Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [54]
. . . it’s tempting to have someone say to you, “You will never have to worry about money ever again,” but no matter how much money someone gives you—what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.
He misdirects. He gets angry about it during interviews—even in Radiohead-produced parodies. But he can’t laugh about it.
In late 2004 the band released The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time (or as fans refer to it, TMGLMOAT), an eclectic DVD, originally planned as part of a Radiohead TV channel that never materialized. It is almost two hours long and contains music videos directed by the likes of Sophie Muller, video shorts contributed by fans (such as an instructional video on how to create a chickenbomb), and odd interludes. During a comic interview titled “My showbiz life: THOM YORKE OUT OF RADIOHEAD,” Yorke is asked all the uncomfortable questions he’s asked regularly. Before the questions begin, Yorke clarifies for the off-screen interviewer that, “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”
The questions delve into Yorke’s celebrity status and his relationship to money. Yorke admits he accepted “a Russian egg” from “some big fish at Microsoft” and confesses to using his celebrity to get free petrol. But when asked: “What’s the most money you’ve blown in a single day?” he lets go an embarrassed baritone “ew” followed by a quick edit to an “uh.” Yorke then stares for a long four-seconds into the camera with a pasted-on, uncomfortable grin and answers: “Six fluffy wee rabbits.” Watching Yorke become uncomfortable is discomforting. Ew, uh, and paused fake grin add up to: next question, please. The mock-interviewer says as much, and moves on.
TMGLMOAT was released not long after 2003’s Hail to the Thief, the band’s last album under contract with EMI. After touring to promote the album for nearly ten months, Radiohead took a year off. When the hiatus ended in 2005, the band started Dead Air Space, a blog (http://radiohead.com/deadairspace/), but, at first, there was no news about a renewed or new record contract. Fans and the press itched for an update. In August 2005, Yorke broke the silence with a sarcastic post and his trademark misspellings:
we have no record conntract.
as such.
any offers?..what we would like is th e old EMI back again, the nice genteel arms manufacturers who treated music a nice side project who werent to bothered about the shareholders. ah well not much chance of that.
The same day the short post appeared, it was deleted, only to survive as a quotation scattered around the internet in various other blogs.
Yorke sings on The Eraser, his 2006 solo album, that “The more you try to erase me / The more that I appear,” lines that ring true in this case: deleting the blog post caused it to loom that much larger, especially looking back after the “pay what you want, no really” release of In Rainbows. It’s clichéd by now to say Radiohead’s digital distribution of the album took the music business, music critics, other musicians, fans, and the press—the world—by surprise and even angered some (Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers declared that it “demeans music”). Yet people who’ve closely followed Radiohead’s career expected a tectonic shift. They didn’t know how or when, but the why was scrawled across nearly every page of Radiohead’s biography.
We Want Sweet Meats
Yorke’s unease about money and music started after signing Radiohead’s first record contract on December 21st, 1991. Pablo Honey’s success stressed Yorke and the band more than it elated them. Plus, their first album’s tour took a toll. Night-after-night performances at times caused Yorke to lose his voice. At one point during the tour while getting off a bus in San Francisco, Yorke fell to the ground, exhausted and collapsing from back pain. At corporate congratulatory