|
Tour Dates
11/12 Entertainment Centre - Sydney
11/13 Entertainment Centre - Sydney 11/16 Rod Laver Arena - Melbourne 11/17 Rod Laver Arena - Melbourne * all Australian dates are sold out Read More This one's optimistic: Radiohead is going on tour in 2012! It's been a while since their last tour, which was about four years ago for the In Rainbows tour.....
|
I'm no Radiohead fan. I've never really understood all the commotion. Many amazing moments - many - and on paper they really should be my type of band but alas I've never really warmed to them. Maybe their fans? Maybe the Oxfordshire public schools they went too? Maybe it's Thom Yorke never really looking happy? This post is not about that though. This post is about My First Playlist record - Kid A.
'Those' albums that I love, well most of the time I never even existed or was still playing in a sand pit to care but for Kid A I was there. Listening to it over the weekend I have made the informed opinion that there will never be another record like it. You could never have imagined an English rock band turning their back on stadiums and making a 540 degree turn + add to that, if they do all this in a parallel universe. The Radiohead I knew still existed in name, but the Radiohead of old or Parallel Universe A was plutons, atoms and string theories away from it in Parallel Universe B. For massive bands to go feral and go all weird and add 'textures', well it wasn't so normal in the first year of this new century. Normal now - not normal then.
In 2000, I was well into my bands that included **cough Pulp, Suede, Oasis, Blur, Manics, Chemical Brothers, ummmm the first Coldplay album and anything worth getting into because of reading 4 month behind copies of the Melody Maker. What I was listening too was so removed from what my school friends were listening too that I may have lived in that parallel universe.
For me Kid A is about dial-up internet and trying desperately on that hour a day my parents would let me 'surf' the net to (try and) download bootlegged versions of "Optimistic" and "The National Anthem." It was mind blowing that I was this 15 year old kid in coastal Australia who could then hop on the net and with the cyberpower of Kazaa and Napster, type in what Triple J were telling me the names were (they hadn't been released) and then hope to god those people didn't go offline which meant the song would cease to download and I'd have to wait till tomorrow. Picture this - songs that were only played the night before in a huge tent in Paris - well f**k me - that's when everything changed. Everything.
I can't remember if I bought Kid A before going to the US on a Mum-funded holiday or if I got it the day I got back. I seem to remember the latter, having only recently returned and going to Target after school to get the album on its initial release. Talking to a friend of mine about it many years ago, not all copies came with the little comic tucked under the plastic bit where the actual CD sits. The physical weight of the CD always felt much heavier (discuss?) to my other CDs which was how it was discovered.
Kid A to me is something else entirely. It's not just Radiohead's 4th album. It foresaw what bands could and would sound like in the future (better for it) - how peoples listening habits and what we call playlists could encompass. Jumping from ambient ("Kid A") to Scott Walker ("How to Disappear Completely") to IDM ("Idioteque") back to guitars 'n' drums 'n' s**t ("Optimistic") and anything in between.
At the time, my life basically revolved around being a school kid and listening to Triple J and watching Channel V. It was definitely spoken about a lot on Channel V and Triple J all doing specials and an issue of Q Mag I had for many years had a huge interview with them. In it Thom Yorke talked about using Photoshop techniques that are now things I use every day in my dayjob. As a Y2K album - for me it represents not just the tunes - it's a 'time and a place album' but in a removed kind of way. I never listened to it with friends or anything so it doesn't represent a social memory, but I guess it is - the way bootleggers would upload live tracks that were barely 24 hours old - that's a kind of shared experience but with no emotional attachment which I guess is also one of the carry over themes from OKC - all this technology.
12 years on we're all totally drone like with Facebook and people glued to their iPhones. It really has turned out to be a Kid A life for us all.
'Those' albums that I love, well most of the time I never even existed or was still playing in a sand pit to care but for Kid A I was there. Listening to it over the weekend I have made the informed opinion that there will never be another record like it. You could never have imagined an English rock band turning their back on stadiums and making a 540 degree turn + add to that, if they do all this in a parallel universe. The Radiohead I knew still existed in name, but the Radiohead of old or Parallel Universe A was plutons, atoms and string theories away from it in Parallel Universe B. For massive bands to go feral and go all weird and add 'textures', well it wasn't so normal in the first year of this new century. Normal now - not normal then.
In 2000, I was well into my bands that included **cough Pulp, Suede, Oasis, Blur, Manics, Chemical Brothers, ummmm the first Coldplay album and anything worth getting into because of reading 4 month behind copies of the Melody Maker. What I was listening too was so removed from what my school friends were listening too that I may have lived in that parallel universe.
For me Kid A is about dial-up internet and trying desperately on that hour a day my parents would let me 'surf' the net to (try and) download bootlegged versions of "Optimistic" and "The National Anthem." It was mind blowing that I was this 15 year old kid in coastal Australia who could then hop on the net and with the cyberpower of Kazaa and Napster, type in what Triple J were telling me the names were (they hadn't been released) and then hope to god those people didn't go offline which meant the song would cease to download and I'd have to wait till tomorrow. Picture this - songs that were only played the night before in a huge tent in Paris - well f**k me - that's when everything changed. Everything.
I can't remember if I bought Kid A before going to the US on a Mum-funded holiday or if I got it the day I got back. I seem to remember the latter, having only recently returned and going to Target after school to get the album on its initial release. Talking to a friend of mine about it many years ago, not all copies came with the little comic tucked under the plastic bit where the actual CD sits. The physical weight of the CD always felt much heavier (discuss?) to my other CDs which was how it was discovered.
Kid A to me is something else entirely. It's not just Radiohead's 4th album. It foresaw what bands could and would sound like in the future (better for it) - how peoples listening habits and what we call playlists could encompass. Jumping from ambient ("Kid A") to Scott Walker ("How to Disappear Completely") to IDM ("Idioteque") back to guitars 'n' drums 'n' s**t ("Optimistic") and anything in between.
At the time, my life basically revolved around being a school kid and listening to Triple J and watching Channel V. It was definitely spoken about a lot on Channel V and Triple J all doing specials and an issue of Q Mag I had for many years had a huge interview with them. In it Thom Yorke talked about using Photoshop techniques that are now things I use every day in my dayjob. As a Y2K album - for me it represents not just the tunes - it's a 'time and a place album' but in a removed kind of way. I never listened to it with friends or anything so it doesn't represent a social memory, but I guess it is - the way bootleggers would upload live tracks that were barely 24 hours old - that's a kind of shared experience but with no emotional attachment which I guess is also one of the carry over themes from OKC - all this technology.
12 years on we're all totally drone like with Facebook and people glued to their iPhones. It really has turned out to be a Kid A life for us all.
Comments