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kottke.org posts about Radiohead

The 100 Greatest BBC Musical Performances

I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:

Blondie โ€“ Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):

Talking Heads โ€“ Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):

Daft Punk โ€“ Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):

Hole โ€“ Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):

Joy Division โ€“ Transmission (Something Else, 1979):

Radiohead - Paranoid Android (Later Archive 1997):

The Jimi Hendrix Experience โ€“ Sunshine of Your Love (Happening for Lulu, 1969):

Patti Smith Group โ€“ Because the Night (OGWT, 1978):

Arlo Parks and Phoebe Bridgers โ€“ Fake Plastic Trees (Radio 1 Piano session, 2020):

Bob Dylan โ€“ live at BBC studios (BBC One, 1965), apparently Dylan’s last acoustic concert:

Dizzy Gillespie โ€“ Chega de Saudade (Jazz 625, 1965). Don’t miss the musician intro at the ~13:15 mark:

Nirvana โ€“ Smells Like Teen Spirit (TOTP, 1991):

And Rihanna (Umbrella, 2008) and Prince (1993) and Lorde (Royals, 2013) and and and… If you’re anything like me, this list will keep you busy for a few hours.

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Radiohead x Kendrick Lamar

A NYC DJ named Dwells released this mashup of Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and Kendrick Lamar’s N95 back in March and I love it:

You can also find it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I ran across it when Radiohead shared a snippet of it on TikTok.

FWIW, Dwells seems to be the same DJ Dwells that won the NYC regional of the prestigious DMC DJ competition when he was just 13 years old. (via @jessicabrillhart)


Jonny Greenwood Pretended to Play the Keyboard When He First Joined Radiohead

This is the kookiest thing I have heard all week: Jonny Greenwood didn’t know how to play keyboard when he first joined Radiohead (when the band was still called On a Friday). Here’s what he told Terry Gross on a recent episode of Fresh Air:

Well, they had a keyboard player who โ€” Thom’s band had a keyboard player, which I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off when I was playing. And I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard that was just โ€” they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off and was just โ€” they made quite a racket, quite a noise. It was all guitars and distortion.

And so I would pretend to play for weeks on end. And Thom would say, I can’t quite hear what you’re doing. But I think you’re adding a really interesting texture because I can tell when you’re not playing. And I’m thinking, no, you can’t, because I’m really not playing. And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords. And cautiously, over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started โ€” you know, started in with Radiohead.

To be fair, Greenwood knew how to play music (the recorder and viola for a start), he just didn’t know how to play the keyboard. Fake it til you make it, I guess!


“OK Computer but Everything Is My Voice”

YouTuber shonkywonkydonkey takes songs and reworks them using only his voice โ€” all the original instruments, vocals, sound effects, etc. are replaced by his vocals. The results are waaay better than you would expect. His magnum opus is probably the entire album of Radiohead’s OK Computer (yes, all 53 minutes, 26 seconds of it):

I am also partial to Everything In Its Right Place:

Hard to Explain by The Strokes is great too:

You can check out the rest of his efforts here. (via @aaroncoleman0)


How Radiohead Wrote the Perfect Bond Theme

For his YouTube channel Listening In, Barnaby Martin analyzed the theme that Radiohead wrote for the 2015 Bond film Spectre, a song that he calls “one of the greatest Bond themes ever written”. Somewhat notoriously (at least around these parts), the producers rejected this theme in favor of a lukewarm one by Sam Smith.

After watching Martin’s video, you should watch the Spectre opening credits sequence with the Radiohead theme โ€” it’s so much better than the theme they used in the film.


