You can put Kid A on now, at this very moment, and it will be brand-new for anyone who has never heard it.
Kid A also will exist ten years from now, as well as ten thousand years from now. And it will seem even more mind-blowing and otherworldly, as a missive from a lost, fallen culture. Whether anyone at that time will actually play Kid A, or be alive to care, is a different question. But the dinosaur bones of Kid A will be there to be dug up and studied for anyone with an arcane fascination with early twenty-first-century rock music.
For now, I’m not concerned with how Kid A sounds decades after it was first released. We’ll get to that eventually. What I want to address at this very moment is how Kid A changed how Radiohead is perceived during the period before the album came out. Because Kid A now also exists in the fall of 1988, when Thom Yorke entered the University of Exeter as a puckish, ornery nineteen-year-old.
If what happened to Yorke later in life had never occurred, his college experience wouldn’t be notable to anyone not intimately involved in his personal life. The band he formed with the other members of Radiohead, On a Friday, would’ve also been forgotten. If not for albums like Kid A, nobody would have posted On a Friday’s demos from the mid-’80s on eBay twenty years later in the hopes of nabbing tens of thousands of dollars. The only reason anyone now wants to listen to unexceptional On a Friday tracks like “Girl (In a Purple Dress)” is so they can link the fumbling piano chords and clumsily syncopated drum beats in some vague way to “Idioteque” or “Morning Bell.”
History has a way of retconning the future into the past. In our imagined daydream of 1988, On a Friday and Kid A sit side by side on the same universal plane. It’s as if we’re all living inside the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. Kid A is here. Kid A was always here. And it will always be here.
Thom Yorke was bored at Exeter. He had already put off college for a year, working odd jobs and playing an occasional gig with On a Friday. The band’s first ever show, in the summer of 1987, was a thoroughly unexceptional affair at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, a venue that would come to loom large in the early history of Radiohead. Jonny Greenwood, age fifteen and not yet a full-fledged member of the band, stood onstage with a harmonica while three saxophonists blared behind the band. Later, in response to On a Friday’s first demo tape, a local music critic concluded, “It was hard work listening to this lot”—an early echo of the complaints made by many British scribes who were baffled by Kid A thirteen years later.
Yorke dealt with his collegiate ennui in typical fashion—by drinking and drugging too much. Sometimes, he would work himself up into such a lather with booze that it would fire up a new song idea. One night, he sketched out a tune about a lovelorn loser who hates himself so much that it curdles into obsessive, stalkerish resentment over an idealized object of affection. A guy who sees himself as a weirdo who definitely does not belong here.
What drove Thom Yorke to write “Creep”? He’s never been all that forthcoming. “I wrote it at college,” he said in 1993. “I wasn’t very happy with the lyrics; I thought they were pretty crap.” And that’s about as articulate as he’s been on the topic.
What we know is that Yorke was an Elvis Costello fan in the late ’80s. He was especially enamored with Blood & Chocolate, one of two masterpieces Costello released in 1986—the first, the roots rock throwback King of America, arrived in spring, while the infinitely more churlish Blood & Chocolate came out about a month before Yorke’s eighteenth birthday in the fall. It’s not a surprise that Yorke gravitated to the unruly one. (Though Yorke and Jonny Greenwood did cover one of the best songs on King of America, “I’ll Wear It Proudly,” at the 1999 Tibetan Freedom Concert.) More than a decade later, Yorke credited Blood & Chocolate as “the album that made me change the way I thought about recording and writing music. Lyrics, too.” You can hear that influence loud and clear in “Creep.”
Costello famously claimed that his motivations for becoming a songwriter were “revenge and guilt.” Blood & Chocolate takes that ethos as deep into petty grievance and fury as Costello would ever dare to venture. Written and recorded in the wake of an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, it’s one of the angriest rock records ever made, a no-holds-barred exposé of male jealousy and misogyny that stays just on the right side of the reportage/glorification divide. Costello delves into the ugliest parts of the masculine psyche, but doesn’t shirk the responsibility of making his indignant protagonists look like the absolute worst people in his songs. Time and again, he sets these vengeful recriminations to pungent, violent garage rock that veers wildly in and out of tune. It all sounds like a drunken argument that will eventually prompt the neighbors to call the police.
