I think people are perfectly capable of making their own decisions and God help them if they listen to me. If you could pick one song that you'd like to be remembered by, what would it be? How To Disappear, After Your Day. What you just watched is an excerpt from an interview conducted by the BBC's Culture Show with Radiohead's Tom York.
It's a great interview from October 2006, a time when Radiohead were comfortably one of the biggest bands in the world. That line seems so significant to me though, to be that confident in your answer when you already have a back catalogue of six albums. What makes How To Disappear off of Kid A so special? It's important to look at the context of the interview.
By the time Tom York was on the culture show, Radiohead had already been a household name for the better part of a decade and it's easy to assume that reaching this top of the musical ladder just perfects your life. After all, that's the goal, right? You have fame, fortune and a back catalogue of songs you can just play for the rest of your lives.
But for Radiohead, and Tom York especially, fame wasn't all it was cracked up to be. In the spring of 1997, Radiohead were close to releasing their third studio album, OK Computer. While writing, they had made a conscious decision to write something wholly different to their previous LP, The Bends. They had received acclaim for this album and were already a big name in the UK.
They knew that they could write something similar and be elevated to the realms of superstardom, but they didn't want superstardom. They just wanted to play the music that they wanted to play. Guitarist Ed O'Brien said in an interview with Q Magazine in 2003, everyone said you'll sell 6 or 7 million copies if you bring out The Bends Part 2, and we're like, we'll kick against that and do the opposite.
We all know what happened next though. When OK Computer did release on June 16th 1997, it was met with almost universal acclaim. Radiohead were, almost overnight, dragged up to the top of the world. OK Computer was a seminal album and everyone wanted to hear it. A month before the album's release, the band played a gig in Lisbon where they barely sold 400 tickets.
Five days after the release, they were playing for 38,000 people at the Royal Showgrounds in Dublin and a week after that they were headlining Glastonbury. You may be wondering where this all ties into How to Disappear Completely. The fact is, these two massive gigs defined Tom York's mental state for the next year.
The Dublin gig was the biggest Radiohead had ever been asked to perform, and York was terrified. The night before the gig he was plagued with nightmares about floating down the Liffey, a river that flows through Dublin. I was running down the Liffey, he once said, being pursued by a huge tidal wave.
And a week later, the band had a nightmare set at Glastonbury. York had already worked himself to breaking point recording OK Computer, and the thought of doing what may be the biggest kick of his career mere weeks after releasing the album was something he didn't think he could manage. And then came the set itself.
Despite being popularly regarded as one of the most legendary of all Glastonbury headline sets, for the band it was a disaster. For almost the entire show they had no monitor speakers, they couldn't hear anything they were playing and they could barely even see the crowd. At one point York turned to O'Brien and said he was walking off.
O'Brien convinced him to stay and the band finished their set, a huge moment in their lasting legacy as one of the UK's greatest ever bands. Despite Glastonbury being a defining night of Tom York's career, something had snapped in him while on stage. The gigs, touring, music, he didn't want to do any of it anymore.
But what could he do? The band still had to complete another entire year of touring, whether he liked it or not. So he looked for coping mechanisms, and reached out to a good friend of his, Michael Stipe of REM.
When asked how to deal with the constant pressure of endless gigs, Stipe had one thing to say. Pull the shutters down. and keep saying, I'm not here, this isn't happening.
So that's what he did. York shut himself off and staggered through the rest of the OK Computer tour. When the band finally did have some time off in the summer of 1998, he was left in an awful mental state. But stardom waits for no one.
When you're the biggest band in the world, you finish touring an album and then you write another one. It was too much for him. Depression and writer's block took hold.
And the future of Radiohead itself was uncertain. Writing sessions in Paris and Copenhagen the following year came to nothing. And when ideas were thought up, they were chopped and changed to the point of obsession. The band only found inspiration when they came to a stark conclusion.
