RAdiohead

Here we go again.

I like Radiohead -- Amnesiac was my favorite release of last year, and Kid A was high up on my 2000 list -- but I'm not really the kind of person who hunts down mp3s of unreleased tracks. I'd rather wait for the record and hear the songs in their finished versions. (Yeah, I know... "Aren't you special?")

To listen to a new song live, to experience it, to watch it unfold, to hear it change as it is reworked is a magical, wonderful thing. It's one of the joys of following unsigned bands is that they lack the fear and/or resources so they are more likely to do it in public.

But to record a live song, distribute it and critique it before the artist has had the chance to stand back from the painting and go "There, OK, that's done" seems kind of unfair. Both to the artist, who is being interrupted, and to the song, which may or may not take a completely different shape eventually.

Listening to works in progress is wonderful, but trying to pin them down and dissect them seems, well ... I'm not going to say disrespectful, but it does seem kind of ... pointless? Self defeating? What's the word I'm looking for?

That said, no I've not seen Radiohead on this tour, nor heard any of the tunes.

I would hope so I really do.

you couldn't resist it could you melissa.

''Scatterbrain: Sounds like the physical act of crying. A dischordant ballad with no way out. The aftermath of a storm.''

this is such a cliched description I don't even know where to begin. Get your head checked melissa.

''Up On The Ladder: Starts poorly, Radiohead try the whole "rocking out" thing again. Fail. But the ending is beautiful, desperate, his voice over mournful synth chords. A song about immense disappointment.''

Pushing the 'sad chords' triggers again. Mournful, desperation, dissapointment. sob, sob, sob...all the way to the bank we go.

''Where I End and You Begin: The day the earth stood still. The Ondes-Martenot keens its unearthly cry. The song is a sentinel, a prison.''

''Wolf at the Door: Each word is a knife. An impossibly hurt, fearful song.''

er...more crying then. I'm beginning to think Thom Yorke wasn't breast fed when he was a baby.

''A Punch Up At A Wedding: The most seethingly angry song I've ever heard. On the surface, it's all insistent beat, slightly rollicking piano, and bass. But it's coming apart at the seams. It's ready to rip your throat out.''

yes but angry at what. Is it like an adolescent who is just angry for no reason or is it actually anger at something specific. This is all bullshit.

''Go to Sleep: Eastern-inflected roots rock song. Dull, really.''

b-but why is it dull? don't just leave it at that.

and on it fucking goes...I avoided the golden jubilee but there's too many institutions and you can't avoid it all.

There, There - bit of a homage to Adam and the Ants circa Kings of the Wild Frontier featuring Ed and Jonny on JAMC Bobby Gillespie style stand up drums with a top acending climax - a fitting opener

Scatterbrain - needs a lot of work and doesn't really go anywhere.

Up on the ladder - pretty rocky with thom doing his 'you and whose army' unfocused anti blair schtick

We suck young blood - slow and swinging with harmonies from phil and ed (phil was wearing an amusing madonna style headset during his backing vox)

I will - an old song, briefly featured in the 'Meeting people is easy' doc with lovely harmonies from Thom and Ed

Myxamotosis - fairly fast rocky number with Ed playing a les paul (surely a first).

going for some lunch now, will post my thoughts on the rest later

melissa, thank you putting up your descriptions.

Melissa couldn't resisit it and nor could I.

''(This is why I don't post on ILM.)''

ILM isn't a radiohead list. Or a keiji haino list. Or improv or free jazz, etc. fans and non-fans of everything to do with [x] are here and when a thread is opened by soemone and I feel the need to comment I will do so.

I'm not 'pissing', I'm just adding my thoughts on your descriptions. Sorry about the 'checking your head' line though.

when you describe a song as ''The most seethingly angry song I've ever heard'' then I want to know at what as well.

irony = julio's stance as radiohead hata being JUST as cliched and as ho hum as he wants (hopes?) the new songs to be. he HASN'T EVEN HEARD THEM and yet he took time out to bash the fecking DESCRIPTIONS. and why?

its one thing to be convinced that radiohead are inauthentic or overrated; its another entirely to pounce like a wolf on anybody else who sees something in them, especially when the crux of that fan-music connection is one borne out of vulnerability.

he (or anyone else) can take the sadness, confusion, anger, fear and deride it, mock it, HATE it all he wants. me, i'll take it (as well as the songs) and celebrate it all. not because i'm a sad moany bastard (really, i'm not) but because the alternative, to deny all of that, is too ugly and dark and boring to bear.

Jules: "Get your head checked melissa" constitutes personal attack with intent. But what's this claptrap about banning the guy??? Tell me that's a fucking joke. I thought what he said was valid ranting.

