Archive special: Radiohead

"EMI were quite disappointed when they heard our LP, because there wasn't a specific theme they could hang their marketing campaign around. We're not part of any scene or movement and that's made it difficult for them to sell us to the music press": interview, May 1993:

"The more acoustic-based ‘High And Dry’, in particular, should help lay to rest the ghost of Thom Yorke and Co. being labelled one-hit wonders" [Hah! - web ed]: single review, 'Planet Telex' / 'High And Dry', March 1995:

"Radiohead have become one of those few bands who make you feel privileged to know and love them. They are not a band you can either take or leave. This is music which forces the listener to commit him or herself totally and forever": album review, The Bends, April 1995.

"I don't want to set myself up like that again. I've had letters from death row, guys who have killed people, and they're responding to the lyrics on 'Creep'. That scared the fucking hell out of me": interview, July 1995.

"This [is] something completely different from everything that’s come before. When U2 did it, they called themselves Passengers. This is Radiohead, kids, but not as we knew them": album review, Kid A, Sept 2000.

"That song was originally written years ago. We were about to do some big festival in Ireland. I was up all night, having the most terrible dreams, I was so shit-scared. And I had one of those really, really vivid dreams and the Liffey was really, really muddy, like a mud river, and I was drifting down to the sea. And it just sort of stuck": interview, Sept 2000.

"Anyone who heard Thom Yorke as the man from UNKLE or the Airbag/How Am I Driving extended EP will have no trouble connecting ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ to something like ‘Pyramid Song’ off this new record, essentially Kid A’s twin, retained in utero for a term while its brother’s bruises healed": album review, Amnesiac, June 2001.

"One of Radiohead’s grislier moments [but] Greenwood’s genius elevates a harrowing song to something of a cathartic triumph. Total genius, but what more do you expect from the greatest band on earth?": single review, 'Knives Out', Aug 2001.

"Jonny Greenwood’s legendary guitar clang sounds so loud and terrifying it could almost be a bolt of lightning sent to accompany the relentless sheets of Oxford rain": live review, South Park, Oxford, July 2001.

“'The planet is a gun-ship in a sea of fear,' he sings, by way of an encore during ‘The Bends’. That might be true. And now we know who’s writing the shanties": live review, Belfast Odyssey, Sep 2001.

"As news networks broadcast raw hand-held footage shot by bystanders – film that probably cost a couple of dollars to process but looked like scenes out of Independence Day – and as surrealist montage and reportage fused into one, I had to force myself to play their last three albums. Too emotional. Too paranoid. Too aware. Thom Yorke, a singer plagued by "unborn chikken voices", the Chicken Licken of rock ‘n’ roll in fact, might’ve wondered if it wasn’t an acorn that hit him on the head but a piece of the sky, a chunk of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, slicing through a stitch in time": interview, Oct 2001.

"'Like Spinning Plates’ is stunningly stripped from its puzzling avant-garde structures and warped loops, left bare as a simple piano ballad. ‘Idiotheque’ is gigantic, frenetic and thrilling as Underworld at full-throttle": album review, I Might Be Wrong, Nov 2001.

“'Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there,' Thom moans, like the ghost of a man hanging around trying to remember what it was he wanted to so tell the living": single review, 'There There', May 2003.