The fact that OK Computer continues to feel like substantially more than rock stars moaning about being rock stars has as much to do with the music as Yorke’s lyrical ability to turn his personal bugbears into something more universal. Even the lyrical tone of overheated chippiness (“We hope you choke” “When I am king you will be first against the wall”) seems to speak of endless hours cooped up on a tour bus, endlessly picking things over in your mind.Įndless hours on a tour bus picking things over … Radiohead in 1997. The ingratiating glad-handing depicted in Electioneering the longing for suburban normality on No Surprises the fretful obsession with travel, underlined by the sound of an airport tannoy on B-side A Reminder the cast of ghastly, coke-fuelled characters on Karma Police and Paranoid Android: all of it feels like the product of months spent traipsing around the midwest. The opening of Let Down reads suspiciously like a retelling of the Morissette support-slot imbroglio. For all the camouflage – the lyrics are elliptical enough to make scrolling through the various interpretations online a matter of days rather than hours – its roots keep showing through. Indeed, it may be history’s most brilliantly disguised example of an old musical tradition: the successful rock band moaning about the day-to-day business of being in a successful rock band. But its origins are substantially more prosaic: OK Computer feels like a reaction to the band’s experience of promoting its predecessor, 1995’s The Bends. An album created in a world where the internet had yet to take off, it eerily prefigured the themes of alienation and information overload that everyone would start discussing the minute it did.
Since its release, it has been held up as a game-changing state-of-the-world address, a critique of globalisation and consumerism. Such was the curious, peevish atmosphere in which OK Computer was created.
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