Radiohead album by album

I remember, leading up to the show, my friend telling me not to expect it. They had already kind of retired it by then. I’m randomly going through setlists now and it looks like they barely played it on that tour. At the show I saw, they followed it with “Polyethylene.” It felt very much like “Ok, you got the hit, now enjoy a b side”

Edit: I checked more lists and it seems like “creep” was more prevalent than I thought. They didn’t play it at every show, but it wasn’t ignored either. There was a lot of talk back then about how much they hated it, though, and everyone I knew was pretty surprised they played it at the show we saw.

 

Soon after 'Shindig', Radiohead came with a new demo. It was called 'Union Street'. Basically a new edit, trackist order and song names, but pretty much the same as 'Shindig'. For that reason, fans consider still part of the third Radiohead demo, not a fourth one.

1. Keep Strong (3.28)
2. Somebody Else (2.48) (previously"Somebody")
3. I Want To Know (4.27) (previously "Burning Bush")
4. I'm Coming Up (3.53) (previously "Climbing Up A Bloody Great Hill")
5. Jerusalem (5.13) (previously "Mr. B")
6. What Is That You Say? (4.05) (previously "What Is That You See?")
7. Something To Hate (1.14) (previously "Everybody Needs Something To Hate")
8. I Can't (2.40) (previously "Upside Down")
9. Without You (3.41) (previously "Shindig")
10. Give It Up (3.05)
11. How Can You Be Sure? (3.45)
12. Everbody Lies Through Their Teeth (1.24) (previously "Life With A The Big F")
13. Rattlesnake In The Big City (6.32) (previously "Rattlesnake")
14. The New Generation (3.48) (previously "New Generation")

 

Ah, I can't agree with this at all. PH & KoL are like two different bands from two different eras.

I've come to really appreciate KoL much more over time--adding in "The Daily Mail" and "Staircase" to its track order makes it even more satisfying, and more like a regular-length Radiohead album.

Pablo Honey isn't even as good as Hail To The Thief IMO, and I rate that one below everything else.

 

"Pablo Honey" has "Thinking About You", so I already like it more than "TKOL".

 

I have Hail To The Thief close to the top, or at least in the albums among their best, which is most of them.

 

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think “Creep” stands head and shoulders above the rest of PH. PH is a solid first record and it does its thing well, but there isn’t much that stands out to me. “Creep” is a rock solid single. It was the breakout hit of that record for a reason.

 

It has been a long time since the peak years of my Radiohead superfandom (RIP ateaseweb) but I think this is pretty broadly agreed upon — the three tracks that always come up when people talk Pablo Honey seem to be You, Creep, and Blow Out. (With apologies to Thinking About You.)

 

From Marc Randall's 'Exit Music' book:


Yet whenever it was time to go back home to Oxford, Thom would always reunite with the rest of his old Abingdon mates in On A Friday. And ironically, considering how long it had taken for the others to fully accept him into the band, Jonny Greenwood was becoming the person Thom looked forward to seeing the most. In a short time, Jonny had progressed from relative exile as a part-time harmonica player to being Yorke's principal songwriting collaborator. The two would spend a lot of time experimenting on Jonny's four-track cassette machine — a pleasurable experience that Thom would later express his desire to recreate during the recording of The Bends and OK Computer — and Thom was finding his junior partner to be a dab hand at putting the expert finishing touches on his sometimes rough compositions.

One event that helped turn Yorke away from solitary songwriting and toward deeper collaboration with Jonny and the other members of the band was the reaction a female friend of Thom's had upon hearing some early On A Friday demos. According to Yorke, this friend said, "Your lyrics are crap. They're too honest, too personal, too direct and there's nothing left to the imagination." Instead of being cowed by these sharp comments, Thom came to a swift realization: his friend was right. "When I first started, I wasn't really interested in writing lyrics," he later explained, "which is strange in a way because if I don't like the words on a record, if it wasn't saying anything, I would never bother with it again. But at 16 your own songs are half-formed and you don't really expect anyone to hear them, so you don't care what the words are. A big step for me was starting to work with Jonny and the others. And that would be a month after my friend said what she said... I suddenly discovered that if I did concentrate on the lyrics I'd get much more out of writing and it would be easier to put a song together."

During the infrequent school breaks when On A Friday would get together for rehearsals (and the odd gig, though there were very few of those), they would work on this new material, go over old songs and, perhaps most importantly, talk: about their favourite bands, about new music that was exciting them, and about their future plans as a group. Thom's long-held desire for rock stardom, which his parents had chuckled about when he was ten, had not abated in the slightest over the years, and the other four gave every indication that they would stand by him in his quest, though an element of pragmatism still governed their discussions to some degree. By 1989, they had begun to talk seriously about going for a record deal — but not until after everyone had finished college.

 

According to ‘Radiohead Welcome to the Machine,’ 1987 was when Thom took a gap year before starting college.

“During this time, his employment included work in a gentlemen’s outfitter and a mental hospital (the latter providing part of the inspiration for ‘Climbing Up the Walls.’ He was also involved in a serious car accident which encouraged his mistrust of mechanical transport.” A theme that would be revisited often in future RH lyrics. He started at Exeter October 1988.

