While not as groundbreaking as Kid A or as cohesive as OK Computer, the latest release from the thinking-man's band has some of the most strangely beautiful -- and epic -- songs written in the past 10 years.

In its first local arena date as the headliner (Oct. 4 at Sound Advice Amphitheatre, near West Palm Beach), the British quintet pulled all the levers of its avant-garde, rock-music mousetrap and made the machine sing. Thom Yorke and Co. were technically sharp and at the same time starkly human, using garage-band chemistry to give emotional weight to even the weirdest laboratory static. The songs were anxious, but Radiohead played them with boundless confidence and turned in the performance of the year.

All hail Radiohead, the most courageous "mainstream" band that's anything but. Radiohead came back from its extended experimentation for another song-focused record. Despite the usual strangely gorgeous layers and rigorous structure, the songs have a pounding rock power that strengthens everything else.

This Oxford art-rock band, who have now been around for 10 years, delivered an epic-sounding album finally worthy of its praise. As I said at the time, Hail combined the swagger of their 1995 album, The Bends, with the more experimental OK Computer (1997) and KID A (2000). They also welcomed back the guitar. It was about bloody time.

One of rock's most inventive bands delivered again. Paranoid Android always hits the spot, and rarities Talk Show Host and Follow Me Around add to the pleasure.

Raising the stakes again after two albums of introspection, Radiohead stirs its sonic experiments into new ravaged anthems, engaging the outside world again with perplexity and rage.

Yes, this collaboration between Merce Cunningham and the rock groups Radiohead and Sigur Ros fizzled. Still devoted to melody and meter, the rockers were too old-fashioned for Mr. Cunningham's attempts to separate dance from musical support. Nonetheless, the choreography, at the Brooklyn academy in October, was super.
Review, Questions for Merce Cunningham and an article can be found here.

The robots relinquish Thom Yorke long enough for Radiohead to find a comfortable balance between the icy electronic wastelands of Kid A and the Floydian guitar grandeur of OK Computer.

Though not as dazzling or daring as past triumphs like 1997's OK Computer and 2000's Kid A, this album still finds the British quintet in a class by itself. The ballads are spooky and enigmatic, the rock numbers explosive. And like most of Radiohead's albums, it reveals new layers of meaning with every listen.

By combining the potent yet abstract melodicism of the 1997 CD OK Computer with the deconstructive experimentation of 2000's Kid A, Radiohead on Hail To The Thief took their music into warmer, less imposing territory without compromising the inventiveness that has marked the band's career.

Who knew they rocked so hard, even with all the lighting effects. This is not easy music to replicate that well live.

After taking its sonic ambitions too far on the disappointing Amnesiac, Thom Yorke and company release the best album of the year when they remember how to play as a band. Jonny Greenwood's guitar and a propulsive, tribal-sounding rhythm section inject visceral energy into Yorke's perpetually gloomy ruminations and stately melodies.

It's a slippery slope from consistently brilliant to taken for granted. "What's that? A brilliant new album by Radiohead? That's nice. But have you heard the Justin Timberlake?" It's sad, because this album picks up where "Amnesiac" left off with occasional flashbacks to the band's more rockist past and a palpable feeling of dread in the face of U.S. foreign policy.

Oxford's finest released their latest album, Hail to the Thief with rumors buzzing and a leak to the internet. Touted as a return to OK Computer, the disc was anything but. Its coherent mixture of the band's sound found itself a perfect dictionary to define the fab five as nothing but remarkable. Hail to the Thief is quite simply the best album of 2003.

Although by most accounts, the beleaguered Field Day festival — ultimately held on a cold, rainy June day at New Jersey’s Giants stadium — was a complete washout, those who braved the weather long enough to see Radiohead’s triumphant headlining set were far from disappointed. A large part of that set consisted of songs from the impressive Hail To The Thief, which, while not a complete return to the guitar-driven antics of The Bends or OK Computer, is still closer to Pink Floyd than Squarepusher. Fourteen tracks of political anger, aggressive guitars, thumping drum machines and lyrics about… rabbit disease — Radiohead albums are never the happiest things, and Thom Yorke can be downright surly at times, but Hail remains full of the kind of positive energy that inspires action. It was no surprise that the disc ascended to the top of CMJ’s charts in 2003 (the band could release a recording of its members tuning their instruments, and it would be heralded as a masterpiece), but it was nice to see that this was hardly a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

Yorke and Brick Lane author Monica Ali are among a team of guest editors due to take over BBC Radio 4's Today programme next week.

