Radiohead in 100 (+) gigs

January.

The year begins with the release of No Surprises on January 12, more B sides (Palo Alto and How I Made My Millions) plus emerging news about Grant Gee’s forthcoming film documentary. Ed and Phil do their bit on the radio, Thom’s pretty much stopped doing interviews, they’re going to be touring until the summer but there are no more UK dates. No Surprises hits number 4 in the top 40.

This is my last year at university. Mostly I am spending it drinking and talking cultural bollocks with the Visual Art Club and supervising the Film & TV resource room. (This involves kicking the photocopier and watching a lot of videos.) I’m enjoying this more than any of the work I’m supposed to be doing for my courses. I’m reading a lot but getting mediocre marks, I think I’ve got education fatigue.

January 26, a big envelope arrives through the post from Keiko. It’s a copy of Snoozer magazine with Thom on the front, but on closer look I see that he has signed it and written “Lucy’s” on his shoulder.  There is no letter enclosed to explain it. But a week later I get a postcard. Keiko and Izzy went shoe shopping with Thom while he was in Tokyo. “Great great greatest!” she says.

February.

February 14. The Unbelievable Truth play at King Tuts. Emily with red hair is there, having been on their trail and been to 15 gigs. They seem to be more a 4 piece than the advertised 3 piece, with Nigel (Thom and Jonny’s pal with the funny hair) on drums. Andy is darker, taller and physically just a bit bigger than his brother, but in his face, his chin and especially when he closes his eyes to sing, the resemblance is there as well as in his expressions and the inflections of his eyebrows, and his not-quite-posh Oxford way of speaking. I’m a little bit freaked out. Some of their songs are not bad, but my oh my there was a lot of REM in their house when they were kids.

Emily is down at the front taking photos but I hang back at the sound desk. She hangs around at the end because she’s not yet got autographs. Off stage Andy doesn’t have the physical nerviness of his brother, or indeed the vague look of ill health. I feel like I’ve fallen into the Twilight Zone. Emily and her entourage head off with the band up Sauchiehall Street and I tag along for a while, but keep going in the direction of home, not feeling in a position to do any proper ligging.

February 16. A friend has taped the MTV Radiohead Night for me. It’s a long play VHS so I have to go and watch it on the more up to date video players in the Resource Room. I fast forward through it and watch the interviews. Talking about touring, Ed says playing big gigs is about trying to reach out to individuals. Thom says it’s a “dream state.” It’s about “something in the air that wasn’t there when you started.” He also talks about how he feels after the shows, “I don’t go and say hello to anybody… I just go and sit on the bus now because I can’t do anything else.” The feeling of getting a new song right can “keep you going for ever.” And he says, “The most important thing in life is to establish heartfelt communication with others… there’s bugger all else to do.”

For some reason this interview in particular touches a nerve.

February 25. Get an email from a chap called Nick, who is producing a documentary on the band for Radio 1. He has a day of interviews with the band and Mr Donwood booked. He’s interested in breaking away from their “deadly serious image” and in Thom’s early artistic career. I email back, dropping a few hints. I’m interested because it’s radio (and not one of those rip off books that have started appearing).  I want to get involved and help out, use this as a way into something bigger, maybe. I send him some bits and pieces I have saved that might assist with the research.

March

When I get another email from Nick, it’s all off. Thom has cancelled. I take the opportunity to ask the radio producer for some career advice.

April

Atsuko sends me a letter with a slightly worrying report of Thom on tour, he was tired and fed up. I’d sent her a letter to hand to him, as it felt like the only way to get a message of support through.

I get to see Drugstore a couple of times this month, just to keep my hand in with the ligging. At one of the shows I end up buying the whole band a round of drinks. El President, their duet with Thom, has charted.

May

Seven Television Commercials, a compilation of the band’s promo videos is released. It’s weird to finally get to see all the videos after only ever seeing the bits they play on TV. They’re all about death and rebirth aren’t they?

I spend the remainder of the term trying to understand Hegel and Post-modernism well enough to pass my art history exams. I distract a friend in the exam by wearing my Leisure Is Pain T shirt – he is sitting behind me and spends the whole exam trying to read it.

Another letter from Atsuko. She got another note from Thom. He sent her his invitation to the Ivor Novello Awards and told her that he has a new house by the sea.

June.

W.A.S.T.E. arrives and confirms Thom is by the sea. He likes the sound of the waves. There is a postcard to send to Bill Clinton about Tibet. They are playing one of the Free Tibet gigs with REM. He’s not losing it, he says, “Honest.”

June 25. Much to my relief I get my degree result. I got a 2:1.

June 29. A Rabbit In Your Headlights, Thom’s song from the UNKLE album, is on the radio. It makes sense. It sounds like they locked him in a room with a piano until he came up with something suitably doomy.

July.

Graduation.  Which is fairly inauspicious. My parents visit and then leave me to get riotously drunk with people from my class. I end the evening playing pool in Nice ‘n’ Sleazys.

July 12. Go to T in the Park on a one day ticket. See The Beastie Boys and Unbelievable Truth (who have Jonny’s guitar tech Duncan as one of their roadies) and Portishead.

July 15. Nick the radio guy is in town and I meet him for veggie food in the 13th Note. We talk about the documentary that was never to be (despite the fact they’d lined up Eddie Izzard for the narration) and I entertain him with some of my anecdotes.

August.

I exchange several emails with Max K, (who at this time is running the best Radiohead website). He seems to know whenever Thom gets spotted in the street. I arrange to swap a load of bootleg tapes with him. I also get Caffy’s new email and find out that she’s been working on a new fanzine that I could write for.

