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.