In “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” Costello whispers sarcastic taunts punctuated by sudden, jagged explosions of sullen noise. The guy in the song has been dumped, and he’s saying all the right things in absolutely the wrong tone of voice. “He’s a fine figure of a man, and handsome, too,” he venomously mewls, with just enough hurt to implicitly acknowledge that his rival really is the better man. By the end of the song, he doesn’t even bother to attempt to hide his contempt. “I know that this will hurt you more than it hurts me,” Costello glowers as his backing band, the Attractions, slams into another car accident.
A few songs later, Costello descends directly into hell on “I Want You,” a hymn to obsession so disquieting it makes you feel unclean for connecting with it. The opening line is chilling: “I want you / you had your fun / you don’t get well no more.” He sings like a man peering through a window shade at an unsuspecting victim, or an incel muttering to himself while staring at a woman’s social-media account.
Actually, Costello doesn’t so much sing as pant the song, affecting a breathy quiver that evokes peeping toms and serial killers in the throes of intense shame and heightened sexual frustration right before their cathartic acts of ultimate sin. The guy in “I Want You,” again, is hung up on an object of affection—women are reduced to things throughout Blood & Chocolate—in the arms of another:
I want to hear he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you
I want you
But no matter how Costello frames it, a young man listening to Blood & Chocolate (like Yorke in 1986 or—about seven or eight years later—me) is prone to feeling empathy for the poor, self-pitying saps at the center of these songs, even one as broken as the person in “I Want You.”
You can imagine how “Creep”—back when it was just a sketch, a mere drunken excuse to blow off some steam at Exeter—might have started as an attempt to re-create the claustrophobic atmosphere of Blood & Chocolate. It’s the pathetic inner monologue of a weak man unspooled without judgment or self-consciousness, in a way that will strike some as ridiculously melodramatic and others as relatable, even righteous.
“Creep” did not belong here or anywhere for many years. Amid the On a Friday demos that have surfaced from the late ’80s and early ’90s, “Creep” never appears. It doesn’t seem to have been part of the band’s early repertoire. When Colin Greenwood, full-time record-store clerk and part-time rock-’n’-roll bassist, passed along the demo to an A&R executive that got Radiohead signed to Parlophone, “Creep” wasn’t on that tape. (The label liked “Stop Whispering”—a mostly forgotten power ballad that Radiohead hasn’t played live since 1996—because it was reminiscent of U2’s “Bad.”)
“Creep” came out of a period when Yorke was woodshedding loads and loads of material that ultimately went nowhere—On a Friday didn’t perform any gigs while most of the band (save Jonny) attended college, a break that lasted for three years. They hadn’t played out much back when they were schoolboys at Abington, either. They would tape their rehearsals, play them back, and then rehearse again. “Nobody liked us except us,” Ed O’Brien told the New York Times in 2000, around the time Radiohead reverted to playing out infrequently.
If Yorke’s songs were mostly unloved at this time, “Creep” was among the least desirable heaped on a ho-hum stockpile. It was too personal, too direct, too obvious. In 1997, Yorke recalled playing some early On a Friday demos for a friend who complained that his lyrics “left nothing to the imagination.” Instead of feeling offended, Yorke agreed. He resolved from then on to not expose himself quite so plainly.
Which meant that “Creep”—a song that tells you everything about itself the first time you hear it—must have seemed gauche not long after that initial surge of angst and alcohol wore off.
The story of how “Creep” ultimately became Radiohead’s breakout song has been told so many times that it feels like a pivotal scene in a bad biopic.
Let’s imagine Daniel Radcliffe, in a radical tour de force that will finally make the public forget Harry Potter, as a young Thom Yorke, who starts playing what he derisively refers to as “our Scott Walker song” in the studio while Radiohead is rehearsing for its first single. The producers, Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie—both of whom are portrayed by Mike Myers doing an overwrought Scottish accent, even though both men are American in real life—mistakenly believe that “Creep” actually is a Scott Walker song, which disappoints them, because it’s the song they like the most.
Cut to the next scene in a recording studio. Radiohead tries in vain to nail a good take of “Inside My Head,” another U2-esque number that only diehards will ultimately remember. It goes nowhere. The Mike Myers twins suggest taking a stab at the Scott Walker number, just to loosen up. What they don’t tell the band is that the performance is being recorded.
As Radiohead lays it down, the dashing guitar player Jonny Greenwood—played by Rami Malek, with the assistance of a floppy black wig and cheek implants—loudly checks the volume of his guitar during the pre-chorus, creating an instantly iconic “ka-chunk” sound. (To emphasize the enormity of this moment, the Hans Zimmer score swells uproariously when Rami hits the first “ka-chunk.”)
