The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 54

tr Pi ri I 1 1 if I 1 I r-lT I I i I 4 I -Ty IJ t' I Jf rj ft 1 i A-V- jfT'- rjtF I "Ssi I I "Any criticism we get is always stuff we have already criticised ourselves with anyway," Jonny insists. "You read one bad review and 100 good ones and the bad one always seems to make more sense to you. You can always see their point more easily." Could that just say something about you, Jonny? "I doubt it," he says with a laugh. "I don't think much I say says anything about me. Anyway, that's for you to decide.

You're the journalist." Ah, there he has me. And there is where my detachment about the whole thing just dissolves. Because while I'm happy to draw attention to the hype's ridiculousness, I basically agree with it. My tongue is as stitched into place as the next guy's. When, in the spirit of Nick Hornby, I was making up my list of music faves a month ago, OK Computer took up six places in my 1997 Top Ten.

That's how good I reckon it is. Why? Because it tries. Because it isn't just a tired retread of the past five years of guitar rock, much of which has been a tired retread of the past 35 years of guitar rock. Because it isn't two-bit, Californian chipmunk punk. And because its reference points didn't die with the first John Lennon solo single.

OK Computer is the sound of a band looking forward, struggling to break free from the idea of templates, abandoning its comfort zone for the shock, and the joy, of the new. It's a record of a band overreaching, but even when an idea occasionally falls short, you still feel compelled to applaud the effort. "I'd say I was happy with about 80 per cent of the album," Colin decides. "If you think of it as a first attempt by a band to record themselves in the studio independently, then it's a very good record on those terms." "I don't feel like we're operating at a peak," Jonny says, "but we did get close to it occasionally during OK Computer. We've found the right way to record now.

But there's still things to change and things that aren't great about it. "Where we got really close is on songs like Exit Music, bits of Paranoid Android, the bits that still sound good and you can't remember how they were recorded or exactly what was going on. Or the bits you're surprised that you got away with." The two songs he mentions capture the scope and ambition of OK Computer as well as any. Exit Music is an instantly familiar classic, a gentle, swelling strum beneath a vocal of heartbreaking loss and despair. The song's trajectory is as solid as it is doomed, but what really sears into the listener's consciousness is its vulnerability, -an emotional intimacy that an act like, say, U2, has never been able to achieve.

Paranoid Android, on the other hand, is a seven-minute fragmentary 'T? A--' jf-v V-I Mf I Fa I I Jonny's brother, Colin, bass player of the Oxford five-piece and a man staving off savage jet lag, yawns, stretches and neatly sidesteps the issue. "The simple answer is that all that has nothing to do with us," he says with a get-out-of-jail-free chuckle. "We just record the album. And that has nothing to do with how it's perceived. Obviously, you asked us what we thought were the greatest records of all time, then we'd probably say people like Beatles, REM, Costello oh, loads of people.

It's an People want SlvSIICSa Thi I) 7r Kaal mm Better than the might of Elvis (choose-your own). Better, even, than the Spice Girls. So, Radiohead, while this is all a whole lot better than releasing an album to deafening silence, is there a point where flattery becomes stupidity, and is this it? On the phone from a Japanese hotel, guitarist Jonny Greenwood sighs and mumbles an awkward "I don't know." He pauses, looses a long, slow breath, then finally arrives at an answer. "I think it's okay as an album from the year," he says, picking words carefully, slotting them into place like jigsaw pieces, "but I'm not sure about how it stands up to albums from the past 30 years. "It takes time for hysteria to die down.

When the Oasis album came out, it got amazing reviews and then people weren't sure. Maybe the same will happen with this one in a few months' time or a couple of years. I don't know v' if When you're proclaimed the future of rock, the best band in the world and the cure for cancer it's too late to plead innocence. Radiohead are not the Messiahs but so damn close. JON CASIMIR tunes his head in.

It's 1997. You're an unassuming rock band from a university town in the middle of England. You make a record, your third, that you quite like. When it's finished, you release it. No big deal that's what bands do.

insane question to ask. "The best thing about the thing is that it's obviously completely ridiculous. If we were to believe it to be true, then that would be very sad. "We're going to go away for six months after this tour, because there's been too much about us in the press and we are all slightly embarrassed about it, in a very English fashion. And obviously, there will be a backlash.

If you believe the hype, you have to believe the backlash too. I. don't believe either, so it's fine." their musicians ey like to think that 1 The next morning, you wake up to find that the world's rock media has sewn its tongue into the back of your trousers. The record, OK Computer, is hailed as Album Of The Year by all and sundry, though the year is barely half over. You are spoken of, loudly, as the best band in the world.

You are the future of rock. You are Radiohead, kings and conquerors, the band most likely to whiten teeth, cure cancer and save us all. Just when you think it can't get any more over the top, the readers of influential magazine vote OK Computerthe best album of all time. Yep. Of all time.

Better than anything the Beatles tossed off. li you only knov; JT. it mm 1 three or four chords 111017 how you're doing Z2 SMH METRO JAN 30-FEB 5.