Pop Is Dead

an epitaph to 1992

Radiohead wrote and released it fast, a single of its own that came out on 10 May 1993, a few months after Pablo Honey, recorded at Chipping Norton with Jim Warren co-producing. Jonny Greenwood's chromatic riff drives it. Thom Yorke called it an epitaph to 1992, and a week before it came out he told Jerry Goossens of Het Parool that he had written it in answer to all the cover versions in the charts, the past recycled faster and faster until pop disappeared into a black hole.

Now we've got the 70s revival, then we'll get the 80s revival, and in the end the early 90s will be done over again.

thom yorke · het parool, 3 may 1993

The words go after the music press and the industry, the same target as “Anyone Can Play Guitar”. That February Yorke told Stuart Bailie of NME that it closed the live show and that he usually dedicated it to Freddie Mercury. At Vernier, near Geneva, that November it went to Phil Collins with an insult, and at a show in 1994 to the press, “fucking bunch of losers”.

the black session

The band first played it in Plymouth on 18 November 1992, six months before the single, and it was in the set 57 times in 1993, closing 13 of its 82 nights. Its final night was Tokyo on 24 June 1995.

It got its best introduction on French radio. On 23 February 1993, the day after Pablo Honey came out, Radiohead played a Black Session at the Maison de la Radio in Paris for Bernard Lenoir's show on France Inter, and one of them introduced the song in careful French as being about the future of pop music, which was going to die that year. Afterwards, talking on air through an interpreter, a band member said pop would be dead within a couple of years unless the record companies and the press got behind bands people actually wanted to hear, instead of selling the old dead stars again. The only good pop star at the moment, he said, was a dead one.

the coffin video

Dwight Clarke shot the video to a treatment Yorke wrote frame by frame, Dilly Gent, who looked after the band's videos, remembered. Yorke plays Pop as a dandified vampire in a glass coffin, carried across the Oxford Downs by members of the band's fan club, who walked miles in the cold, unfed, while being shouted at, and were thanked for it in the next newsletter from W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order and fan club. EMI supplied a stylist and a clothing budget.

We looked like we were in four different bands.

colin greenwood · nme, 17 october 2024

The fans' magazine swore that the villagers watching took the filming for a pagan ritual. It was called Pop Is Dead too, named after the single and run from Manchester by Val Savage, and by 1994 it was the band's official fanzine.

banana co. and ripcord

The single carried an acoustic “Banana Co.”, from a session at Signal Radio in Cheshire, which the biographer Mac Randall called Beatlesque, with a dislike of multinationals showing through the words; an electric version turned up on “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” in 1996. Live versions of “Creep” and “Ripcord” filled out the formats, taped at the Town and Country Club in London on 14 March 1993, the night they supported Belly, and “Ripcord” has a line the studio version lacks, “They can kiss my ass!”

scrubbed

It reached number 42 in Britain and was not released in America. Reviews were poor and the band came to hate it; Ed O'Brien has called it a hideous mistake, and Yorke, looking back at the videos of those years, said the band had thought them all right at the time and now all just wanted to die. The 1995 video Live at the Astoria is one of the few official places a performance survives. When the last of the catalogue reached the streaming services in November 2016, this single was still missing, one of a few exceptions.