OK Computer
In 1996, Radiohead got asked to go on tour as an opening act for Alanis Morissette. At the time, Brit pop was dominating the U.K. music scene, but Radiohead had no interest in competing with Blur and Oasis. “To us, Brit pop was just a 1960s revival,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood said in 2017. “It just leads to pastiche. As soon as you go down that route, you might as well be a Dixieland jazz band, really.”
Before the Morissette tour started, they began cutting songs for their third album at Canned Applause, a primitive rehearsal space near Didcot, England. “It’s an apple-storage shed on a farm,” recalled guitarist Ed O’Brien. “There’s nothing around.”
For inspiration, they immersed themselves in masterpieces like Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and began writing songs just as grandiose and moving. “There were no constraints,” said OK Computer producer Nigel Godrich. “It was a perfect thing. Lots of people, lots of ideas, and we all could pull in the same direction.”
After the Canned Applause demos, the bulk of the recording took place at St. Catherine’s Court, a nine-bedroom Elizabethan manor house owned by actor Jane Seymour in Bath, England. The material ranged from the neo-prog-rock of “Paranoid Android” (a cross between “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” in the words of frontman Thom Yorke) to the haunting menace of “Climbing Up the Walls” to “Airbag,” with a beat inspired by experimental hip-hop artist DJ Shadow.
Many of these songs were filled with anxiety about the dehumanizing impact of technology at the dawn of the internet era; for “Fitter Happier,” the band fed bland self-help instructions into a Mac computer’s voice program, which read the creepy list before ominously declaring man to be nothing more than “a pig in a cage on antibiotics.”
OK Computer’s influence was so enormous that Yorke left rock behind altogether when the band returned to Canned Applause in 1999 to begin work on its next album, Kid A. “I just knew we weren’t going to repeat OK Computer,” Yorke said. “We’ve never been able to repeat anything.”