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Ed O'Brien: “I've been horrified to find people think it's depressing”
Only five advance tapes of OK Computer were sent out, and the press office would say nothing about the record. Even so, about two months before it reached the shops, one of the dozen or so unofficial Radiohead websites had its lyrics, chords, sleeve art and gossip. Thom Yorke, talking to Select for its July issue, thinks it must have come out of Japan, and can't work out how. Ed O'Brien expects worse. One day, I'm convinced we're going to be on the internet and we'll find an option to download an album we haven't even started recording yet
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All five were interviewed at Colin Greenwood's semi-detached house in Oxfordshire, just back from three weeks of promotion in Japan. Colin denies that there was ever a plan to keep the album secret; the band simply stayed at home in Oxford.
It was made in two stretches at an Elizabethan house in an empty valley outside Bath, which Colin and Yorke found after the south of France had been considered. Philip Selway recorded his drums in a disused child's bedroom, and the words of “Fitter Happier”, Select says, began as something Yorke posted online at 4am.
None of them makes much of a sales pitch. Colin puts the album somewhere between Frank Sinatra and Joy Division. Jonny Greenwood says it is the band trying to recreate records they love, from Gorecki and Miles Davis to DJ Shadow and one sound off a Genesis album, and missing. O'Brien calls it troubled Phil Spector, made for shopping malls, and Selway puts its atmosphere down to how much they drank. Yorke says it is meant to make the listener uncomfortable. He hasn't played it since it was finished, and says people will need two years to make sense of it. Colin doesn't expect it to break them worldwide. One early verdict has dismayed O'Brien.
I've been horrified to find people think it's depressing
Ed O'Brien1
“Paranoid Android” is the single, and Yorke says it is about the fall of the Roman Empire. R.E.M. threw a party for the band in Seattle. When the two bands toured together, Michael Stipe used to steer radio-controlled cars across the stage during “Planet Telex”.
As for the next record, the band say they will throw away their instruments and build it from samples.