Melody is dead, rhythm is king. Enter Kid A. Released at the turn of the century, it took Radiohead in a direction nobody expected. Gone were the pulsating anthems of The Bends and OK Computer, gone were the majority of guitars, gone were the majority of all analogue instruments.
In their place, synthesizers, drums, and guitars. drum machines and for Johnny Greenwood, one of the oldest digital instruments, the Ond Martino. Greenwood was primarily the lead guitarist of Radiohead before Kid 8, so for an album that has no real lead guitar lines, he needed to focus his efforts elsewhere.
only member of the band to have any training in musical theory, Johnny jumped at the chance to show his ability to write orchestral lines, both for analogue and digital instruments. Producer Nigel Godrich once said,"...the first time Johnny showed his string arrangements to the other members of the band, they all just sort of burst into giggles because they couldn't do what he'd written. It was impossible or impossible for them anyway."These arrangements are sparse on Kid A. It as a record does not really call out from any lush string or woodwind sections. But what One Song Did Track 4 How to Disappear Completely How to Disappear Completely is the first and only song on Kid A to feature an acoustic guitar.
It's the only song on Kid A to be anywhere near conventional. There are no drum machines, no crazy synth melodies, just Radiohead, their instruments, orchestra and Tom York singing his heart out. The first thing you notice when listening to How To Disappear Completely is that string line and how uncomfortable it sounds.
The song is written in D major but these quiet strings play a low a low D, a low A and a high A sharp, a note which is not in the key signature. As the song develops, more and more strings enter and swirl around your ears, never leaving you time to really understand what they're playing. Greenwood's On Martino is tracked alongside real acoustic strings and it really shows.
The melody never stays in one place, often slowly rising or falling, moving in and out of key on a whim. That's not me These strings are what make How To Disappear so interesting, musically. While they were recording, members of the band knew that they'd captured lightning in a bottle with the orchestral arrangements.
In the diary that Ed O'Brien kept during the writing and production of Kid A, he wrote, Johnny came up with an outrageous Martino part. It's just a matter of getting on his planet. The real emotional weight of the song is Tom York's lyrics and his incredible vocals.
How to Disappear is Tom's attempt to exorcise the demons that possessed him during the OK Computer Tour. He directly references the nightmares he had in Dublin. And the chorus is word for word the line Michael Stipe told him to repeat.
Going on to reference the Glastonbury technical disaster, the music seems intertwined with York's lyrics. It's as if the song directly reflects the feelings that you had during those fateful two weeks in 1997. The strings build constantly, evolving and changing, like they're trying to drag the vocals under, until there's a moment where everything is completely engulfed. The tidal wave chasing York has reached him, and everything else is pulled underneath, leaving only this wall of dissonance.
He's lost, completely dissociated from his surroundings. All he can do is cry and wail until... It's over.
Suddenly everything is in its right place. Everything is in key and there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The strings reach one final heartbreaking climax and then How to Disappear Completely ends.
We're left dumbstruck, exhausted, the way Tom York was left exhausted in the summer of 1998. The story of How To Disappear Completely is, at its heart, one that warns of the dangers of superstardom. It's a cautionary tale of what can happen if you push a musician to their breaking point and then ask them to keep pushing. For me, of us, headlining Glastonbury Festival is a dream, and it's a dream that so few of us will ever actually achieve. But for Tom York, it became a nightmare.
How to disappear completely is a testament to that, but it's also the crowning jewel of an absolute absolute masterpiece of an album. It's Radiohead at their core, five musicians who just want to make music. The story of How To Disappear is without a doubt a deeply upsetting one, but at least it has a happy ending.
Radiohead were able to exorcise their demons, they were able to finally push away from the hype and the pressure that everyone had piled on top of them, and perhaps most importantly, they were able to create this song. this gorgeous, wonderful, beautiful song. I hope that when it comes down to it, it was worth it.
If you could pick one song that you'd like to be remembered by, what would it be? How To Disappear, After Your Day. Why? Because it's the most beautiful thing we ever did, I think.
I'm not here This isn't happening I'm not here