Bands today are always looking for unusual places to record.
When it was time for Radio head to begin work on their keenly anticipated new album, the British quintet convened at actress Jane Seymour's country house.
Seymour's home, St. Catherine's Court, located in a secluded valley outside of Bath in the southwest of England, was where the bulk of Radiohead's adventurous new disc, "OK Computer," was recorded. Other tracks were cut at the band's farmhouse, complete with herds of Jersey cattle grazing outside.
"We were looking to record somewhere," Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said. "There's nothing more depressing than arriving at a studio and walking past walls of gold discs and feeling like you’re just part of the mill. Actually, the (Seymour) house is usually rented out for corporate gatherings and conventions. We walked around with name tags on and did some recording.”
Radiohead, whose 1993 single “Creep” became an MTV and radio staple, sold out a Troubadour show last weekend in 10 minutes, but returns to Los Angeles on July 26 with Teenage Fanclub at the Wiltern Theatre.
The sprawling and ambitious “OK Computer” (Capitol), Radiohead’s third effort, will be released July 1. The label developed an unusual campaign to get the disc to reviewers by sending out a limited number of glued-shut cassette players with the album trapped inside.
“They’ve come up with another great record,” said Lisa Worden, music director at KROQ-FM (106-7). “It’s absolutely brilliant. I don’t know yet if I hear any total radio smashes. But we love them here at the station.”
Radiohead – which also includes Thom Yorke (vocals), Ed O’Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass) and Phil Selway (drums) – had to overcome a flash-in-the-pan stigma during the “Creep” era. The single, embraced by the alternative-rock radio as a slacker anthem, blessed the band with instant success, but the Oxford-based quintet failed to follow up with something similar and radio lost interest.
Next came “The Bends,” Radiohead’s 1995 sophomore effort, a work of fragile beauty often cited as one of the finest alternative-rock albums.
It was during the tour for that album that Greenwood and Yorke struck up a friendship with R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who once declared on stage that Radiohead “are so good, they scare me.”
Yorke and O’Brien recently collaborated with Stipe in London on the soundtrack for the film “Velvet Goldmine”, a David Bowie-inspired glam-rock love story set in the ‘70s that Stipe is producing.
Greenwood said the band is looking forwards to its US tour, which kicks off next month.
“It’s worthwhile at the end of the day to do concerts and play to an audience,” he said. “There are lots of double standards with British bands when they talk about America because they like to talk badly about America yet they want to conquer America. We’ve in awe of America.”
The first single from “OK Computer” is “Paranoid Android,” a six-minute epic in three parts. Another track on the record features a strange computerized voice droning disembodied poetics.
“We tried lots of different avenues and then went back to the original versions and original takes of the songs,” Greenwood explained. “It was a roundabout route back to what we had originally done. We thought we should at least try other versions, but we always ended up going back. As for the spoken track, we wanted to put across these words somehow and we couldn’t do it with someone speaking. It would have sounded pretentious. We got excited about the way the computer mispronounced and misemphasized things. It seemed beautiful to us.”
Radiohead appeared at the Tibetan Freedom Concert earlier this month in New York with U2, Patti Smith, Foo Fighters and others. Greenwood said there was an unusual sign backstage: “Please leave your egos in the dressing room.”
The suggestion was apparently taken seriously by the performers.
“Everyone did full sets and seemed really down to earth about the whole event,” the guitarist said. “You don’t see that sort of thing often in rock ‘n’ roll.”