OK Paranoia – Radiohead deconstruct rock music
“It should be a really fast album with a lot of samples,” says Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, describing how he originally imagined their third album “OK Computer”. “But then everything changed – the samples were too slow and I couldn’t get the upbeat songs.” What came instead – dramatically distorted guitars and pre-millennium blues, most of it recorded in the fall of 1996 at St. Catherine’s Court, a 15th-century country estate in the south of England – was, in Yorke’s words, “everything a bit…poisoned.” And it was a creative masterpiece. Radiohead’s portrait of a crumbling world order topped the charts in England and became their first album to reach the top 30 in America. “OK Computer” made Yorke the new Angry Young Man of rock.
“One evening a dark cloud hovered over me,” he says. “So I locked myself in my room and got drunk.” Meanwhile, guitarists Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, Jonny’s bass-playing brother Colin and drummer Phil Selway worked with engineer and co-producer Nigel Godrich on the instrumental parts of “Paranoid Android”. When Yorke woke up the next day, he was blown away by the result. “I nailed the vocals on the first take,” he says, “because that energy got me going.” Using their mobile studio, Radiohead recorded the basic tracks in a huge ballroom – and much of Yorke’s vocals, as on “Paranoid Android” after the first attempt.
The line “Kicking, squealing Gucci little piggy” came to him one sleepless night in LA after watching a woman freak out in a bar because someone spilled a drink on her dress: “That woman had a look, I’d never seen anything like that before… She became a fury.” “It’s not really about computers,” he adds. “It was just the sounds of computers and televisions that had been playing around in my head for almost a year and a half.” And he knows exactly at what point that chaos turned into something special and lasting: “When we were mixing ‘Airbag,’ it played Nigel said it really loudly and I thought: ‘We never dreamed we could do something like this.’ I was so happy that I called my girlfriend just to tell her, ‘Wow, we did something really, really great.'”