Music Banter

Everyone knows who U2 are, right? Ageing stadium rockers, miniscule singer with a giant ego, god-botherers, sometimes a bit too keen on sticking their noses in where they don’t belong, more like a giant, world-straddling brand than a rock group? With Or Without You, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Live Aid, Mullets, good old Oirish boys who are proud of where they come from but outsourced their ridiculous wealth so their homeland gets no tax monies from all those album sales. Bono’s friends with Barak Obama, Bill Gates and the pope. He’s a dilettante and an egomaniac, a man who spends more time prancing about trying to save the world than he does no his music. That’s them, right? They’re horrendously unstylish, awkward in every way, lumpen, lumbering and just plain unsexy, the opposite of all good rock and roll, right? Most of all, of course, it’s that singer, that Bono. What a collossal ego, right? Wants you to believe he has the answers just because he’s up on that stage?

Wrong.

I’m going to take you back to my bedroom. Steady on, now.

I was fifteen. It was 1993, and I was a desparate, disaffected teenager, looking for an escape from a drab and desperately sad reality that I could hardly even talk about, much less come to terms with. Most important, like teenagers everywhere, I wanted- something other. Something to lift me up. Something to transcend the mundane.

And then I found it. I found it in a strange, subversive and endlessly obscure band who I loved, whose music took me to places I’d never been, who seemed to speak to me alone in my room. Listening to this strange band seemed to open up new possibilities, draw the curtain back on new worlds.

I’d discovered music a while back, when Meat Loaf and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been supplanted at the top of the UK charts by a wild, unsettling chunk of distorted guitar, sleazed-up vocals and pounding rhythms which were unlike anything else, but now this band were touring the world. Strange reports were on Radio 1 every day of increasingly bizarre scenes at their shows, giant screens full of deconstructionist slogans, papier mache models of the band dancing in the crowd, a singer dressed as the Devil singing songs about selling your soul whilst giant TV screens displayed the slogan ‘Everything You Know Is Wrong.’ It was dizzying, it was exciting, and I wanted a part of it.

This is the band that made that sound:

And this was their singer:

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that is not a man who is unaware of how he comes across. It sure likes interesting, don’t you think?

I certainly did. So I went out and bought the band’s new album. The first album I ever owned. ‘Zooropa.’ An absolute masterpiece and still, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums ever made. From the strange buzz of feedback and babbling voices chiming ‘What Do You Want?’ on the opening title track, through the slow, industrial rattle of ‘Numb’ to the sad romance of ‘Stay,’ the angry father/son confrontation of ‘Dirty Day’ and the world-weary voice of Jonny Cash singing about being a wanderer in a strange futuristic wilderness, and then a klaxon in the emptiness which chimes out unexpectedly after the last song, and then teminates in a sort of electronic sob, it’s a record that oozes strangeness, that absolutely throbs with the bizarre. I love every song on it, for completely different reasons, and as a whole it’s a wonderful, wonderful 51 minutes and 15 seconds of anyone’s life.

All through the record, Bono’s lyrics reflect ambiguity and confusion, a sense of having no direction, being utterly lost in a dizzying world, questioning everything, claiming that ‘uncertainty can be a guiding light’ as he views the modern landscape of slogans and disinformation around him, and finds it lacking. So what does he do? He chucks out a whirlwind of ad slogans, lyrics about lucid dreams, false promises and lies whilst dressed as the devil, and beaming pictures of lonely cosmonauts to stadiums full of people.

Here’s the ‘Numb’ Video, which I promise you is musically about as far away from your preconceived idea of U2 as you could ever get.

And here’s some live footage from then: First up, here’s ‘Lemon’- a sort of futuristic disco song about despair, futility, and the pointlessness of all our efforts- ‘a man builds a city/with banks and cathedral/he turns his money into light to look for her… these are the days when our work has come asunder’ and the redemptive moment at the heart of darkness- ‘midnight is where the day begins.’

