Fake Plastic Trees Jigsaw Falling Into Place Paranoid Android Radiohead

Fake Plastic Trees Album: The Bends (1995)
Jigsaw Falling Into Place Album: In Rainbows (2007)
Paranoid Android Album: OK Computer (1997)
BY Radiohead

According to Thom Yorke, Fake Plastic Trees is about an area in east London called Canary Wharf, which was built on unused wasteland by the docks of the Thames. The area was supposed to be a major business district, but it was hurt by a market downturn in the '90s. Canary Wharf was landscaped with a lot of artificial plants, which is where the title came from.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Yorke said that Fake Plastic Trees was the song where he found his lyrical voice. He cut the vocal, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, in one take, then the band filled in its parts around him. Yorke said the song began as "A very nice melody which I had no idea what to do with, then you wake up and find your head singing some words to it."

An acoustic version was featured in the 1995 film Clueless and its accompanying soundtrack. In the movie, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) criticizes her stepbrother's taste in music when she overhears him listening to the tune, calling it "crybaby music."

When asked by Vox if he minded the insult, Yorke replied: "I mean, I suppose it does piss me off, but I am a moaning crybaby from Hell, really. Besides, the characters in that film aren't the kind of people I'd want to like Radiohead. They're just average, two dimensional Beverly Hills kids, and the person who is actually listening to them to us in the film is the only three dimensional character. So the answer is: 'F--k you, we're for 3D people!'"

Karyn Rachtman, the movie's music supervisor, admitted Cher was reflecting her own opinion of the band at the time. "I looked at them as 'the whiny band,' and I was very, 'Whatever' on them," she explained to Flavorwire. "I became a Radiohead fan later on, but I remember hearing at the time that they were assholes. I had to go to England to show them Clueless, and Thom Yorke was such a great guy. I may have really played up how shallow Cher was, like, 'Of course she's going to call you whiny, it's a compliment, get it?' They were fine with it."

The band were finding it difficult to nail Fake Plastic Trees and decided to take a break and catch a Jeff Buckley gig at Highbury. When they returned to the studio mesmerized by Buckley's set, Yorke sang the song twice before breaking down into tears.

According to Q magazine April 2008, Jonny Greenwood played on Fake Plastic Trees an old Hammond organ, whose tone controls required resetting after every bar.

When the band showcased Jigsaw Falling Into Place on their 2006 tour it was known as "Open Pick."

In an interview with the New Musical Express December 8, 2007, vocalist and lyricist Thom Yorke was asked if he'd experienced the night out he describes in this song first hand. Yorke replied: "I would never say it was personal because it's always a set of observations. 'Jigsaw Falling Into Place' says much about the fact I used to live in the center of Oxford and used to go out occasionally and witness the chaos of a weekend around here. But it's also about a lot of different experiences. Personally, I was really surprised that it's going to be the single. The lyrics are quite caustic - the idea of 'before you're comatose' or whatever, drinking yourself and getting f--ked-up to forget. When you're part of a group of people who are all trying to forget en masse it is partly this elation. But there's a much darker side."

When the album was initially released in 2 formats, an innovative DRM-free download with a name-your-own price scheme or in a deluxe boxed version. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood was asked by Rolling Stone magazine why they initially chose to release the album this way. He replied: "Partly just to get it out quickly, so everyone would hear it at the same time, and partly because it was an experiment that felt worth trying, really." Greenwood was then asked about the variable pricing. His response was: "It's fun to make people stop for a few seconds and think about what music is worth, and that's just an interesting question to ask people."

When In Rainbows was completed in the summer of 2007, the band were without a record contract, as their 6 album deal with Parlophone had expired. In an interview with Steve Lamacq on the BBC 6 Music radio station, Thom Yorke said that the idea to initially release it as a download came from the band's management, who didn't want to release an album while out of contract. They also had to take strict measures to stop the album leaking. Guitarist Ed O'Brien explained: "We had to literally tell no one. I didn't tell my wife we were going to release it like this."

In an interview with the Observer Music Magazine December 2007, Thom Yorke was asked why the album was called In Rainbows. The Radiohead lyricist replied: "Because it was the desire to get somewhere that you're not. I thought of that last night."

Thom Yorke worked on many of the songs for the In Rainbows album in his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. He explained in an article in the New York Times December 9, 2007: "I sit there, on the way in, because it's a really nice little table. And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they're just scraps of paper, and I'm going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don't know yet. I'm just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn't know."

In Rainbows was chosen by journalists at Mojo magazine as their Best Album of 2007. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood explained to the magazine in their January 2008 issue why he was surprised by the response to In Rainbows' digital release: "I felt some would be curious and that there'd be people in record shops who'd be annoyed. But it was mad. I sat in my kitchen at midnight, wrote a few words saying that the album was coming out in 10 days' time, and it generated all that. The immediacy of it all was very exciting, very different to the old ways of putting records out."

In Rainbows rose from #156 to #1 in January 2008 on the Billboard album chart, the biggest jump to the top this century and the third biggest leap to the summit of all time. The record for the biggest rise to #1 belongs to the Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death, which in April 1997 shot from #175 to the pinnacle. This superseded the previous record-holder, now in second place, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy, which went from #173 to #1 in December 1994. All 3 albums arrived in the chart at a low position, prior to their official release.

