...and this just feels like...spinning plates...

For as long as he lives poor old Liam Gallagher will never understand Radiohead. Come to think of it I'm not sure I understand them too. I gather though that their new album The King of Limbs, isn't just about an old tree. But then again...

I didn't understand Thom and Co. when Creep came out. It was just another post-grunge, jangly guitar record by someone pretending to be angst-ridden, wasn't it? I was more into Euro dance music at that time, the first Abba revival and any number of electronic duos. When some punchable idiot coined the term 'Britpop' to christen the generic indie scene, Radiohead's The Bends seemed at odds with Oasis and Blur. For all intense purposes it was outside of it, outside of my radar as well. It wasn't untill late 1997 that I realised how beautiful Street Spirit (fade out) was, how many goosebumps Planet Telex gave me, and how devastating Fake Plastic Trees was. These discoveries came to me AFTER the majesty of Paranoid Android, the unsettling but complete OK Computer. I was hooked. Could never really get into their early stuff but that didn't matter, we were moving on together, perhaps. In 1998 I bought the EP Airbag/How Am I Driving? from Music Zone in Wigan. I loved it. Not only did I enjoy the tracks but the little short vignettes of short fiction contained in the booklet, New Job and Chip Shop. Yep. More b-sides were added to my collection, Talk Show Host, Bishop's Robes.

It was also refreshing to read interviews in Q with a rock band who didn't talk shit about how great they were, how much they drunk or how wasted they were. In fact they didn't seem to talk shit at all. You were more likely to listen to Thom discuss root canal surgery or filling in his UCAS form as opposed to him boasting about how much he vomited into Selway's lap.

I gather some people didn't like Kid A much but the disjointed, cut up vocals, electronic experiments that defined the majority of this and subsequent albums were a breath of fresh air for me. Here was a band who owed as much debt to Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada as they did 70s punk rock, and unlike many of their contemporaries, they weren't afraid to take this forward. Are they pretentious, vanity artists? I don't know. Who the fuck am I or any of us to say? It's certainly more interesting than Beady fucking Eye. And I don't care what anyone says In Rainbows' 15 Step is fucking storming.