Next we have With Or Without You, an old song off their Joshua Tree days, the kind of song that gets featured in montages in Friends, a safe song, which all of a sudden seems to have that little bit more Edge (see what I did there? Oh, never mind) to it when it’s a gold-suited Devil singing about giving your soul away. Oh, and whilst we’re about it, my god, that boy had a voice on him then:

The Zooropa show closer ‘Love Is Blindness’ off the preceding album ‘Achtung Baby,’ which segues into an absolutely ASTOUNDING version of Unchained Melody. If it doesn’t break your heart, then you are a cold and dead person, lying to yourself.

This is U2 as they were back then. My U2. Wild and ambiguous, four mad souls dancing at the heart of a gleaming, chaotic, contradictory whirlwind of glitter, gold and love, and keeping their heads about them whilst they did it. They were the best band in the world. The strangest band in the world. The most daring rock stars ever. The band that saved my life when I was fifteen and my mother died.

This is my U2. Zooropa is a classic album you thought was shit. Everything You Know is Wrong.

Well, the old days are certainly ending with a vengeance.

Supergrass, the crazy teenage wild things of that gorgeous Golden summer of Britpop, 15 years ago, have split up.

It’s fairly fresh news- so fresh that at the time I post this, the split isn’t even mentioned on their website, and, well, it’s not entirely expected. After all, eventually bands like them fade from sight, and you stop hearing about them. There’ll be a lot of people going ‘really? they were still going?’ at the news. That’s just the way of things- no band lasts forever. A slow slide into obscurity is pretty much inevitable, after the first flush of youth and success, unless you’re Aerosmith or U2 or someone.

So let’s remember Supergrass as they where when they began; a riot of energy, colour, noise, fury and excitement. I saw them in 1994 at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford, part of a dream line-up of Oxford bands including the Mystics (anyone? No? Ah, well), and a truly fantastic Radiohead, who were still only successful because of Creep, but had a whole bunch of amazing new songs that no-one had heard but were to make up The Bends. That in itself was the stuff of legends, let me tell you.

Back to Supergrass, though. The thing that struck you about them was that there was so much energy coming off that stage, and at the same time, a sort of sun-drenched tiredness that seemed really esoteric- it wasn’t aggressive, or confrontational, it was simply happy, joyous and full of life. They were a little subtler than your average thrashy punk band, too. Here’s an example, ‘She’s so Loose’ from Glastonbury Festival a year after that:

They were fantastic, and a lot better than that shit novelty hit ‘Alright’ which was a bit like ‘Country House’ for Blur, a caricature version of the band that someone could use to shove them into the public consciousness. Supergrass always rocked a bit harder than that.

As time went on, the inevitable happened- they mellowed, their songs got a bit looser, a little slower, and they carried on. People would go see them to feel like they were young again, to recapture the spirit of long ago.

And maybe that’s part of why I’m not surprised to see them split up. Eventually, things change, the old gang suddenly have mortgages and don’t live down the end of the road any more. Supergrass will always be there, back in 1994, jumping around that stage and rocking like only teenagers can.

And anyway, at least we’ve still got Ash.

Shit, did I just jinx them? Please God, don’t you DARE take Ash next…

Another week, another pop culture moment that makes you feel old. This week, it’s been the sad news that Malcolm Mclaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, has lost his fight with cancer at the age of 64. My god, Malcolm Mclaren was 64? My first thought on reading that was surely that can’t be right?

But it was. The Silver Jubilee was a long, long time ago, kids. There’s teenagers alive to whom Punk Rock means Fall Out Boy, or the Offspring, or something. Strange indeed.

Let’s just take a moment, then, to remember that back in the seventies, Britain was screwed, both musically and culturally. Bin bags piled up in the streets, no-one had anything, rock music had disappeared up its own arse and was staring at the Dark Side of the Moon or Journeying to the Centre of the Earth. It was something done by rich people, or aliens. Society was stagnant and things were terrible.

And then came the Sex Pistols. A glorious, ranting, enraged mess of noise, filth, profanity and bodily fluids who hated everything around them, hated themselves, hated the establishment, hated their own audience. Where they went, anger, noise, barbarism, energy, change, anarchy, rebellion, shock and outrage followed in their wake.

