Rock and Hard Places (42 page)

The next day, still feeling like someone’s set me on fire and beaten it out with a railway sleeper, I sit in the interview suite at the hotel while representatives of various fashion, music and style magazines file in at half-hourly intervals to ask Shellie and Karen the following questions:
What was it like working with Dave Stewart? What’s it like being sisters in a band? Is the fact that their father is Brian Poole, once of The Tremeloes, in any way significant? Who is Alisha? What do they think of Japan? So, at half-hourly intervals, Karen and Shellie say “Great,” “Fine, no problem,” “No,” “Sort of an alter ego,” and “Not as weird as East 17 told us it would be.”

I interview one Tokyo journalist about the interview she’s just done. I ask her if she’s aware that Japan is talked about by third-division English pop groups as a veritable rock’n’roll Shangri-La, that the general perception is that Japanese pop consumers are at once the most enthusiastic and ignorant on earth, happy to scream at, spend money on, and sleep with, any clump of British clowns who can hold a guitar the right way up.

“People do think we’re easy,” she agrees. “But everyone comes here now, and we can afford to be picky.”

But they’re not. “Big in Japan” is the defiant boast of every bunch of tuneless timewasters who couldn’t get arrested in Britain if they ran through Downing Street naked but for an Irish tricolour and a grenade-launcher, and it’s usually true. I know of musicians back in London who couldn’t give away their records at home if they came with a £20 note stapled to the sleeve, but who’ve come to Japan and had to be smuggled in and out of the back entrances of hotels for their own safety.

“We just like music,” she smiles. “And maybe we are not so cynical as you.”

And maybe she’s right. That evening, we are mini-bussed across town to Harajuku, the Tokyo suburb famous as the spot where Japan’s somewhat demented yet oddly demure fascination with western pop culture is given its fullest expression. It’s just like Camden Market, except that everything’s three times as expensive and there are marginally fewer Japanese people here. Karen and Shellie pose for photographs in a fashion boutique where, I cannot help but notice, one set of shelves is decorated in clippings from old issues of
Melody Maker
. Taking this homage to a frankly disturbing level of fastidiousness, each shelf is upholstered with cuttings by a different writer. Mine is the fourth shelf from the top. I hope they’re not arranged in descending order of preference. The bloke who’s got the shelf above mine is a sub-literate plodder with the aesthetic sensibilities of a chair leg.

AT THE HOTEL that evening, there’s a small cluster of giggling teenagers waiting in the lobby with autograph books, photos of Alisha’s Attic and pens. They squeal delightedly while Shellie and Karen sign their stuff, though I can see that Shellie and Karen are thinking what I’m thinking: nobody in Japan has heard of them—who are these people?

“Yeah,” says a friend of mine, back in London, whose own band had been through the same thing a few years previously. “The record company pays them.”

 

 

 

L
IKE MOST PEOPLE—AND even, if they’re honest, most rock critics—I arrived in my thirties aware of, and not much bothered about, the truth that my musical tastes were unlikely to expand much further, if at all. I knew what I liked—and, by and large, liked what I knew. It remains, I suppose, theoretically possible that some or other brainstorm will bestir a hitherto utterly dormant affection for techno or reggae, but it also remains theoretically possible, and about as plausible, that a long and complex sequence of early deaths and tenuous genealogical links will lead to me being crowned King of Tonga. And if that happens, I hereby promise that my first decree will order the adoption, as national anthem, of a Derrick May remix of Bob Marley’s “Jammin.’”

The older I’ve gotten, the more likely it has become that my reply to the question of what kind of music I like will be: “Both kinds: country and western.” The longer the road rolls beneath whichever conveyance is bearing me, the more my ears hunger for the truth—as Harlan Howard had it—set to three chords, with tears-in-the-beer vocals, crying violins, twanging guitars, lonesome lap steels, duelling banjos and the sort of piano you can imagine being played by some gold-hearted hussy in crinolines and fishnets while Gary Cooper and John Wayne hurl barstools at each other.