Thom Yorke’s 2021 Remix of Creep

In collaboration with Jun Takahashi, Thom Yorke has released a “Very 2021” remix of his band’s iconic Creep. Slow and reverby, the singer’s perhaps-least-favorite Radiohead song takes on new life for this (second?) oddest of years. On first listen, I like but maybe don’t love this version, but some of the YT comments are worth reading:

Can’t believe Thom Yorke finally collaborated with Radiohead. Two of my favorite artists making a song together

Thom has went so far into artistic discovery he looped back on himself. It’s like post-post-irony, but musically

I can’t believe Thom made a doomer wave version of his own fucking song

Thom nailed this one, he sounds just like the originals singer!

You can find the song on a variety of platforms.


Guest Vocalist Dave Chappelle Sings Creep at Foo Fighters’ MSG Show

Well this is peak…something: last night surprise guest Dave Chappelle led fans in a singalong of Radiohead’s Creep at the Foo Fighters’ Madison Square Garden show (which you had to be vaccinated to get in to). Not much more to say about it โ€” you’re either going to watch it or not based on that info. Nature is healing?!


Thom Yorke, From The Basement

In 2005, Thom Yorke recorded a 15-minute set for the From The Basement series โ€” just him, a piano, and a microphone. He sang Videotape from In Rainbows and Last Flowers & Down Is the New Up from In Rainbows Disk 2. Lovely.

See also Radiohead, From The Basement.


Radiohead Are Uploading More Classic Live Concerts to YouTube

Back in the early days of the pandemic when people all over the world were staying inside in an attempt to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Radiohead dug into their vault and started putting classic live concerts up on YouTube in their entirety. Over the course of a few months, they shared more than a dozen concerts, including this one from 1994 and this one from 2018.

Starting last week, the band is once again uploading some more classic concerts “from a life that we all yearn to return to”, citing the science and vaccines that are getting us closer to that. The first show they uploaded (embedded above) is their 2008 show at 93 Feet East, played before just 1500 fans. That show is a bit infamous for Thom Yorke having a tough time playing Videotape (at ~47:00), which difficulty Estelle Caswell explained in her very first episode of Earworm. Anyway, they’re uploading a new show every Friday for the next few weeks โ€” the next show will be Coachella from April 2017 โ€” so check it out.


Radiohead, From The Basement

From the Basement was a series of musical performances from groups like The White Stripes, Radiohead, Gnarls Barkley, PJ Harvey, and Sonic Youth recorded in the late 2000s. Above, Radiohead performs a 55-minute set of music mainly from In Rainbows (there’s also a set from King of Limbs). You can check out more performances from the series here or in their playlist of full sets. (via open culture)


Radiohead. Ballet. Together at Last.

A pair of dancers from the Polish National Ballet perform a dance to Reckoner by Radiohead, choreographed by Robert Bondara. This is from a longer performance featuring a number of Radiohead songs. The whole performance briefly popped up online over the weekend but is gone now. The video above is the only clip I could find on YouTube โ€” hopefully the whole thing will be available again at some point.


String Quartet Performs Billie Eilish’s bad guy

Over the past two decades, musical group Vitamin String Quartet has covered the songs of dozens of musical artists and groups, from Jimi Hendrix to PJ Harvey to Eminem. In the video embedded above, they cover bad guy by Billie Eilish, apparently one of several covers that appears in Bridgerton (haven’t seen it). The group’s music has also appeared in Westworld, most notably Radiohead’s Motion Picture Soundtrack. And, I just this second made this connection: VSQ also did the Strung Out on OK Computer album, a longtime staple of my music for working.


Tonight’s Classic Radiohead Concert Is From 1994

Since early April, Radiohead has been putting video of one classic concert a week up on YouTube (playlist here). Tonight’s show, which starts streaming at 5pm ET, is from a really interesting point in the band’s evolution. In May 1994, Radiohead had released only one album (Pablo Honey) and no one knew whether they were going to be anything more than a one-hit wonder. At the time, the group was in the midst of recording The Bends and the setlist contains several songs from that album, including Fake Plastic Trees, The Bends, My Iron Lungs, and Just.