They signed their record deal in front of Buckingham Palace and openly expressed their contempt for the monarch. And behind them (usually at a safe distance), Malcolm Mclaren stood smirking.

Just look at this picture of that signing:

Notice who’s standing there, staring at the camera like he knows this picture is going to be on the front of every paper in the country the next day? Yup. He knew what he was doing, did McLaren. He looks like one of the band in that picture, and it’s clear that they were, in a lot of ways, his carefully selected weapon of choice. I’m not wanting to take anything away from John Lydon and the rest (I suspect if I did, Lydon would find me as I slept, rip off my head and gob down my throat, kick my sorry corpse till it stopped twitching, using my head as a kind of twisted glove puppet to make me apologise for my disrespect), but I think that everyone knows that McLaren’s flair for publicity was a vital part of the Sex Pistol’s success.

As England lay Dreaming, languished in the depths of suburban misery, McLaren gave the Sex Pistols a chance to wake it up, and reminded us that Rock and Roll could still be truly shocking. That means Punk Rock, if not his idea, is at least partly his fault.

For that, I for one salute the grumpy old cunt.

Kele Okereke, of Bloc Party, has gone solo, releasing a new album, ‘The Boxer’ on the 21st of June. He’s also saying he wants to ‘go dance,’ which has been kind of apparent since they released ‘Flux’ in 2007 but there you are. What with the guitarist, Russell Lissack, releasing a new album with his band ‘Pin Me Down’ this month, and Drummer Matt Tong’s stated interest in ‘trying something else for a while’, it sounds fairly likely that Bloc Party are pretty much finished as a moving concern. Certainly, all concerned are moving on with their lives pretty quickly, at least for the moment. It seems a good time, then, to take a look at their debut album, ‘Silent Alarm’.

For me, this is their best album, because it was truest to their identity as a band. On its release, in 2005, there wasn’t actually that much going on in British Music. Britpop had been and gone a few years before, and Radiohead had disappeared into electronic backwaters which, although captivating and wonderful in their own right, didn’t quite have the same capture on the zeitgeist, the musical imaginations of the young as they once did.It had seemed to be America’s turn, for a while, and sadly they’d had nothing more to offer than a seemingly endless stream of horrific Nu-metal dross like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. In this climate, Bloc Party were a bit of a breath of fresh air- vibrant, angry, and exciting. I remember hearing ‘Helicopter,’ with its angular, urgent guitar parts, and ferocious drumming, and dancing round my room on my own for half an hour, like a giddy school kid.

The whole album was like that, the supercharged sound of a band who had paid their dues together live, and sounded fantastically tight and together. A lot of this was down to Tong’s drumming, in my opinion- just listen to ‘Positive Tension’ where he carries the track on his own for a good minute before anyone else really does anything, and it’s fantastic. A good friend of mine once said I drum a bit like that. I was glowing, I tell you, as when I heard this I genuinely thought he was one of the best drummers I’d heard in ages.

I really Like Lissack’s guitar playing on this record, too- it’s taught and angular, and seems to have learned all sorts of interesting lessons from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood about how to be abrasive and soulful at the same time. He also sounds like an afficianado of Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, and it can be argued that this album is one of the major reasons that Gang Of Four were a fashionable name to drop, and that other bands were trying to sound ‘edgy’ and ‘angular’ for a year or two afterwards.

What else? Kele’s lyrics, which, for me, later devolved into incoherence, captured that magic in a bottle which someone like Thom Yorke or Mark E Smith manages- he’s not storytelling, more conjuring up images and atmospheres of a sort of modern unease. When he sings “Are you Hoping for a Miracle?” you don’t quite know the specifics of what he’s talking about, but somehow it feels right. In the same way, ‘This Modern Love’ is indirect, both hopeful and anxious at the same time. The lines ‘To Be lost in the Forest/to be caught adrift/you tried to reach me/you bought me a book’ addresses those indirect ways in which we try to reach out to those we love, to communicate through other means than words. In the same way, his promise in ‘So Here We Are’ that ‘I made a vow, to carry you home/I really tried to do what you wanted’ is touching, but also speaks of a certain weariness with romance. You don’t get any answers, because the protagonist doesn’t seem to have any answers.