Radiohead ends up capturing the entire song in one take. In the control room, they listen to the playback. “What do you think?” Radcliffe asks. “I think it’s the best thing we’ve done in ages,” Rami says. (This is the actual dialogue from the real-life session.)
In the biopic, the film would now segue to a montage of Radiohead enjoying instant fame and fortune as “Creep” storms up the charts. But it didn’t actually happen that way. “Creep” didn’t become a hit in the United States until the summer of 1993, almost a year after the single first came out in the UK, in September of 1992. At home, Radiohead was completely overshadowed by Suede, a swishy, swaggering glam-rock band in which every member had Jonny Greenwood cheekbones.
Oh, Suede. I am one of the few Americans who still remembers them. I even play their records from time to time. I especially like the first two LPs, 1993’s Suede (the one with two beautiful androgynous glowing beings making out on the cover) and 1994’s Dog Man Star, an overblown opus that’s like Suede’s version of Be Here Now, only with cocaine exchanged out for heroin. Suede was fronted by a guy named Brett Anderson, who basically looked like an artist’s rendering of a perfect ’90s British rock singer, with swept-back black hair, feminine, catlike features, and a look of perpetual insouciance. The “guitar player with mystique” in Suede was Bernard Butler, who resembled Johnny Marr if Johnny had tried to impersonate Jimmy Page.
In the early ’90s, the smart money was on Suede to become the massively successful legacy act, and Radiohead to be the flash-in-the-pan one-hit wonder. But that just goes to show how stupid the smart money is sometimes. The British press was essentially forced to pay attention to Radiohead after Pablo Honey went gold in the United States in the fall of 1993. But the local press still framed them in the context of Suede, even though Suede’s self-titled debut, the New Musical Express conceded, had been outsold 15 to 1 by Pablo Honey in the States.
Now the idea was to make Radiohead seem more like Suede, purely for the sake of satisfying the prurient interest of rock writers. Colin was compelled by Melody Maker to dish about his naughty collegiate past, in which he flirted with heavy drug use and homosexual dalliances.
All of this added to the disorienting feeling inside of Radiohead that “making it” wasn’t worth it. Over time, they came to resent their hit song about resentment. While on tour in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, Yorke dedicated the B-side of “Creep,” “Yes I Am,” to “all the people who shat on us,” protesting later to Melody Maker “about the sensation of being the underdog for so long, and how suddenly everyone’s nice to you. And it’s like, ‘F you.’”
If people loved them too late in England, fans loved Radiohead too early in America. “Creep” translated to MTV and US rock radio because, unlike Suede, Radiohead wasn’t ironic or androgynous or averse to overt rock-dude guitar riffage. For Yorke, it wasn’t his words or his impassioned delivery that sold the song, “it was just that guitar noise,” he admitted to Rolling Stone several years later. “If that guitar hadn’t exploded where it exploded, there’s just no way it would have got on alternative radio. And we wouldn’t be anywhere.”
And yet Yorke was still the face of the song—the freak, the loner, the alienated outsider. He was the one on the hook for interviews with middle-American Morning Zoo Crew disc jockeys who constantly asked him whether he was like the person in the song, and if he was just as messed-up as Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder. He played along, because that’s what you do when you have a hit. But he came to believe that the radio played “Creep” too much, putting Radiohead in a corner it might never escape. “You can’t imagine how horrible that was,” he recalled in 2000. “And the thing about being a one-hit wonder: you know, you do come to believe it. You say you don’t but you do. It messed me up good and proper.”
“Creep” and Kid A now peacefully coexist in the same shared history—of Radiohead, of alternative rock, of all the people who have made those things pivotal parts of their lives. They’re both trusty, reassuring warhorses. It’s difficult now to understand how, for a time, they existed at opposing poles.
But Radiohead really was defined by one song for most of the ’90s, and that song now has little to do with what the band’s persona became. The cliché about Radiohead is that they make arty, esoteric, enigmatic music that willingly confounds listeners—and that comes from Kid A. But that’s not how they were perceived before Kid A. They were pop music. A teen-angst band. Kid stuff. The sort of thing that anyone over the age of twenty-three reflexively scoffs at.
