Rock and Hard Places Page 2

  “Mike Mills,” says Colin, “told us not to wear anything we want to wear again.”

  “Paint,” speculates Thom, gloomily. “It’ll be paint. Or custard pies. Oh, God.”

  “So the idea with the ping-pong balls,” continues Colin, “was that we’d get the roadies up in the lighting gantries above the stage to drop them on R.E.M. during the last song.”

  A contemplative hush settles as we drive through Hartford. If you’ve never driven through Hartford, the effect can be recreated in the comfort and safety of your own home by going to sleep. I flew in from London last night with Melody Maker photographer Pat Pope and Radiohead’s press officer, Caffy St Luce. Our efforts to hit Hartford and paint the town red had come to nought; we couldn’t even claim to have painted the town beige. The first place we tried was a sports bar, decorated with fading hockey pennants and populated by four lone, middle-aged men staring morosely into their drinks. We asked the barman what people in Hartford did for fun. “They come here, sir,” he replied. We finished up in a deserted cocktail bar where the star turn was a drink called a Zombie. “Limit two per customer,” said the menu. I asked a waitress what happens if you drink three. “You can’t walk,” she replied.

  “I wonder why people build cities in these places,” says Thom, balefully surveying the fist-chewingly unremarkable scenery. It’s a real graveyard with streetlights, this place, the kind of town where you could fire a Gatling gun down the main road without hitting anybody—and if you did, you’d be doing them a favour.

  The venue for tonight’s show is the Meadows Music Theatre, a giant half-indoor, half-outdoor affair, something like Wembley Arena with a back yard. It’s early afternoon, hours before showtime, but we’ve arrived early so Radiohead can soundcheck and do some of the aimless milling about that constitutes the major part of any rock’n’roll tour. In Radiohead’s commodious dressing room, Thom draws a smiling face and the words “Thanks for having us, you’ve been brilliant, love Radiohead” on a scrap of paper and gives it to a roadie who will secrete it amid the sheets on Michael Stipe’s lyric stand. This gesture is at odds with the received wisdom on Thom Yorke, which is that he’s slightly less amenable than a cornered mongoose.

  “Yeah, well,” he shrugs. “They’ve really been brilliant to us. We’re getting a whole hour to soundcheck every night, and you know how often that happens to support bands in real life.”

  Gratitude notwithstanding, the other members of Radiohead have been talking, and a Plan B prank has been hatched. R.E.M.’s stage set is an extravagant homage to Alexander Calder that includes a backdrop of enormous red lampshades, swinging from the stage roof. The idea now is that as R.E.M. close their show with “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” the lampshades will be joined in flight by all five members of Radiohead, suspended from harnesses. Colin, Jonny, Phil and Ed look well pleased with this scheme. Thom looks rather less so.

  “It’ll never work,” he says.

  Radiohead go off to do their soundcheck, which I watch from the hill at the back of the empty arena. Between songs, Ed plays snatches of “Radio Free Europe,” R.E.M.’s first single. I’ve often thought that it’d be a great gag for a support act to close their set by playing the headliner’s biggest hit, but I suspect Radiohead want to be invited back one day.

  Back in the dressing room, Radiohead are informed that the harness jape is off—R.E.M.’s tour manager isn’t having it. Someone else says, probably quite rightly, that Radiohead’s insurers would pop a rivet if one of their clients got injured in a mid-air collision with a giant item of lounge furniture.

  Phil brings one of the big red props into the dressing room for further discussion.

  “We could,” he offers, “just put them on our heads and run around the stage.”

  He tries it on. He looks silly beyond description.

  “I can’t see,” he announces, muffled.

  “Typical,” snorts Thom, momentarily recalling, as he sometimes does, the deadpan snarl of John Lydon. “Very bloody Keith Moon, aren’t we? Other bands seem to be able to misbehave without looking like utter wankers. I wonder what our problem is.”

