Month: October 2001

From the BBC:
Radiohead, famed for their distinctive brand of haunting rock, are officially the best band in the world, according to this year’s annual Q Awards.

And while Liam Gallagher was unusually well-behaved it was former Sex Pistol John Lydon who stole the limelight as he heckled winners and tried to hand back his own award.

Oxford-based Radiohead beat off competition from the likes of the Stereophonics, Manic Street Preachers and last year’s winners Travis.

Radiohead, who have achieved the difficult task of breaking the US market, were voted favourites by the readers of music magazine Q.

Read the full article…
{thanks to Jason, John, Alan, & Zach}

Here’s the Rollingstone review of the upcoming I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings release:
Radiohead: I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
Capitol
Less is more for rock’s best live band
Before he sings a word of “The National Anthem,” the opening track on the surprisingly raw I Might Be Wrong, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke makes his presence felt with some human-beatbox-style mouth percussion. Like a boxer delivering jab after jab, he sprays a series of ohh-ahh syllables over the calm-seashore pulse. The syncopation is practically under the surface, but it still kicks the introduction into high gear and offers a clue about why Radiohead are so compelling live: Rather than chase the textured grandiosity of recent studio recordings Kid A and Amnesiac, the resourceful Oxford five-piece grabs whatever’s around ? anything that might help translate the occluded texts of those psychodramas, or take them, scraping and clawing, toward some hint of enlightenment. If they recent studio work has been distinguished by additive, layer-by-layer composition, in concert Radiohead’s magic comes from subtraction: The elegy “Like Spinning Plates” relies almost entirely on Yorke’s famously anguished voice. The music evaporates in the second verse of “Idioteque,” leaving Yorke to wrestle his demons with just the drums for support. You get the feeling he likes controlling the temperature: Even when the band is roaring, the peaks are still somehow shaped by Yorke’s sense of beautiful understatement.
?Tom Moon
{thanks to Shane}