The specter of one-hit-wonderdom hung over Radiohead for years. In their reviews of 1995’s The Bends, Rolling Stone and Spin framed their takes on how well Radiohead did or didn’t move on from the ubiquity of “Creep.” The Rolling Stone review, puzzlingly, dinged The Bends for being too poppy, harrumphing that “‘Creep’ whacked Americans because its message was unfiltered.” Spin similarly dismissed The Bends as “never ‘Creep’-like enough.” This sort of reaction was inevitable for Radiohead’s first post-“Creep” album. But “Creep” also appears in the first graf of Rolling Stone and Spin’s reviews of OK Computer. Only, in these reviews the tone is dismissive—“Creep” is no longer a standard that Radiohead can’t live up to, but an albatross that can only embarrass them.
Radiohead continued to play “Creep” regularly throughout the ’90s—356 times, to be exact, from 1992 to ’98. But after Kid A, “Creep” rarely appeared in the band’s setlists. At the height of the song’s success, Yorke remarked that singing “Creep” felt like covering somebody else’s song. Even back in 1993, the impact of “Creep” was so massive that it felt as though it belonged in the public domain. But by the early 2000s, Radiohead had truly severed themselves from “Creep,” gifting it to the bizarre array of bands—everyone from Tears for Fears to Blues Traveler to Korn—that have performed “Creep” in concert in Radiohead’s place. From there, “Creep” filtered down to American Idol, and then filtered again even lower down to the Ryan Murphy teen drama Glee. “Creep” has had a life completely independent of Radiohead, venturing to places the band itself would never go.
How do you escape an arena when all local trains will take you right back to where you started? For Radiohead, “Creep” was the trap and Kid A was the escape plan.
While nobody in the band has ever stated it in exactly these terms, Kid A was the album that kept Radiohead from being regarded as strictly a ’90s band, like Bush, Blind Melon, or any of the other acts whose breakout hits are collected, along with “Creep,” on the immortal CD MTV Buzz Bin, Vol. 1: The Zen of Buzz Clips.
It’s safe to say that MTV Buzz Bin, Vol. 1: The Zen of Buzz Clips doesn’t have the stature of Kid A as an era-defining masterpiece. But if you’re looking for a snapshot of what rock music sounded like at the height of alt-rock radio, The Zen of Buzz Clips is absolutely essential listening. It is more eclectic than you might remember—the MTV Buzz Bin had enough room for Danzig and the Dave Matthews Band. “Creep” is situated on the track list between “Low” by the smart-ass country-rock band Cracker, and “Cantaloop” by the English jazz-rap group Us3. That’s where Radiohead landed in the early ’90s—somewhere between meat-and-potatoes guitar rock and British novelty pop.
(By the way, “Creep” is not the best song on The Zen of Buzz Clips. That honor goes to “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms, which contains one of the all-time great rock song lyrics: “Tomorrow we can drive around this town / and let the cops chase us around.” In later years, the Gin Blossoms have occasionally put “Fake Plastic Trees” into their setlists as they’ve worked the county-fair circuit. Though the Radiohead song they should really cover is “Let Down,” an epic ’90s jangler worthy of one of the decade’s great jangle-pop bands.)
No matter the greatness of The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead’s career still rested on a continuum with its debut album, in much the same way that Pearl Jam’s subsequent ’90s albums all can be framed in some way as a reaction against the titanic success of 1991’s Ten.
Pearl Jam really is an easy point of comparison here. It’s particularly helpful for defining how Radiohead put the Buzz Bin behind them. Pearl Jam never put out an album after the 1990s that stands apart definitively from the band’s “classic” period. This is not meant as a knock against late-period PJ efforts like Backspacer or Lightning Bolt—it’s just a fact that those albums didn’t have the cultural impact of Vs. or Vitalogy. But Kid A mattered at least as much in Radiohead’s career as Pablo Honey, possibly more. And then Radiohead put out another landmark LP, In Rainbows, seven years after Kid A, ensuring that Millennials would have their own Radiohead album as crucial as The Bends and OK Computer were for Gen-Xers. It’s possible those same Millennials like No Code. But the relative conciseness of Pearl Jam’s “relevant” era consigns them to ’90s-band status, whereas Radiohead found a way, starting with Kid A, to be extragenerational.
In the 1995 film Casino, professional gambler Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) refers to Las Vegas as a “morality car wash” for lowlifes and degenerates. Kid A was like that for Radiohead when it came to washing away the stigma of once being an alt-rock also-ran. But this cleansing resulted in some collateral damage, starting with the reputation of Pablo Honey.
