CHAPTER 5

 

 

 

#96: RADIOHEAD

"Paranoid Android"

from the album OK Computer

Released: May 1997 (single release and initial album release in Japan)

You can't know about it if you never went to Habitat at the Botley Park Roundabout, groaned as you sat down in a 100 bus heading to Witney, never heard Bill Heine on the local radio or saw his shark in Headington demanding that we not be destroyed - apt that the shark house was close to an industrial complex in Shotover. Never scoured the racks of Russell and Acott for pre-war popular music, when it was still considered civilised by too many kindly people you were kind enough never to bump into on the High Street of a Saturday, even if you were disembarking from the London coach. Never ran off to the Carfax Chippy when trout was on the High Table menu (again). Never went into the music section of the Westgate Library itemising what they needed to order. Never considered the two record store majors, facing each other across Cornmarket like wearied gunslingers.

 

Never went past the barracks on the 4B bus to Abingdon without thinking how much they must have thought about them. Never asked (in their head, they wouldn't dare ask out loud) the techno connoisseur banging out his joints one floor above if he wouldn't mind turning the noise down, since you're trying to get to sleep despite all those even louder voices crowding your head out.

 

 

(So many of these things not actually existing any more. In fact, most of them have long since stopped existing since you were there.)

 

 

 

Never sprinted to Massive Records behind the bus station to see what London is like. And if London at its best in those days could make you feel massive, this place could make you feel like an insect. You can't help but react, conjuring up a dismally amusing fantasy involving the people who hate you most, or perhaps it's the people you hate most if you've got handy access to a mirror.

Never scooped up the tyre listlessness of Park End Street.

Fantasies about revenge on the smugly rich. The song clocking on at the beginning as though beginning the closing day's work. The nervous jingle of vulnerable but that radio voice from your childhood (listening to Marvin all night long indeed); this is becoming an imbalanced nightmare.

Then the plea starts to show its teeth. You'll be first against the wall (but who'll be last is the question the singer really daren't ask). "What's THIS?" he exclaims, hurt and baffled. Random terms pulled out of the Situationist hat, burbling Fender Rhodes (emergency on Planet Patrol)...

...then a SLASH, and a BASH, as guitars thumbnail a battering ram into this plea, DO YOU REMEMBER MY NAME I THINK HE DOES - Kurt, are you here ("OFF WITH HIS HEAD, MAN!")? The guitar/rhythm lines transform the Nirvana into a Rush before it all slams suddenly into a wall of molten what

 

(the insomniac Tube driver in Geoff Ryman's 253, who finally manages to fall asleep, and as a welcome bonus never has to wake up either.)

An adagio ensues, an elegy for something not yet departed, a solvent sickness, a resigned doubt ("God loves His children - yeah"). At the quiet climax, the lead guitarist takes over the main vocal refrain - nothing really matters to them. But there's one quick, final roundelay of heaviness which splutters to a stop as though its steam supply had all been used up (is that a plug being pulled out at the end, or just a computer being switched off?).

Like "Bohemian Rhapsody" - though structurally the song has far more in common with "Happiness Is A Warm Gun," and perhaps specifically the Breeders' cover - "Paranoid Android" is a stylistic advertisement for the band. This is what we do, look at the range, what do you think? Its real genesis is perhaps a lot more humdrum - some cocaine heads were being obscurely disturbing when gathered around the singer in a bar in Los Angeles - but you can't know THINGS if you never knew exactly why they were done or who prompted the doing.

The song reminded me how easy it once was to mistake an enclosed world for an outside world.