More than the original contributions, however, it was the fact that this band sounded like a unit- unstoppable, completely together, the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer. I almost saw them live in a 200-capacity venue just before this album came out, but I was ill. Still kicking myself about that one, it would have been fantastic. Check this video of their UK TV debut out to see just how energetic and exciting they were at that point:

Luckily, Silent Alarm is there to record what they were at that time. If they don’t make any more records, it will remain as a testament to this band at their best.

This isn’t strictly speaking a music post, but it’s close enough to be of relevance to this blog. Plus, you know, it’s my blog and I say it counts. Oh, the power.

So, anyway, Stonehenge.

I’m talking about the mystic home of the I’m talking about the mystic home of the druids, people. The giant bluestone temple on Salisbury Plain which has stood for thousands of years, and spawned vast acres of discussion, archeological investigation, scholarly speculation and new-age rambling about Crystals and mythological allignments. No-one really knew what it was. Was it a temple? a giant solar calendar? A well-ventilated yet badly-secured barn?

There have been all sorts of suggested uses for the place, too. Some say it was a focus point for sun worship. Others a meeting place for festivals, or perhaps a Lourdes-like destination for pilgrimage. More luridly, it has also been imagined that human sacrifice too place on that altar in the centre.

It’s recently been suggested that the central purpose of Stonehenge was… a music venue?

Apparently so. Rupert Till, an acoustics expert and part-time DJ from the University of Huddersfield, is convinced that the ancient site would have had the ideal acoustics to set up a ‘repetitive trance rhythm.’

Bangin’. Maybe it would have been a bit like this:

Of course, everyone who’s ever been to Glastonbury, Cropredy, or even a particularly rowdy village fete, knows that music is better in the open air. It’s also true that there are a few neo-pagan festivals kicking around the UK, for example Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire, which give a bit of a hint as to how something could have been done. It’s also silly to think that back in the days when people were scratching a living from these lands before the Romans came, people wouldn’t have put a premium on having a good time.

Music is an intrinsic part of our culture- that’s something which it can be all too easy to forget, especially when you hear the latest music industry spiel about how downloading is killing music and eventually, rock and roll will be a thing of the past. Something like this serves as a reminder that music was always with us, and probably always will be.

Still, it’s all speculation. No proof.

I do like to think Stonehenge was a music venue, however. The world seems simply better if that’s true. I also like to think that the music that was played there went a little something like this:

LONG LIVE ROCK AND ROLL!

Ah, the nineties, eh? A golden age, of crusties, raves, dogs and strings and the crumbling remains of a decrepit government desparately clinging on to power. A recession based upon the folly of the bankers, and a disenfranchised youth looking for something to believe in, something about modern society to care about.

Nothing like today, then.

The early nineties were an interesting time, musically and culturally. There wasn’t any one overwhelming movement (Britpop hadn’t happened yet), despite the continued attempts of the British music press at the time to manufacture one. Instead, there were a lot of disparate bands trying to make it.

One of the more unusual bands stalking through this musical landscape were the Levellers. They were an odd one to categorise- a sort of folk-rock version of the Clash, with a resolutely anti-establishment, anti-society outlook on life that seemed to extend to the. They sang about climbing up onto hillsides and looking down on cities in disgust. They started out playing in squats for gypsies and new age travellers, living in squats in Brighton and singing about life on the road. Not in a rock and roll sense, mind- they were less about the groupies and tourbuses as they were hand-woven coracles and gypsy wagons. As such, they were a focal point for every vaguely disaffected youth who saw the concrete overpasses, identikit shopping centres and Enterprise parks that covered large swathes of their country, and wondered if there wasn’t something more, something better lying underneath it all. Well, they were for me and my mates, anyway. We loved the Levellers. We would sit round campfires singing their songs whilst our schoolmates got drunk and had a miserable time in city centres. We were different, we were out-of-step, and the Levellers were our band. I found out later that some people at our school called us ‘the Levellers Posse.’ Suited me just fine. ‘Do I belong to some ancient race/I like to walk in ancient places/these are things that I can’t understand’ they sang, and there were a lot of people who felt exactly the same as they did.

