Sydney, AU. (Top40 Charts/ EMI MUSIC Australia) - They've had more emotional highs and lows than your average daily soap, battled prolonged periods of writer's block, commercial ups and downs, and mass-audience expectations, and have through it all emerged victorious. Few, if any, bands can claim to have followed their artistic muse with such ferocious - and potentially fatal - honesty as Radiohead.
But 15 years on from their sudden and ultimately undesirable MTV success, the creative five-piece from Oxford, England remain one of the biggest and most intriguing bands on the planet (and certainly the most inventive from the 1990s so-called Brit Pop movement).
To mark the end of tenure with their longtime label EMI, the breath and depth of the band's body of work is at last being celebrated in its entirety. And what's perhaps most surprising about the clearly labelled 'Best of Radiohead' is how seamlessly the band's back catalogue sits together on the double-disc set.
Listening back to a life less ordinary in music for frontman Thom Yorke, fellow guitarists Ed O'Brien and Johnny Greenwood, bassist Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway is a joyously rich and diverse experience. From the anthemic Creep (from their debut Pablo Honey) through the anti-radioplay genius of The Bends and unexpected mammoth success of OK Computer, to latter-day electro doodlefests Kid A and Amnesia, up to the so-called return-to-rock of Hail to the Thief, the former school mates have confounded their fans and critics alike, reinventing their own musical wheel with ever-more unpredictability.
Those who've followed the band closely, though, continue to be delighted and astonished at their roll-the-dice approach to making music. As tortured frontman Thom Yorke admitted on a recent UK radio series on the band, "Sabotage you think is very important in the way that we operate because I think we're unhealthy paranoid about complacency, to the point where it's just silly. I think that part of the creative thing for us really is that if something has worked in the past, we can 100% guarantee, without fear of contradiction ever that it'll never work again. So we don't go there. And if you do go there it's purely by accident."
Their first about-turn came immediately after the US went Radiohead mad, with the gargantuan MTV-fuelled success of Creep, programmed on the new collection exactly where they played it on that initial juggernaut tour of North America, four songs on in. The song quickly became such a noose around the band's neck, in fact, that they happily 'got it out of the way' early on in their shows to make way for everything else.
Ed O'Brien recalled how a large portion of the audience on that first big US tour was seemingly only there to hear the 'big hit'. "We played Creep fourth in the set [and] 25% of the people walked out."
Johnny Greenwood, meanwhile, recalled how the band "stopped them and asked, 'Why are you leaving?' And they said, 'Well, we do this with all the gigs we see. We saw Nirvana last week and we just go after Smells Like Teen Spirit. Cos that's the one that was on MTV, and that's the one we know. We don't go to gigs normally."
How on earth does a young band overcome such a suffocation, having unwittingly become a victim of their own success? In Radiohead's case, simple: go back to basics, make a totally different kind of record - the antithesis of what had gone before - and hit the club circuit.
Ed O'Brien recalled the band's 'let start again' approach with the band's critically acclaimed sophomore release The Bends. "When we went back to America... a lot of these people, unless we're gonna play Creep 10 times in the set, aren't gonna come and see us... so we started right back at the clubs and did exactly what we did in the UK and Europe in like '92, and just toured smaller places. And we did like five tours of America and gradually, the following got bigger and bigger."
The music, too, took on a whole new quality, eschewing any thought of commercial concern for a maturer mood and feeling and above all, a purer instinctive for writing and performing. The Bends, amply covered on the new 'best of' with the likes of Planet Telex, High and Dry, Just and My Iron Lung, proved to be the template from which the band would develop and experiment to the present day.
Thom Yorke summed it up by saying The Bends was "essentially a lot of very neat songs that were entities in their own right and luckily went together."
If the critical success of The Bends was welcomed by the band (with the lack of immediate commercial success leaving them undaunted and more determined than ever), 1997's OK Computer proved to be even more of a surprise, kicking off with a-then unheard-of six-minute single Paranoid Android, an ode to 'how utterly powerless people are' as Yorke put it. The harsh, almost schizophrenic energy of the song - along with a typically offbeat animated video - propelled the song unfathomably to the top of the UK singles chart. Radiohead has once again followed their instincts to the letter and were rewarded for it.
Mammoth sales far exceeding expectation saw the band back out on the road with an ultimately exhausting world tour, the highlight of which was a now legendary headlining performance at England's Glastonbury Festival. Although technically everything that could go wrong did, the mud-sodden crowd - this journalist being one of them - experienced what is remembered as probably the band's finest performance.
Once again, despite their lack of commercial concern and staunch focus on their work, the band found themselves giants on the world stage, a position that frontman Thom Yorke loathed with ever-vocal admissions. The answer, once more, was to go back to basics, to put out a record that would confound the world all over again. The result: intense, sombre, electro-doodlefest sessions that would ultimately produce Kid A and its quick followup and companion release, Amnesia.
Playing for hours and painstakingly logging their results (even swapping instruments this time), the two albums offered no obvious singles and tested the patience of those who yearned for the quick-fire melodies of their previous releases. But once again, the band proved their instincts were right. The first track from these session, the aptly titled Everything in its Right Place, says it all, with its so-called 'bedroom style' approach.
Beyond the emotional rollercoaster of success, expectation and creative satisfaction, though, there lies a political awareness that remains an integral part of the band (Kid A and 2002's Hail to the Thief, for instance, are barbed, direct comments on war and the misuse of power), an anti-rock star approach to life on the road, and an intense, bordering on obsessive, dedication to their craft.
Ed O'Brien admitted that Radiohead remains a band that is 'emotionally honest' and that former producer John Leckie's mantra of an album being 'literally an aural snap-shop of a band at a given time' remains at the core of their work ethic. They've survived near breakups, near nervous breakdowns, near commercial meltdowns and as a result still pave the way for pioneering bands the world over.
Johnny Greenwood summed up the Oxford band's longevity so amply displayed on this new collection by pointing out that 'because we started so young, I guess this is what defined us when were 14, 15, so you stick with it really. It's been our saving really.
'We're lucky,' he added, 'we've still got the mood that not only does everyone really want to be in this band, but also all of us are still very interested, obsessed even, in the music we're recording, and what we're gonna do next.'
Before the next chapter of the Radiohead story unfolds, the band's unmatched legacy reminds us all how far they've travelled and gambled, leaving the mind to boggle at what they can do now to top it all. Which they surely will. For now, there's over a decade's worth of stunning music to soak up all over again.
