NME gives Radiohead's Pablo Honey seven out of ten

Pablo Honey is reviewed in this week's NME, dated 20 February, two days before Parlophone release it. In NME John Harris gives it seven out of ten, under the heading “Glow Frequency Band”, and saves his scorn for “How Do You?”, two minutes that he says lift the riff of Sham 69's “If the Kids Are United” and find Thom Yorke doing an awful Johnny Rotten. It is the one song he calls rubbish, and he thinks it wrecks the album's momentum.

Harris files Pablo Honey with the debuts that are flawed but satisfying and suggest the band's real talents will come through later. The three EPs struck him as strong in their lead tracks and lukewarm elsewhere, so he was braced for a patchy album and finds a much more even one.

Re-recording old songs looks cynical, he admits, but it gives the album its best moments. The new “You” and “Prove Yourself” (the first single), both on the Drill EP last May, sound ten times more confident than the originals. His favourite is “Thinking About You”, also from Drill, which he knew as a tinny thrash-pop number and now hears as an acoustic weepie full of Yorke's self-loathing. “Blow Out” and “I Can't” he finds forgettable; “Creep” and “Anyone Can Play Guitar” save the album.

He rates it far above two other bands' first albums, Teenage Fanclub's A Catholic Education and Primal Scream's Sonic Flower Groove. Anyone who feels let down, he ends, has only themselves to blame, because Radiohead are getting there.