June 16, 2017 marks 20 years of Radiohead's 'OK Computer'.
In 1997 Radiohead were at a crossroads in their career. Their 1993 debut ‘Pablo Honey’ had yielded a surprise hit single. ‘Creep’, and with their second album, 1995’s ‘The Bends’, they’d found a slow-burning fame that kept them touring for years. The intensity of their schedules had left an impact on the band: “I was basically catatonic,” Yorke recently told Rolling Stone. “The claustrophobia – just having no sense of reality at all.” And yet the product of that difficult period became their biggest commercial success to date: ‘OK Computer’ went five-times platinum in the UK, went on to sell more than 4.5m copies, and contains their two highest-charting singles yet in ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’. The recording process for the album is just as fascinating as the turbulent tour that accompanied it – as these fifty lesser-known facts prove.
1. ‘Lucky’ was recorded two years ahead of the rest of ‘OK Computer’ – for ‘Help’, the 1995 charity album for Warchild. They completed the recording in just five hours.
2. Brian Eno, who commissioned ‘Lucky’ for Warchild, said it was “the most beautiful song I’ve heard for a long, long time”.
3. When Radio 1 didn’t playlist ‘Lucky’ in 1995, Yorke said that he was “waiting for the karma police to come and sort it out”.
4. After ‘Lucky’, the first ‘OK Computer’ recording was ‘No Surprises’. Six different versions were recorded, but the band ended up using the first one.
5. Thom Yorke wanted it to sound like Marvin Gaye’s ‘What A Wonderful World’, though as he noted, “it was about being poisoned, full with debris and waste.”
6. Miles Davis’s ‘Bitches Brew’ was a huge inspiration for the band’s drumming and piano parts on the album. Yorke called it “a record for the end of the world.”
7. The title ‘OK Computer’ is a line from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
8. Also drawn from Hitchhikers… is the name ‘Paranoid Android’ – aka Marvin, the depressed robot. Yorke said of the joke title: “That’s how people would like me to be.”
9. The album was recorded in a 15th century mansion near Bath called St Catherine’s Court. It’s owned by actress Jane Seymour, of Live and Let Die.
10. Yorke said of the isolated house: “I spent my whole time there terrified, because everything constantly reminded you of your own mortality.”
