Meeting People Is Easy

one night in Barcelona

Parlophone's first idea for OK Computer was a video for every track, with Grant Gee among the directors. It cost too much and was dropped, but Gee was still sent to Barcelona in May 1997 to film the record's launch. About a month later he wrote to them with a proposal.

There wasn't an idea to do a film but I said, 'Look, I can do you a film if we just keep going'.

Grant Gee · Uncut, January 1999

They kept going, for most of a year. Gee shot on Super 8 and on hand-held video, through America, Europe, Japan and Australia, and Rolling Stone put the bill at £200,000. The band left him alone with it. Ed O'Brien told NME in June 1998, with eight hours still to cut, that it was honest and that the last thing they wanted was a rockumentary, because that would be so Spinal Tap.

the same questions

What Gee caught was the repetition. The film is made of press junkets, radio sessions and photo calls, with tired people answering questions they had answered the day before. The concerts are in there, but rarely a whole song at a time, and the film comes back again and again to the tour's machinery grinding on. Gee said that was the point. The thing that gets to you, he told Rolling Stone, is having to do the same things day after day while trying to move forward.

The music is in pieces too. Glastonbury sings “Creep” back at the stage; a crowd in Philadelphia does the same, and Gee's favourite moment is Thom Yorke's face changing as they do it. “Karma Police” goes out on Late Show with David Letterman. Gee directed the “No Surprises” video while he was making the film, and the shoot is in it, Yorke inside a helmet filling with water.

The scene every review picked out is a New York cab, with Yorke talking about what the Smiths and R.E.M. had meant to him, and wondering whether Radiohead could ever be that to anyone. At the club a doorman turns him away and shouts the name of their biggest hit after him.

songs nobody had heard

Some of the music in it was years from release. “Follow Me Around” turns up at a soundcheck in Fukuoka in January 1998 and then went unreleased for 23 years, until Kid A Mnesia. “How to Disappear Completely” is played acoustic at a soundcheck in New York, three years before Kid A. “I Will”, “Life in a Glasshouse” and an early “Nude” are in it too, years before the records that carried them.

The hardest stretch is at Abbey Road in March 1998, where the band try to record “Big Boots”, also called “Man of War”, for the film of The Avengers, and it will not come right. It stayed in the drawer until OKNOTOK in 2017.

out

Parlophone put the film out on video in Britain on 30 November 1998, after a London premiere that Gee could not bring himself to sit through. In America it opened at South by Southwest the following March and then sold out cinemas in four cities before MTV showed a 50-minute cut. Rob Sheffield, reviewing it for Rolling Stone, said rock stardom had never looked this bad and he could not look away. It was nominated for best long form music video at the Grammys in 2000.

the band look back

When the band opened the Radiohead Public Library online in January 2020, Meeting People Is Easy was in it, streaming in full. Thom Yorke picked it as one of his finds for Flood, and admitted he had not watched it since it was finished.

It would send me back down a mental hole that would take me days to recover from.

Thom Yorke · Flood, January 2020

Skimming it again, he found it funny, sad and alarming, and said he still recognised all five of them.