radio head

Rip It Up, Issue 199, 1 March 1994, Page 18

radio head

"I wish I was special but I'm a creep I'm a weirdo What the hell am I doing here I don't belong here..."

It's a popular self-loathing anthem. Top 10 across the globe. Radiohead's 'Creep' seemed to ignite the rejected adolescent in all of us. The band are presently back home recording new material ("More of thesame really... different fish in the same kettle") and Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's lead guitar, is doing the interviews this time round. He's the guy responsible for those violent derh deh, derh deh guitar rips when the 'Creep' chorus is coming up. You know, the ones everyone air guitars out of time to.

"Yeah that's me. It was kind of frustrating in two ways. Firstly, it was because of the song itself in that I didn't like it. It was kind of quiet all the waythrough and the lyrics and the music weren't connected all that well. And the guitar sounds frustrated because that's what the song is about as well."

So Thom arrives with all the lyrics and stuff and you...

"Ruin it with all the music, yeah. The parts where Thom stops singing and all the strange chords come in, that's me ruining his very nice pop song..."

Radiohead's album, Pablo Honey, is full of very nice pop songs. But they were never touted as 'the next big thing' in England. The press over there ignored them, until they made it big in the States, of course.

"We haven't been that successful in America. The song 'Creep' has been successful in America. It's going to take the second album to really decide what success we have. We see ourselves as writing better and playing better, but not successful successful."

But are you always welcome in the States? "It varies from state to state really. People say 'oh how did you feel about America' but all the states are so different it's like travelling around Europe. We were probably biggest in San Francisco - because it was a radio station there that first played 'Creep'." Jonny and lead singer Thom York had been writing and recording songs for about six years before they took the band out of the garage. "We just decided we were ready to come out, as it were, and do it in public and it snowballed from there.

"\Ne were playing a lot of concerts in England to a lot of fans but they were people who'd seen us play live before. They were bringing friendsalong and it was going well butslowly, by word of mouth. We weren't getting mentioned in the press.

"But that all ended about two months ago when we released 'Creep' for the second time

"On our rider it's got all the drinks for the rest of the band like lagers, beers and wines or whatever. There's always a half a pint of semiskimmed milk, which is mine."

and they didn't ignore it and did like it." Do you still like it? "Yeah, that'sthe bestthing about 'Creep'. You read interviews with bands and when they're asked about their hit or first big song they'll say 'Oh we're sick of it, we hate it'. But we're still into it." Someone else who's still into it is Belly's Tanya Donelly. It was Tanya that first told me to keep my eyes peeled for Radiohead in an interview last year. Next thing you know their album's nearly gold in the States and she's touring with them. "She was going to do these radio interviews in Leister and we were doing some the day before. We just assumed she'd never heard of us and we left a message for her just saying 'Congratulations on the album we think you're great — Radiohead' and gave her a t-shirt and thought nothing of it. And like about two weeks later they asked us to play with them in America. We were going to go over, but that doubled the audiences." You've called yourselves a testosterone-free band... "Thom once said that rock and roll is all about body odour and getting blow jobs from strangers, which is very true. There is that dated side to being in a rock band which we're not into at all." So if you're a stranger with body odour, don't ask Jonny out for a blow job when the band play here later in the year. Or a beer for that matter... "I don't drink. You play in a band and you have some beer after the gig and you fall asleep. I've got nothing against it, it's just as soon as you link it to being in a band it gets really boring." So no cases of Jack Daniels in the dressing room then? "No I don't think so. I like to have milk, actually, which is a bit of a secret. On our rider it's got all the drinks for the rest of the band like lagers, beers and wines or whatever. There's always a half a pint of semi-skimmed milk, which ismine. I probably shouldn't betellingyouthis..." Ah, don't worry Jonny, it's just between you, me and a couple of thousand creeps. JOHN TAITE

YOTHU YINDI . ' , • Freedom (Mushroom) Yothu Yindi's third album is a brilliant integration of their aboriginal elements into what is irresistible rock n’ roll. Freedom delivers the potential shown on some of the material on Tribal Voice (particularly the title track) with an amazing consistency over the scope of sixteen songs with only three of them falling into the totally traditional bracket.;

Stretching from 'Timeless Land"s inspired funk lift-off to vocalist Mandawuy Yunipingu's collaboration with an archetypcal Neil Hinn tune ‘Dots On the Shells', through to the tribal choruses of 'Back To Culture' and ‘World Turning', Yothu Yindi have made the best indigenous rock n'roll crossover album since Los Lobos' criminally ignored classic, Kiko. GEORGE KAY KRISTIN HERSH Hips and Makers (4AD) The word is beautiful. The first solo attempt from Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh is a beautiful, bare, acoustic mindfuck. Throwing Muses haven't split, they're recording their new album, University, right now. But this was an outlet for Kristin's acoustic material that wouldn't fit in the Muses. There's no band to hide behind, no distortion to cover the vocals (not that she ever needed it) and the songs themselves are more obviously about Kristin's troubled past. We begin with 'Your Ghost' with guest vocals from Michael Stipe. It's the introduction, the hit, full of cello, darkness, confusion and fragility. And it sets the scene for plenty more haunting, delicate numbers like 'Velvet Days', 'Beestung' and the brilliant 'Me and My Charms' ('You can't leave me now—l haven't left you yet.')

