While 1995’s The Bends foreshadowed a much more colourful musical scope, it wasn’t until OK Computer that Radiohead’s reputation as sonic frontier-expanding experimentalists was established. Prior to OK Computer’s release, Radiohead were mainly regarded as being an angst-ridden guitar band, having only really dented the public consciousness with 1993’s unrepresentative outsider-anthem Creep. It’s a vision that, in retrospect, seems eerily prescient. Yorke’s lyrics alluded to the fast-paced, casual violence of an interconnected world ( Paranoid Android), Hordes of faceless, insect-like commuters, heads-down within a sprawling modern city network ( Let Down) a resulting sense of social isolation ( Climbing Up The Walls) and a prevalent back-watching paranoia – a gnawing fear that a 1984-like authority would deem you cancel-able and bundle you off somewhere unpleasant ( Karma Police, Lucky). Via its 12 tracks, Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Philip Selway anticipated a soulless, tech-saturated future. That foreboding anxiety is central to Radiohead’s critically lauded OK Computer. With their gradual infiltration of our daily lives then a pretty unthinkable idea for most, the rapid development of computing – not least the potential of the internet – led a swelling company of forecasters feeling uneasy, particularly as an unknowable new century ominously loomed. But back in 1997, computers were still clunky desktop affairs.
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