The release of The Bends and the reception to it established Radiohead as a group to be taken seriously and set the stage for OK Computer launching them into the critical stratosphere. As Jonny Greenwood later recounted: “That’s when it started to feel like we made the right choice about being a band”. Really excited to watch this one.


Radiohead’s Rejected Spectre Theme Song Played Over the Film’s Opening Credits

My kids have been making their way through the Daniel Craig Bond movies so when I mentioned that our local theater was planning on showing drive-in movies on a screen in the parking lot, my son said, “ooh, maybe they’ll show the new Bond movie”.1 Then they began to speculate who would be singing the theme song in the new movie, and I piped in: it’s Billie Eilish and they’ve already released the song.

So we listened to it and, since they had just watched Spectre, I also played Radiohead’s rejected theme song, which I obviously prefer to Sam Smith’s bland Oscar-winning song. This morning, while trying to figure out who sang the official one, I ran across the video of Radiohead’s version played over the opening credits (embedded above). Gah, so much better. What a missed opportunity.

P.S. Funny story from my research: not only was Smith unaware that Radiohead had been asked to do the theme song before them, they were also apparently unaware of who Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke even was.

  1. We’ll have to wait until at least November for that, although I suspect that as the summer goes on and people don’t go back to movie theaters even if they reopen, the studios will have to start releasing films straight to digital/Blu-ray. The can’t delay everything for a year or two.โ†ฉ


Radiohead Putting Classic Live Shows on YouTube During the Pandemic

Starting today and continuing weekly, a little musical band you have never heard of called Radiohead is putting classic live shows up on YouTube. First up and embedded above is a concert they performed in Ireland in October 2000. Here’s the setlist in case you want to skip around a little. The band says they’ll be putting shows up every week until “either the restrictions resulting from [the] current situation are eased, or we run out of shows”.

I went to a show of theirs in Oxford in 2001 and I would love to see it again. They played Creep for the first time in ages after an equipment failure 86’d whatever song they were supposed to play โ€” and the crowd went fricking bananas.

Update: You can find all of the live shows they’ve uploaded in the At Home with Radiohead playlist. They include Bonnaroo 2006, Buenos Aires 2009, Berlin 2016, and Coachella 2012. Tomorrow’s show will be Summer Sonic 2016 (streaming begins at 9am ET).


The Radiohead Public Library

Radiohead

Let’s be generous and say that over the years, Radiohead’s web presence has been eccentric. Disorganized and scattershot maybe. In order to remedy that, the band have launched a massive online archive of stuff called the Radiohead Public Library. Stereogum has a nice rundown, including some rare stuff the band has uploaded to streaming services to celebrate the library’s opening.

Dubbed the Radiohead Public Library, the band’s official website Radiohead.com now contains comprehensive materials organized by album, starting with the A Moon Shaped Pool era and working backward. Among the treasure in this chest: high-quality concert and TV footage, B-sides and rarities, music videos, artwork, out-of-print merchandise, and playlists the band members shared during their recording sessions.

If you click on the ID card in the site’s nav bar, you can even download and print out your very own Radiohead Public Library card. It is still Radiohead though, so the library isn’t super easy to navigate โ€” there’s a lot of clicking random images to see what’s hiding behind them โ€” but it’s a start!


Radiohead’s Entire Discography Now Available on YouTube

Radiohead have uploaded all of their albums to YouTube where they are available for all of your streaming needs.

The move comes after Billboard announced that album charts will reflect YouTube views.

Over at Open Culture, Josh Jones notes that the band has always been willing to experiment with technology and distribution, as with the pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows:

As Yorke had predicted, Napster encouraged “enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do.” The industry began to collapse. File sharing may have been utopian for listeners, but it was potentially ruinous for artists. 2007’s In Rainbows showed a way forward.

Released on a pay-what-you-want model, with a “digital tip jar,” the release was met with bemusement and contempt. (The Manic Street Preacher’s Nicky Wire wrote that it “demeans music.”) Two years later, the jury was still out on the “Radiohead experiment.”

