For all their obvious limitations, Radiohead were one of the very few big-league guitar (!) bands this decade to combine creative envelope-pushing with a sustained political engagement. As such it’s hardly surprising that probably the most eloquent poetic-musical response to the Iraq nightmare and its wider symbolic implications came from the ‘Head camp, in the form of Thom Yorke’s staggeringly resonant ‘Harrowdown Hill’, the lead track on his solo debut The Eraser. At the decade’s absolute Stygian nadir, we were frankly pretty damn lucky to have a mainstream lyricist of Yorke’s calibre with the guts and intelligence to summarise a horrific (and horrifically confusing) set of international political events.
In time-honoured British romantic-radical tradition (Shelley, Blake, Morris), Yorke uses landscape as a starting point, specifically Harrowdown hill in Oxfordshire - ‘near where [Yorke] went to school’. On this spot in 2003, government weapons expert David Kelly committed suicide, caught up in an unsavoury scandal involving propaganda, spin, hyperbole, war, lies, weapons of mass destruction, the death of thousands; basically all the most appalling aspects of the last ten years (I shudder writing this to think how gothically awful things actually got. Despite the many reasons to be fearful heading into the 2010s, at least we know there’ll be no Guantanamos on Obama’s watch).
Yorke marries the wider apocalyptic theme with a bathos and attention to detail which bears out this juxtaposition of local minutiae with global politics. A scratchy and uncharacteristically funky (sexy?!) bass riff opens proceedings, but it soon gives way to the sort of grand narrative choral-orchestral soundscape that has become Yorke’s locus classicus. It’s this marriage of large and small that is the track’s greatest strength. The jittery home-programmed drum track and nagging rhythmic insistency sits perfectly beside the widescreen melodic sweep of the chorus. And, as an on In Rainbows highlight ‘Reckoner’, the harmony is quite ingeniously simple, based on a two-chord pedal that changes with a slaying subtlety as the verse slides into the chorus hook. Kraftwerk had such high-pop tricks down to a tee, and this seems to be one of many lessons Yorke has picked up from those automobilephilic German lads, though nowhere so obviously and brilliantly as on ‘Harrowdown Hill’.
The track’s crystalline magic moment is of course the refrain: we think the same things at the same time / we just can’t do anything about it. No one who has lived through the traumas of the last ten years can fail to be moved by this couplet. It packs a rhythmic punch (often not the case with Yorke’s vocal lines) and the melody is killer, but it’s the content rather than the form that does all the work here. Is this the saddest, loneliest lyric in pop history? Perhaps. What makes it finally life-affirming is the fact that Yorke’s powerful, multi-layered musical-lyrical avowal of that we goes a long way towards rebutting the pervasive selfishness and atomism that will finish the lot of us, if we’re not a hell of a lot more careful.
AN
