Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to use decades as dividers for cultural commentary? As good as the decimal system is, it is surely naïve to believe there is a significant change from one decade to the next based only on the fact ten years have neatly come to an end. What could possibly have changed so much between 31/12/1999 and 01/01/2000? This is brought into sharp focus by this decade, which is the story of the end of one era and the start of another, the turning point of which was not in line with these neat groupings (70s, 80s, 90s etc) but instead occurred on a single day in the Autumn of 2001: perhaps the biggest signifier of the end of an era since the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89.
When I think of this pre-09/11 world (read post-1989 as well), my mind focuses on things that will likely never occur again; foremost is a certain sense of naïve optimism. Optimism about the world and culture. An excitement of variety and possibility, which may just have been a by-product of my youth, or might have been a genuine reflection of a different time; I really can’t tell. In musical/popular culture terms Radiohead’s Kid A is certainly from this old world order, thus I find it inseparable from these emotions. From my current viewpoint in this post 09/11 era, Kid A is one of the final landmarks of that time – and it is a landmark – and a perfect exemplar of that indefinable feeling that will never quite be recaptured, the high water mark of a lost culture. Read the rest of this entry »
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’. Read the rest of this entry »
After making the BBC Radio 4 news bulletin it’s hard to ignore this Radiohead tribute to Harry Patch, the last WW1 vet, who died last week. Inspired by an interview Harry Patch gave on the Today programme, its probably best I let Thom Yorke’s words fill in the gaps;
“Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111. I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4. The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me. It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death. It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny. I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor.
It would be very easy for our generation to forget the true horror of war, without the likes of Harry to remind us.
I hope we do not forget.
As Harry himself said
‘Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims’.”
The song is available for download for £1 with all the proceeds going to the Royal British Legion.
