left frontman Thom Yorke dazed, confused and on the verge of implosion – with his bandmates also feeling the burn.
Yorke said to The Wire: “I tell you what is ridiculous – going into a bookshop and there’s all these books about yourself. In a way it feels like you’re already dead.”
Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of Radiohead.
The band’s members were left shuffling about onstage like corporate chimps beneath huge advertising banners in vast, soulless arenas on the Against Demons tour while their ideology and politics slid into the ether.
Speaking about the period to The Guardian, Yorke said he was left “completely unhinged”.
The endless procession of meet and greets and interviews worsened his condition, with the continual over-analysis of his lyrics leaving him drained. He told The Wire: “People assume everything you write is completely personal… it feels like someone walking over your grave.” Clearly, all was not well.
As the tour limped to its end, the shattered musicians returned to their private lives shell-shocked and unsure of where to go next. Hit hardest was Yorke, who fell into a deep depression.
By New Year’s Eve 1998 thing had spiralled out of control. The songwriter later revealed the difficulties and anxiety he felt when trying to write any new songs during this time, telling Q that the period was “one of the lowest points of my life”.
As the band met in Studio Guillaume, Paris, in January 1999 to begin sessions for what would become Kid A, Thom was still suffering from writer’s block and arrived with little new material. The new sessions also revealed division within the band over their next move – with Yorke’s passion for the electronic music of Warp records failing to inspire other band members.
Initially the band attempted to work through tracks which had been hanging around for a while, such as ‘Lost At Sea’, using the traditional method of rehearsing and jamming. However, it soon became clear that this no longer worked.
Guitarist Ed O’Brien, who wanted the band to make an album of short punk-style songs, summed up the frustrations the group would feel over the coming months in his tour diary.
He said of a session in August 1999: “The problem we have found is that we are essentially in limbo – for the first time we have nothing to get ready for except an ‘album’ but we have been working on that since January and nothing has come of it.”
Amid all this conflict and turmoil, the band were lacking a solid base from which to record. Hit by the news of delays to the completion of their own studio – near Abingdon, Oxford – they departed Paris after sessions there failed to bear fruit.
By the time the weary members pulled into the drive of Barsford Park in Gloucestershire in April 1999 they knew that time was running out – even though they had no official deadline to meet.
However, the sessions in the secluded mansion led to a break in the cloud. A series of tense meetings concluded that the band would not be splitting.
Energised by this newly reaffirmed bond, the band set to work on fusing their opposing ideas into a collective way forward that would enable them to avoid the huge arena tours and over-exposure of ‘OK Computer’ while retaining their artistic credibility. But the road ahead looked long and hard.
Drummer Phil Selway said: “Immediately before we were on the back of ‘OK Computer’ and it felt like we had reached… a good cut-off point in a way for how we’d been working. But throwing all of that out of the window in a way really undermines your confidence.”
Mojo writer Jim Irvin, who initially gave ‘Kid A’ a ‘raspberry’ review, said: “I loved Radiohead for their expansiveness, vertiginous vocal melodies and emotional clout, and ‘Kid A’ felt autistic, enclosed and wilfully small in outlook, purposefully obscure. But live with it for a while and that becomes its chief appeal, it’s a record to retreat into. I now think their instincts to retreat were honest and correct. They knew what level of pop stardom they could function at and felt there was a public assumption that they would ascend to a kind of fame which they’d have been uncomfortable with.”
Words by Shane Gladstone
Read more of Clash’s ten years of Radiohead ‘Kid A’ overage:
The Making Of ‘Kid A’
The Flavours And Ingredients Of ‘Kid A’
The Contentious Campaign Of ‘Kid A’