The first Radiohead album is routinely ranked as either the band’s worst or second worst LP, along with The King of Limbs, which actually deserves to be considered the worst. As an OG “Creep” lover, I believe this development is unjust, though it’s not surprising in the least. Much of Radiohead’s career can be interpreted as an attempt to bury its platinum-selling debut.
The members of Radiohead started telegraphing their low opinion of Pablo Honey practically as soon as they were no longer required to promote it. In 1996, while lounging in San Francisco with Thom Yorke and a journalist from an online zine, Jonny Greenwood mused that “when reviewers [say] bad things about the first album, we just sort of half agree with them.” The Bends meanwhile had turned Radiohead into “that horrible thing of a band’s band, or a critic’s band,” he mused. Two years later, amid the glow of OK Computer’s rapturous critical reception, Yorke insisted that Pablo Honey “was like a demo: ‘Three weeks, don’t worry about it, no-one will hear it, it’s our first album’… and then so many people bought it. We were still forming and didn’t have any idea what we were doing.”
Pablo Honey certainly was rushed, especially compared with the open-ended, marathon sessions that yielded both Kid A and Amnesiac. (Though Radiohead deliberately worked through Hail to the Thief in about the same amount of time as Pablo Honey, knocking out a song per day. That album’s lead-off track, “2 + 2 = 5,” also opens with the sound of Jonny Greenwood plugging in his guitar, which is reminiscent of that ka-chunk from “Creep.”)
Moreover, it’s obvious—like “Creep,” Pablo Honey lacks mystery and ambiguity. Instead, Radiohead made a bar-band record in which the pleasures reside exclusively on the surface, hitting instantly upon impact. At that time, they didn’t have the luxury of producing a “grower.” They had to be liked immediately in order to survive. Fortunately, they were really good at being superficially likeable. You don’t have to play Pablo Honey a hundred times in order to fully absorb it; playing it a hundred times might, in fact, make you like it less.
This, of course, is not the Radiohead way as we’ve come to understand it. Radiohead makes Profound and Important Radiohead Albums, not a hit single surrounded by lesser-known filler hastily assembled and then slapped on a circular piece of plastic. Profound and Important Radiohead Albums are serious propositions that require serious commitment on the part of listeners. You must be willing to put in the same amount of time listening as they did writing and recording it. Only then can you and the band together achieve fully formed status.
You can’t enjoy Pablo Honey under these conditions. And that makes me sad, because I loved this album when it came out. I know I did—I have that review I wrote for my hometown paper as evidence! While I can acknowledge that Pablo Honey is not as good as most of what came after it, I didn’t have access in 1993 to the albums that Radiohead would one day make, the actual 1993, the one without the retconned Kid A. As opposed to the imagined 1993 of my memory, the one cluttered with all that inconvenient baggage from the future.
When I bought Pablo Honey for the first time, there was only one Radiohead album, and no guarantee that there would ever be another one. And, at the time, it was enough for me. When I put Pablo Honey on now, I want for it to still be enough for me. Therefore, I have decided to listen to Pablo Honey from now on with the ears of my sixteen-year-old self. I will not judge it via the lens of subsequent Radiohead albums—I am instead tricking my brain into perceiving it as the only Radiohead music that I have ever heard. Because lying to yourself in order to once again enjoy albums you used to love is good.
How refreshing it is that what I’ve come to see as flaws have been restored once again as strengths! What was basic is now visceral.
Once I put myself back in the guileless state in which I originally heard these songs, Pablo Honey suddenly sounds like a gang of bros thrilled by the larger-than-life noise they have spontaneously whipped up in the studio. I can shout along with the choruses—“I’m not a vegetable! I will not control myself!”—and imagine striking back against a parental authority figure, even though I am now a parental authority figure. I can fantasize about this album giving me the power to strike back against the beautiful and affluent oppressors at my high school. I can listen to Radiohead and just dumbly enjoy riffs.
Pablo Honey, in other words, rocks.
Anyone can do this with any work of art. You don’t have to literally fool your brain, you just have to remind yourself that you once had a different set of expectations.
In the case of Pablo Honey, I wasn’t looking for “art” or “experimentation” or “challenging” music when I was sixteen. I wanted to feel better about myself and my lot in life. I yearned to experience an even small rush of power. I needed to feel like I had some semblance of control. My most reliable vehicle for achieving these ends was listening to rock ’n’ roll at full volume on headphones, and Pablo Honey is the most rock-’n’-roll rock-’n’-roll record that Radiohead has ever made.
