Drill

terrible name

In February 1992 John Harris, Melody Maker's young correspondent in Oxford, went to the Venue on the Cowley Road, a former Co-op dining hall, to see the Candyskins. The support band got the review, and it had two words for their name: “Terrible name.” The band, newly signed to EMI, took the advice. In Melody Maker that May the old name was the worst in the world, with a swear word in the middle, and the new one came from “Radio Head”, a song on Talking Heads' True Stories. Jonny Greenwood told Harris it suited them because he hated the idea that nobody could get away from radio waves.

Oxford found out from an advert. The band paid £30 for a box in Curfew, the free local monthly that had given them their first reviews, and filled it with a notice: On a Friday have changed their name to Radiohead, first EP out in April. It came out in May.

We should have hired one of those skywriting planes instead.

colin greenwood · bbc news, 13 march 2016

Colin reckoned the advert reached the 50 people who could be bothered to follow them.

the courtyard

Drill was made where the tape that got them signed had been made, at Courtyard Studio in Sutton Courtenay, near Abingdon. Chris Hufford owned it with Bryce Edge, and the two of them were now the band's managers. Hufford produced and engineered the EP, and Timm Baldwin mixed it.

Half of it was new. “Prove Yourself” and “Stupid Car” were recorded for the record; “You” and “Thinking About You” came off the five-song cassette made in the same room the previous October and sold at the Manic Hedgehog shop in Oxford. Hufford said later that producing his own band had been a mistake.

A huge conflict of interests. I think Thom was very unsure of my involvement.

chris hufford · mojo, 1997

He had been on the other side of it as a musician, when one of his own band's managers had produced them, and he admitted he could be overbearing in the studio. Otherwise, he said, it was a treat, and they fired the songs out.

radio.doc.7

Hall or Nothing, Philip Hall's press office in west London, sent out the news on 22 April: one typed page announcing the EP for 5 May, 19 dates of a first tour from Keele University to the Adelphi in Hull, and work already under way with Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie. It called Radiohead noisy guitar popsters from Oxford. The file name is typed at the foot: radio.doc.7.

The promotional postcard went further. The front is the sleeve in grey, and the back quotes Melody Maker: “Radiohead swing between uneasy calm and crazed desperation.” Harris had written that sentence in February about On a Friday, and the new name had been dropped into it. By the time the postcard was printed the tour ran on to the Cotton Club in Tring on 11 June.

out on parlophone

Parlophone released Drill on CD, 12-inch and cassette, 3,000 copies of each. The band were on the road with it, supporting Catherine Wheel and Sultans of Ping FC, whose audience, Thom Yorke told the NME, probably expected a joke band.

Gary Davies played “Prove Yourself” on Radio 1, the first time the band were heard on national radio in Britain. Phil Selway remembered hearing it in the van on a Sunday, on tour, picked as Davies's record of the weekend, and the feeling that things were suddenly going right. A DJ on hospital radio in Newcastle was playing it too.

I didn't know anything about the band - it just sounded great.

gary davies · q, april 2008

It reached number 101. The band later said Drill had more radio play than “Creep” got that autumn, which is why they thought “Creep” was doing badly.

the notices

The Melody Maker singles reviewer of 9 May had lost the press release that came with the white label, and could not say whether Radiohead was the band, the EP or the record company. Whichever it was, it sounded like Hüsker Dü with gleeful harmonies, and that was a good thing. In the same issue Harris, meeting the band at the Jericho Tavern, found the EP “deliciously crazed”, heard the Pixies and Throwing Muses in it, and could not see Steve Wright playing it on daytime radio. He took “Prove Yourself” for a song about the urge to end it all, and “Stupid Car” for a love song.

Simon Williams in the NME picked “Prove Yourself” as the best of the four, for the way it meanders and then erupts. Curfew, writing about the band again the next February, thought Drill good but without a stand-out track. That was the fair verdict, and it still is. Three of the four were better on Pablo Honey, and the fourth, “Stupid Car”, never got another go.

handle, wheel, chuck, bit

Icon, the design company that went on to do Pablo Honey, made the sleeve. It is a hand drill drawn as a diagram, each part named in small type with an arrow: handle, turn to operate, wheel, chuck, bit. The band's name has an arrow too, labelled “logo”, and its “r” sits in a black circle. The wheel is a pocket-watch movement, and behind it are splashes of yellow and green, an old engraving printed in blue and red, “4 track e.p.” in a blue box and a stamped number running off the bottom edge.

The sleeve card in the 2009 Collector's Edition box reprints it in blues. The version XL put on the streaming services in 2020 is cropped closer and brighter.

thirty pounds, then two hundred and fifty

By 1996 Drill was deleted. That November Record Collector valued the CD at £30, the top price in its Radiohead guide, shared only with the two On a Friday tapes, and in May 2004 its new discography put the same CD at £250. Four Tet said in 2015 that he had followed the band from this record.

EMI put it at the head of the second disc of the Pablo Honey Collector's Edition in 2009, with all four tracks marked as demos. Pitchfork heard three rudimentary versions of album songs, and in “Stupid Car” the first of Yorke's songs about cars. On 20 January 2020 it went on the streaming services, the day the band opened the Radiohead Public Library.

Capitol reissued it on 180-gram 12-inch in April 2009, with a sticker on the shrink-wrap that said “On Vinyl For The First Time”. Parlophone had pressed 3,000 of them in 1992.