August 14. Go and see comedian Rob Newman at the Edinburgh Fringe… I’m happy to see him again (it’s been a while) but he has a gag about Radiohead being whiney and it upsets me. He was glad they weren’t on at Glasto this year, and “don’t let anybody tell you that they’re good, because they’re not.” He mocks High And Dry and says that’s the voice that your mum tells you off for using “One more word out of you like that…” It’s hard to hear one of my heroes slag off another…

I spend the summer failing to get jobs, even temporary ones and ones that pay £3 per hour. My “self esteem” is possibly at an all time low, now I don’t even have University to distract me, I feel rather purposeless. The band seem distant from day to day life, once in a while I note in my diary how good a particular album sounds on my headphones. My film tutor suggested that I should be a journalist and that I should send articles to magazines but I’ve not been writing a great deal lately and I lack confidence. I fail to get jobs in two book shops and a video shop; and I can’t seem to stick to office temping for more than a couple of days at a time. I give in and sign on.

September.

Max sends tapes, there are gigs with the new songs – Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) and How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found. Maybe there will be something to look forward to now.

September 26. Max emails to tell me that Thom and Jonny are in Israel, that there is not going to be a B-sides album  (which had been rumoured) and Meeting People Is Easy (Grant Gee’s film, henceforth referred to as MPIE) will come out on video at some point. Apparently it’s full of depressing footage of Thom facing off the media circus. Radiohead are playing an Amnesty International gig in Paris on December 10 and the W.A.S.T.E. HQ was very busy when Max visited recently.

September 28. I buy the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, which has Thom “doing” Bryan Ferry, he sounds… drunk…and not like himself, but you can hear its him in the characteristic splutter on the plosives.

October.

Go for training at a job in a book warehouse, but I also have an interview on the same day for a job in a record shop called Fopp. I know which job I would rather have. I leave more nervous than I went in and spend the rest of the day feeling like I’ve blown it. But they call me the next day to ask me to start on Monday (in two days time). I’m so surprised, I nearly fall over.

October 5.  Start the job and learn the ropes quickly. The next day I sell a lot of Morcheeba CDs.

October 7. Thom’s birthday. I’m in the shop first thing and I put one of my favourite B-sides, Lull, on the stereo in his honour (as when it’s not busy we can play what we like). We play and sell The Beta Band 3 EPs a lot in true High Fidelity fashion.

I phoned up a number advertised in the NME to find out about the Show Travel packages for the Paris gig, but the prices are off putting.

 

I’m on the later shift at the record shop today, this morning I almost put on my Paranoid Android T-shirt but changed my mind at the last moment. It is busy in the shop all morning. At lunchtime, I eat a sandwich in the Botanic Gardens and when I come back at 2.30pm, I go back behind the counter. I look up to find myself face to face with a man with a beard. It’s Thom.

And HE says, “What are you doing here?!”

He’s grown the colour out of his hair. He’s got a big khaki coat on. He’s got a hand full of records and he’s grinning at me.

When I remember to breathe, I realise I’m not dreaming, I’m at work and I’ll have to reach the vinyl down from the shelf. He’s got Squarepusher, Plasticman and Arab Strap albums and several more techno 12 inches that I have to find.  I slow down. Over the last couple of days I’ve developed a fast pace, this is a busy shop. I have to look for the records but I want to look at him to make sure he’s really here. He comes round the side to the vinyl counter and as I get the discs down from the shelf he puts them in the sleeves. I’m glad, because at this point my hands are no longer responding to signals from my brain. Someone else leans over asking for a listening copy of something (there is a deck on the counter with headphones so people can listen to the 12s, we get a lot of DJs and techno fans in), he doesn’t notice who he’s pushing out of the way.

We must have been talking because he tells me he’s up here visiting a friend for his 30th birthday. I tell him I just started this job, he asks me if this means I’ve graduated and I tell him I got a 2:1.

He tells me they’re staying at the local posh hotel, which he’s quite amused about, it’s his birthday treat. I must have asked him how things are going because he says, “It took me three months to be a normal human being again.”

I ring the records in the till and he produces a large roll of notes from his pocket to pay. I don’t want him to go yet, we’re still talking, I go around the counter so I don’t have to serve anyone else. (No one else in the shop at this point has recognised him, he looks different with the beard and longer hair) He mentions Paris and I ask him why they are playing it and he starts to say “Well, Amnesty….”

I know that, I say, but the rest of the bill is a bit dubious… He agrees, he feels a bit dodgy because the other bands are “a bit crap apart from ADF. But if we don’t do it now we never will. We’re getting to like not playing live.”

“That will never do.” I say. We both pull a face.

“Where did you hear about it anyway?” he asks, surprised I know about the show.

“Caffy,” I tell him. “And I get email from Max.” My spies are everywhere, I’m not sure if I actually said that out loud.

“Oh,” he says, “You’ve got an email then? I’ll give you mine.”

I dive back behind the counter to get the only available paper, the stickers we use to mark damaged records, and a pen. He scrawls his email  address on one and I write mine on another and we swap.

The Mercury Rev album Deserter’s Songs is playing in the shop. We’ve been playing it everyday and it’s selling well. “What is this?” he asks. Jane, the manager, is passing by at that moment, probably keeping an eye on me, and she tells him.

“Oh I’ll have that,” says Thom to me, “Colin told me about it.”

I hurtle off across the shop to get a vinyl sleeve, but when I get back he’s changed his mind and would rather have it on CD. He pays cash again and I say something about not knowing how to give him a staff discount yet. “It’s OK,” he says, “It’s my job.”

I want him to stay a bit longer. I ask him how big the Paris gig is going to be and he tells me it’s about 150,000 capacity.

“Oh piece of cake then!” I raise my eyebrows.

“You’re staying in Glasgae then?” he asks, doing a Scottish accent.

“Looks like it.” I shrug.

“Well,” he says, “It’s better than London here.” We talk a bit more but he has to meet Rachel and their friend. I give him a hug before he goes.

I disappear into the back room and drink a glass of water. I try to regain some hold on reality. I hide the sticker in my bag and then I go back onto the shop floor. About half an hour later, when the shop is less busy, my friends Nigel and Kath come in. Before he says anything else, Nigel asks me “Have you seen him?”

When I reply in the affirmative he says “Thank God for that, we’d have got you the sack if you’d have had to run out of the shop.” It turned out they’d just seen him in Ashton Lane, not far from the shop. They only knew it was him when they heard one of his companions call his name. He had bags from every one of the five record shops in the area.