Producer Lenny Kaye, who played guitar in Patti Smith's band, has allowed the atmospheric unhappiness stand unguarded in many of the songs. Tracks like 'The Letter' and 'Close Your Eyes', both written ten years ago when Kristin was 16, are harrowing, claustrophobic cries for help at the peak of her psychological nightmares ("I'm sliding really fast/1 don't understand the puzzles/I can't breath/close your eyes.") It would have been a crime to let

these go unheard. It always seems that in taking the biggest risks, music reaps the greatest rewards. This is wide open and risky as hell. And if you fell head over heels for tracks like Two Steps' or 'Pearl', or you're a sucker for strong female singer songwriters, or you're just totally infatuated with anything Kristin Hersh touches, Hips and Makers is going to leave you breathless. Truly beautiful. JOHN TAITE REM The Automatic Box (Warners) As a cleaning up exercise the sweeping's on The Automatic Box don't contain enough of the rough diamonds found on their late 80s round-up Dead Letter Office. Wrose than that. For a band that's always maintained a profile of political correctness (REM campaigned for the elimination of the wasteful CD long box) the Automatic box represents an ill-judged extravagance. Eighteen songs spread over four CDs doesn't make for an environ mentally conscious package (but no doubt makes for higher record company profits). At least they've saved on cover artwork, recycling the same band photo in four different colours on four discs: vocal tracks, instrumental, cover versions and B sides. The latter contain the choicest cuts: a remarkably faithful 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight', a frenetic run through Iggy Pop's 'Funtime' and a version of 'Everybody Hurts' more poignant than the original. They also pay tribute to English genius eccentrics Robyn Hitchcock and Syd Barrett. Of the rest, 'lt's A Free World Baby’ is probably the pick of the vocal track disc and 'Fruity Organ' is a fun romp amongst the meandering instrumental doodlings. REM-heads may find moments of musical fascination but The Automatic Box's only real achievement is in redefining the term 'For completists only'. MARTIN BELL MELVINS Houdini (Atlantic) Here's a Melvins live review. Ridiculous. It was a small club in Long Beach if I remember rightly (this was some time ago) and they were

ridiculous. The singer looked like the fat guy from the Cure trying to rock out, the drummer had some stupid fingerless gloves on and kept holding his sticks above his head, then playing really badly and Shirley Temple's daughter was on bass and some heavy medication. The whole thing was made even more bizarre by the fact that the Melvins were trying hard to be crushingly heavy but the sound man had other ideas. Maybe it was heavy for people who enjoy Pantera or White Zombie, but to those of us who dug those early Melvins records, it was weak. Anyways, some years have passed, grunge happened and now the Melvins are signed to a major label. They’d put out a few albums and a whole heap of great singles over the years and now they had Kurt Cobain producing them and were on the same label Big Joe Turner and Led Zeppelin recorded for. Odd indeed. Not so odd is the fact that yes, Houdini is a great album and no, the Melvins didn't wimp out and make somevaguely commercial MTV deal. That's not to say there aren't some great songs on it — there's a very true to the original cover of Kiss' 'Going Blind' that deserves to be huge and 'Lizzy' and 'Teet' which sound suspiciously like tongue in cheek classic rock. What sets this stuff apart is the fact that it has an element of weight. The Melvins play songs just that much slower, or record things with the levels just that much further into the red and the result is a strange and superb extension of rock. It’s a mentality of pushing things that inch too far that our own Gordons, Skeptics and Head Like A Hole do so well. Put Houdini on the headphones and crank up 'Hooch' or 'Joan of Arc' and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Or you won’t. In which case just keep buying those Radiohead albums and leave me the hell alone. KIRK GEE THE BADLOVES Get On Board (Mushroom) The secret of this Melbourne based quintet isn't so much the songs (with the exception of the single 'Lost' and 'Memphis' they're pretty much just funky grooves lent colour via some nice Hammond sounds) but the vocal interplay between lead singer

Michael Spiby, lead guitarist John Housden and bassist Stephen "Irish" O'Prey. Live (they recently toured here with Jimmy Barnes) their harmonies and the intelligent arrangements of the material bore out Mushroom's belief in the band and clearly no expense has been spared on the production or packaging of this debut album. Producer Doug Roberts (who worked on Paul Kelly's recent live album) has given the band just the right sort of understated 60s sound, giving heavy emphasis toTony Featherstone's Hammond. The liner notes attempt to pre-empt suggestions that the Badloves, for all their skills are little more than a pleasant throwback to simpler times—"lmagine hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory for the first time, a decade after its release. Imagine never having heard of Janis Joplin and then listening to her bleed her soul through ‘Tell Momma' . . . Listening to the Badloves can have that sort of effect"... well, with liner notes like that the Badloves could've come up looking very silly indeed. It's a testament to the spirit they bring to their music that rescues Get On Board — just. But one can't help but think that passengers tempted to ride hang around till the Badloves find their own tracks to travel.

GREG FLEMING