(via open culture)


Mashup of Radiohead’s Creep & All I Want for Christmas is You

This is a little slice of genius right here, a mashup of Radiohead’s Creep and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You. It takes a little bit to get going but I LOL’d when the vocals finally came in.

I have to say though that it’s not quite as entertaining as this All I Want for Christmas / This Is America combo, which might actually be the best thing on the internet.


Measuring the Popularity of the Falsetto in Pop Music

In today’s episode of Earworm, Estelle Caswell teams up with Matt Daniels from The Pudding to track the popularity of the falsetto in pop music from the 50s to today. Caswell has a hunch that falsetto has been getting more popular, so they end up getting a bunch of data from Pandora that tracks the amount of falsetto used in a song and the vocal register of the singer, which they compared against Billboard Top 100 songs. The verdict? You’ll have to watch the video, but just remember all of those soul songs in the 70s and heavy metal & pop songs in the 80s…

Caswell compiled a Spotify playlist of songs with prominent use of falsetto:

In the recommended reading list, I found this Frieze piece from 2010, The Evolution of the Male Falsetto.

By reputation the falsetto voice is both angelic and diabolical, depending on who is singing, and to what purpose. Jรณnsi Birgisson, vocalist with Sigur Rรณs, is revered for his keening falsetto, the most ethereal element inside a great wash of sound. Birgisson is openly gay; on the other hand I still remember, at age 13, hearing Robert Plant singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog’ (1971) for the first time, and how its devilish heterosexual lust scared me to bits. Plant is a truly outrageous singer, possessing a voice so alight with desire that he sounds in imminent danger of burning up. He is predatory but vulnerable, a bare-chested rock god who sings from a place of sexual rapture that cancels out the boundaries of his own body. He got there through intensive study of the blues: as with most tropes in popular music, the falsetto is in continual transit between black and white performers and their audiences.

But back to the video, I LOL’d at ~3:30 when they went through the raw data of falsettos, which goes from George P. Watson in 1911 (a yodeler) to contemporary Radiohead. I am a big Radiohead fan. And my kids? Not so much. In fact, my son has been trying to convince me for the past year that Thom Yorke doesn’t so much sing as yodel. I’ve explained falsettos to him but I will invariably hear “ugh, yodeling!” from the backseat when Radiohead comes on in the car. This Watson/Radiohead connection though…maybe he has a point? Maybe I just like yodeling?


Rather Than Pay Ransom, Radiohead Puts Stolen Music Up for Sale

OK Minidisc

According to Jonny Greenwood, someone stole Thom Yorke’s “minidisk archive” recorded around the time of OK Computer, the album that propelled Radiohead into the stratosphere. The thieves demanded a ransom of $150K, the band didn’t pay up, and the audio leaked onto the web. Instead of fighting the pirates and leakers, the band put all 18 hours of the archive up for sale on Bandcamp with the proceeds going to Extinction Rebellion.

as it’s out there
it may as well be out there
until we all get bored
and move on

Here is a detailed FAQ and timestamps for all the songs & snippets in the archive โ€” “holy grail” tracks are marked with a star. On Bandcamp, Tanner Gallella describes the release:

Rarely is the artist’s process presented in such an unfiltered, uncompromising way โ€” especially at this strata of musicianship. Polished mixes are juxtaposed against takes recorded in bathrooms; landmark tracks against distorted noise. A unique and delightful insight into a band in the middle of writing their masterwork.

My Radiohead fandom stops just short of listening to 18 hours of Thom Yorke recording music in bathrooms, but this is certainly a trove for superfans and those interested in the musical process of one of the world’s biggest bands.


