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’.
When Thom Yorke met with his bandmates at Studio Guillaume, Paris, in January 1999 to begin the sessions for Kid A, he had been listening almost exclusively to electronic music.
After returning emotionally bruised from touring, the singer had ordered the entire back catalogue of Warp records – losing himself in the music of Aphex Twin and Autechre.
The synchronized beats and bleeps squelched around his battered brain – rekindling within him a love for techno dating back to his university days when he had been a member of Flickernoise, smitten with records such as Sweet Exorcist’s ‘Per Clonk’.
Yorke was surprised at how affecting the music on Warp was – despite its lack of lyrics. He told Q at the time: “It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices on it. I felt just as emotional about it as I’d ever felt about guitar music.”
Some claimed the move was a fad; an attempt to be trendy. Mojo journalist Jim Irvin said: “‘Kid A’ sounded, at first, like a try-hard stab at emulating Thom’s Warp and Mo’Wax favourites… It felt like they were pointlessly pursuing “cool” when they already were.”
However, Yorke’s work with James Lavelle’s UNKLE showed the passion for beats was long-term. The Radiohead man worked on ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’ for the ‘Psyence Fiction’ album.
Lavelle said of ‘Kid A’: “They embraced our culture and they made our culture better, which was really, when I heard ‘Kid A’, it was like, ‘Motherfuckers!’ you know? ‘You’ve just done everything we tried to work towards but we couldn’t quite do!’”
Meanwhile, the claim that Yorke was reading Ian Macdonald’s Beatles book Revolution In The Head during the ‘Kid A’ sessions is hardly surprising. The book documents the recording sessions for every Beatles track – revealing parallels between the two groups.
Both bands retired to bunker-like studios after growing disillusioned with life on the road. Also Yorke’s move to ditch the guitars and go electronic tallied with The Beatles’ innovative embracing of Indian music, backwards tape loops and abstract lyrics decades before on ‘Revolver’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’.
Jim Irvin said: “I think ‘Kid A’ was very influential. Rather in the way that though The Beatles didn’t invent psychedelia, when they adopted it they brought the idea to a much wider public, Thom’s love of Boards Of Canada, or whoever, certainly transmitted that idea of manipulated electronic beauty to a far wider audience.”
However, drummer Phil Selway was quick to quash the comparison, saying: “I don’t think you could even dare to compare yourself to what they did, it has passed so much into what everybody does on daily basis in terms of recording and I think you underestimate their impact.”
Also, like the mop-tops in the 1960s, Radiohead were still heavily influenced by politics and current affairs. They had raved about Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate book No Logo – which at one point was expected to be the album’s title.
Guitarist Ed O’Brien told Q: “No Logo gave one real hope… she was writing about everything I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting.”
With the melting pot containing sparse underground electronic music, Beatles-influenced production, left-wing politics and band turmoil, it’s no wonder the record was, at times, heavy going.
Words by Shane Gladstone
Read more of Clash’s 10 years of Radiohead ‘Kid A’ overage:
After Limbo – The Genesis Of ‘Kid A’
The Making Of ‘Kid A’
The Contentious Campaign Of ‘Kid A’