Former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit, radio critic Gillian Reynolds and scientist Professor Stephen Hawking will also guest from 29 December to 2 January.

The five, invited by Today editor Kevin Marsh, will choose some of the issues to be tackled on the programme.

Meanwhile, presenter John Humphrys has signed a three-year deal with Today.

The contract will see Humphrys present the programme seven days a fortnight, a BBC spokesman confirmed on Tuesday.

There was speculation he had threatened to quit after a comment on the Iraq war by the Archbishop of Canterbury was cut from one of his interviews in October.

But a BBC spokesman said Humphrys had not seriously considered resigning from Today.

The programme's guest editors will be responsible for up to a third of each programme's output.

Director Simon Pummell does not lack ambition - his first feature film is a documentary that charts the journey of man from birth to death and beyond.

Bodysong, newly released in the UK, begins with medical footage of sperm fertilising eggs, and then a montage of births from all over the world, with footage from as far back as the 1920s.

Pummell is a director of short films that some critics liken to the work of Peter Greenaway.

He told BBC News Online he wanted to make a film that looked at human life from birth to death - and celebrate the century of cinema and moving image at the same time.

Pummell was inspired by the recent birth of his son. I put in 40 or 50 births because I wanted to make the birth sequence seem bigger, more important - that moment is still an awesome thing, the director said from his Dutch home.

He said he specifically wanted to draw away from using footage with which people were already familiar.

We see moving images everywhere, on monitors, home movies, on the internet, Movies have escaped from the cinema.

I wanted to make a film that flattened out the hierarchies of what is important, and just celebrate all the different images we see.

You get challenged by the work of others to make it better. For example, when I heard A Wolf At The Door by Radiohead for the first time, I literally grinded my teeth: "I can fuckin do that better!” It just stimulates me more, and that’s good.

Hail To The Thief - Radiohead: The 14 tracks are woven like a thick and exotic cloak around the plaintive, soaring voice of Thom Yorke, who reaffirms his place as the gloomiest gus in music.

On the startling 2+2=5, Yorke warns You have not been paying attention so frantically that you feel both guilty and stirred. As the Orwellian title suggests, the song expresses Yorke's perplexity at a world in which reason is thrown out the window. With a choppy beat, blazing keyboards, and the sort of aggress.

Evidence that Jonny Greenwood plays more of a role in Radiohead's artistry than he gets credit for, Bodysong is an ideal soundtrack: cinematic but never merely background music, the songs Greenwood concocted with the occasional help of the Emperor Quartet and a jazz band actually demand your attention. Only one track -- the polyrhythmic Convergence -- feels like it's missing something without the visual accompaniment. Otherwise, Greenwood does a masterful job. 24 Hour Charleston is an obvious highlight, sounding not unlike one of Radiohead's darker songs. Colin Greenwood lays down a brutal bassline while a swarm of electronics menacingly hiss and Jonny emulates Trent Reznor's trademark jangly guitar.

The genre-hopping diversity of the songs comprising this soundtrack is staggering. Though a thematic thread consistently holds the album together, Greenwood jumps from full-on jazz to poignant string arrangements to stark electronic compositions and sometimes blends all three. He's obviously full of ideas.

What's most interesting about Bodysong is it liberates Greenwood from the constraints of his work with Radiohead. As adventurous as Radiohead can be, they make pop music when it comes down to it and pop music's conventions can only be stretched so far. Here, Greenwood is free to delve into territory Radiohead can only dabble in as long as they remain a rock group.

Hearing the results of Greenwood's solo excursion is revelatory. This soundtrack proves he is perfectly capable of reaching the creative heights achieved by Radiohead all by himself.