I have to work until 7pm, and it’s all I can do to hold myself together. At the end of the day the manager gives me a beer, she wasn’t sure who it was I was talking to but when I confirm it, she was characteristically only concerned about how much money he was spending. “He’s loaded isn’t he?”

I wonder what it would be like if I could just phone the hotel and take them all out for a drink, like they were friends of mine. It is not going to happen.

I’d had dreams where I’d taken Thom shopping, (like the girls did in Tokyo) but this felt even stranger than those. The job (which I have for the next 6 months) never quite recovers from this moment.

*I know, I know I’ve done it again, but at the time it had been so long since there had been  a tour that it counted as a “hit”.

 

When I go to check my email the day after Thom came into the shop, there is a rumour circulating from the Japanese continent that Thom is going to be a father. I somehow doubt that this is true, as he surely would have mentioned it yesterday, but I use my new opportunity to contact him to find out what’s going on. He puts me straight in a reply the following day. (In the end it was Phil’s wife who was about to have a child and someone somewhere got their wires crossed). It feels weird to be in a position to quash some inaccurate gossip.

I spend the next week or so in a daze, trying to work out whether trying to go to Paris for the Amnesty gig is even an option. It isn’t.

I find working full time very hard going and I am becoming quite depressed. Don’t think this can be entirely due to having to play Robbie Williams’ new album all day long in the shop, although it doesn’t help.

Caffy puts me in touch with a Melody Maker journalist who is compiling a feature on pop fans.  I send him the story of my first letter from Thom.  I don’t have a computer of my own and I have to check my email every few days in a local book shop where there is an internet café. When the MM comes out Caffy says if she were a pop star she’d be honoured to have me as a fan! Which was very nice of her, I’d been rather worried about my contribution, but I’m starting to think about writing more about my experiences.

In November Caffy sends me a promo copy of Meeting People Is Easy, I am a little awed by it at first. There are new songs and Thom talking about “the most important thing.”

There are moody scenes soundtracked by Scott Walker songs, the queue outside the Astoria (but not the one I was in) and a brief glimpse of Keiko crying as she sees the band off at the airport in Japan. I buy a copy of the VHS as soon as it comes out.

The NME are making a lot of the “Thom hates fame” angle. Atsuko (who I met in Dublin, who is now back in Japan) has asked me to find out if it would be possible to interview Thom for InRock, the magazine she works for, but in the end she calls me and asks me to write something about my experiences and review the film.

Here’s what was translated for the magazine, published in January 1999:

Grant Gee’s film Meeting People Is Easy gives an intriguing insight into the process of touring and promoting the album OK Computer. It takes its visual cues from the sleeve artwork of the album, making the endless cities that the band visit look like alien landscapes. The band themselves also seem like aliens at times, at the start of the film they appear to land from a spaceship and then make their way towards a stage to the strains of Fitter Happier. On the streets of Tokyo, they try to mingle with the crowds but end up standing out and looking lost in the futuristic city.

The album’s recurring themes of movement, speed and transport are interpreted here as views from vehicle windows as the world speeds by in a blur of bright lights, freeways, tunnels and airports.

It is remarkable how close Gee has come in interpreting the band’s musical vision on film.  Reading through some of the countless press interviews that the band did to promote the album I found that the way they describe the songs and feelings on OK Computer corresponds very closely to the images in the film.

Thom tried to describe the point of view from which he had written the songs:

“It was like there was a secret camera in every room and it’s watching the character for each song.  The camera’s not quite me, its neutral, emotionless, but not emotionless at all, in fact it is the complete opposite.”

Grant Gee has said of the film, “What I tried to do was to scoop out the emotion as much as possible and just show frustration.  Even though there are some candid scenes in there, it is kind of empty.  There’s nothing you can show about these people that’s going to have anything like the same impact as the music they make.”

The music is the connecting force. The most important thing in the process. The Radiohead live experience is only shown in fits and starts in the film but there are moments when it all comes together and even someone who is not a fan can feel the emotional power of the music.

The first song that we hear them play is the first song that they played to the world on the tour at the opening show in Barcelona, Lucky. Jonny Greenwood recalls “shaking in Barcelona and never wanting to loose that feeling” The excitement of playing live is as palpable for the band as it is for the audience.

The film is less about the band than them at the centre of the process of taking their music out to the world. This process is not even really fame because they are not really  famous.  They are not (thank goodness!) famous like movie stars or household names but their job now involves taking part in the process of celebrity, the rounds of interviews and TV appearances, self advertisement that leads them to become a kind of human product on the global marketing treadmill. It is their own fear that they will become part of this machine, the fact that it is so much not what they are about that makes the film so compelling.

For these five worriers, being caught up in this intense situation is often more than they can stand. In taking their art to the people there are a lot of draw backs, a lot of reasons to quit.  As it becomes monotonous and they become weary (as in the later sections of the film) they have to keep focusing on what it is that drives them on.

As Thom has said:

“There are a lot of good reasons for not doing tours. It fucks you up, it takes too long and it costs shitloads of money…but…its about looking people in the eye when we play our songs.”

The film is full of hidden tension. Touring the world is the thing which drives the band to greater success but at the same time it is also the thing which prevents them from leading normal human lives and being able to concentrate on the thing that they love, the music.

Yet as the film illustrates, their music comes from the kind of situations which they encounter on the road. The emotional resonance of the songs fits with the images. Shopping malls and ‘modern life’; handshakes and carbon monoxide… Meeting People Is Easy manages to be both revealing and not at the same time. There are candid scenes of the band back stage but we never get any closer to finding out about how they work together. The film uses fragments of interviews and footage which manage create an impressionistic and occasionally profound picture of Radiohead without ever achieving concrete coherence.