But I still listen to Radiohead, arguably the least country and western white band in the world. They seem one of few bands left even interested in trying
to attempt something as ambitious as a soundtrack for the times—and one of very, very few bands left capable of creating such a thing. The album they’d just made when I climbed aboard their bus for this trip in 2003,
Hail to the Thief
, was—and is—a masterpiece, a superb articulation of the angst felt not just by Radiohead, but by the people rather like Radiohead who constitute much of Radiohead’s audience: that vast global constituency of youngish, fundamentally decent, middle-class liberals born into a fortunate life which presents no real impediment to their happiness bar the nagging suspicion that their comfort is related to the fact that someone else, somewhere else, is being paid ten cents a week to sew stripes onto their training shoes.

For such a crowd, Radiohead’s singer and principal songwriter, Thom Yorke, is the ideal everyman: an aggrieved, affronted figure whose rage was borne of impotence, who was nevertheless willing to rebel against whatever you’d got, but didn’t quite know where to start.

“WELCOME ABOARD,” SAYS Thom Yorke. “Coffee? Instant okay? I think there’s a cafetierre here somewhere, but I’m not sure where . . .”

Thom rummages noisily in a drawer in the kitchen at the back of the bus. Radiohead have just taken delivery of this imposing, midnight-black vehicle, which will be their home for a couple of weeks of European festivals. Today, we’re doing London to Paris with a complement of Thom, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Radiohead tour manager Hilda, a crew member whose name I don’t catch and me (I’m assuming there’s a driver, as well). We’re meeting the rest of the band in Paris, at the howlingly fashionable Costes Hotel.

“Have you stayed there before?” asks Thom, as he continues his search.

I haven’t. What’s it like?

“Unbelievably expensive, full of the most awful wankers, and decorated like a brothel.”

You’ve stayed there before, then.

“We always stay there. It’s brilliant.”

The downstairs area of the bus, where we are now, contains the
kitchen, the toilet, four blue and gold leather seats around a table, a sofa-cum-bed, a vast television hooked up to a PlayStation and DVD player and a stereo. Upstairs there’s a lounge area, eight bunks, two more vast televisions, at least one more stereo, and, up the back, a separate room with a double bed and a mirrored wall.

“Maybe I should take that,” says Ed. “I have trouble fitting into bunks.”

This seems fair enough. Ed is six and a half feet tall, and tour bus bunks are, generally, less roomy than jockeys’ coffins.

“Exactly,” he nods. “Made for shortarses.”

“Hmmm?” says Thom. Thom, even when he stands up following his efforts to locate the cafetierre is, it might charitably be said, bunk-sized. He regards Ed quizzically, something like a jaguar deciding whether or not to pounce on a faintly annoying rodent.

“I mean,” giggles Ed, “for completely normally proportioned people much like you, Thom. As opposed to grotesque freaks like myself.”

Good catch, Ed.

 

IF THOM YORKE the human being was anything like the Thom Yorke of received wisdom, his reaction to Ed’s mild dig might have encompassed any or all of the following: i) Ed’s instant dismissal from Radiohead; ii) the total destruction of every inanimate object on both decks of the bus; iii) Thom’s relocation to a tin shack deep in the woods, there to perch atop a stack of tinned food and argue with the clamorous voices in his head. However, today as in several meetings going back over eight years, Thom Yorke the human being and the Thom Yorke of received wisdom seem nothing more than a coincidence of names. Thom is unstoppably talkative, laughs frequently and is only reluctant to submit to a proper interview because he and Nigel and I get too absorbed too early in a discussion of the world at large. Thom is vexed about Iraq, especially his own early views on the conflict. “I bought it,” he admits, glumly. “I thought, okay, if he has these weapons, they should be taken off him. You’d think I’d know better.”

