INTERVIEW: Radiohead (Part 2)
- Nancy Price
(The first part of this interview appeared in the September 1 issue - #120 - of Consumable Online).
Radiohead are one of a handful of bands who clearly seem to be plugged into the nineties, and even own their namesake domains (radiohead.com and, for Europe, radiohead.co.uk). The website itself is certainly unique with its spartan content. "Stanley Donwood does the website and does the artwork with Thom," explains O'Brien. 'We just didn't want to do one of those websites that is basically like `here's a picture of the band, here's the band on the set of their latest video, you can buy the video, you can buy the new single out now.' We wanted something that provoked a bit more of a reaction - you either love it or hate it. People think it's interesting... and then other people say "why can't I get the chords to "Creep?" ' O'Brien was unaware that the website seems to be having a bit of trouble, and, for the past couple months has included the message, "This site, embarrassingly listed as the official Radiohead site, has been left in a state of confusion by Stanley Donwood, who has vanished."
Although the band may not visit their virtual home too often, they are, at least, computer literate. "Oh, completely - yeah. Totally. Colin and Thom have got Powerbooks out on the road, Jonny's going to buy a Powerbook." So do they do much websurfing? "Yeah," O'Brien replies, "I find it so boring, though. I personally feel the best thing about the internet is the text. The graphics - it takes so bloody long to download anything. The text is the stuff that interests me." (His insistence upon his interest only in the text is intriguing, as I made no effort to steer the conversation in that direction. A couple days later, however, I learn from a writer from Rolling Stone Online that she initially had an interview scheduled with O'Brien to discuss sex-related websites... but the interview was canceled without explanation.)
O'Brien does, however, attest to the power of the web. "When we're in the studio - the day after we tracked the songs, there was a website saying the songs we were recording. We have no idea - *no idea* - how they got the names of the songs. Okay, some of them we played live, some of them we haven't. There's no way. Stuff that had been written the night before, been tracked. Really weird. I just have got a feeling that one of the others in the band is going onto the computer about three in the morning and being a mole... and that's cool, that's fine."
There's certainly a major demand for news about the band in the online world. Radiohead's internet devotees span the globe - in fact, the UBL (Ultimate Band List) mentions more than seventy sites dedicated to the band, and their high-volume mailing list has over four hundred members... well, four hundred, and, on occasion, another five. O'Brien smiles, "When we were in the studio, we'd occasionally go in on that. They wouldn't believe who we were. They told us to get off."
For real-time online interaction, fans will pretty much have to wait for one of the numerous online chats featuring the band, or, as the case may be, the band minus O'Brien: "I always avoid [chats]. I've done it once. I'm not that interested at all. You've always got some person regulating it, and I don't want to have just the `good' questions. I want to see what else is being said, and it's really frustrating to have that `we can't show the band *that* question.' If someone says `you guys, you suck, I hate your album' I want to retort, I want to respond to that."
Personally, his favorite aspects of Internet connectivity vary. On the web, he admits to liking "things like typing in a word and seeing where it gets you. I'm also a big soccer fan - Manchester United - so I check out the MU sites, and there are a lot." And though he has a Mac at home, "on the road, I can't get any of the world wide web. I do e-mail with a palmtop - you can get text only." The written word - that text - again is apparently where his passion lies. "I love e-mail, e-mail is brilliant. It changes the way we talk. Suddenly, you're getting letters on the road. Contact, rather than you sending and it being one way the whole time."
Contact with home and the outside world in general would be vital for anyone on the road, holed up with other band members and crew for sometimes months on end. Still, even when they're back home, it sounds like they just can't be apart for too long. "We all live in Oxford. If we're back for months, we see other friends and chill out, and then by the second week, we're phoning one another up, saying `what are you doing?'"
That honest, undiluted friendship is the foundation upon which Radiohead have built their remarkable career. It is also what motivates them to move forward. Of the future, O'Brien says he sees the band's goal as, "fairly simply, to continue making good and better records. And remain friends, really. Remain friends and remain human beings." A moment's pause, then he clarifies, "If for one moment I believed that me and the band as a whole had become rock and roll casualties who don't get on, who become twisted... you see a lot of these old rock and rollers - unwilling to take the rough, having had the smooth... then I wouldn't carry on. I'm not interested in compromising our characters or becoming rock and roll assholes - not interested in that at all."