A year after I bought Pablo Honey, I became obsessed with another band from England, Oasis, who made their hunger for rock stardom the primary thematic concern of their debut album, Definitely Maybe. For the next few years, the members of Radiohead made it a point to publicly distance themselves from Oasis and other Britpop bands. Yorke once dismissed Oasis as “a bunch of guys who act stupid and write really primitive music.” In another interview, he denied that Radiohead had anything to do with Britpop because “we don’t really like cocaine that much.”
This, again, seems like revisionist history. The members of Radiohead weren’t much older than I was in 1993. Phil Selway was the old man in the group at twenty-six when Pablo Honey started moving up the charts in America, while Jonny Greenwood had not yet turned twenty-two. They were all young men in search of salvation, and “Creep”—before the song’s success held them captive—delivered the very things they so desperately desired, even the less reputable stuff (fame, money, influence) they were later reluctant to admit that they had once sought out.
My favorite track on Pablo Honey is “Anyone Can Play Guitar,” in which Thom Yorke sings about standing on the beach with his guitar while the apocalypse descends on London, and thinking only about joining a band when he goes to heaven, so he “won’t be a nothing anymore.”
I suppose it would be wise to read this song as an ironic commentary on rock-dude solipsism; the part when Yorke claims that he “wanna be, wanna be, wanna be Jim Morrison” probably shouldn’t be taken completely at face value. On the other hand, the delivery of “Anyone Can Play Guitar” doesn’t seem ironic, and Radiohead has never been a particularly ironic band. The guitars are over-amped and arrogant and a little show-offy, and the rhythm section practically swaggers—Radiohead approaches actual glam rock on “Anyone Can Play Guitar.” It’s basically a prequel to Oasis’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” with only slightly more shame.
A discussion about “Anyone Can Play Guitar” would be incomplete without mentioning Radiohead’s infamous MTV Beach House appearance from 1993. For those who don’t remember the details of MTV’s annual spring-break coverage: Every year the music channel would devote a week or two of remote coverage to some college-party destination, hosting a series of bands at a lavish beach house. Normally, the MTV Beach House was a venue for artists like Gerardo, the hunky early-’90s Latin rapper of “Rico Suave” fame. But every now and then, they would host some horribly incongruous act who definitely did not belong amid the muscle-bound bros and string-bikinied babes.
This is where Radiohead comes in.
People always note the same two things about this clip: (1) the extreme weirdness of seeing Radiohead in the context of the MTV Beach House; (2) the fact that Thom Yorke almost died because he dove into the pool and was dragged down by his waterlogged Dr. Martens. However, what is usually undersold about the performance of “Anyone Can Play Guitar” is Radiohead’s commitment to executing some classic rock-star moves. Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood both prowl the small poolside stage like Pete Townshend in The Kids Are Alright. And Yorke, looking resplendent in his bleach-blond Kurt Cobain hairdo, affects a breathy vocal and mugs shamelessly for the cameras on the Jim Morrison line, before dramatically hurling himself into the pool during the song’s guitar-screeching outro.
There’s another interesting and frankly sort of weird premonition in Radiohead’s MTV Beach House performance: it’s reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s death from drowning four years later. Buckley famously influenced Thom Yorke’s melodramatic vocals on The Bends, particularly the song “Fake Plastic Trees,” which was recorded not long after the members of Radiohead saw Buckley in concert in 1994. The Bends’ producer John Leckie said Buckley made Yorke “realize that you could sing in a falsetto without sounding drippy.” In 1997, Buckley went swimming in a harbor off the Mississippi River in Memphis. He dove in wearing all of his clothes, include his Dr. Martens boots. Thom made it out of the water, but Jeff didn’t.
“Anyone Can Play Guitar” is hardly an isolated island of sublime trash on Pablo Honey. Radiohead dares to go even dumber on “How Do You?,” a laddish pile-driver about “a stupid baby who turned into a powerful freak” that sounds like the Vines or the Hives or some other forgettable garage-rock band that was on the cover of Spin in 2003.
