Pablo Honey

a deal and a flop

On a Friday signed a six-album deal with EMI at the end of 1991 and came out of it as Radiohead, on Parlophone. Their first release for EMI, the Drill EP in May 1992, was made with Chris Hufford, one of their two managers, at his Courtyard Studio in Oxfordshire. It reached number 101, and the first pressing ran to 3,000 copies of each format.

For the album Hufford and Bryce Edge wanted someone from outside. Steve Albini, who had made the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, was talked about, but he had not yet worked with a major act and EMI thought it too risky. The job went to Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, two American producers who had worked with the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr and happened to be in England looking for work. Kolderie came away from the first meeting more impressed by the managers than by the band.

chipping norton

EMI first sent the band to Chipping Norton Recording Studios, a residential studio in the Cotswolds, to make a single with Slade and Kolderie. The label wanted “Inside My Head” or “Lurgee”, and neither came right. What did come out of the room was “Creep”, played between takes, and once EMI had heard it the two Americans were kept on for the album.

The label's own biography of the band, sent out in the spring of 1993, says the album was made in three weeks in July 1992. Kolderie, in Mac Randall's book Exit Music, put the cost at more than £100,000, and said it was not an easy three weeks: the band knew little about studios and found it hard to call a track finished. The mixes, they insisted, had to have no reverb.

It was their first record and they wanted to be the Beatles.

paul kolderie · mojo, july 1997

Jonny Greenwood played the whole album, Guitar.com says, on one guitar: a tobacco-burst 1990 Telecaster Plus bought out of the EMI advance. It was stolen in Denver in 1995, along with Thom Yorke's Gibson SG and Ed O'Brien's Rickenbacker, which still had Pablo Honey stickers on it.

The tapes went back across the Atlantic to Fort Apache in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Slade and Kolderie mixed them, and Chris Blair mastered the record at Abbey Road.

the old songs

Five of the twelve songs were older than the record deal. “Creep” went back to Yorke's years at Exeter. “You”, “I Can't” and “Thinking About You” were on the Manic Hedgehog tape of October 1991, and “Stop Whispering” on an On a Friday demo from earlier that year. “You”, “Thinking About You” and “Prove Yourself” had already been on Drill and were recorded a second time. O'Brien later called the album “a collection of our greatest hits as an unsigned band”, and did not mean it kindly.

Two tracks never went near Chipping Norton. The booklet marks “I Can't” and “Lurgee” with an asterisk, produced and engineered by Hufford and recorded at Courtyard. The band had not liked the “Lurgee” they made with Slade and Kolderie, so they kept the one they already had, which had been on the back of “Creep” the previous September.

pablo, honey

The Jerky Boys were two friends from Queens, Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, who made prank calls and taped them, and bootleg copies of the tapes were doing the rounds. Rolling Stone says it was Chapterhouse, another Thames Valley band, who passed one to Radiohead. The line the band took comes from a call in which one of the two, playing a muddled mother, moans “Pablo, honey? Please come to Florida.” Yorke said it suited a band of mothers' boys, and the sample turns up in “How Do You?”.

But the notion of phoning up people cold is so Nineties.

thom yorke · select, may 1993

a baby in a flower

Parlophone's sleeve was put together by Icon, a design company, from paintings by Lisa Bunny Jones and photographs by Tom Sheehan. On the front a black-and-white baby looks out from the middle of a yellow flower, ringed by eight sweets rolled in hundreds and thousands. The band's name runs across the top in a ragged typeface, its “r” in a black circle and filled with the same sprinkles. On the back the titles sit under a night street of neon marquees, one of them for Earl Carroll's Sketch Book, half blacked out with paint.

The eight-page booklet has the five of them washed blue against a tiled wall, the band on a bare painted floor with their gear, and a toy crocodile squaring up to a toy iguana on a leaf. The credits call the guitarist Jon Greenwood and the singer Thom E. Yorke, and the last line gives an address to write to: P.O. Box 322, Oxford.

Yorke did not like it. He told The Art Newspaper in 2025 that the label had taken a generic approach to the art, and before the next album he rang Stanley Donwood, whom he knew from Exeter. The two of them have made the band's sleeves ever since. The band had already had their own go at the label's look: the first mailing to fans offered a T-shirt of the Radiohead logo crossed with Parlophone's, for £8 including post, with a pen drawing of it captioned “brilliant illustration of T-shirt”. The same logo, with trade muck where the trade mark should be, is in the Radiohead Public Library today.

out on parlophone, then capitol

The mailing list heard first, in a typed sheet from the new P.O. box that listed the dates of the first headline tour and all twelve songs. Parlophone released Pablo Honey on 22 February 1993 on LP, cassette and CD, three weeks after “Anyone Can Play Guitar” had given the band their first Top 40 single. They played Sheffield University that night and a Black Session for France Inter in Paris the next day.