  He clomps off to wait in silence for showtime, fidgeting with some artwork he’s got stored in his Macintosh laptop. Jonny, meanwhile, is trying to evade a phone interview with some local radio station. He asks if I fancy doing it. “They’ll never know,” he says. He explains that several Japanese and Taiwanese magazines currently trailing exclusive interviews with Radiohead’s right-angle-cheekboned guitar hero are, in fact, running with the thoughts of his mates, cousins or anyone else who was sitting around his house in Oxford when the phone rang.

  “Go on,” he goads. “It’s easy. How are you finding touring with R.E.M.? Do you feel under pressure to follow the success of ‘Creep’?”

  It’s a tempting offer, and the trust Jonny is offering at such early acquaintance is touching—after all, there’s nothing to stop me saying, “We’re only supporting R.E.M. for the money, all of which we plan to invest in companies which test cosmetics on baby seals and pay Malaysian children three cents an hour to drill those pointless little holes in the ends of toothbrushes and I am sleeping with your sister.” However, I’ve done more than a few phone interviews myself, I know how prone they are to literal and metaphorical crossed wires even when you’re talking to who you think you are and I don’t want to wind up a fellow hack unnecessarily. There is some honour among scoundrels.

  “Suit yourself,” he says. “I’ll ask one of the crew.”

  Jonny tells me that his driving ambition is to leave America having said “Wanker” and “Bollocks” on every radio station in the country.

  GIVEN THAT HARTFORD is what it is—the kind of place where they’ll have to close the zoo if the chicken dies—it’s not surprising that the venue looks full to its 30,000 capacity an hour before Radiohead are due on.

  To get to the arena from backstage, I have to run an ideological gauntlet of stalls operated by the organisations R.E.M. have invited on tour with them: Greenpeace, Rock the Vote, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and some people who’d like it to be more difficult for other people to buy handguns. There’s a couple of groups with more nebulous names, like People for the American Way and Common Cause, which sound excitingly like rogue shotgun-wielding militias of squirrel-eating far-right rednecks that have snuck under R.E.M.’s wire, but these also turn out to be cheerful liberals encouraging others to be cheerfully liberal. I talk to a few of them. I probably even agree with most of them. I’ve just never grown out of that shockingly juvenile reflex of rebelling against any opinion that is being thrust at me in tones of righteous certainty, even if it’s my own. By the time I get to my spot on Radiohead’s mixing desk, I’m almost goose-stepping.

  Radiohead are brilliant tonight, but as they rarely display any aptitude for being anything else, it’s not surprising. As for R.E.M.’s threat of practical jokes, this pretty much turns out to have been the practical joke itself. Ed is briefly tormented by a radio-controlled car operated from the wings by Mike Mills, but no custard pies or paint bombs are deployed. Nevertheless, Radiohead have convinced themselves of the worst: as soon as the last note of their last song (a rousing version of “Nobody Does It Better,” dedicated to R.E.M.) fades, they down tools and leg it as fast as they decently can. As Radiohead complete their flight, R.E.M. wander on stage bearing a tray of champagne glasses, seeking to toast their support act, and find nothing but 30,000 people laughing. After a couple of agonising minutes, Thom, Ed, Jonny, Colin and Phil are retrieved, and the R.E.M./Radiohead mutual admiration society drinks its health to sustained applause.

  Backstage at the end of the night, every friend or relative of every member of R.E.M. and Radiohead makes both bands stand together for souvenir last-night pictures. Peter Buck gently taunts Radiohead for their eventual, agonised decision not to storm the stage during the encore. Colin brings me a beer.

  So, Colin. Do you fe
el under pressure to follow the success of “Creep”? How are you finding touring with R.E.M.?

  “I can remember listening to R.E.M.’s first couple of albums on my Walkman on the way to school,” he says. “They’re one of the reasons I wanted to be in a band. This is still really strange.”

  During R.E.M.’s set, Colin had shepherded me out onto the stage, to a position just behind Peter Buck’s amplifiers, where we spent the set giggling like two starstruck teenagers who’d snuck into someone’s soundcheck.

  “They’ve been so good to us, and it’s been really good for us, especially Thom. This seems to have been his year for meeting his heroes. Elvis Costello introduced himself at this thing we did in Italy. I think that kind of thing has helped Thom a lot.”

