Radiohead: Ghosts in the Machine
Review by Mark Mordue

Kid A, the fourth release from the British group Radiohead, has been one of the most awaited events of the musical calendar. Perhaps because no other 'rock' band of the present era has the newness of presence and the experimental vigour to qualify for what most critics - some a little less consciously than others - see as a millennial statement, a chance to push the boat out into the 21st century.

Both REM and U2 are also due to release their own recordings soon. Have no doubt, they still know how to set an influential pace: each will be received as a major statement, each will be looking to affirm their liveliness. But even these musical giants seem to have accepted their more historic place after long careers and bowed their heads to a new pathfinder.

REM singer Michael Stipe was quick to tell the world over a year ago,   "Radiohead are so good it frightens me." U2's Bono was more recently quoted as saying that the last two Radiohead CDs - The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997) - "are among the best things ever recorded in pop music."

The more experienced point men of contemporary music have a new  champion walking beside them. Most critics and recent music polls agree with them.

And what does the new leader say?

"I'd really like to help you man. I'd really like to help you man..."

Recited in a manner - on a new song called 'Optimistic' - that suggests maybe he/they can't. That singer Thom Yorke and Radiohead are as lost as anyone.

Pre-publicity and hype around Kid A proposed something so experimental and aurally unexpected - strong new electronic influences, a drastically reduced use of Radiohead's trademark guitar sound and Thom Yorke's high, sweet-sad voice - something so musically strange we would have trouble even listening to it.

This was going to be a high art event. A record you  struggled with.   Half-baffled, half-admiring reviews are still perpetuating this lie. The truth is Kid A is beautiful. Complex textured music, yes - but driving and beautiful, filled with luminous energy.

Most Radiohead fans will have long ago detected a utopian coolness at the heart of their sound. Everything from the band's CD artwork through to Thom Yorke's fluorescent lyrical ache - think of songs like 'Fake Plastic Trees' and 'Paranoid Android', let alone their CD titles (Kid A betrays a fascination with biogenetic engineering) - have added to that surrounding mood of futurist uncertainty. This is tomorrow's music from today's romantics, struggling to maintain emotional efficacy in a world increasingly iced by electronic light: the internet, surveillance, reality TV, automated transactions, voyeurism, a denatured and alienated global communications 'village' where contact is byte-sized.

In no way, however, do Radiohead present themselves as rock 'n' roll primitivists, or Luddites opposed to a technological culture inside or outside of music. If anything, in today's scene they are regarded as the last word in modern rock 'n' roll - up to the minute and beyond it.

If you wanted to place Radiohead into a 'tradition', you'd refer to acts like Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd, as well as the Bryan Eno influenced exoticism of early Roxy Music (those brassy squalls and cool angles) and the Berlin digressions of David Bowie and U2 (the same pop alienation). Peers like the British avant-dance act Underground, and Britpop's most intelligent act, Pulp (in songs like 'The Fear') are also a relating influence, along with electronic leaders like Aphex Twins and Autechre. And of course, mid career Beatles at their creative, if shadowy, peak in the studio. Revolver, Dark Side of the Moon, Achtung Baby, The Man  Machine... these are the musical moments that Kid A lodges itself beside.

In a like-minded way, Radiohead are straining at the  boundaries of the pop-rock form and their own identity as a group within it, ranging over epic and neo-classical territory in a manner that is both aesthetically and technologically interesting. Despite the complexities, the coolness, there's an undoubted exhilaration to this, the sheer thrill of new space.

Unlike the bloated 'progressive rock' movement of the early 70s (Yes, Genesis, ELP), which tried to instill rock music with classical seriousness - a movement Radiohead are said to have re-energized in Britain (though groups like Muse, Coldplay and The Doves are hardly acts to feel ashamed of) - Kid A shows discipline, tension, focus. Radiohead are also part of a re-intellectualization of the British music scene, smart, sensitive Oxford boys who provide a relieving and awesome contrast to the road weary, lads-on-piss attitude of bands like Oasis and the cheapening magazine culture that followed them like bulldogs down retro-lane.

It's possible to argue that Radiohead are a post-Empire blues band. No longer a vital economic entity, Britain's depends on 'culture' for its post-colonial identity. It uses pop music, graphic design, fashion, and media aggression to reassert its prominence all the while its physical and social conditions emanate decay. The British are still set on world domination: they just operate their imperialist tendencies in a different matrix these days.