It went into the chart at number 25 on 6 March. EMI's count in the spring was about 20,000 copies. The next single, “Pop Is Dead” in May, was a new song and not on the album, and the band's second newsletter told fans to take it as a taste of things to come. It reached 42.

Capitol released the album in America on 20 April, three days after “Creep” went into Billboard's Modern Rock chart, and there the record had a hit to carry it. It entered the Billboard 200 on 29 May and peaked at 32 on 7 August. The Los Angeles Times put its American sales at 400,000 by the middle of August, and in October Melody Maker reported it gold. When Beavis and Butt-Head cheered the “Creep” video in an episode early in 1994, Capitol ran ads saying Beavis and Butt-Head said Radiohead didn't suck, and billed them as Oxford, England's rowdiest band. Platinum in America followed in September 1995.

Yorke was less sure of the place. On his second day of American press that spring he sat through an MTV interview he thought pointless until he asked the crew whether they got paid to do this, and he told Matt Ashare of the Boston Phoenix that the album had lots of faults. The same trip put the band on KROQ's Loveline in Los Angeles, answering callers' problems, and the fourth newsletter joked that the station's ratings fell as a result.

the notices

The NME and Melody Maker reviewed it on the same day, 20 February, two days before it was in the shops. John Harris gave it seven out of ten in the NME. He was hard on “How Do You?”, and found that the old songs the band had recycled, which looked cynical, made the best moments on the record. His last line was that Radiohead were getting there. Q and Select gave it three out of five. Pippa Lang, who had seen them at Kingston Polytechnic in January, gave it a warm notice in Metal Hammer, of all places, and heard Bono in Yorke on “How Do You?”. By December the NME had it 35th in its albums of the year.

America wrote more about “Creep” than about the album. Marisa Fox in Entertainment Weekly rated “Creep” the last word in neurotic teen anthems, gave the album a B, and quoted the Jim Morrison line from “Anyone Can Play Guitar” back at Yorke.

You mean Morrissey.

marisa fox · entertainment weekly, 14 may 1993

Mario Munoz, in the Los Angeles Times, gave it two and a half stars out of four and heard too much of the Smiths and the Cure, though he rated “Creep” among the catchiest singles of the year. Robert Christgau in the Village Voice did not recommend the album and picked out “Creep” as its one cut worth having. Rolling Stone's Paul Evans got round to it in the year-end issue and thought the band worth watching, if their attitude did not sink them first.

on the road

They toured it for most of two years. The first headline tour of Britain started in January; in March, with “Creep” a hit on Israeli radio, they spent a week in Tel Aviv and played three nights, the first two thin and the last packed. In June the fourth issue of W.A.S.T.E., the newsletter the band wrote themselves, opened by sending up how far they had come since February.

Urbane, witty, well-dressed, and well-travelled? We weren't.

radiohead · w.a.s.t.e. 4, june 1993

America started at Venus de Milo in Boston on 22 June. A sore throat took Yorke out of the Reading Festival in August. The reissued “Creep” went to number seven at home in September, when Yorke put the year's gigs at about 100, enough to turn them from amateurs into a working band. In the autumn they went back to America with Belly, drawing 3,000 to Roseland in New York, and turned down a support slot with Duran Duran; the year closed with five weeks opening for James. Kolderie credited the Pablo Honey tours for making them tight.

I like the first album, but we were very naïve. We didn't really know how to use the studio.

thom yorke · melody maker, 1993

“Creep” was up for Best British Single at the Brit Awards in February 1994 and lost to Take That. The album's last big night was the London Astoria on 27 May 1994, filmed by EMI and released on video the next year, by which time nearly half the set was songs that would be on The Bends.

talked down

The band have rarely had a good word for it. In 1997 O'Brien told Select they had been “in hock to Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies up to our eyeballs”. Hufford said the band had never been happy with it, and called it “a snapshot of them developing”. In 2020 O'Brien called it “pretty shit apart from one song”, and in 2026 he told Uncut that without “Creep” EMI would very likely have dropped them.

We weren't that good but we worked hard and became good.

ed o'brien · the face, 6 february 2020

Their verdict is harder than the record deserves. John Harris had the measure of it in February 1993, when he found the old songs the best things on it, “Thinking About You” above all, and the band plainly on their way. In February 1998, with OK Computer sending new listeners back to the start, it reached its best British chart placing, 22, and Q's poll that month put it 61st among the greatest albums ever made. Pitchfork's line in 2007 was that Radiohead had stumbled into success on grunge's coattails and spent years saying sorry for it.

EMI boxed it with the rest of the Parlophone albums in 2007, after the band had left. In 2009 it came back as a Collector's Edition, with Drill, the B-sides, a 1992 Radio 1 session and, in the three-disc set, the videos and the Pablo Honey half of the Astoria show; the band had no say and nothing was remastered. Since 2016 it has come out on XL. In February 2025 O'Brien told Folha de S.Paulo that takes left off the record had turned up.

In April 2005 Britney Spears was photographed buying a copy.