Throughout the film, Gee returns to the idea that all the critical acclaim the band are receiving is adding to the pressure on them to live up to expectations. The barrage of press-superlatives builds up and overflows until they feel the fear of the inevitable backlash. In one interview, done on the Australian leg of the tour, Thom talks about success bringing with it new responsibilities, making taking risks very hard. There is always this fear deep down, but risks need to be taken, success should bring them the freedom to express themselves creatively, rather than add to the pressure to bring more success. The pressure of feeling it and meaning it all the time as a job means that Radiohead often take everything too seriously.

The moments in the film where it is most obvious that Radiohead are better than any of this, worth more than all the strife that they have to contend with are the fragments of new songs.

One which may or may not be called Big Ideas (Don’t get any), performed in New York and others which we can see being worked on in sound checks, including one with the lyric ‘You follow me around’ that sounds a little like a country-style REM song.

For me, as a fan, the part where Thom talks about the most important thing being that he can remember what it is like to have songs which were etched on your heart when you are were a teenager, when life goes wrong. When he realised that his songs were as important to people as The Smiths or REM were to him, then that is what makes it all worthwhile. To know that he understands the big deal is very meaningful.

 

I watched it again, for the first time in a long time in 2011 (in the process of writing this):

I always find it strange that the band portrayed in this film is the one that a lot of people think is most like the real Radiohead. It’s a film about the process of promoting a record as much as anything, I think at the time I relied on it to fill in the gaps, there was almost a year and a half with no gigs. The hyperbole around OK Computer always bothered me, and watching its effect on the band is quite an uncomfortable experience. Meeting People Is Easy is rather one sided in that respect. Grant Gee is not at every gig, he drops in at various points on the tour and perhaps by choice doesn’t attempt to give a balanced picture. Some of the absurdity but little of the humour of the Radiohead camp is captured by his cameras. What comes across is Thom’s inherent distrust of his own success, the fact that touring is repetitive and tiring, not particularly glamorous and at some points just down right inane. I do wonder if music journalists still ask those same, humourless, pointless questions these days?

Thom’s body language throughout is something that could probably offer a student of psychology a lot of mileage; there is never really a chance to see him when he’s not under pressure. I don’t think this helped dispel any preconceptions about the band, they DO take things very seriously but there are moments of levity on tour that MPIE totally neglects to mention.

Grant Gee isn’t trying to shoot a concert film, its more all about the peripheral stuff – and there are things here I recognise – soundman Jim on his skates; Tim looking at his watch and handing out cups of tea; the strange polite air of resignation with which the band awkwardly conduct themselves in the face of formal meetings with foreign record company personnel. I do sometimes wonder how I never ran into the film crew on my travels (they were at the Astoria fan club show but I never noticed).

My least favourite scene is the clip from Sky News where the monstrous presenter Kay Burley talks disparagingly all over the promo video for No Surprises, calling it “music to cut your wrists to,” while her fellow presenter seems to actively enjoy watching Thom narrowly avoid drowning.

There are some interesting cuts between photo shoots and interviews taking place and the finished articles, like the Raygun piece where Thom talks about college radio being “fridge buzz” and in Japan where he extrapolates a complicated economic theory, as if being able to talk about anything other than himself is more important than talking about having made the “best album in the world” for the 1000th time.

MPIE throws up a couple of faintly surreal moments: “Tower lobby floor?”  The band get lost on the way to shoot a video acceptance speech for the NME Awards, fuck it up, re-do it and get very frustrated only to have the NME use the botched version and in the process make the band look like they’re trying deliberately to be iconoclastic.

Some questions are thrown up. Did Thom ever wear anything other than those giant combat trousers?  Has Ed ever considered going into politics? His ability to answer questions without actually saying anything meaningful at all is surely a valuable skill in that field. Indeed his best contribution is now something of a catchphrase…“Polaroids? What kind of Polaroids?”

Thom doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself, which concurs with reports I received at the time. He frames everything in comparison to their performance at Glastonbury, which has become the benchmark against which everything else is measured and found to be disappointing. “Everything that happened after Glastonbury has been a let down.”

There is a moment near the end of the film when Thom seems to be losing his ability to communicate, he implies that he’s bored of the songs and all but suggests packing it in, telling the others that they should “get out while the going’s good.” Even while they’re still on tour they’re bracing themselves for the inevitable backlash. The film ends back in New York with a new song, which a TV presenter refers to as Big Ideas (don’t get any). Thom introduces it as being about “believing you’re actually wonderful when you know it’s not true.” (This song will eventually take about nine years to be finished and be recorded as Nude, on In Rainbows.)

After watching MPIE, I don’t think I ever took an interview at face value ever again. If it had been all I had to go on, I would have been even more worried about the future of the band than I already was.

January.

Working in the record shop on my feet all day is exhausting. I spend my wages on discounted CDs and let my friends take advantage of the perks.  The manager insists on us playing acid jazz funk most of the time, which does my head in.

February.

In my diary I seem to be punishing myself for not living up my own expectations of myself, for not being able to talk to people, for getting drunk too often, for not being able to make my feelings known. Despite being involved in a short film that a friend is making, I don’t feel like I’ve found a way to express myself. I don’t have the confidence.

March.

After feeling that I’m decidedly on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, I get taken aside by the boss and told that as I’m “not management material”, this is the end of my trial period. Basically, I get sacked. I feel reckless and light on my feet as I leave.

April.

I go back to signing on. Whenever I seek careers advice I get told I have to push myself more. I should really go and do something vocational, or a journalism course, but after 5 years I can’t take any more academic education and besides, I can’t afford it.

My mum lends me the money to get my own computer, so I can write more, but when it arrives it has a fault and I have to send it back.

I’m still checking my email at a friend’s and I get an email from Thom, with the subject line “How to build the ideal bunker. He says “we are sort of working now.” He was just looking at a pile of cut outs and words and “this bloody broken keyboard and wondered how you were.” There are vowels missing and letters doubled (must be the keyboard.). I write back and tell him about the state of play and the Elvis Costello gig I was at the night before.

He’s playing a solo set on June 13th in Amsterdam for the Free Tibet gig. I email My dad’s Dutch cousin and she invites me to stay with her, when I tell her why I want to come, she buys me a ticket for the gig.

June.

