Radiohead are not my favourite band (though they’re in the top five), they’re not the most historically significant in rock history (though they’re in the top five), but I can see that, maybe, they are the best. They made nine albums, one of which is a dud, two of which are pretty great, and fully six of which are groundbreaking classics, unquestionably among my top fifty records of all time. One of these six – OK Computer – can plausibly claim to be the most compelling album made by any artist during that brief half-century between 1965 and 2016 when rock ruled the airwaves, a position which, after some reflection, I would also probably go along with, though it’s a close one.
But who are the otherworldly freaks that made this masterpiece? They emerged in the mid-90s out of the ashes of shoegaze, grunge, and Britpop, and combined elements of all three – the shimmering weirdness, the maladjustment, the British riffing. But the members of the band were, and have always been, oddly inconspicuous. In fact, they’re a bunch of squares – quietly spoken students from Oxford, anathema to any marketing executive with designs on building a cartoon-like cult of personality around them. The only hook you could have hung that particular hat on was Thom Yorke’s classic 1950s movie star good looks, and for some reason, they didn’t go down that route.
This distinct lack of colour and rock’n’roll gimmickry partly explains the critical street cred that Radiohead have astutely accumulated among tedious journalists who want things to be “all about the music, man”. But it also accounts for the band’s strange coldness and aloofness, as if there’s nothing, or at least no human being, responsible for their music, but rather a committee of space aliens or intelligent machines. And doesn’t this notion perfectly capture the essence of OK Computer – a computer-generated soundtrack to a weird, alienated, ultra-digitalised, authoritarian future; that is, to the world in which we really find ourselves in 2024? This album was made long before everyone was permanently glued to small glass rectangles, or holding meetings with 300 tiny and indistinguishable faces on laptops, and yet Radiohead were already singing about such things in 1997, forecasting developments which would not come to pass for another twenty years or more.
OK Computer is thus a prophecy in the form of a rock album. And it is a horrifying prophecy indeed. Perhaps its central conceit and main unifying idea is that consumerist, capitalist, workaholic, technologized societies render those who live in them physically and mentally sick. A good proportion of the songs on this album narrate a process of psychological degradation, from depressed conformity to psychotic disintegration, most famously “No Surprises”, a deceptively chirpy top ten single which sounds almost childlike in its chiming, twinkly, music box-like cheeriness. But the jauntiness of the music is belied by clinically depressed lyrics about jobs that slowly kill us and the apparent attractiveness of suicide.
But if suicide isn’t an option, then perhaps dissociative delusion will do. The celestial and futuristic sounding “Subterranean Homesick Alien” first describes the maddening banality of life as an anonymous urban worker surrounded by similarly despondent slaves, until a fantasy of alien abduction suggests itself as the only conceivable escape from this living nightmare. The distressingly downcast “Let Down” casts its jaded eye across legions of commuters, which it compares to helpless and disposable insects. Once again, fantasy becomes the only way of dealing with this purgatory, except this time, it involves growing wings and simply flying away.
This tendency toward escapist fantasising in the face of unconscionable misery and drudgery occasionally borders on delusionally messianic. The protagonist of “Airbag”, the album’s crunching opener, has narrowly avoided death in a car accident, and now feels euphorically born again, “back to save the universe”, as a neon sign scrolls banally up and down in the background, hinting at the utter indifference of society to whether this inadequate Christ figure has survived or not. “Lucky” tells a similar story; its narrator has been pulled out of the wreckage of a crashed airplane, and has subsequently given himself over to an omnipotent delusion – a superhero who doesn’t have time to meet the head of state.
At several points on OK Computer, Radiohead explicitly locate the sources of this process of psychological breakdown on a broader societal plain, in repressive and exploitative social and political forces. “Fitter Happier” comprises an inhuman voice narrating a succession of yuppie platitudes, a vision of idealised, industrious, temperate, bourgeois normality and conformity which is ultimately likened to a caged, drugged swine. However, the song’s reference to footage of a baby smiling in the backseat of a car indicates that this is, in fact, a propagandistic script, intended by some malignant and nameless overlord to induce mass hypnosis.
