Author: joseph

The b-side song “Fog” opens with the following lines:

There’s a little child
Running round this house
And he never leaves
He will never leave

At line 7, the song’s setting changes dramatically: “Baby alligators in the sewers grow up fast.” Urban alligator mythology has a distinguished history. But this mythology, made in 1980 into a movie entitled Alligator, is applicable only indirectly. The speaker begins with talk of a “little child” that remains in the house despite unstated wishes that it would leave (evinced in the repetition: “And he never leaves / He will never leave”). The ensuing evocation of baby alligators, a stand-in for the anxiety inducing little child, should come as no surprise. Parenting a child confirms the parent’s mortality, a theme voiced succinctly in Donald Hall’s poem “My Son, My Executioner.” Thom Yorke has a son named Noah, but it is not at all clear that the protagonist of “Fog” can be equated with Yorke.

Track 10 on Amnesiac is entitled “Like Spinning Plates.” To be in a situation where it feels as if you are spinning plates means to have many things happening at once. To spin plates, however, is a skill of uncertain origin, according to this site. You can purchase plates especially for spinning here.

Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew is a recording that should be heard–an immensely important predecessor to Radiohead’s experimentation. For the album’s liner notes, Ralph J. Gleason wrote in 1970: “this music is new music.” It is still new music.

Who is Krzysztof Penderecki?

A transcript of Jonny Greenwood’s online Yahoo! chat with Radiohead fans is available. A quote: “Apparently 90% of your questions are about hair.”

The New Yorker article on Radiohead is available online here.

There is an article on Radiohead in The Guardian: “The term … is disintermediation.” Yorke was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune: “When you come to see us play you aren’t going to Disneyland … Or maybe you are.”

Jonny Greenwood plays an ondes martenot on “How to Disappear Completely.”

I have written an essay on Radiohead’s antivideos.

Radiohead has released a video for “I Might Be Wrong” that is only available on the internet here in the QuickTime multimedia format. The full-length video, directed by the inestimable Chris Bran of the vapour brothers, was a top story on the Apple Computers web site. A collage built from previously released Amnesiac antivideos and footage for an unreleased video of “Pyramid Song,” the video for “I Might Be Wrong” visually enacts the song’s alternation between disturbingly anxious and calmly claustrophobic moods.