Colin Greenwood: “Don't expect another big single”

There is no “Creep” on OK Computer, Colin Greenwood tells Richard Baimbridge of the Dallas Observer. We're not a band who goes for easy options. So don't expect another big single.¹

Greenwood and Phil Selway met Baimbridge in Capitol Records' New York office, Greenwood twisting the telephone cord round his wrists until Selway took it off him. In America Radiohead are still the “Creep” band. The Bends, dedicated to the Texan comedian Bill Hicks, flopped there despite its reviews. “Fake Plastic Trees” got little radio play. Worldwide, Greenwood says, The Bends sold as well as Pablo Honey; only America missed it, for want of a radio hit. Of the “Creep” years he says It's like learning in public¹, and the paper says the band came to call the song “Crap”.

The leap between the first two albums he puts down to nothing grander than studio time. They had been signed less than a year when they made Pablo Honey, and they needed more of it. He remembers Thom Yorke recording “Planet Telex” flat on his back on the floor at two or three in the morning, which sounded tedious until it all came together. The Pink Floyd comparisons he laughs off as his brother Jonny's fondness for early Floyd and Syd Barrett, not something the band share.

For OK Computer, the paper reports, about a third was recorded in a converted apple shed outside Bath and the rest at Jane Seymour's country house. Selway says the idea was to get back to the feel of recording themselves on a four-track. Baimbridge doubts radio will touch “Airbag” or “Paranoid Android”. To Greenwood the album sounds like a traditional 1970s English rock record. Selway hears sour lyrics on top with a quite different feeling underneath.