Lack of money and direction cause me to pack up and leave Glasgow. I try to convince myself that I’m not moving in with my parents, rather storing my stuff there while I go travelling. I go to Hull and call in on my brother before I catch the Ferry to Holland. The ferry was cheaper than flying, and I haven’t booked a cabin. Instead I stay up and watch a not very good Mel Gibson thriller and then lay out my sleeping bag on the floor between the seats to snatch a couple of hours sleep. In Amsterdam I meet my dad’s cousin Maria at Central Station. Her flat is not far away, she’s an academic and it’s full of books. I can stay here while she’s at work. I feel remarkably sprightly considering my lack of sleep and go exploring. I spend the next couple of days going to galleries, shopping, wandering around. I really like Amsterdam. I visit the Stedelijk Museum, The Jewish History Museum and Kitsch Kitchen (my favourite shop in the world).

There is a fringe event for the Free Tibet movement in the Dam Square, I go and have a look and spot a few familiar faces in the crowd, including Emily with Red Hair. I make contact with Keiko later and go to meet her at her hotel. We talk excitedly. She’s been to 40 gigs by now. We catch up on the gossip (Colin got married, it was Phil’s wife who had the kid, Thom and Stanley really liked Tokyo). We’re rather ridiculously excited about tomorrow’s gig.

 

The venue for today’s Tibet Freedom Concert is a big exhibition hall. Keiko photographs everything and is gutted when they don’t let her take her camera inside. She and her friend Myoko are on the guestlist and I have my ticket. I buy a T shirt with the line up on the back on the way in. We set up camp about three rows from the front. It’s a bit of a scrum. The faithful are here in force. In front of me is a very small girl with a tattoo of the ‘hex’ star symbol from the OK Computer art work.

Despite the crush, it’s all very civilised with everyone holding their places. We are surrounded by the Dutch wing of the fan club, The Panic Button, who have their own T-shirts and a photographer ready down at the front. We watch Luscious Jackson, some dancing Tibetan monks and Dutch hardcore band NRA, whose fans mosh like crazy, a weird juxtaposition with the images of non-violent protest being shown between the acts. They do a dance which consists of running around in a small space at high speed whilst punching and kicking each other at random. They’re just behind us and I reciprocate a few elbows, but they’re too funny to get annoyed about.

Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros are next on. They play several Clash songs and some new stuff. I admire Scott their bass player, with his strategically placed tattoos. They play I Fought The Law. It’s your actual Joe Strummer and he’s on the same bill as Thom!

Ben Harper, who follows with a sit down blues set, is rather boring by comparison. He even manages to make Voodoo Chile sound dull. I’m fainting with hunger but there’s no time to get out of this crowd now. As a Tibetan artist plays a one stringed harp-like instrument, Keiko and I try not to get too excited about the sound of an acoustic guitar being tuned just behind the scenes. We exchange good luck hand shakes and brace ourselves. I have my camera and my crappy tape recorder but they are just a distraction. I focus on staying upright. Thankfully there is not too much of a surge in the crowd when the catsuit-wearing Dutch VJ woman announces the next act.

Thom saunters on and sits behind an upright piano. Jonny is here but he’s not playing yet. It’s just Thom at the piano playing a quiet new tune. Something about a little row boat and nothing to fear… He pulls some faces and then exchanges instruments with Jonny to play Street Spirit. There are some distracting noises off stage and as usual he doesn’t look happy when people talk during the quiet bits. He’s nervous but just about in control. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does it’s about why they are here, playing at the Tibet Freedom show.

“There’s a lot of issues going on at the moment, so it’s understandable that Tibet is not getting the attention it deserves but there’s an underlying issue. The issue is where world powers choose to exceed their authority and where they don’t, the selective amnesia that keeps going on around us and the media keeps just portraying it as the truth. So erm that’s why we chose to do this gig.”

He strums a few chords and starts “I hate these.. curtains..” He’s trying to play I’ll Wear It Proudly, Elvis Costello’s song he’s previously cited as a favourite, but he can’t remember the words. He turns to Jonny in bewilderment and swears and laughs. I call out what I can remember of the words, something about “the colour of your hair”, there is a whoop from somewhere in the audience and he pulls it back together, and introduces the song properly. (it’s ‘flaming curtains’ he can’t remember)

With Jonny on the Hammond organ, they get through it. The words come through clearly “if you don’t know what is wrong with me you don’t know what you’ve missed.” Beautiful.

They go straight into Lucky and we get a smile when everyone sings along. A girl behind me with an Alannis Morrisette placard uses it to poke a photographer out of the way so we get a better view. There are no cameras on the stage. No posing for the big screen. In spite of the size of the venue, this feels like an intimate gig. Thom moves to the piano for Karma Police and is saved by the audience when he gets the chorus ravelled up.  They’re not on stage for long, we get Exit Music, and he takes a little bow centre stage at the end.

Fake Plastic Trees is the soundtrack to the next bit of video footage when the curtains close. Keiko and I escape to the toilet. We want to find Thom and say hello. We spotted the VIP rooms but there is no way to get in, we get pass outs and go for a look outside. Without passes we’ve not got a hope, but it feels like we ought to try.  Keiko knows enough crew members to ask for and she’s very determined. We go back to the arena, we don’t want to watch Garbage. Keiko leans on a fire exit door and it opens out onto an area where the buses are parked. No one is stopping us so we go for a look around.

Keiko and Myoko are convinced that there’s nothing more to see and decide to go back to town. I promise that the next time we see each other will be in Tokyo. I find a spot to sit down, and let the sub Led Zep dirge of Alannis wash over me. I don’t understand why she’s so popular. Blur come on late. They look chunkier than they used to. Alex is playing a stand up bass. They play most of their album 13, which I’ve been listening to a lot lately. This new weariness kind of suits them. They encore with the never played live before Blue Jeans and the rousing Song 2. It gives me the required lift from my exhaustion to get out and back to town.

 

 

February.