What's most apparent on Hail to the Thief is that Radiohead have managed to reconcile their desire to expand their sound (a feat they achieved on Kid A and Amnesiac but with results that are arguably cold and detached) with the inimitable songwriting skill that made OK Computer so acclaimed. The result is a collection of fourteen songs that each offer something worthwhile. Every track here can stand alone, sufficient in itself to function as an intriguing listen while also blending seamlessly together.

Radiohead's xixth album met with a mixed response - those hoping for a return to stadium rock values were disappointed by the glitchy intricacies of 2+2=5, while technoheads who took Kid A and Amnesiac as proof that rock is dead can't have appreciated stadium singalongs like Go To Sleep. Still, the are classic Yorke moments throughout - There There was a fantastic single while Sail To The Moon is the quintessential modern ballad, at once ironic and tragic. Radiohead fan's will debate the "Better than Ok Computer? Better than Amnesiac?" questions endlessly - the rest of us can slip on our headphones and marvel.

To have a Radiohead album show up among the best albums of the year seems almost obligatory, see above. But what are we supposed to do since this band is consistently putting out one masterpiece after the other? HTTT opened up the (can’t translate Verklausulierung, sorry, try as good as I can) former reduction to seclusion a little and replaced last two album’s experiments with more accessible sounds and more distinct messages.

Having recorded the album during fall/winter 2002 Radiohead mirror the claustrophobic mood facing the upcoming Iraque war with powerful guitar riffs and threatening walls of sound. With ghostly monotony “Sit down. Stand up.” puts into context the awkward feelings among Europeans against the USA, who more and more openly displayed themselves as some kind of allmighty orwellean Big Brother.

Singer Thom Yorke still believes the world to be a chaotic mental asylum and us to be “accidents, waiting to happen” (ThereThere). Radiohead work on their purpose to reflect this pessimistic-paranoid attitude in musical terms with increasingly grim vehemence. This year, again, featured nobody else who was able to push rockmusic further beyond our usual level of experience.

Nicole Kidman has finished a movie called Birth, directed by Jonathan Glazer: I loved his music videos for Radiohead; they had these amazing images in them. The film is a little odd, about the depth of love and what someone will do knowing they'll never have this again.

It's another installment in the serial psychodrama Thom Yorke and His Invisible Demons. It's another not-so-heroic struggle involving rock's paranoid android and the wolves at his door, another song cycle devoted to the gap between "Where I End and You Begin" sung in the key of ambivalence. It's also the most unabashedly tuneful Radiohead effort in years, a thrill ride that lurches through moments of quiet reflection and gnawing frustration, and then, when you least expect it, slams you head-first into some giant-sized emotional torment.

There will have been those who suspected that BBC 6Music was playing some sort of prank when it invited Radiohead to act as station programmers over Christmas week.

Radiohead's popular reputation is not far from that of Dickens' festive refusenik Scrooge: grumpy, volubly dissatisfied with everyone and everything, and on balance unlikely to partake of the office-party conga.

There will be those who imagine that Christmas music chosen by Radiohead will tend towards Slovakian funeral marches, sinister electronica overlaid with air-raid sirens and, perhaps, the lonely whimper of a small boy they'd had trapped down a well especially for the purpose.

Those people are wrong, and it is to 6Music's credit that it's seen past the caricature of Radiohead as surly miserabilists. This, I can promise you, is exactly what Radiohead aren't - rather, they're victims of the inverted snobbery of much of the music media, which behaves as if it's a bad thing when thoughtful people who read books make music.

1. The White Stripes – Elephant
2. The Rapture – Echoes
3. The Strokes – Room On Fire
4. Elbow – Cast Of Thousands
5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever To Tell
6. Rufus Wainwright – Want One
7. Kings Of Leon – Youth And Young Manhood
8. OutKast – Speakerboxx/The Love Below
9. Radiohead – Hail To The Thief
10. My Morning Jacket – It Still Moves

The sound of a band that's decided to stop hating itself. The bubbling electronic feel and scattering-the-birds rhythms are still there, but also more layered instrumentation and more structured lyrics. There wasn't a more intelligent, emotion-pricking album this year. Radiohead are still the most interesting rock band we've got.

