Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [41]
Intelligence Gathering
As interviews, Dead Air Space postings, and Yorke’s dismissive characterizations of his own lyrical contribution to the band’s productions indicate, this question manages to animate every aspect of Radiohead’s creative process. What constitutes real profit, real development, and actual, discernible, sustainable progress in our doing, spending, and manufacturing? What’s it all for? And in typical fashion, Yorke has noted that he often goes to work having already done the business of writing particular phrases out even as he waits expectantly for his bandmates to tell him what the words mean, proffering them sheepishly, not as a finished work, but as words that might yet be made to work. How might private exercises in expanding ones sphere of sanity like writing out on a napkin a description of a realization we don’t know what to do with, raw facts that can hardly be contemplated without inducing paralysis, be corralled in the direction of something helpful, something worth recording and making public?
Yorke describes his arranging of the fruits of his intelligence gathering, occasionally undertaken in an Oxford pub, thusly:
I sit there, on the way in, because it’s a really nice little table. . . . And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they’re just scraps of paper, and I’m going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don’t know yet. I’m just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn’t know.20
In a process that appears to parallel William Burroughs’s cut-up method, Yorke’s practice of “collating information” is a way of giving form and meaning to otherwise inarticulate and what can seem to be completely futile and hopeless thoughts. “You see things you didn’t know,” even if the arrangements of the various fragments have yet to yield a sufficiently lyrical sensibility.
Yorke won’t even call it writing for sure just yet, and even upon the release of Radiohead’s albums, he’s been known to insist that “the lyrics are gibberish,”21 as if their contribution content-wise to the music can only ever be minimal. With this in mind, the appearance of The Eraser, inserted between Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows by way of borrowing Nigel Godrich and a bit of surreptitiously recorded Johnny Greenwood piano chords (on the title track) only owned up to a year or so after the fact, is an especially bold move in the only paradoxically self-assured and counterintuitively confident, creative output of Thom Yorke. If the music of Radiohead is an emergency broadcast system, The Eraser is Yorke’s own personal, unconventionally articulate signal flare.
In the every-living-moment activity of collating information, one can easily imagine how Yorke’s thoughts could linger over one tragic story of science and war-making and a maddeningly inconclusive paper trail. These thoughts come together in “Harrowdown Hill,” Yorke’s response to the death, in July of 2003, of the scientist David Kelly, an employee of the UK Ministry of Defense and a UN weapons inspector in Iraq once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Named after the wooded