I mentioned the new “website” I’m writing for, (people dont’ really understand the idea of an “online” only magazine yet, they keep asking when it’s coming out) in an email I sent to Thom late one night, and he replied a few days later. He said he was worrying about “finishing, touring, fax machines and parking, the usual stuff.” He also said “I could do an interview whatever that is”.

March.

Finally there is some tour news.  There are half a dozen European dates in June and July. Ed’s diary, which he’s been posting online since last summer, says they’re getting their heads above water.

March 25, wake up to find that while I was out at a gig the night before, I missed Thom and Jonny playing a DJ set of their current favourite tunes as a webcast. My connection wasn’t really up to it anyway, and they do these things unannounced… It made me jumpy to miss it. Another gig, Coldplay and Terris to write it up for the web-magazine. They sound like EMI’s wet dream of the saleable bits of Fake Plastic Trees.

May.

Thom eventually answers the email full of questions I sent, he’d lost my email the first time and I had to send the questions again. I don’t know how to edit it, don’t feel I want to alter what he’s sent, so I send it as a Q&A piece  and they run it without a great deal of fanfare. It’s the first interview he’s done this year, but not many people notice.

They are playing a UK show on July 1st, as part of the Meltdown Festival, curated by Scott Walker. He writes, “we’re a bit rough and creaky like old men.”

Caffy fixes me a press ticket for the show…

In London, I go for a look at the art at Somerset House. Then in the afternoon I sit on the South Bank, eat my sandwiches and watch the people go by. In between rain showers and cups of tea, I read the paper and use phone boxes to try to call Caffy’s mobile and set up a meeting.

About 3pm I get through and find that she’s feet away from me on the other side of the doors. She has a ticket for me. I’m looking for Keiko, but no one has seen her. I resume my vigil but I think I’m probably just trying to sublimate the tension, directing my nerves onto something else. I wander around and spot Emily with the Red Hair and various people who look kind of familiar. But I feel detached and sit on the fringes. These must be the people from the new Message Board. I’m looking for Max K but I don’t even know what he looks like.

The tickets were hard to get hold of, 500 were reserved by WASTE and some people queued up in the early hours of the morning when they were released to buy them at the venue. Other people paid five-times the face value for them on eBay. I know how lucky I am to be here at all.

At 7.30pm I realise I can go inside, there are already people in the bar. I see Tim the Tour Manager and Brian the Manager on the door. We chat and I ask how it’s going.

“It was OK until today…”

“…And then the fear set in?” I suggest.

“Something like that,” Tim says.

I douse my headache and low blood sugar with Coca Cola at the bar. I have a glance at the new T-shirts, but the picture I like is on a long sleeved brown one…

I find I’m on the fifth level of seats, this venue is more formal than I’m used to.  I’m going to have to stay in my seat. I park myself and realise that Steve Punt (the comedian and member of The Mary Whitehouse Experience) is at the other end of the row, and this instance of the interconnectedness of all things makes me laugh heartily.

Clinic are on first. They wear masks, they go dungadungadunga, but that’s not what we’re here for.

The place is still filling up with people while they’re playing, which is very distracting in a venue like this where you’re meant to be in your seat to concentrate. I’m still looking for Keiko. When Clinic have finished I go back downstairs to buy a shirt, having decided on a Khaki one with Customer Focused Music Solutions and a drawing of a hug on the front. I have another Coke and settle back into my seat as more people arrive in the row. Radiohead are on at 8.45pm, this venue is strict about timings.

Thom, in baggy shirt and black trousers appears on stage and says “Hey!” and they kick off with a new one: Optimistic. It wails and thrashes and it is ON. Awesome. Jawdropping. Apeshit. Incredible. I’m writhing in my seat.

The new stuff is intense and dark but the beats! The bass! Colin is playing a stand up bass. Phil is playing a techno programmed machine. It’s wonderful and I’m so glad I waited to hear the songs here. Beautiful. I’m shivering. It’s been a hell of a long time, but they’re back and it feels very good.

There’s one for “Tony Blair- what a shame I never got to shake hands with him”, the song sees Thom sit astride the piano stool centre stage and he gives toothy grins at appropriate moments… Dollars and Cents (“the pounds and pencesssssss” he hisses). That makes it 10 new songs, enough for a new album. Ed tells a story about watching a nature programme this morning about the mating habits of Chinchillas. The female “pisses in the face of the male” if she’s not satisfied. Apparently they’ve had this image in their heads all day.

When they’re done, I walk past Polly Harvey on my way to the Ladies. I am so shocked I think I actually said “She’s tiny!”, out loud and scared her away. I finally find Keiko, she is by the sound desk, but we are both speechless. She’s bought one of each of the new T shirts.

Out of 22 songs in the set they played 10 new ones. I remember a weird feeling about the Royal Festival Hall on the night, more usually used as a classical venue, known for its great acoustics, it was mentioned in several of the reviews – which were decidedly mixed. (The worst one is probably this one from the Guardian.) I was so overawed that I didn’t manage to write one of my own.

I remember clinging on to my seat, unable to keep still, annoyed at being unable to make a decent recording of my own, being disengaged from reality. I was there but not there. I remember sitting down in my seat and I remember the band coming onto the stage, but the gig itself, like some traumatic experience, is not clear in my head at all. I couldn’t take it in, all the new stuff, I wanted to memorise it on the spot, I wanted to be able to take it away with me, to hold on to it.

July.

The NME announces the LP will be called Kid A. It will be available in October. The gigs that have already been announced are in September, in a specially constructed tent that the band are taking out on tour with them. The track listing for the album is still to be finalised, with The NME speculating that the songs played at the Royal Festival Hall will make up LP4, the internet is rife with ideas about which tracks will be included.