With tunnel echo magnifying fluctuating drum sounds and lackadaisical zigzagging guitars layered over a mercurial bassline, Radiohead's opening mission statement of 2003 made a case for two directions: a clear affinity for the comfortable past of their traditional rock background and the natural progression of a maturing stadium rock giant. Thom Yorke shuttles his fragile voice between fretting regret and ambivalent disdain, along with trademark esoteric lyrics. An example of accessible rock that's not only forward-thinking and powerful, but altogether gorgeous.

This is not a collection of songs, it is a journey through a musical maze of Fear and Poverty, TV and God, Aids and Oil, the Internet and Liquor, and many other issues. It is one of the most original compositions I have ever heard and how it could fail to be included in Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time is totally beyond me.

Certainly it is not an easy album: one has to actually participate and actively listen to every song. The musical complexity has your mind racing to keep up. However it is tempered with some softer moments where you can draw breath before the next onslaught. If all this sounds like too much hard work, I can assure you that the sheer power and excitement makes for an exhilarating ride. Thom Yorke has never been more savage or gentler as he stumbles through the maze. Like us, he is trying to process the information and perhaps make sense of it. But ultimately Hail To The Thief remains a mystery, which only adds to its appeal.

Monday - Gideon Coe's guests are Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood plus two specially recorded acoustic tracks incl. Karma Police. Album Of The Day, chosen by Ed O'Brien will be Scott Walker 4.

Tuesday - Craig Charles interviews Ed O'Brien, while Jonny Greenwood chooses Sonic Youth's Goo as Album Of The Day.

Wednesday - Thom Yorke co-presents the Evening Sequence with Tom Robinson, while Album Of The Day, chosen by the band, is Pig Lid by Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks.

Thursday - Colin Greenwood chooses Al Green's Living For You as Album Of The Day.

Friday - Jonny Greenwood brings in a boxful of vinyl for It's My Party with Liz Kershaw and Christoph De Babylon's If You're Into It I'm Out Of It is Thom Yorke's choice for Album Of The Day.

One possible harbinger of change in mainstream music is Radiohead, who McKeown counts among her favorite bands.

I love them, she says. They've been doing a lot to say to their fans, 'Don't love us without question.' I think it's good, challenging music. I hope that more things like Radiohead break through and more people will be interested in the music that I make.

It's been ages since I've seen a program like it: eclectic, adventurous, musically aware. It's the program of a musician with an eye for color.

Pianist Christopher O'Riley was the colorist Tuesday night in a Flagler Museum series concert. His four-work lineup was not only well thought-out but also analyzed six ways from Sunday. He pitted the first half against the second: Old World against brave new world, Baroque (Rameau, and Handel a la Brahms) vs. modern Russian dramatists (Shostakovich and Scriabin).

The icing on the cake was a pair of encores, his original transcriptions of songs by the British rock band Radiohead.

It's hard not to be drawn into O'Riley's world. The 47-year-old Los Angeles resident plays with a beauty, poetry, magnetism and individuality that are quickly addictive.

Hail wasn't exactly Radiohead's anticipated return to rock; instead, the band simply turns down the volume on the electronics and lets the songwriting drift to less chaotic, more atmospheric realms. But on the singles There There and Go To Sleep, the album comes into scary focus: guitars swell to arena-worthy crescendos, supporting songs that demand repeated exposure to reveal themselves. And on this past summer's tour, Radiohead proved again that they're the best band in the world.

At last report, Radiohead were seen drifting further and further away from their guitar glory days circa OK Computer. Depending on your feelings towards Hail To The Thief, you have resident musical anarchist Jonny Greenwood to partly thank or blame for the band’s new musical direction. For the score to the experimental film Bodysong, Greenwood lets his guitar continue to gather dust while indulging in his fetish for ambient electronica. Tiny noises, clicks, throbbing bass, glockenspiel, jazz trumpet and the sad sawing of violin strings all float in and out of this mesmerizing recording, which incidentally also doubles as a fine companion for drinking oneself into oblivion with a fat bottle of Japanese whisky.

Percussion music is revolution, declared John Cage, the visionary composer and proto-DJ who was also choreographer Merce Cunningham’s longtime companion and collaborator, in an essay about modern dance. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.

