Melody Maker meets Radiohead in Perth on the last night in Australia

Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood sat down with Michael Dwyer in Perth on the last night of Radiohead's Australian tour, and his report, “OK Kangaroo”, runs over three pages of this week's Melody Maker. The piece also carries the one Australian interview Thom Yorke gave on the tour, to Richard Kingsmill on the radio station Triple J. He explained why Radiohead would not be playing the Grammys in New York.

No, we pulled out of that. They said we weren't good for the ratings, so we said OK.

Thom Yorke¹

The band had toyed with playing “Exit Music (For a Film)” and walking off. The Academy then asked them to present an award to someone else instead, and they said no. OK Computer won Best Alternative Music Performance) on 25 February without them.

Dwyer met O'Brien and Jonny in the bar of the Perth Hilton the day after the Brit Awards, which Radiohead missed). Jonny reckoned that if The Bends wasn't good enough for the Brits, this album wasn't either, and O'Brien said he would rather be go-karting in Perth. The two also joked about a cult of Phil Selway in Japan, where fans hold up banners saying “Phil Is Great” and “Colin Is All Right”.

O'Brien was asked about OK Computer being voted the greatest album of all time in a readers' poll. My initial reaction to that poll, to be honest, was like winning the FA Cup. But the hysterical laughter soon turned to ironic laughter.¹ Their American label, he added, had first told them people wouldn't get the record.

The band are baffled by people calling the album futuristic, Jonny said, when so many of its songs are about speed, as “The Tourist” sums up. I don't think there are any statements on this record, are there?¹

The first time Radiohead came to Australia, in June 1994, O'Brien remembers playing to about 40 people in Adelaide. This time, Dwyer writes, the Australian dates opened with a sold-out Festival Hall in Melbourne in a heatwave, and they filled arenas of 8,000 to 12,000. They also asked the crowds not to mosh. Jonny said they were tired of walking offstage to casualties, and remembered a show in Chicago last year where a 12-year-old girl was kicked in the face and got glass from her broken spectacles in her eye.

The Perth show opened on “Airbag” and ran to about two hours. In Dwyer's review, Yorke stopped “Karma Police” in its first verse and started again, and before the end told the crowd he was longing to go home. Two nights earlier in Adelaide he had stopped “Creep” halfway through because the crowd didn't seem interested.

After the American leg ends in New York in April, Yorke told Triple J, the band will walk away from it and only start work again when they can't stand not to, which could take a year. I'm not convinced that we'll do another one before the year 2000, necessarily.¹

Australia and New Zealand, 1998