  Bill Berry, R.E.M.’s drummer, comes over to say goodbye. He’s wearing a purple Radiohead t-shirt.

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, in a New York City feeling the first chills of winter, Radiohead are due to play a secret show at the Mercury Lounge, a tiny venue on East Houston. The band leave Hartford by minibus while Pat, Caffy and I get on a train, which breaks down, then a bus, which gets a flat, and then another bus, whose unspeakably sadistic driver hits upon Planes, Trains & Automobiles as just the video everyone is going to want to see by this stage.

  When we get to the Mercury, almost hysterical with irritation, Radiohead are mid-soundcheck. I stand up the back and try to be inconspicuous, which isn’t easy in a brightly-lit venue almost too small to change your mind in.

  “There you are,” grins Thom from the stage. “Any requests?”

  Someone’s in a good mood, at least. I suggest “Sulk,” a deliciously bitter tune that sounds roughly the way you feel when trapped in an interminable bus journey while being subjected to a film which could have been based on your misery, except that you know Steve Martin is going to get home eventually.

  “We were going to do it anyway,” says Thom, with a smirk. They play it, and things suddenly seem like they could be worse: my favourite band of the moment play a four-minute concert for an audience consisting of me and the bloke on the mixing desk.

  Thom and I head for a coffee in a place up the street. The waitress is wearing a Sleeper t-shirt—evidently one of New York’s sub-species of ardent Anglophile indie-rock fans. She double-takes at Thom, but obviously can’t quite place him. She carries on double-taking while we talk.

  “The thing that’s really freaked me out about doing a tour with a band as big as R.E.M.,” begins Thom, “is seeing how being so famous can change the way everybody, and I mean absolutely everybody, behaves towards you.”

  Someone once wrote that the curse of being Marlon Brando, I think it was, was that you’d never see people being themselves.

  “Absolutely. And it is really hard to do, to be yourself in front of somebody famous.”

  The waitress is beyond double-taking and is now staring. She’s worked it out.

  “I find it . . . fuck, you know, I don’t want it to happen. But that’s presuming we’re even going to make another record that people like.”

  Colin was saying last night that you’d found meeting a few people in your position helpful. What happens? Do you have those magnificent, unfathomable conversations that artists always want everyone else to believe that artists have, or do you just stand around gawping like a fan?

  “No . . . it’s more . . . you’re there, and there’s millions of things you can ask, but just the fact that you’ve met them becomes enough. I mean, even someone like Elvis Costello you can still judge on first impressions to some degree, and he was really nice, really trying to be nice. He can obviously be extremely sour, just like I can be, just like a lot of people under pressure can be, but he was really nice.”

  I think the reputation he’s got—rather like the reputation you’ve got—is more than anything to do with an inability to suffer fools gladly, or even at all. If you can’t cope with imbeciles, and you work in the music business, you’re going to upset people.

  “You’re right, and the music business is quite bitchy and competitive, but after all that, you meet people you really admire, and suddenly that whole competitive thing is just not important. I found that helpful. Just being able to say I’ve met him. That’s enough.”

  So you just talked shop, like everyone else.

  “I bloody hope not. Although, to some degree, you do find yourself in the same boat, having gone through the same experiences, and they’re quite a limited set of experiences, and they can turn you into quite a limited personality. So, I think, it’s a shock when you discover that there other people who have gone through that, who are a few years ahead of you in the time machine, and have come back and said it’s okay, you know, they’re still alive.”

  Since Radiohead’s debut single, “Creep,” went supernova in the States in 1994, the band as a whole, and Thom and particular, have reacted to the fame thrust upon them with the bewilderment and disgust of a Methodist who inherits a brothel. The common take on “The Bends,” the title track of the album Radiohead made against the backdrop of that success, was that it was a vicious, splenetic rail against the fact that stardom is not the liberating force that people imagine. It’s actually incredibly limiting, and ultimately, unless you can ignore it, rise above it or find a way to have fun with it, utterly cretinising. “The Bends,” like The Byrds’ “So You Want Be A Rock’n’Roll Star,” Costello’s “Hand In Hand” and “Pump It Up,” or Nirvana’s “Serve The Servants” and “Pennyroyal Tea,” sounded like one of those records often made by newly successful bands—they’ve got what they always wanted, and discovered that they don’t want it.