And that was the point. They stood for something. Not just alienation, a feeling out-of-step. They actually felt in step with something, with a sort of pastoral, anarchist ideal of a world where money wasn’t as important as community. Where there was such a thing as society, and where freedom was more important than the law. It was hopefully naive, but that was part of their charm. They weren’t trying to be smarter than anyone. They were trying to have more fun.

Musically, they bore a similarity to other, less well-remembered acts such as The Outcast Band and their predecessors, TheWaterboys, in so much as they combined electric guitar and violin to fashion their sound. This was nothing new, of course- Fairport and the like had done this thirty years previously, but the Levellers were a bit more straight-ahead, a little musically basic in that kind of primitive, punk way.

That very simplicity helped their cause, and the presentation of their message. They were angry but unlike someone like Billy Bragg, they made no attempt at all to disguise their message- you listen to ‘Sell out’ or ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ and you’re getting straight down-the-line, simple takes on the old-versus-new struggle they saw going on in the world around them. Travellers good, police bad. Freedom and fun good, offices and jobs bad.

Sounds about right to a seventeen year-old, I can tell you. This was the era where the Tory government were passing more and more ridiculous legislation which seemed aimed at the prohibition of fun. Most notably, if you were three or more people in an outdoors space, listening to ‘repetitive beats’ then you could be legally classed as a rave and ordered to disperse or face arrest.

In a world like that, you got to fight for your right to party. Because the Man don’t want you on his land. Or your dogs on strings, neither.

The Levellers put their money where their mouths were, too- they set up the Metway, which for years was home for the anarchist newspaper Schnews, as well as a variety of other local artists, anarchists and odd cultural concerns. It currently lives on as The Metway Studio and has made a long-running contribution to the general vibe of Brighton as a wild and groovy place.

The Levellers are still going strong, though in some ways they are still frozen in time in that golden period where their vision of an older world shone bright as we reeled in the ashes of Thatcher’s Britain, waiting for what came next. Of course, we got more of the same in a different suit, but it’s nice to dream of what could have been.

I listen to this band, and despite my current state as a tubby thirtysomething with a reasonable haircut who works for a bank because they offer flexi-time, a good pension and a decent work-life balance, I still feel like a gawky, long-haired teenager in a shabby coat and ripped jeans again. And I feel all the better for it.

The Levellers’ essential album is Levelling the Land. Go track it down, and learn that there’s only one way of life, and that’s your own.

So the moment finally arrives. Throngs gather. The clamour of nations grows silent. And across the land all music-loving folk wait.

But unfortunately, they’ll have to wait for a new Radiohead album a little bit longer. In the mean time, here’s my top album of the Noughties. Once again, it’s a choice which I’m sure will astound and repulse in equal measure, and leave most people who read this scratching their heads and going ‘who?’

So, my top album of the years 2000-2009 is Tom Mcrae’s ‘Just Like Blood.’

It’s the second album from the acoustic singer-songwriter, and is a marked progression from the pared-down grace of the first. Mcrae started off as your bog-standard one-man-and-his-guitar outfit, and whilst his debut had been remarkable, dark, and intimate, ‘Just like Blood’ was a step forward. The first song, ‘A Day Like Today’ starts with what sounds like a marimba or a thumb-piano, picking out a repeating melody that switches round as the drums kick in, and a strange, eerie sound that I think is a guitar starts to resound like an unhappy ghost before Tom whispers ‘Welcome back/says the voice on the radio/but I never left/I was always right here,’ which is one of my favourite lyrics of all time. It’s a good illustration of what he does well lyrically, addressing his audience directly, and noting the strangeness of life, and the things people do. You can tell it’s part of his plan- this is the first song on the album, deliberately so. The song stands up in its own right- a desparate, wailing hymn to obsessive love- but it’s also a very deliberate entrance point to the album.