This is a good place to start. Radiohead’s current album,
Hail to the Thief
, is a distillation of the static that was buzzing in Thom’s head at the end of 2001. If all you’d heard of it was the title, you’d be forgiven
for expecting an explicitly political tract. As is always the case with Radiohead at their best, though, it is and it isn’t.

“It’s not an America-baiting thing,” says Thom, as we watch Kent go by. “That’s not the point at all. And the title keeps coming from different places, anyway. First, it’s about that coup there, but look, there’s another one here, and another one over there. And you could also think of it in terms of access and influence. It sets me off in different directions depending on what day of the week it is.”

Hail to the Thief
has an alternative name,
The Gloaming
. This is more in keeping with the obtuse titles that have graced previous Radiohead albums: 1993’s
Pablo Honey
(a reference to a sketch by phone pranksters The Jerky Boys), 1995’s
The Bends
(what Radiohead felt about their sudden rise to prominence in the early 90s), 1997’s
OK Computer
(an approval of, or submission to, the technology that runs our lives), 2000’s
Kid A
(possibly borrowed from Carl Steadman’s novel
Kid A in Alphabet Land
), 2001’s
Amnesiac
(answers on a postcard).

“I was unhappy about the potential consequences of calling it
Hail to the Thief
. Personal attacks, threats . . . people can get quite upset. So I wasn’t wild about that. But it’s more jubilant, and deranged, and doublespeak, like ‘collateral damage,’ or ‘regime change.’
The Gloaming
was much too . . . aaah AAAAHH ahh.”

Thom delivers these last three syllables in a passable impression of a church organ.

“And that wasn’t the point either. The record definitely enters a dark place in the middle, but it isn’t the whole thing. When we were doing
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
, I had this thing that we were entering a very dark phase. I mean, you know me, I’ve made a career out of saying things like that. But it did strike me that things were going to kick off one way or another, and at the same time there was a rise, politically anyway, in ignorance and stupidity, and all that lovely euphoria after the Berlin Wall came down had disintegrated into this global political and economic anarchy.”

I’d wondered about the alternative titles also given to the songs on
Hail to the Thief
. They suggest a much gloomier record—the
Hail to the Thief
tracks “Backdrifts,” “Go to Sleep,” Where I End and You Begin,” “We Suck Young Blood,” “Scatterbrain” and “A Punchup at
a Wedding” become, respectively, “Honeymoon Is Over,” “Little Man Being Erased,” “The Sky Is Falling In,” “Your Time Is Up,” “As Dead as Leaves” and “No No No No No No No.”

“I like that one. That would have been a good name for the record. Here it is, the new album by—guess who—Radiohead, and it’s called
No No No No No No No
.”

Little Man Being Erased
would have been a very Radiohead title, as well.

“That,” beams Thom, “is my absolute favourite.”

 

THE SLEEVE ARTWORK of
Hail to the Thief
, created by Stanley Donwood, is a series of maps of major cities in which the streets have been replaced by coloured blocks, emblazoned with malevolent phrases. London, for example, has districts renamed Spiked, Take You Down, Quango, Skinned Alive and Shareholders. It could be an aerial view of the London of George Orwell’s
1984
: the dystopian capital of Airstrip One, with Thom Yorke, his voice a lonely cry of aggrieved, affronted humanity, in the role of Winston Smith. “2+2=5,” the title of the opening track on
Hail to the Thief
, was the formula with which Orwell’s party invigilator O’Brien demonstrated to Winston his utter powerlessness before the malign forces that ran his life.

Now, stop me if I’m trying too hard, but . . .

“I did re-read
1984
a while before we did this record,” confirms Thom, “but I’d forgotten where 2+2=5 came from. The other bit in the book I thought about a lot was the fake war—we’re at war with Eurasia, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”

Did that hopelessness of Winston’s position strike a chord with you? There’s a line in “Scatterbrain”—“A moving target on a firing range”—that seems to sum up your view of most of humanity.