Well, it’s tomorrow, and to Radiohead, Merce Cunningham’s Split Sides probably seemed like the fulfillment of Cage’s prophecy. The group that has struggled so famously with fame landed a gig out of singer Thom Yorke’s fever dreams: providing abstract accompaniment for a dance troupe from the darkness of an orchestra pit, pretty much invisible to the audience, most of whom wouldn’t have recognized the band if they’d been busking outside the theater. Most, but not all: A squad of somber Radiohead fans canvassed Lafayette Avenue for a miracle ticket to this one-time-only performance, for which scalpers were getting $500 a seat.

The lobby throbbed with art-world glitterati and rubberneckers (Who’s that woman with Lou Reed? Are he and Laurie Anderson finis?!). Onstage, New York’s arts-loving, smoke-hating mayor, Michael Bloomberg, delivered opening props to Cunningham, the 84-year-old high priest of modern dance, as Cunningham’s company warmed up behind him. Meanwhile, Radiohead and their Icelandic prog-rock pals Sigur Ros stood squirming like kids at a school assembly. Yorke, in a battered black leather jacket, black shirt and pants, and white sneakers, periodically cracked wise to bassist Colin Greenwood; one briefly imagined that the singer might actually miss being the center of attention.

"They sound great. I would hope (the remix album) would be released at the beginning of next year, but we really don't know whether to make it a whole record or a series of smaller releases. But then we've also been talking about doing a B-sides record as well. We talk and talk!"

I just don't understand people who can make the same kind of record over and over again, without being bored.

Jonny Greenwood claims that Bodysong, the soundtrack of an experimental film, is not a solo album. The multi-instrumentalist, who has already made a reputation for himself as a member of Radiohead coloring in the stark imaginings of Thom Yorke, seems content being a musical wonk who supplements the art of others. This album, however, works successfully as a work unto itself.

Unlike most rock musicians who do soundtracks, Greenwood makes complex music with real arrangements. Fans of the last three Radiohead albums will find much to love in the album's jittery, moody melodicism, but the freedom of the project also allows Greenwood to explore other musical interests.

Dunno if there were too many Red Bulls in the backstage rider this evening, but something has given Thom Yorke wiiings. In fact, along with Thom’s frantic making-shapes-in-the-air dancing, there are many factors to indicate this is not a garden-variety Radiohead experience... Phil Selway on the sampler, doing some unforseen lounge-y shuffle, Colin Greenwood actually laughing, Ed O’Brien looking as if he’s having fun. Perhaps it’s the imminent arrival of two new Radiohead babies, but tonight there is an unmistakeable air of frivolity in the Point. In fact, the show feels surprisingly intimate, a space too small and inadequate to contain the band’s gargantuan genius.

#428 - Kid A
Just when they seemed destined to become the next U2, Radiohead made this fractured, twitchy record. Despite esoteric nods to glitchy electronica ("Idioteque") and free jazz (an eight-horn pileup in "The National Anthem"), they morphed those sounds into surprisingly accessible elegy to tenderness—and had a hit anyway.
Total album sales: 1.3 million
Peak chart position: 1

#162 - OK Computer
Radiohead recoreded their third album in the mansion of actress Jane Seymour while she was filming Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. OK is where the band began pulling at its sound like taffy, seeing what happened, not worrying if it was still "rock." What results is a slow, haunting album with unforgettable tracks such as "Karma Police." Said guitarist Jonny Greenwood, "I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn't sound like 'Eleanor Rigby,' which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past thirty years...We used violins to make frightening white-noise stuff, like the last chord of 'Climbing Up the Walls.'"
Total album sales: 1.9 million
Peak chart position: 21

#110 - The Bends
If the first half of the Nineties was shaped by Nirvana, the template for the second half was set by Radiohead. Though the 1993 smash "Creep," from their debut, is itself indebted to Kurt Cobain, The Bends, their second album, is less angsty and more operatic, marrying a majestic and somber guitar sound to the virtuosic urgency of Thom Yorke's vocals. Not yet shying away from guitar anthems, Radiohead draw on the grandeur of U2 and the melancholy of the Smiths and Jeff Buckley. "Fake Plastic Trees" was a radio hit, an introspective acoustic ballad of alienation. But elsewhere, the guitars roar and hiss, establishing Radiohead as the band to beat.
Total album sales: 1.5 million
Peak chart position: 88

Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal
» There There

Best Alternative Music Album
» Hail To The Thief

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical
» Hail To The Thief - Nigel Godrich and Darrell Thorp, engineers

Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical
» Nigel Godrich (Hail To The Thief)

To call Bodysong a documentary, as the British Independent Film Awards did when they named it best in that category for 2003, is slightly misleading. Sure, it documents human life from its messy start to various grisly ends, but don't expect a kindly-voiced narrator to explain what you're seeing. Bodysong is an experimental amalgam of imagery, brutally so in parts. Home movies, newsreel and other archive footage have been cut together to create a mesmerising showcase of the cycle of life set to a mostly abstract soundtrack by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

Nikhil Chinappa: Are there any records you wish you’d produced?

So many of them. But seriously, I wish I’d produced Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of the Moon. Another one was Radiohead’s Kid A. Kid A was a really influential record. When it came out (in 2000), we realised that it contained textures similar to the sounds we used.

Amnesty International logo
Audioslave CD 2
Badly Drawn Boy deck 1
Badly Drawn Boy deck 2
Beth deck one side
Beth deck other side
Coldplay deck 1
Coldplay deck 2
Duran Duran DVD photo
Rancid poster 1
Rancid poster 2
Ryan Adams Deck
Ryan Adams photo

Sze's installation is most pertinent, calling into question the value we place on objects. Sze's sculpture of everyday items caught in a snow-drift of foam and painted bamboo, alludes to the human compulsion to accumulate and display — be it in the museum or the home.

She wants to blur the boundaries between art and life, to emphasise the arbitrary nature of an object's value:

I think of all art work as being installation art: the way they are framed, the way they are placed, she says.

In his first work outside Radiohead, Greenwood has composed the soundtrack for an arty, dailogue free film about life and death. Resolutely un-Michael Nyman like, he proves himself even more avant-garde than Thom Yorke. Splitter, for example, is what jazz sounds like when it implodes, convergence comprises nothing more than a bunch of sticks being beaten furiously, and the atmospheric Clockwork Tin Soldiers is pointedly extra-terrestrial. The commercial potential is precisely nil, but it's surreal invention and eye-popping detail suggests that Greenwood is in his boffin-like element. He must have the most peculiar dreams.

There was a time when Thom Yorke cracking a joke onstage would’ve been met with the quaking of the earth imploding in on itself and the skies turning black. Similarly, asking the crowd to clap-along (“it’ll make the song sound brilliant!”) would once have been as likely as the Queen inviting the Daily Mirror’s editorial team round for tea.

But Thom Yorke 2003 is a different man. He has, ssssh, fun! He pulls funny faces and says this is what the British Prime Minister looks like. He dances like the bastard child of David Brent and John Travolta! He dons Justin Hawkins' catsuit and plays Chumbawamba covers! Ok, one of those is a lie, but, catsuit or not, Radiohead are – finally – enjoying being Radiohead.

Rockers Radiohead played a breathtaking gig in front of 10,000 fans at the SECC last night. The band breezed through an eclectic set that included a sharp dose of their old adrenaline-fuelled grinding rock tracks, a huge dollop of new songs and an awesome combination of lights and visuals. The Oxford indie veterans crammed a wealth of material into the two-hour set, and effortlessly combined the early grungey tendencies of Just with the drum 'n' bass ferocity of newer songs from the era of Kid A, Amesiac and their latest album, the massively acclaimed Hail To The Thief.

Fans were also treated to a splendid version of soaring OK Computer track Lucky, and Paranoid Android. Frontman Thom Yorke quickly overcame his customary shyness and by the second half of the compelling set he was bopping and grooving across the stage like a frenzied ragdoll. The sound was incredible for a venue that has long been pilloried by both fans and bands for ruining the live sound - it was perfectly clear and intense, and the visuals were truly exceptional.

1. White Stripes - Elephant
2. Blur - Think Tank
3. The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium
4. Kings of Leon - Youth and Young Manhood
5. Justin Timberlake - Justifield