Blue Planet II

Having achieved spectacular success with Planet Earth II, the BBC and David Attenborough are revisiting another of their previous nature documentaries, the 2001 series The Blue Planet, “a comprehensive series on the natural history of the world’s oceans”. Blue Planet II, Attenborough promises, will use new technology and our increased understanding of the natural world to great advantage in telling the story of the animal and plant life โ€” dancing yeti crabs! dolphins spitting to trick prey! TurtleCam! โ€” that dwells in our oceans.

The score is by Hans Zimmer, who also collaborated with Radiohead to rework an old song of theirs for the series. Bloom, off of King of Limbs, was originally inspired by the first Blue Planet series, so it’s come full circle with its inclusion in the new series. Vox examines how Zimmer and the band adapted the song:

If you listen closely enough to Radiohead and Hans Zimmer’s rework of “Bloom” for Blue Planet II, you can hear a really fascinating orchestral trick at work. They call it the “tidal orchestra” โ€” it’s a musical effect created by instructing each player to play their notes only if the person next to them isn’t playing. The result is a randomly swelling and fading musical bed for the entire series that captures the feeling of ocean waves. It’s a captivating way to score a soundtrack for the ocean โ€” but it also fits in with a long history of capturing randomness in music composition.

The “tidal orchestra” technique was inspired by pointillism and randomness: using small individual sounds to build a soundscape rather than starting with a specific tune. For some reason, it also reminds me of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 797. (No idea what inspired Yorke’s pants though. MC Hammer? Wow.)

Planet Earth II was probably my favorite movie/show/media from the past year, so I am really looking forward to Blue Planet II.


Radiohead: Lift

What’s that? You want to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke riding in an elevator accompanied by a revolving cast of odd people getting on and off at even stranger floors of an apartment building? Ok, here you go. The song is fan-favorite Lift, which was first recorded in the late 90s but not officially released until this year on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. The video contains a few Easter eggs for hardcode fans, including some cameos:

Perhaps some of Radiohead’s notoriously devoted fans will recognize Thom Yorke’s girlfriend, Italian actress Dajana Roncione, in the opening of the band’s new music video for “Lift.” Accompanying her, and pushing all of the buttons on the lift, is Yorke’s daughter Agnes.


The Hidden Rhythm in Radiohead’s “Videotape”

In her first installment for a new Vox series called Earworm, Estelle Caswell takes a look at some weird musical stuff happening with Videotape, a song off of Radiohead’s In Rainbows. According to a longer video by Warren Lain referenced by Caswell, Radiohead has hidden a syncopated rhythm in the song that even the band members have trouble keeping straight when they’re trying to play it. Videotape is my favorite song on that album…maybe this is a reason why?

Also, don’t miss the short explanation of how “rhythmic sound synchronizes the brain waves of groups of people”. !!!


Radiohead hid an old school computer program on their new album

As if you already didn’t know that Radiohead are a bunch of big ole nerds, there’s an easter egg on a cassette tape included in the Boxed Edition of OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. At the end of the tape recording, there are some blips and bleeps, which Maciej Korsan interpreted correctly as a program for an old computer system.

As a kid I was an owner of the Commodore 64. I remember that all my friends already were the PC users but my parents declined to buy me one for a long time. So I sticked to my old the tape-based computer listening to it’s blips and waiting for the game to load. Over 20 years later I was sitting in front of my MacBook, listening to the digitalised version of the tape my favourite band just released and then I’ve heard a familiar sound… ‘This must be an old computer program, probably C64 one’ I thought.

The program turned out to run on the ZX Spectrum, a computer the lads would likely have encountered as kids.


Three synched performances of Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead

Radiohead has performed Fake Plastic Trees at the Glastonbury Festival three times: in 1997, 2003, and 2017. This video synchs all three performances into one, with the audio switching between the three. (via web curios)


Old new Radiohead: I Promise

OK Computer is 20 years old and to mark the occasion, Radiohead is reissuing the album with three previously unreleased songs from that era (as well as eight B-sides). The album is now available for pre-order and will be released on June 23, but one of the unreleased songs, I Promise, is out now on Spotify, YouTube (see above) and elsewhere.


