The Scrapbook OKComputer, considered by many to be Radiohead’s masterpiece, is celebrating its quarter century this week. Launched on June 16, 1997 in the United Kingdom and the next day in Canada, the opus came as a bomb to the world of British pop, also marking the break in the group’s first two albums.
Wow, it looks far away … 1997 belongs to another era. We are just young people with solid energy and focus. There are no parties, just the desire to improveEd O’Brien, one of the band’s guitarists, recalled in an Instagram post last month.
We absorb so much music out of our alternative thing with guitars… Bitches Brew [de Miles Davis], What is happening [de Marvin Gaye], Pet Sounds [des Beach Boys], scott walker
OKComputer was recorded in St. Catherine’s Court, a 16th-century mansion in the city of Bath, southwest England, owned by actress Jane Seymour. Most of the songs on the album were recorded live, rather than instrument by instrument as is often the case in the studio.
I don’t want to make a split recording (overdubs), because it is not naturalsaid Ed O’Brien in a magazine interview Guitarist in October 1997. Something strange happens when you play live. Some of Thom Yorke’s vocal segments on the album were also first picked up.
An album earlier
In addition to moving away from its predecessors, Pablo Honey (1993) at The Bends (1995), musical, OKComputer also marked a change in the themes addressed in the lyrics. It may not be obvious to listen to – Radiohead remains a heavily melancholy band – but then vocalist Thom Yorke said he wanted to stay away from songs with sad talk like scary.
We could do another moribund, sad, morbid and negative album, lyrically, but I really don’t want to do that.he explained to Andy Richardson of the magazine NME in 1995, before recording OKComputer. I try to write down all the positive things I see or hear.
If it doesn’t have a concept album in its own right, some songs fromOKComputer deal with technology and the sense of isolation it can cause; an avant-garde theme at a time relatively before the World Wide Web.
I feel like I’m living in a time of information overload, which is ironic, because it’s worse now.said Thom Yorke in an interview with the magazine NME in 2017.
The paranoia I felt then was more about how people interact, but I used technology terminology to express it. Everything I’ve written is really a way to reconnect with other people, while you’re still in transit.
Until now, OKComputer is considered one of the most important albums of the 1990s. It is the 42nd of the 500 greatest albums of all time according to the magazine Rolling stone and occupies 2nd place in the 200 best albums released between 1996 and 2021 in a ranking established by the magazine’s readers pitchfork.
Radio Canada
Radio Canada
Source: Radio-Canada
