Radiohead's manager tells NME he went looking for another band

Chris Hufford, Radiohead's manager, admits in this week's NME that while the early sessions for The Bends were going badly, he and his partner went looking elsewhere. Me and my partner started shopping around for another group to manage¹, he tells Ted Kessler, because Radiohead did not look as if they were going to make it. They took on Supergrass.

Ed O'Brien remembers those first sessions as horrible, with the band questioning everything. Kessler tells how the producer John Leckie sent Thom Yorke away to work out the songs, and how the record came together in a two-week stint in the summer, after Mexico.

Kessler's feature, “Radio Daze”, comes from a press day at a Madrid hotel. Colin Greenwood calls being in Radiohead a rock version of It's a Knockout, and dreams of founding a rock-and-roll fellowship at his old Cambridge college, Peterhouse.

Jonny Greenwood says he despaired in Canada a few weeks ago. He had gone weeks without touching an instrument while talking about Radiohead every day, and ranted that they should sign to an obscure indie label and just play concerts in England and make records. What lifted him was meeting Elastica in Cologne and trading promotion stories with their bassist, Annie Holland. I asked her what kind of bass she played and she said 'a black one'. It was the first time I had laughed in ages.¹

Yorke kept saying he was leaving on a recent run in America of five nights in a row: midnight gigs for radio stations, three hours' sleep, an early flight and then a day of interviews. The plan, he says, is to make enough room with this record that they need not play the promotional game for long.

He says the paranoia in The Bends shows how the band were functioning then, and that NME hailing it as an important album has opened new doors in their heads. He envies jungle, the Warp label and Tricky's album for the sense that they were made in isolation, and “Planet Telex” touched on what he wants to explore next. There's just this sense of innocence and adventure working with computers that's so exciting.¹ Politics is proving harder. I've been trying to write something political but it's hard not to come up with Live Aid '80s bollocks.¹