Using data science to find the most depressing Radiohead songs

Saddest Radiohead Song

Radiohead is data scientist Charlie Thompson’s favorite band and he recently employed his professional skills to determine Radiohead’s most depressing songs and albums. Using data from Spotify and Genius, he analyzed and weighted how sad each song sounded musically and the sadness of the lyrics.

While valence serves as an out-of-the box measure of musical sentiment, the emotions behind song lyrics are much more elusive. To find the most depressing song, I used sentiment analysis to pick out words associated with sadness. Specifically, I used tidytext and the NRC lexicon, based on a crowd-sourced project by the National Research Council Canada. This lexicon contains an array of emotions (sadness, joy, anger, surprise, etc.) and the words determined to most likely elicit them.

Unsurprisingly, True Love Waits is Radiohead’s saddest song and Moon Shaped Pool its saddest album. You can play with this interactive chart to see all of the results. I thought Videotape would score lower on the Gloom Index…along with True Love Waits, it’s my go-to Radiohead song for wallowing in the darkness of my life. (via @RichardWestenra)


Brahms vs. Radiohead

Steve Hackman, aka Stereo Hideout, composes, arranges, and conducts mashups of orchestral music and pop music. Not just mixes on Soundcloud, mind you, but entirely new compositions that are played by actual orchestras. The video embedded above is Brahms Symphony No. 1 mixed with Radiohead’s OK Computer but he’s also done a few others that are available on YouTube: Copland vs Bon Iver, Beethoven vs Coldplay, and Bartok vs Bjork. Hackman’s next project in this vein? Tchaikovsky vs Drake, which he’s premiering with the Pittsburgh Symphony in March. (thx, spencer)

Update: Here’s the Tchaikovsky vs Drake performance:


The western rock covers in Westworld

I haven’t quite figured out if HBO’s new show Westworld is any good or not,1 but I’m sticking with it at least through the first season. One of the fun things about the show โ€” ok, maybe the only fun thing, Westworld takes itself pretty seriously โ€” is the western-style covers of rock songs by the likes of Radiohead, Soundgarden, and The Rolling Stones. There’s a mini playlist of the main theme and some of the covers โ€” Paint It Black by the Stones and Radiohead’s No Surprises โ€” up on Spotify.

Oh, and here’s one of the most popular fan theories out there: the multiple timeline theory.

Update: The entire “two-disk” album from season 1 is up, which includes original music as well as covers like Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film). LOL.

  1. The show is giving off some serious Lost vibes. Lost, if you’ll remember, started off very strong and then the people running the show got lost themselves and had no idea how to keep the whole thing from being an incoherent wreck. Thinking they’d turn it around somehow, I watched until the very end, and, disgusted by the ending, have never thought about it again, except in a context like this. Westworld, don’t play me like that!โ†ฉ


Radiohead plays Let Down for the first time in 10 years

Until their first show at Madison Square Garden in NYC last week, Radiohead hadn’t played Let Down off of OK Computer in concert since 2006. I was lucky enough to be in attendance and some collective shit was lost over this, I tell you what. They’ve since played it at all three of their subsequent shows. (They’ve also played Creep twice in the past week, which is also rare.)

Here’s the full set list from that night, which is mainly just for me in 28 years when this is the last remaining page on the internet with this info.

Burn the Witch
Daydreaming
Decks Dark
Desert Island Disk
Ful Stop
Lotus Flower
The National Anthem
15 Step
No Surprises
Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief
Separator
Planet Telex
The Numbers
2 + 2 = 5
Everything in Its Right Place
Myxomatosis
Idioteque

Encore:
Let Down
Present Tense
Paranoid Android
Nude
Bodysnatchers

Encore 2:
Bloom
Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Update: Here’s a video from when they played it in 2006 in Wolverhampton:

(via @jamsandwich)