In the same way, the last song, ‘Human remains’ is directly addressing the listener. ‘You’re looking away/looking for what’s next’ which is exactly what the average listener is looking- going through their CD collection, wondering what to listen to next. As a way of directly addressing the listener, it’s remarkably effective. This song about wading through the ashes of a relationship is suddenly being sung directly to you, involving you, making you feel like you’re the target of his anguish.

The rest of the album is fantastic, too- ‘Stronger than Dirt’ is a fantastic account of that feeling you have when you’re walking through tragedy, concentrating on just putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that somehow you’ll survive. ‘When the dust has cleared/I will still be here/will you?’ he sings, and as he does so, the song resolves into a blissed-out peace, the kind of zen acceptance that comes over you when you know that you’re about to split up with someone and soon things will be easier. The album is full of little touches like this, where the music and the theme reflect each other perfectly, and augment each other.

It’s ‘Stronger than Dirt’ which is emblematic of the whole album- the rest is about dreams dying, crumbling expectations and the terrible sad knowledge that love is slipping away. On that one song (and perhaps to a lesser extent on another, ‘Ghost of a Shark’) you see the way out, and the way onward.

Tom Mcrae went on. He’s made other, slightly happier albums since, but none which quite hit the mark in the way this one did. It may be a classic heartbreak album, and he’s certainly not the first person to plough this lyrical furrow, but on this album, he does it with a steely-eyed grace and unique artistry which is all his own.

So onwards we trot, merrily chuntering along into the cold and the snow. Nippy out, eh?

Never mind, there’s always number two of my lists of the best albums of the Noughties. I should say that most people probably won’t agree with this choice. It might be said I’m being wilfully obscurist, or trying to seem cool by picking something alternative and weird. Well, screw you. This is a personal list, and sometimes that’s just the way it is.

My second album is M83′s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’

Some albums are uniquely tied to a certain time of life, a certain mood and a certain place. To listen to them after a long time has passed can take you back there, can make you feel like you once did, for better or worse.

When I hear this album, I remember walking into an HMV one day, and hearing a sound like galaxies unfolding playing over the tannoy. I was in the throes of a long and not particularly pleasant battle with insomnia, where my days were often spent in a sort of half-asleep fugue, and my nights were long, solitary stretches of exhaustion and restless thoughts. I lived in the middle of a city, but right next to a park and late at night sometimes I would go there, and walk through the trees, staring at the lights of towerblocks, feeling like the only person alive in the world, but knowing that in each of those glowing, sparkling towers slept a thousand people or more, so many lives all unfolding together, all across the city, all across the world. I felt a curious stillness, and a sense of the great stifling weight of humanity, in all its bustle and energy. I felt apart from all of life, an observer of the world rather than a participant.

And when I heard this album, I found music that sounded like that feeling.

That’s all you need to know. No descriptions of the music are necessary or indeed possible. Go get hold of this album now. Listen to it in the darkness, when sleep no longer comes. Then you’ll understand.

My god, it’s cold out there. It’s like the norse Fimbulwinter, the legendary time when three winters came at once, and the Gods died. Ice covered everything, and even the trees themselves withered and died, leaving nought but a basted and empty wilderness, cold, barren and dead.

Still, never mind, eh? Chin up. Stop snivelling, you’re not out in the cold, you’re inside looking at a computer, the reassuring hum of central heating chuntering onwards, keeping you from having to do any REAL work to keep warm.

Now, sit back, and pop this album on. This is an album which changed the game, showed that bands really didn’t need a record company, promotion and all of that bullshit. If they were famous already, that is.

This album is Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows.’

Yes, yes, I know, the last one I did was a Radiohead album, but you know what? Get to fuck. This is how the list turned out, and it was compiled through a highly scientific process whereby I scribbled down the best albums I could definitively remember as having come from the Noughties (a distressingly hard task, for a thirty-one year-old with all his faculties still supposedly intact) and then agonised pointlessly for what felt like an eternity over the order I should rank them. And this is just about right.