The relatively new phenomenon of mp3 downloads means that bootlegs of all the songs, apart from Idioteque are available “with the right software.” Piecing together info from fan sites and Ed’s diary (on Radiohead.com), the NME claims the band have about 40 songs to chose from. They speculate that the remainder will be released as a series of 12 inch singles…

From Thom’s website postings I note names of possible forthcoming songs: There There, Wicked Child and Knives Out. These ramblings on the website have a lot to answer for. My old notebooks are variously full of:

• quotes from Guardian editorials (including whole columns by Hugo Young),
• notes on anti-globalisation
• unrecorded playlists
• meaningful paragraphs from Douglas Coupland novels, [e.g. Miss Wyoming p114: ” If he learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears a room.  …He also just wanted to see her face. This is how fans feel about stars, he thought. So this is what it’s like…”]
• notes for an unrealised short film drama about George Orwell, including long passages from Nineteen Eighty Four
• telephone numbers for film making training courses I never joined
• scored out ‘to do’ lists
• fragments of overheard conversations
• email addresses
• definitions of words like ‘lassitude’
• the seeds of melodramatic and unfinished short stories about people who run away from home
• notes for gig reviews
• evidence of an obsession with Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner
• scribbled lists of situationist book titles.
• Things written to make me look occupied while drinking tea at a media training course.

I eventually get a work experience placement at Scottish TV, writing factsheets on social issues to accompany their daytime programming. I go and see The Unbelievable Truth at King Tuts again. I go and see Rob Newman at the Edinburgh Fringe again. I go and see Drugstore, again.

August.

I luck into a job with an independent TV production company who are looking for a researcher for their video review show. My friend Nigel is one of the presenters, and another friend of mine has already been unsuccessfully interviewed for the post. After submitting some of my ideas, they decide to give me the job for a trial period.

Not one of the reviews of the summer gigs agrees on what the new songs sound like. There are several mentions of prog and jazz, but that is usually short hand for “music we don’t understand that isn’t entirely based around guitar, bass and drums.” The lyrics, often mumbled, are oblique and misquoted. I have a go deciphering some of them in my notebook.

The Tent Tour shows are advertised in the broadsheet press, and quickly start to sell out.

In an attempt to prevent the album leaking out before its formal release, there are a selection of listening parties. The Daily Telegraph documents the one for journalists, (a sign that Radiohead are now a serious, even mainstream, band).  “Yesterday I woke up soaking” the author David Cheal mishears the opening lines. “Commercially,” he concludes, “it’s probably suicidal.”

The playbacks for the fans take place the following week. Admission is granted on a one ticket per person basis. I pop into Fopp and pick one up as soon as they’re available. The playback is on September 4th at King Tuts. I go along alone and am given a specially printed “Radiohead drinks voucher.” I get a beer and find somewhere to sit. There are less than 50 people milling about, drinking and chatting. They’re just going to play the album over the venue PA, none of the fancy headphones and beanbags that were at the press event. It’s hard to listen with everyone talking. I close my eyes and try to focus. I just want to hear it. They play it twice round. I can pick out the brass on The National Anthem, which is the main difference from the live version I heard in London. It’s frustrating because of people talking. But I get a flavour of the record and I’m intrigued and excited. The texture of it is different to anything they’ve done before. There are no pop songs, but as lately I’ve been listening to plenty of Warp Records releases and other electronica on the recommendation of my brother, and the playlists that Thom has been putting up on Radiohead.com, I’m not all that shocked. Kid A isn’t that weird if you’ve spent the last 6 months with Autecre albums on your headphones.

The album cover is already on the Radiohead website. And there are some of the video blips, with very short clips of the songs, but my internet access is still too slow to play them all or absorb them coherently. I find an unused poster for the playback, with the mountains from the album cover in another record shop. I drop a pound in their collection box and take it home to put on my wall.

After the playback I email Thom. I tell him I’m impressed that he finally carried out his threat to use brass bands; that I’ve started a new job and that I want to come to some of the tent shows but don’t have tickets. They are £25 each and are selling out. This is the moment to take him up on his oft repeated offer to see me right for the guest list.

In September, I start work at the TV production company in Glasgow. I can’t get much time off, but InRock, the Japanese magazine where Atsuko is still working, arranges for me to get a ticket to one of the London shows, so I fly down. I arrange to stay with my uncle’s brother, his place is on the outskirts of the city, on the right side of London for Hackney. I go and visit him in his office in Canary Wharf, he writes obituaries for the Daily Telegraph, and pick up his spare keys. I don’t know anyone else with a spare bed in London at the moment. I only have one ticket for the show (normally I would trade my plus one for a bed). It somehow doesn’t occur to me to be sociable, I have to leave as soon as the show ends to get back to the end of the tube line. Here’s the review I wrote, which appeared translated into Japanese:

UNDER A BIG TOP, it says on the ticket, just like the circus.

Radiohead, the most contrary band in the world, are proving that they can do things their own way. They’ve taken over the park and the surrounding area,  announcements in the tube station anticipate the invasion, warning us to avoid counterfeited tickets and to behave on the way to the park, hoards of fans walk from Mile End through Tower Hamlets, some with ghetto blasters discreetly blasting out tapes of the new album , “Just follow the crazy people,” says a bemused policeman.

Inside the big blue tent, Mira Calix DJ’s some fractured beats over the babble of chat until Clinic make their appearance as support. Their weird new-skiffle rattles round the arena. They are a band who are ever-improving and their new material shows them stretching their formula to stimulate parts that most bands rarely bother with. They rock! (as Thom would say). They’re followed by more submersible beats and some choice hip hop.

Radiohead go straight into a threeway of new songs from Kid A and we don’t have time to catch our collective breath. Optimistic, and Morning Bell with their outstanding bass and drums respectively make an immediate impression, but without the horn section it is difficult for The National Anthem to be more than a shadow of the recorded version. The OK Computer songs that follow, Airbag and Karma Police become singalongs, strangely comfortable in their angular new surroundings.

Up in the roof hang six big screens like CCTV, spying from different angles, we can see Ed’s one finger piano during In Limbo; Thom’s tambourine; Jonny’s endless supply of instruments – here is a band who have adapted, who are learning, exploring.

My Iron Lung sounds as angry and loud and raw as it did 6 years ago when they first played it and I am dumbfounded that after so long Radiohead can continue to surprise me. It is followed by the almost abstract Permanent Daylight,  as if they are compensating for the lack of guitars on some of the new tracks.