And right-on Mark P - you are on the money.

yeah. I've heard everything they've done up to this and when I saw the descriptions it just reminded of the past. Irony indeed.

''its one thing to be convinced that radiohead are inauthentic or overrated; its another entirely to pounce like a wolf on anybody else who sees something in them, especially when the crux of that fan-music connection is one borne out of vulnerability.''

i did not intend to 'pounce'. I didn't know it was borne out of some 'vulnerability'.

''he (or anyone else) can take the sadness, confusion, anger, fear and deride it, mock it, HATE it all he wants.''

I love or hate a lot of music with nothing in between, which is unfortunate sometimes.

melissa- hope you accept my apologies.

''"Get your head checked melissa" constitutes personal attack with intent.''

yeah, and I apologised for that.

Imagine Dragons unfurled a Palestinian flag onstage a few days ago.

It is shouting from the darkness. It is not looking people in the eye when you speak.

You mean it is someone who has to stand in a dark audience while you stand up on stage with a microphone and a bunch of lights on you?

It’s funny that these dipshits got a name as a “political” band during the war on terror, presumably if that were going down today they would just be going “have any of these protesters considered that the taliban and saddam bad”

xxp don't want to argue too much about how much credit we should give public figures 20 months into a genocide for expressing solidarity, but this is after they played Israel (and Azerbaijan) just last year, so to go back to the first part of this post, not gonna give them too much credit for covering their asses

LOL has anyone ever listened to radiohead and thought, he seems like a lovely person, i really want to give him a hug.

more ‘he seems like the stereotype of a rock star'. not the hotel room trashing kind but the reserved English variant who is married to a supermodel and drinks expensive cocktails at a members only club and is a vegetarian but spends all his downtime shopping for leather jackets and has come to believe in his own myth to the degree that he thinks his fans don’t deserve him rather than the other way around.

who gives a shit what he says

Centrist dad music made by centrist blokes.

Must be really difficult for him getting negative press, he won't know how to handle it

Coincidentally, Humans of New York just posted this, and if feels like a potent antidote.

I think the guy is both dumb and a horrible posh English reactionary cunt seeming to believe that his vacuous boilerplate genocide apologist soundbites sound thoughtful in some way. Very much in the fashion of his music career imo. He's always been a posh cunt with corny shit lyrics that he is narcissistic enough to believe that they have some level of profundity.

I was talking about my son's OCD issues and medication with my brother and he starts quoting a Radiohead lyric at me. I told him if he ever did that again I was going to get a plane over to Dubai (where he lives) just solely so I can punch him out.

Knock me out, smash out my brains
If I take a chair and start to talk shit

Dance you fucker, dance you fucker Don't you dare, don't you dare

I recall seeing (or reading) Yorke talking cryptically about things he 'found out about' that, if he told you, would make you 'shit your brains' this was maybe around the early 2000s, (to me at least) that sort of talk translated as "I've been looking at truther shit on message boards..', he was already borderline unbearable back then but being dumb enough to bring it up in interviews just translates that his general cogency was not to be trusted.

Funny thing is a lot of dumb people make the best music, and Radiohead were thought as kinda smart, as people, a cut above the Gallaghers or something like that.

heh! it's really funny when you encounter that cryptic "you wouldn't believe the things... I ....have ... uncovered whilst conducting my research" irl. There is an absolute idiot I know who says things like that all the time and he cracks me up. I always assumed that Yorke was an Oxbridge graduate, but apparently he was "was too thick to even apply,". It's hard out there for the son of a brainy nuclear physicist who is thick as pigshit!

that was his underdog "mean streets" flex - he might have been very posh but he went to a very common as muck uni

In my head - and this might not be actually true - he's angry with Tony Blair more than anyone else in the world, ever.

tbf,

Guessing Tony Blair's take on the current cobflict mirror Yorke's.

It seems like he was actually more angry with the legitimacy of the Bush regime than with Blair. But if you keep everything verbally and textually as oblique as possible and are posh English, then people just assume that you are actually clever rather than a clueless fuckwit!

The only thing I want to hear Thom Yorke explain is the guitar signal chain on “Bodysnatchers.”

speaking of "Bodysnatchers", this is great (references the aforementioned song): https://infinitejaz.substack.com/p/karma-police-arrest-this-man

It seems like he was actually more angry with the legitimacy of the Bush regime than with Blair. But if you keep everything verbally and textually as oblique as possible and are posh English, then people just assume that you are actually clever rather than a clueless fuckwit!

Reggie Watts’ response to Yorke

Based Reggie Watts pic.twitter.com/QVwngFa09m

— Acid Leftist (@AcidLeftist) May 31, 2025

I would not have expected such an eloquent statement from a b-list comedian, good for him.