First off, ‘In Rainbows’ was an Event, not just an album. It was announced that not only did Radiohead have a new album out, you weren’t going to be able to buy it in shops, which is fine because no-one buys music in shops any more, except the confused, the old, and the mentally ill. What was especially exciting, however, was that there wasn’t a set price. You could pay what you want for it. It became a talking point- how much do you think this album’s worth? Me, I was busy experiencing an intensely traumatic breakup with a psychotic Courtney-Love-a-like, and was a bit distracted, so I just got a mate to burn me a CD. HA! In your face, Thom Yorke! I WIN! I WIN!

Anyway, I could talk about the ramifications of this for the music industry, but frankly life’s too short and everyone else has done that already. What matters in the end is the music, always has done.

And ‘In Rainbows’ is a wonderful album. It’s also Radiohead’s most upbeat. Thom Yorke sounds almost content. Almost. On ‘Nude’ he warns you ‘Don’t get any big ideas/they’re not going to happen/you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.’

My fiancé tells me that it’s about the point in your relationship where you get bored and consider adultery, but I think she’s just trying keep me in my place. Relationship politics aside, ‘Nude’ is a wonderful song, possessed of a sort of medicated, drifting grace that recalls ‘No Surprises’ but is somehow more at peace with himself. It’s almost as if Thom’s found that a Pretty House with a Pretty Garden is actually quite a comfortable place to live, and has reined his expectations for life in a bit. Taken together, those two Radiohead songs are a demonstration of the maturation process that every over-sensitive and ambitious young adult goes through, from wanting the world, to accepting that if you just have a piece of it, and that you can make you and your loved ones happy within it, you’ll be a lot happier.

‘All I need’ is the same thing- a slow, calm meditation on contentment, an acceptance of one’s own turbulent nature, and the fact that sometimes you settle for what is enough. ‘I only stick with you/because there are no others’ is delivered as a romantic line, but god knows what Yorke’s girlfriend thinks of it. Still, never mind, next second he’s telling her ‘You’re all I need/I’m in the middle of your picture.’ He also describes himself as ‘a moth/who wants to share your light/just an insect trying to get out of the night.’ It’s a little clingy, a little frantic, but somehow, it’s all calm. The song ends with the alternating chant of ‘It’s all wrong/it’s all right’ which, for Thom Yorke, is as close to ‘Shiny Happy People’ as I suspect he’ll ever get.

Still, Valentine’s day must be a hoot round the Yorke household. I picture an endless sequence, year after year, of his girflriend opening Valentines cards with endlessly disturbing protestations of frantic, angst-tinged love which reassure and disturb in equal measure, occasionally daubed in blood. Woman must have the patience of a saint.

Imagine that, actually, a range of mass-produced cards using the lyrics of Thom Yorke’s songs as their special romantic message. Ironic hipsters would disembowel each other to get hold of those. Finally, I shall be rich with this scheme!

Lyrics aside, the band as a whole are playing fantastically well on this record. Radiohead have loosened up in recent years, playing faster, more groove-led songs. Witness the wonderful shimmering arpeggios of ‘Weird Fishes’ which sounds like the waves, like water flowing, and the musicians are prefectly in sync, crafting mood as much as song.

My favourite on this album for that is ‘Reckoner,’ a sweeping, orchestral kind of take on Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ It’s lovely, sweeping, and delicious, and Phil Selway’s playing is fantastic, echoey and full of bounce and atmosphere. Anyone who doesn’t think drums are a proper instrument should listen to that song and think again. Over it all, Thom croons- yes, croons!- ‘you are not to blame’ like he’s absolving you of all your sins.

The whole album is like this, and I think that’s the reason for the muted reception it got critically- people don’t really expect Radiohead to sound so blissed out. Well, they are and they were, and this is lovely. So there.

I had a dream last night. In that dream I sat chained to a laptop, which was also a window to a giant forest made of hessian and steel wool, full of creatures, pitiful creatures, for they were weak and had no opinions. They longed to be told what to think, and so they called out in their multitudes;

“On, on, noble scribe!” they called, in a voice like thunder. “Tell us your thoughts, so that we, the humble and pitiful people of the internet, may know, and be enlightened.”

