Guitar World puts its 1998 Radiohead feature online

Guitar World has put Mac Randall's “The Golden Age of Radiohead” on its website, the feature it printed in April 1998, when OK Computer had just been nominated for two Grammys, Album of the Year among them. All five are quoted, Ed O'Brien most of all.

His best story is from the Irving Plaza show in New York in June 1997. Members of U2 and R.E.M. were on the guest list, and so was Madonna, and so was O'Brien's mother, seeing the band for the first time in four years. Madonna had been given the best table, so he swapped the signs. Madonna was at the back, and my mum had the best table in the house, between U2 and R.E.M. And that's exactly how it should be.¹

The band made OK Computer themselves with Nigel Godrich, first in their rehearsal space and then at a 15th-century house near Bath that belongs to the actress Jane Seymour, and they tell Randall where several of its sounds came from. The chords that open “Planet Telex” are a piano fed through three old Roland Space Echo units in a row. The “Airbag” drums were sampled on an Akai S3000 and cut up over two days on the band's Macintosh, an idea Thom Yorke credits to DJ Shadow. The noise at the end of “Karma Police” is O'Brien's AMS digital delay feeding back on itself, and “Lucky” begins with him dragging a nail file across the strings above the nut.

From The Bends, “My Iron Lung” is a live take from the London Astoria in May 1994 with only the vocal replaced, and “Fake Plastic Trees” was saved by a slip in the mix, when Paul Kolderie missed a cue and the electric guitars came in late; the band kept it. The songs are not all Yorke's, either. Jonny Greenwood wrote most of the music of “Just”, the slow section of “Paranoid Android” and all the music of “The Tourist”.

Jonny also explains the brace on his right arm. A doctor told him to wear it after he developed a repetitive strain injury playing on the Bends tours, and he likes putting it on before he plays. It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match.¹

O'Brien is glad about one flop. “Pop Is Dead”, the 1993 single, did badly at home and was never released in America. Thank God. It was rubbish.¹