Alex Ross - Listen to This

How these five quirky Englishmen became the Knights Templar of rock and roll—the most closely analyzed, fervently admired, hotly debated, and slavishly imitated band of the modern era—is anyone’s guess. They are not too sure themselves. “Everyone comes to us with their heads bowed, expecting to be inducted into the mystery of Radiohead,” Selway said. He made a King Tut gesture with his arms. “We were hoist on our own petard with that. At a certain point, around 1997, we were simply overwhelmed and had to vanish for a bit. This was our honest reaction to the situation we were in. But some people thought we were playing a game, or had started taking ourselves too seriously. Really, we don’t want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism.”

What happened to Radiohead in 1997 was that they caught a wave of generational anxiety. The album OK Computer, with titles like “Paranoid Android,” “Karma Police,” and “Climbing Up the Walls,” pictured the onslaught of the information age and a young person’s panicky embrace of it. Yorke’s lyrics seemed a mixture of overheard conversations, techno-speak, and fragments of a harsh diary. The songs offered images of riot police at political rallies, anguished lives in tidy suburbs, yuppies freaking out, sympathetic aliens gliding overhead. In “Let Down,” Yorke even dared to describe the feeling of disappointment that follows a blast of hype, such as the one his band was producing. The album sold more than four million copies worldwide, enabling the group to become, by 1999, an independent operation. Radiohead were the poster boys for a certain kind of knowing alienation—as Talking Heads and R.E.M. had been before.

Radiohead remain a magnet for misfits everywhere, but their outsider status is only a part of their appeal. What fans seem to like, even more than the content of the songs, is the sense that the band members have labored over every aspect of the product. They are skilled, first of all, at inventing the kinds of riddles that people enjoy unraveling. The records, the videos, the official website, even the T-shirts all cry out for interpretation. Why are words spelled funny? What are all these charts and diagrams? What about the grinning bears and crying Minotaurs? “We liked worrying over that kind of thing when we were kids, and we’re still in the same mind-set a lot of the time,” Selway said. “But it’s a bit incidental. We’re dead set on the music. That’s the thread running through this whole thing. We met at school playing music together, and we still get together over music now. We like solving musical puzzles. That’s what Thom gives us.”

A Radiohead song is usually written in three stages. First, Yorke comes up with a rough sketch; then, Jonny, who studied composition briefly at Oxford Brookes University, fleshes out the harmony; finally, the others digest it for a while, working out their parts on their own. It can be months, even years, before a song comes together in a way that satisfies all of them. Take away any one element—Selway’s flickering rhythmic grid, for example, crisp in execution and trippy in effect—and Radiohead is a different band. The five together form a single mind, with its own habits and tics—the Radiohead Composer. This personality can be glimpsed in the daily bustle of the group, but you can never meet it face-to-face, because it lives in the music. A lot of what has been written about Radiohead—there are a dozen books, hundreds of magazine articles, and millions of words on the Internet—circles around an absent center.

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