In songs like 'Kid A' and 'The National Anthem' you hear this put into an unsettling position. An indecipherable vocal croon distorting like something out of a 1920s microphone, a disembodied song-hall lament; a splenetic rush of BBC-like orchestrations thundering and broken. 'Great' Britain in sickness more than health. I suspect Radiohead, with these allusions and their generally elusive atmosphere, are refusing to take on a more culturally chauvinistic roll as yet another English musical export a la 'Cool Britannia'. They are also making music in anti-heroic mode, which includes forsaking cliched rock rebel poses: the bad boys, the decadents. No, Radiohead offer something more reflective, even traumatized.

If you're the investigative type, you may have already discovered a booklet hidden beneath the back packaging of the CD itself. Once lifted and revealed you'll find a lengthy poem inside, constructed, Burroughsian cut-up style, out of newspaper headlines and magazine phrases as well as song lyric fragments, culminating in the repeated phrase, "the gap between you and me". There are a few drawings and portraits of cartoon violence and organic isolation amid this typographical chatter. A native, dystopic soul is at work here: Thom Yorke's lonely, ugly-funny, beautiful-sick sense of things, in a form that might be classified as 'art brut' or 'outsider art': that is, the kind of disturbed creative expression usually associated with eccentrics and schizophrenics.

But in almost everything they do, Radiohead exhibit a profound sadness that goes way beyond the facile psychologizing of Thom Yorke's depressive inclinations and his past history as a mental hospital orderly. There's something 'social' embedded in their sound, a broader grieving that picks up on the communication problems of the brave new world. They seem materially plugged into something, armed and disarming at once: exactly because their technical sophistication is dependent on the culture that troubles them. It's a riddle.

Kid A accordingly resists anthems. And provides instead a soundtrack - diving and resurfacing, often melodically pretty, inevitably sheeted with that touch of Radiohead ice, that surface over a deep pond feeling - that is hard to resist. I'd go so far as to liken listening to Kid A to the experience of skating over a pond in winter: so pleasurable and cool, so terribly alive to something childish and risky and temporary, easy on top, disturbing below.

Musically the recording could certainly be regarded as a retreat into childishness. There's a fixation with something funereal, explicitly conjured in the organ sound and heavenly harp of 'Motion Picture Soundtrack'. And a need to transcend and back away from that darkness. That attitude infuses the entire recording with a regretful light. A   womb-like yearning for lost warmth most easily heard in the lullaby mood of the title track and the bioscopic sound affects that colour the entire CD.

This 'retreat' sees the band backing away from easy musical hooks, erasing standard song structures, and therefore side stepping simple analyses. The band's own identity almost fades away at certain points. They are literally lost in space. The decision to release no singles or promotional videos is part of this dissolution, while their 'i-blips' (brief images with soundtrack samples from the CD) on the internet accentuate, at most, a fleeting take on self promotion.

Perhaps Kid A's affirmation of a struggle for humanity and spirit just off the edges of our individual consciousness - out there in a world of science, mass media and the internet - is one reason why I resort to the poetic rather than the analytical when I speak about it. That's no bad place to be. As I've said, from what I've read critics are struggling to pin this one down, warning fans not to expect to like it, or even understand it. That's so far out. I think they will manage much more easily than is expected. Because at a time when pop music is more than ever an industry of empires, a world of units shifted and niche markets carved, Radiohead are happy - strangely happy - to be mysterious and elusive, a ghost in the machine.

Or as Thom Yorke so eloquently put it in the wonderfully named song 'How To Disappear Completely', "I'm not here. This isn't..."

And what is the next word that he says? Unhappiness? Happening? It's hard to hear him. Like so much of this record, the message is unclear.

"This isn't unhappiness."

"This isn't happening."

Maybe he says both. The song rolls on: "I'm not here. I'm not here. In a little while I'll be gone. The moment's already passed. Yeah it's gone."

On Kid A, it's not what Radiohead say or declare that matters, but what they don't know. This record is about loss, absence, a heavenly and hellish sense of space: mortality caught in a new technological web. Where so many people may have expected a major statement, they've thrown up an eerie question mark. And we are all the better for it.

©  Mark Mordue

Mark Mordue's Music Archive: Ben Harper: "The Gift".   Mark gets in the mood in Glebe, Sydney with the new Dirty Three CD, "Whatever You Love, You Are."

Tom Roe's Music Archives: Made in New York, "No More Prisons", Sonic Youth

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