While CD sales continued to decline in 2008, sales of vinyl albums picked up, as audiophiles sought them out. In Rainbows was the biggest selling vinyl album that year, with 25,800 units sold. Originally released in 2007, it was initially distributed as a digital download, then on CD, then on vinyl, in January 2008.

Lead singer Thom Yorke decided to bar-hop in Los Angeles one night, but what began as a festive evening soon became a nightmare as Yorke found himself surrounded by parasitic scene-stalkers intent on extracting a pound of Yorke-flesh. "The people I saw that night were just like demons from another planet," said Yorke, now safely ensconced in a New York hotel.

"Everyone was trying to get something out of me. I felt like my own self was collapsing in the presence of it, but I also felt completely, utterly part of it, like it was all going to come crashing down any minute." That night inspired "Paranoid Android," a song that sums up OK Computer's claustrophobic blend of melancholic beauty and nerve-rattling aggression. Surging through ethereal acoustic passages and punkish, guitar-mauled explosions, the song ends with a choir that seems a plea for heavenly forgiveness.

Yorke: "It's about being exposed to God, I dunno. It was that one night, really. We'd been rehearsing the song for months, but the lyrics came to me at five o'clock that morning. I was trying to sleep when I literally heard these voices that wouldn't leave me alone. They were the voices of the people I'd heard in the bar. It turned out to be a notorious, coke-fiend place, but I didn't know that. Basically it's just about chaos, chaos, utter f--king chaos."

Paranoid Android's structure is patterned after "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" by The Beatles. Both are clearly a collection of other, shorter pieces of songs put together into one.

The guitar solo at the end of Paranoid Android was written by guitarist Jonny Greenwood. It was not originally intended for the song, but something was needed to close the song and this solo was in the right key and right tempo. Some parts of this closing solo are played forward and other parts are played backward.

The title is a reference to Marvin the Paranoid Android in the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

In 1996, Radiohead toured as the opener for Alanis Morissette. On this tour, they played "Paranoid Android" a lot, which allowed them to develop it long before they recorded it for OK Computer. When they played this live, it would often go 15 minutes or more.

Despite a 6:27 run time, this released as a single in many territories, but not the US, which helped boost album sales. Many radio stations clamored for a shorter version of the song, but Radiohead refused to edit it down.

The video was made by Magnus Carlsson, who created a series of short animations entitled "Robin." They, along with the music video, featured the surreal adventures of the eponymous hero and his friend Ben, and were shown on Channel 4 in the UK.

Paranoid Android was first performed by the band in Belgium in July 1996. While supporting Alanis Morissette later that summer it mutated into a 10-minute epic. Once in the studio taking a cue from "Happiness Is A Warm Gun," the band broke the song into sections.

Guitarist Ed O'Brien (from Humo magazine July 22, 1997): "We wanted to make a crossing of Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and The Pixies. No, it didn't become a 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of the '90s; it's not complex enough for that and it contains too much tension. It's the song that we played to our friends when they, a long time ago, wanted to know what the new album was going to sound like. You could see them thinking: 'If that's the new single, what will all the rest be like?'"

Jonny Greenwood recalled the recording of the song to NME October 15, 2011: "We were in Bath, recording at (Tudor manor house) St Catherine's Court. We were having drinks, and then we started doing percussion on a drum loop that Phil (Selway) had made. It grew from there. We'd already rehearsed an early version of the song, played it on tour with Alanis Morissette - obviously it didn't go down very well. Originally it had a 10-munute organ outro, which ultimately we ditched and replaced with the 'rain down' section. Was that the right decision? I think so, but sometimes I regret the lack of psychedelic, patchouli-soaked organ madness."

Thom Yorke told Pitchfork (August 16, 2006) about his reputation for writing about dark subject matters: "Loads of the music on OK Computer is extremely uplifting. It's only when you read the words that you'd think otherwise. That's just kind of the way it is. The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren't normally given voice to, and a lot of those things are extremely negative."

The OK Computer title also came from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While touring for The Bends, the band killed time in the bus by listening to an audio version of Douglas Adams' classic 1979 sci-fi-comedy novel. Halfway through the story, a spaceship computer declares that it's incapable of fending off incoming missiles. "OK, computer," responds the president of the galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, "I want full manual control now." The incident is an important one in the narrative as it marks the point when humans saved themselves by reclaiming control from machines, and Thom Yorke noted the phrase. He told Rolling Stone:

"The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other. But I was using the terminology of technology to express it. Everything I was writing was actually a way of trying to reconnect with other human beings when you're always in transit. That's what I had to write about because that's what was going on, which in itself instilled a kind of loneliness and disconnection."

"The whole album is really f---ing geeky," Yorke continued. "I was kind of a geek when I was a kid, unashamedly so. Then I'm in this rock band famous for drinking tea and never socializing, where the truth is somewhat different."

One of the instruments in the mix is a Mellotron, which Greenwood played. He generally thought of progressive rock as archaic, but copped to lifting the Mellotron part from early Genesis.