I would not have expected such an eloquent statement from a b-list comedian, good for him.

― That Pedo Band (Boring, Maryland), Sunday, June 1, 2025 4:57 PM (yesterday)

well that's kind of rude!

LOL has anyone ever listened to radiohead and thought, he seems like a lovely person, i really want to give him a hug.

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse)

i wouldn't say "lovely person" but he _was_ a role model for me, for a long time. maybe that was stupid of me. i mean, i've changed a lot over the past 25 years. i figure, well, if i changed, maybe he changed too.

Knock me out, smash out my brains
If I take a chair and start to talk shit

― imago

like, when i was younger this song, "A Reminder", meant a lot to me. i worried a lot that i'd turn into the kind of horrible old man that, well, Thom Yorke has turned into. well, i didn't, and now i realize the futility of a song like that. if someone was to play that song to yorke now (i'm pretty sure the person he addresses the song to is dead now, so it wouldn't be them), he genuinely wouldn't think he'd become the person the Thom Yorke 1997 Edition is singing about. or else...

i think, sometimes, about how my past self would judge me, about what 21-year-old proto-Kate would think of me. because 21-year-old me was desperately afraid of becoming the person I am now. i tried so, so hard to not become the person i am now. i do feel a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, for letting that version of me down, somehow, even though, well, i haven't. no matter what 21-year-old me _thought_ they wanted or didn't want... they'd be proud of me, and i'd be proud of them.

thom yorke is probably very proud of himself. well, i'm not like him, even though i'm also proud of myself. he was a role model for me, though. the anxiety. the dissociation. "i'm not here/this isn't happening". i said that to myself a lot. for him it was the terror of standing in front of a stadium full of fans. for me it was just, well, dysphoria. still, when i dissociate - and it's not the dysphoria anymore, it's the intolerable awfulness of the world around me - i hear his voice, hear that melody. 25 years is a long time. a lot of my emotions, my feelings, are encapsulated in things he sings.

so it sucks that he's a shitty human being. maybe i was stupid for liking his music, but it's not something i can undo. i mean, he could always stop being shitty, but i don't really expect him to. i'm responsible for myself. nobody else.

don't know why they didn't release pre HTTT cuts during the 2002 touring. "there, there" had johnny's guitar part start even earlier than the recorded version. plus the legendary salamanca request show!

Fuck Radiohead

extremely interesting and valuable take

bet Keyes is real fun at social gatherings

I’m more or less there with Keyes, although I wouldn’t necessarily jump into a thread about it. I’m keeping and enjoying my old Radiohead but no more money for them.

I’m should revisit HTTT. It’s the only one I don’t know well.

I thought they were done after A Moon Shaped Pool, but apparently not:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/03/radiohead-announce-first-tour-dates-since-2018-and-face-boycott-from-pro-palestine-campaigners

for christ's sake, if the other three are that hard up they could just start a patreon. i'd give them money to _not_ work with thom and jonny lol.

i honestly thought and still think that phil has been sacked...

Phil wrote the email and it says "all five of us."

hmm. did it say phil selway? or just 'phil'? plenty of phils out there that can drum, i know one myself

they're great on drum fills

Activists have asked fans to spurn the gigs until the band ‘convincingly distances itself’ from guitarist Jonny Greenwood performing in Tel Aviv during the Gaza war

Does this mean Jonny has to play on one side the stage and the rest of the band on the other?

map beat me to it, but I'm gonna post my joke anyway

the world is already full of great drum phils

Radiohead with Phil Rudd would rule.

"It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Hail Thieves)"

Does this mean Jonny has to play on one side the stage and the rest of the band on the other?

― Wounded Insulter (President Keyes)

efrim menuck as second guitarist

These concerts are essentially going to be Israeli flag waving conventions, aren't they? With the extreme polarization everywhere...

Except for maybe a couple of confused people buying a ticket (and supporting the band) just to go protest with a Palestinian flag they'll smuggle inside.

Expecting lots of huffiness from Thom.

Truly I think the majority of fans either don't know or don't care about the Israel stuff.

They're prob still in the Jez from Peep Show "fuck you, Bush' era.

These concerts are essentially going to be Israeli flag waving conventions, aren't they? With the extreme polarization everywhere...

― StanM, Wednesday, September 3, 2025 2:02 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I can't speak to Europe but if they do shows in America there is exactly a 0% chance of this actually happening.

yeah most people who would go to see a radiohead show in the us don't know or care about that stuff, i'd wager. they're, like. an old band for old people.

i'm kind of curious as to what sort of hell online radiohead fan communities must be like, though. i didn't like them much even back in the day...