  “Well, no. . . ,” says Thom, sounding almost apologetic for tearing down this hastily-constructed theory. “That song was really just a collection of phrases going round in my head one day. The crazy thing about that song is that there was no calculation or thought involved—it was just whatever sounded good after the previous line. It was written way before we’d ever been to America, even, but yeah, it’s always interpreted as this strong reaction against the place and everything that went with it for us.”

  Understandable, though. The lyric is loaded with sleepy-eyed views from aeroplane windows, an alcohol drip-feed, the fear that the surface everyone sees is all you’ve got left.

  “Oh, absolutely, but that hadn’t started at all. I wrote it before we recorded the first album. We hadn’t been anywhere. Is that the time?”

  I imagine so.

  “Shit, we’re on in half an hour.”

  I pay for the coffees while Thom waits outside, polishing his sunglasses on the hem of his baggy jumper.

  “Is that the guy who sang ‘Creep’?” asks the waitress.

  STREWN AROUND THE Mercury after another typically incendiary show are record company flyers plugging The Bends. These trumpet excerpts of the blanket critical praise The Bends has attracted. Radiohead have predictable difficulty taking any of it seriously.

  “Radiohead toss and turn like the best Pearl Jam and U2 anthems,” recites Jonny, from one leaflet.

  “With the emphasis on toss, presumably,” adds Ed.

  “Thom Yorke’s voice,” reads Thom Yorke’s voice, “is as enigmatic as Billy Corgan’s.”

  Thom blinks a few times.

  “Thanks a fucking bunch,” he splutters, less than enigmatically.

  Colin, meanwhile, is perturbed by the critical line taken by Rolling Stone. “It’s four stars in quotation marks,” he grins. “Does that mean they just swore at it?”

  Outside on the pavement, a few dozen people have waited for Radiohead to emerge so they can tell them that they’re, like, rilly rilly awesome. One woman apologises to Thom for her boyfriend, who’d been making a nuisance of himself down the front during the gig, and had come very close, at one point, to having Thom’s guitar shoved down his throat. Sideways on, to judge by Thom’s expression.

  There’s a record company meet-and-greet bunfight we’re supposed to be at, though nobody is keen on the
idea. Thom and I get in the last of the fleet of taxis that Caffy has flagged down.

  “Right,” he says. “Here’s the plan. We hit the room, we charge around it as fast as possible, we shake hands with and smile at as many people as we can, whether we know them or not, and then we get out and go back to the hotel. I hate these things.”

  Right.

  “If it doesn’t kill us,” says Thom, “it makes us stronger.”

  It turns out to be fairly low-key and relaxed, and everyone eventually stays for more than a few drinks. Even Thom could be mistaken for a man who’s not having all that terrible a time. When we get back to our lodgings at the Paramount Hotel near Times Square, it’s long past midnight, so we stage a chaotic photo shoot in Pat’s tiny room—to allow all of Radiohead to get in front of the camera, I have to sit in the bath. Pat’s efforts to encourage Radiohead to look like stern, seen-it-all road warriors are not aided by Jonny who, as Pat loads new film, reads choice titles from the catalogue of the hotel’s in-house video library. “I will give anyone in this room five dollars in cash,” he announces, “if they will ring reception and ask for Honey, I Blew Everybody.”

  When Pat finally despairs of getting any sense out of them, Thom and I head downstairs to a table overlooking the lobby. The Philip Starckdesigned Paramount is a triumph of style over substance. Everything in the hotel has been built or chosen to look good, regardless of whether it’s any use—this creed applies equally to the furniture, the staff and most of the guests. If everything written about Thom Yorke was true, there’s no way he’d come in here except with a beltful of grenades and a flamethrower, but he seems to find the place amusing. We order a tableful of beers, though we’re both well on our way already. Thom peers over the glass balcony at a tottering catwalk mannequin loitering in the lobby below, bulging out of a dress that could scarcely be less comfortable if it was made of barbed wire and nettles.