And then there’s “I Can’t,” my most precious Radiohead deep cut that apparently nobody else likes, including the members of Radiohead. They’ve played it only nine times, and not since October 27, 1992, at a gig in Leeds that coincided with the sessions for Pablo Honey. But they never bothered to trot out “I Can’t” after the album was released, and they sure as hell never even considered playing it on any tour afterward. Why have you forsaken “I Can’t,” Radiohead? It’s just such an infectiously corny pop song, like a reimaging of Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout” that’s only 10 percent gloomier.
If the transparent melodrama of “Creep” and Pablo Honey was a necessary device for Radiohead to get a foothold in America in 1993, distancing themselves from it just a few years later was probably also required for the band’s long-term survival. The wave of alt-rock bands that followed Nirvana already seemed pretty played out by the time The Bends was released. Radiohead initially promoted the album with its most abrasive and least pop-friendly track, the sputtering and disease-obsessed “My Iron Lung,” in which Yorke pointedly sings, “This is our new song / Just like the last one / A total waste of time.” Radiohead’s spin on “teenage angst has paid off well / now I’m bored and old,” that classic expression of post-fame jadedness which opens Nirvana’s In Utero.
If this was meant to disarm a skeptical music press before they pressed Play on The Bends, the gambit failed. Spin’s Chuck Eddy was among many critics who were quick to lean on alterna-hit jokes. “This is one of those follow-up albums (like the last Spin Doctors one and, I fear, the next Counting Crows, the Offspring, and Blur records) that I always hope will sound like ten imitations of the one or two great hits of the band’s not-so-great previous commercial-breakthrough LP,” he wrote, “but instead just proves the band is afraid to be pigeonholed into the only style it’s very good at.”
In case the implication of lumping Radiohead in with Spin Doctors and the Offspring wasn’t clear enough, Eddy added several more unflattering comparisons, likening The Bends to “Suede trying to rock like Sparks but coming out like U2, or (more often) that hissy little pissant in Smashing Pumpkins passive-aggressively inspiring me to clobber him with my copy of The Grand Illusion by Styx.”
This kneejerk mockery of early ’90s alt-rock—particularly the B- and C-list stuff that never transcended the era—always makes me defensive, because when Pablo Honey was big (along with Counting Crows and Smashing Pumpkins and Cracker and countless others) it meant the world to me. If I ever claimed decades after the fact that alternative music didn’t seem revolutionary to me as a teenager, I’d know deep down that I was a horrible liar. Because that music blew my sheltered, small-town, middle-American mind back then.
The earnestness and extremely un-punk accessibility of those alt bands read as dorky just a few years later. But at the time it was genuinely thrilling watching guys like Thom Yorke jump into swimming pools, if only because he clearly didn’t look or act like Bret Michaels. It was music that transported you from one rather depressing path to another infinitely more interesting path. Inevitably, you moved past that music at some point to something else entirely stranger and more adventurous, as the members of Radiohead themselves moved on to a more adventurous version of their own band. But I’ve never lost my love, or my gratitude, for those initial game-changers that bubbled up from the Buzz Bin.
When Radiohead entered the Kid A era, the members were questioning everything—the music industry, rock ’n’ roll, traditional song structures, even the very definition of what a band is. They also sought to deconstruct their own formulas, attitudes, and ideas about what Radiohead was and what it could be. But they never really stopped being who they are. They couldn’t. All they could do was try to hide it better.
Maybe that’s why I can still hear the Radiohead of Pablo Honey in the band’s subsequent work. They’re still the band that relentlessly grasps for the emotional jugular, leading with the heart rather than the head, and putting ultimate value on what must be intuited over what can only be intellectualized. They just got better at not making it so damn obvious.
The trajectory of pretty much every Radiohead album that’s not Pablo Honey is that it seems weird and alienating at first, and then gradually sounds more and more direct and emotional. Think of the first time you heard “Paranoid Android.” The prog-rock excesses, the menacing lyrics, the epic length—it was all so strange coming after The Bends, wasn’t it? Like something you would have to work hard in order to get. Now think of the last time you heard “Paranoid Android.” Is it possible to still hear anything remotely strange about it? It’s just a mass of swelling balladry and guitar noise, punctuated by some incredible, dramatic Jonny Greenwood ka-chunk. It’s Pablo Honey with superior chops.
As for Kid A, that album no longer seems quite so weird either. Even when Radiohead consciously ditched guitars, they still viewed the music they made together as a means of surviving the apocalypse. Anyone can play guitar—or not. The path from “I don’t belong here” to “I’m not here” isn’t so far after all.