Ed O'Brien says nobody touched a distortion pedal for two months

For about two months of rehearsals for OK Computer, none of Radiohead stood on a distortion pedal, Ed O'Brien tells Ken Ilcisin of Edmonton's Vue Weekly. It was the first time in some eight years. For three years before they were signed they had been making a wall of noise. Part of it was boredom, after five years of guitars slamming in on the road. Without the pedal they had to find the lift somewhere else, in a change of rhythm or parts woven round each other. The album is about picking out melodies and rhythms.

Distortion is cool but it's a bit limiting. It's great for effect but it's kind of like it's a bit easy, you just step on that box.

Ed O'Brien¹

They talked in a Vancouver hotel restaurant on 31 July, eight hours before a private show for fewer than a thousand people: 300 staff from the distributor EMD and a few hundred contest winners. O'Brien accepts it as part of the job and says the band do less of it than they used to. On the night Thom Yorke gave “No Surprises” a dedication. This is for the people playing pool.¹

O'Brien relates to the new songs more than to The Bends, where Yorke's lyrics looked inward. Around 1987 and 1988, he says, the band were openly angry about yuppie values, Yorke most of all. OK Computer is more compassionate, and “No Surprises” feels for the nine-to-fivers stuck on the treadmill, yuppies among them.

He remembers April 1993, the band's first American trip, when EMI laid on a fan meet-and-greet on Long Island after a New York show. They rode two hours in an enormous stretch limousine expecting a bar full of kids with things to sign, and found an office party with about two people at their table.