These authorities are also alluded to on “Karma Police”, a tuneful, Beatles-esque piano track which channels Yorke’s paranoia around anonymous authorities and their capacity to ruin lives. Their shadowy presence is again felt on “Electioneering”, which neatly captures the cutthroat and self-seeking mentality of the political class. This song also represents the sole moment when OK Computer rather gloriously rocks out, a throwback to Radiohead’s earlier, more conventional albums.
But if the songs so far examined relate the various coping strategies that individuals invoke in order to keep it together in a fundamentally sick and sick-making society, then other points on OK Computer deal with those moments when the wheels come off entirely. In an act of perverse self-sabotage, one such moment was chosen to be the album’s lead single. “Paranoid Android” is a batshit crazy three-part rock opera, a Bedlam Bohemian Rhapsody, which apparently relates a disturbing experience that Yorke endured in an LA bar, surrounded by coked up yuppies, where he witnessed a violent altercation. The downbeat, sinister opening section segues into the spittle-flecked fury of the second and the bleak, post-psychotic despair of the third.
A similar level of public exposure was also afforded to the equally mental “Exit Music (For a Film)”, an unspeakably bleak number which was apparently written explicitly for the end credits of Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo and Juliet remake. The song’s despondent acoustic opening and troubling lyrics about running away from home soon escalate into a cataclysmic cavalcade of drums, eerie sci-fi sound effects, and the chilling intonement that we want you to choke. Cinemagoers surely went home with smiles on their faces after this party anthem.
But the most distressing track on a thoroughly unsettling album is surely “Climbing Up the Walls”, an ungodly roiling of the icy and terrifying mien of Joy Division with the synth-driven instrumentation of their successor band New Order. The lyrics were apparently inspired by Thom Yorke’s time working in a mental asylum, where obviously unwell and in some cases dangerous individuals were prematurely discharged under the Care in the Community scheme. The result is an utterly demonic and blood-curdling number, with the cacophony at its culmination marking the absolute nadir of the process of psychological breakdown which OK Computer narrates.
Is there a moment of uplifting positivity at the end of this album, to send the listener home a bit happier than the poor suckers who sat through Romeo and Juliet? Of course, there isn’t; this is Radiohead, after all. That said, OK Computer does end on a note of reflection. When juxtaposed against the chaos and darkness that has preceded it, the plaintive, subdued “The Tourist” sounds like waking up from a nightmare. It was inspired by Yorke watching sightseers rush mindlessly around Paris in an effort to photograph all of its attractions and realising that, in light of his frantic workaholic songwriting and touring, he was not so very different from them. The chorus calls on the listener to slow down, but this was apparently an injunction to himself to take his foot off the gas before the inevitable nervous breakdown. It’s not an optimistic closer by any stretch of the imagination, but it does, to some degree, represent a calm after the storm of encroaching madness.
For all its brilliance, OK Computer was not without precedent. There exist other prophetic and groundbreaking albums that have dealt with the effects that routinised drudgery, paranoia-inducing oppression, and dizzying technological acceleration can have on the human psyche. Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon spring to mind. The latter is the record with which OK Computer is most commonly compared and, arguably, it even has a similar sound, an unorthodox but tuneful marrying of conventional rock with space-age sound effects and strange spoken-word interludes. Neither Dark Side or OK Computer offer many reasons to be cheerful, and both finger corrupt, malignant elites and institutions as the chief culprits behind the hyper-competitive consumerism which ultimately breaks the sanity of those who are exposed to it.
But whereas Dark Side was underpinned by an appreciable disgust at all of this injustice, OK Computer is oddly removed and despondent, apart from the conspicuous moments of frenetic madness. A strange combination of cold detachment, compassionate sadness, and belligerent, bewildered emotional overload colours the album, just as much as its space-rock references to neon signs and air crashes. This thematic and emotional complexity would be impressive enough on its own: Radiohead somehow manage to combine it with a remarkable tunefulness, a succession of immaculate and flawless songs, most of which could be played on the radio, with the notable exception of the one they actually picked as the lead single. But that’s just one more endearingly incongruent aspect of a perfect record, one of the best and most unique in history.
10/10
Highlights: “Airbag”, “Climbing Up The Walls”, “No Surprises”