My god, they were ugly as hell and twice as tragic. But still I wrote on, for they needed my opinions. I was as pathetic as them. I needed them. They told me my opinions mattered. But nothing did, because the forest was a shrieking, cold, and empty place.

DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE?

So, anyway, number 4 in my top ten is Radiohead’s ‘Hail to the Theif.’

Radiohead are one of those bands that almost everyone seems to love, almost everyone in a certain age-group has a memory of, or some kind of personal connection to. They’re this generation’s Pink Floyd, or Led Zeppelin; a critically acclaimed band who walked their own paths, throwing up fascinating new ideas in their wake. Everyone with half a brain loves them.

And yet, they somehow lost their way a little bit with Kid A and Amnesiac. After the sublime peak of OK Computer, they’d seemed like good albums, but somehow, not quite as good. You could like them, but not quite love them. Still, they were the sound of a band redefining its parameters, setting their sites on new horizons, and remembering that it’s fun to rock out in the process.

Hail to the Theif was the band finding out what laid on those new horizons, and finding that it was fucking awesome. Strange, percussive nightmare drum and bass tracks about things that go bump in the night (‘The Gloaming’) sat next to meandering Beatlesy jams like ‘A Punch-up at a Wedding.’ The musicians are excellent, stretching themselves. Drummer Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are grooving like never before, and Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood just keep pulling out more and more wonders from their seemingly endless bag of atmospheric tricks.

It was also Thom Yorke’s Parenthood album- his child, Noah (to whom the line ‘maybe you’ll be president… in the flood you’ll build an ark’ in the gorgeous ‘Sail to The Moon’ is surely referring) is clearly the centre of his life, and in the lyrics of the album you see his famously angst-ridden focus shift. He’s no longer singing about his own personal demons, or at least not about himself.

The Thom Yorke of ‘Hail to the Theif’ is a grown man aware of the world around him, who still feels that jittery disquiet, but now cares about someone else more than his own self. In the paranoid freak-out of ‘A Wolf at The Door’ his central concern is that it will steal his children, not that it will mess him up.

The real musical and lyrical standout for me, however, is ‘There There,’ a kind of warped mythological journey through dark forests at night. Drums pound and rattle like voodoo chants, guitars clang discordantly, and Thom’s lyrics seem to show that he was busy those days being a dad, telling stories to his child. Let’s dwell on that image, for a minute; Thom Yorke telling a child a bed-time story. Not going to be reassuring, is it?

The lyrics of ‘There There’ almost give you a glimpse of what that would be like. He talks about sirens and shipwreck, unseen things which touch you on the shoulder, and darkened landscapes through which he walks. The whole thing is very primal, very dark, and makes you think of monsters under the bed.

The whole song hangs on the touching refrain ‘just because you feel it/doesn’t mean it’s there,’ a phrase which is both reasurring and deadening, depending upon the context to which you apply it. I always imagine him comforting his child, telling him that the monsters aren’t really there, and then going to bed himself, trying to convince himself of the same thing.

And that’s the key to Thom Yorke, and Radiohead as a band- it’s the contrast of the beautiful and the ugly, the harmonious and the discordant, the reassuring and the unsettling, a deliberate cognitive dissonance which springs into the mind and itches at you, tells you something’s wrong with this picture, even though it’s beautiful. It’s the restless and troubled heart which beats at the heart of the band, and always will.

The album also shows the point at which Yorke’s focus drifted outwards. Hail To the Theif was conceived in troubled times, the times of George Bush’s presidency in the US, of wars for oil and increasing disquiet in the world in general. 2+2=5 is about the folly of leadership, the grand delusions of politicians, and captures that cynical petulance with a scalpel wit, once again seen through the lens of children’s stories. I guarantee you no other song written anywhere in the world will draw parallels between the Iraq war and Chicken Little!

These days, if Thom Yorke is in the public eye, he’s as often as not focussing his restless energy on the problems of the environment. Hail To the Theif represents the album where his gaze first turned outwards. It’s remarkable, even now.