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Capitol's Gary Gersh vows to make Radiohead the biggest band in the world
OK Computer stood at number 41 on the Billboard 200 as Mojo's September issue went to press, and Capitol's president Gary Gersh says the label won't let up until they are the biggest band in the world.
1 Jim Irvin's long feature, with the American reporting by Barney Hoskyns, opens on a photograph of the band at the Wiltern) in Los Angeles on 26 July.
Gersh has seen nothing live, in any country, that excites him as much. He says there is no better singer than Thom Yorke and that Jonny Greenwood is as exciting a guitarist as anyone alive. Our job is just to take them as a left-of-centre band and bring the centre to them.
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The album entered at 21 in the week the Prodigy's The Fat of the Land went straight in at number one, then fell to 29 and 41. Mojo calls that better than The Bends, which stalled at 88, but short of what Capitol hoped for.
“Let Down” had a disappointing second week at American radio. The jury is still out, says Nic Harcourt, programme director at WDST in Woodstock, New York. Capitol mailed out Aiwa personal stereos with tapes of the album sealed inside; Roy Trakin of the trade weekly Hits says the stunt annoyed some people but got them listening. American reviews have been close to unanimous.
On The Tonight Show on 25 July, the night before the tour opened, the band played a snarling “Electioneering” instead of “Let Down”, Yorke's guitar carrying a pro-choice slogan. Capitol had heard “Electioneering” as an American radio hit when the band tried it out on their 13 dates supporting Alanis Morissette in 1996. Chris Hufford, who manages Radiohead with Bryce Edge, says that by the time the record was done the song had turned abrasive and garagey, and the other songs the label liked were not on the album.
Between The Bends in March 1995 and finishing OK Computer, Radiohead toured America five times. Hufford and Edge took their model from Miles Copeland with the Police and Paul McGuinness with U2, and the plan is to keep coming back.
Hufford also gives his side of Glastonbury) on 28 June. Yorke's monitors went off after the second song, “Talk Show Host” fell apart and ground to a halt, and Hufford thought Yorke was close to walking off. They played on to the end. From Thom's perspective it was one of the worst gigs of his life. But then at the end, seeing the crowd's reaction, they'd obviously had it away.
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