 

Definitely going to follow this thread. First started listening to Radiohead in college in the army 80’s when they were playing it on KROQ 106.7 FM. Became a much bigger fan with the release of In Rainbows. Then I went backwards and started to have a greater appreciation for the earlier catalog. I really like there music throughout their career for different reasons. I saw them live 2 years ago at the United Center in Chicago, what a great show. I’ve got every album and some a few different pressings.

 

Radiohead's pivotal demo was 'Dungeon', April 1991
With this demo the band convinced Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge to produce their next one.
Also, it was the first Radiohead's demo to include a song that would end up officially released. 'Stop Whispering'.

From 'Exit Music' book:

In April over the Easter break, the band had recorded a three-song demo tape at the Dungeon 16-track recording studio near Oxford, including the tracks 'Give It Up' (a light, dancy number, far from the mood of the music they'd later make but adding flesh to the early comparisons with Haircut One Hundred), 'What Is That You See?' (a clanging, R.E.M.-ish tune, later described by Jonny as a 'feedback frenzy'), and 'Stop Whispering' (a two-chord anthem along the lines of U2's 'Bad'). Richard Haines, the Dungeon's owner and principal engineer, who has also produced the Candyskins and Dr. Didg, among others, remembers those sessions as "very comfortable, no problems. They were already a tight, accomplished band at that stage, though musically they were still finding their way to the direction that they wanted to go in. Even then it was fairly clear that Thom was a really together guy — he seemed to know what he wanted out of the songs and out of the session. By that I don't mean that the others were just sitting around doing his word, because they weren't. It's just that he had a vision of what the overall picture should be. That's quite rare in bands, to have one person that's got such a definite view and is unswerving in that view, and that helps focus the whole band."

Haines wasn't overly impressed with 'What Is That You See?' or 'Give It Up', though he admits that "by the end of the session, it was hard to judge because I'd heard them so many times." But 'Stop Whispering' stuck in his head: "At that time, I was quite into U2, as a lot of people were, and that one track had a similar feeling which made it stand out. I wouldn't say it was completely obvious to me what would happen with them from just those few days of recording, but it wasn't a surprise when things started to firm up for them later on." If Colin Greenwood can be believed, the band had a great time recording at the Dungeon. "I bumped into Colin after they did The Bends," Haines remembers, "and I hadn't seen him since they did that demo. He said that they had the best memories of that session, because it was their first time, I suppose — there often is a sort of romantic attachment to the first time you record as a band. He may have said it just to be polite to me as well, but it was sweet of him to say that."

1. What Is That You Say? (4.02)
2. Stop Whispering (4.12)
3. Give It Up (3.49)

 

I've read the Exit Music book ages ago (once all the way through--I think on a second read I started it during The Bends era), but I really must have forgot that the On A Friday band had recorded so many early demos.

 

I never knew Thom Yorke wrote High And Dry so early. An interesting performance!

 

Yeah I was definitely not aware that this much early material was out there!

 

I enjoy it more than Thief and King of Limbs

 

I really hope there is a chance of John Leckie’s Bends mix being released one day. What they did to him was so phenomenally disrespectful and rude that I’ve never been able to look at them the same way. They didn’t even have the courage to apologize

 

Do tell, what happened with Leckie?

Loved his work with the band Magazine, as did Thom, I assume.

 

They had it remixed by the Pablo Honey producers behind Leckie’s back

 

I never knew there was any bad blood with Leckie. I thought I’d read somewhere that they wanted to involve Slade and Kolderie because of their work with the Pixies, which always made sense in my mind.

 

There's an early song of them from the On A Friday era called 'Everybody Knows' which became a favorite of mine. I even recorded a cover of it a year ago.

 

Leckie really went after them in an interview with Q circa the Kid A era. They just clicked with Godrich

 

I think Leckie worked on The Bends. But yeah they worked on an EP with Nigel Godrich instead of Leckie...never looked back as they still work with Nigel.

 

I've noticed an On A Friday demo released in 1988. People are rumoured to have copies, but I can't find it on YouTube. It's called Medicinal Sounds.

 

I agree, after listening to the majority of the first demo, I can safely say that is one of my favourites, alongside Girl (In The Purple Dress).

 

'Manic Hedgehog' was the fifth (and last) demo of the band as 'On a Friday'. It was recorded then and released on cassette in October 1991. It was sold in Oxford for £3.
This is of course the most important of their demos, because with this demo they got the contract with EMI

From 'Exit Music' book:

In October, On A Friday recorded a new five-song tape with Hufford at Courtyard, including three songs — 'I Can't', 'Thinking About You', and 'You' — that would later appear on their debut album, Pablo Honey, albeit in re-recorded and less frantic form. The other two selections, 'Nothing Touches Me' and 'Philippa Chicken', were stage favourites at the time but soon fell out of the band's favour.

This latest recording was released in cassette form and sold locally for f.st. 3 by Manic Hedgehog, the independent record store on Cowley Road that was one of the centres of the Oxford scene.* For this reason, it's been known ever since as Manic Hedgehog, even though those two words appear nowhere on the package. The spine of the cassette J-card actually bears the legend ON A FRIDAY first tapes — not strictly true, but how many out there would know? — while the front cover features a simple cartoon, probably by Thom, of an odd-looking creature with a stretched head similar to the aliens in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Next to this image is scrawled the pithy slogan 'Work sucks'.

1. "I Can't"
2. "Nothing Touches Me"
3. "Thinking About You"
4. "Phillipa Chicken"
5. "You"