The shivers down my spine hit when during How To Disappear… a giant projection of a green laser loop appears at the back of the stage, Jonny appears to be controlling its movement with sound – it twists and flips with the frequencies he produces.

Dollars and Cents, as yet to be released, starts as a muted and formless hum but builds into a remarkable rant – “…Dollars and Cents, the Pounds and the Pence, The Mark and the Yen..” – global villains in the war against the World Bank.

After the familiarity of Street Spirit and Paranoid Android (The People’s Favourites) Idioteque blows your head off… Thom is loving it, dancing and flailing and reminding me of the intensity of the earliest Radiohead gigs. He is racing against his own lyrics, which for once in the new material rise above the mix to be heard – “We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening”

Just is gleefully announced as being for ‘dirty little boys’ and sees both band and audience relishing their performance in a way that they didn’t on the OK Computer tour.

Radiohead haven’t reinvented themselves, they are just playing by their own rules, like they always wanted to. They are like people who have realised that the thing they are doing is the best thing, the only thing that they could possibly do. With this realisation they have been liberated.

To think that Radiohead are innovating by incorporating their love of Warp Records Techno and the electronics of bands like Can into their own music is to show up how stifling and unimaginative the category-crazy music scene has become in 2000. Breaking out of their prescribed roles, the members of the band are challenging themselves more than ever. Anyone that mentions ‘free jazz’ or ‘prog-rock’ or any other pejorative musical term when they hear the tracks from Kid A, is revealing their own musical ignorance. Radiohead’s reference points are literate and no more esoteric than any respectable record collection, it is their own skill at getting it wrong that has won through again. A contradictory band – they aim for a Techno track and get a catchy tune with words that stick in your head for days. They banish all logos only to replace them with their own – grimacing bears stare out from a thousand T-shirts and from the W.A.S.T.E. merchandise tent. They sing songs about the impossibility of getting your life together when clearly the idea of what Radiohead is, is stronger than it has ever been.

The encore, I Might Be Wrong sounding like a mutated Beck tune is the surprise of the night, but the feeling that they have returned at their finest is back in fullest force with Lucky and the pure simplicity of Egyptian Song which is a bliss of piano and twinkling lights. The final solemnity of Exit Music is broken by Thom stifling a giggle, he is clearly enjoying himself as much as the rest of us circus freaks.

 

I go back to Scotland and figure I can’t go to the other Tent shows. Thom replies to my email. He’s in Brussels “listening to a chorus of a hundred trucks with their horns going forming these occasionally beautiful harmonies.”

There have been a spate of protests about fuel prices springing up all over the place this week, lorry drivers and farmers have been barricading petrol stations and blockading oil facilities.  When I ask him if I can bring a friend to the shows he says, “Bring someone you want to errr… impress.”

As I don’t have anyone like that on the horizon, I invite my brother as I owe him a birthday present and JC, one of my few Glasgow friends who still goes to gigs.

I’ve stopped keeping a diary and so my impressions of these gigs weren’t captured in as much detail as previous ones. These two shows have blurred together. I was frustrated at not being able to leave work early to get across to where the tents were pitched. I remember sitting at my desk in the afternoon, knowing that the band would already be in town, that the tent would already be up and the sound check would be taking place without my being able to get there.

By the time I reached Glasgow Green and negotiated the long walk along well cordoned paths to the tent, I was only just in time to catch the start of the show. I missed the ritual of arriving early, pitching up at the front and watching the stage being prepared.

I’m not close enough to be able to see much of what’s happening on the stage. The gigs themselves are not preserved by my faulty memory. I remember being very happy that Thom had put me on the list, honoured that he’d added aftershow passes.

Of the Thursday, I have one enduring memory. My brother Jim had been interested in the intro tape that played between Clinic and Radiohead’s sets. He’d heard that Warp Records’ artist Mira Calix (aka Chantal Passamonte, wife of Sean Booth from Autechre) was due to be the DJ on this tour. When we briefly spoke in the catering tent after the show, I introduced my brother and he asked Thom if “Chantal” was here DJ-ing or if it was a tape. Not many people had heard of Mira Calix, let alone knew who performed under that name. Jim had been hanging out and working with artists affiliated to the Warp crowd in Sheffield. He’d been at parties with them, he’d projected video at a variety of gigs and he moved in the same circles. He knew the people behind Skam Records, Autechre, SND and a whole load of the electronic music that Thom was now into. My brother was unselfconsciously telling a story about working with them and Thom was hopping from foot to foot with excitement. “You know Sean!?”. My younger brother, for that moment, was infinitely cooler than Thom.

The next night, the tent contained a typically excitable Glasgow Friday night audience, revved up, loud, beery and boisterous. I was wound up, on edge, having raced to get there and meet JC. The crowd took over the feeling that night. The gig felt physical in a way the shows hadn’t done for a good long while. Thom was dancing again, bouncing about and into it. The cynicism of the OK Computer tour was gone. I was glad this part of his performance was back, but I couldn’t see much of it and I couldn’t connect. I couldn’t get the release I wanted from the show. I felt like a frustrated addict.

In the aftershow area, JC and I found a table with an array of interesting European bottled beers cooling in a tub of ice. As we were examining them to see what they were, Thom appeared and asked us to find him one with “a low number”, he wanted to get an early night. Between us we pulled all the different types of beer out of the bucket, searching each label for the alcohol percentage numbers. Once Thom was satisfied he had the weakest of the bunch he wandered off and left us with a Belgian beer called Kwak, at about 8% it was one of the higher numbers. JC was convinced it tasted of bananas, but we drank it anyway. This may go some way to explaining why I can’t remember much of the rest of the evening.

We stayed put and calmed down a bit, drinking a couple of the beers. I couldn’t find my tongue to talk to Thom. My head was crowded with requests from other people who wanted to give him messages, or ask him to get in touch. In the end I just gave him a hug when he left. I noticed a pregnant woman leaving at the same time, but didn’t put two and two together. Having never been formally introduced to her I didn’t realise then who it was…