Part 1 (2/2)

Radiohead are brilliant tonight, but as they rarely display any apt.i.tude for being anything else, it's not surprising. As for R.E.M.'s threat of practical jokes, this pretty much turns out to have been the practical joke itself. Ed is briefly tormented by a radio-controlled car operated from the wings by Mike Mills, but no custard pies or paint bombs are deployed. Nevertheless, Radiohead have convinced themselves of the worst: as soon as the last note of their last song (a rousing version of ”n.o.body Does It Better,” dedicated to R.E.M.) fades, they down tools and leg it as fast as they decently can. As Radiohead complete their flight, R.E.M. wander on stage bearing a tray of champagne gla.s.ses, seeking to toast their support act, and find nothing but 30,000 people laughing. After a couple of agonising minutes, Thom, Ed, Jonny, Colin and Phil are retrieved, and the R.E.M./Radiohead mutual admiration society drinks its health to sustained applause.

Backstage at the end of the night, every friend or relative of every member of R.E.M. and Radiohead makes both bands stand together for souvenir last-night pictures. Peter Buck gently taunts Radiohead for their eventual, agonised decision not to storm the stage during the encore. Colin brings me a beer.

So, Colin. Do you feel under pressure to follow the success of ”Creep”? How are you finding touring with R.E.M.?

”I can remember listening to R.E.M.'s first couple of alb.u.ms on my Walkman on the way to school,” he says. ”They're one of the reasons I wanted to be in a band. This is still really strange.”

During R.E.M.'s set, Colin had shepherded me out onto the stage, to a position just behind Peter Buck's amplifiers, where we spent the set giggling like two starstruck teenagers who'd snuck into someone's soundcheck.

”They've been so good to us, and it's been really good for us, especially Thom. This seems to have been his year for meeting his heroes. Elvis Costello introduced himself at this thing we did in Italy. I think that kind of thing has helped Thom a lot.”

Bill Berry, R.E.M.'s drummer, comes over to say goodbye. He's wearing a purple Radiohead t-s.h.i.+rt.

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, in a New York City feeling the first chills of winter, Radiohead are due to play a secret show at the Mercury Lounge, a tiny venue on East Houston. The band leave Hartford by minibus while Pat, Caffy and I get on a train, which breaks down, then a bus, which gets a flat, and then another bus, whose unspeakably s.a.d.i.s.tic driver hits upon Planes, Trains & Automobiles Planes, Trains & Automobiles as just the video everyone is going to want to see by this stage. as just the video everyone is going to want to see by this stage.

When we get to the Mercury, almost hysterical with irritation, Radiohead are mid-soundcheck. I stand up the back and try to be inconspicuous, which isn't easy in a brightly-lit venue almost too small to change your mind in.

”There you are,” grins Thom from the stage. ”Any requests?”

Someone's in a good mood, at least. I suggest ”Sulk,” a deliciously bitter tune that sounds roughly the way you feel when trapped in an interminable bus journey while being subjected to a film which could have been based on your misery, except that you know Steve Martin is going to get home eventually.

”We were going to do it anyway,” says Thom, with a smirk. They play it, and things suddenly seem like they could be worse: my favourite band of the moment play a four-minute concert for an audience consisting of me and the bloke on the mixing desk.

Thom and I head for a coffee in a place up the street. The waitress is wearing a Sleeper t-s.h.i.+rt-evidently one of New York's sub-species of ardent Anglophile indie-rock fans. She double-takes at Thom, but obviously can't quite place him. She carries on double-taking while we talk.

”The thing that's really freaked me out about doing a tour with a band as big as R.E.M.,” begins Thom, ”is seeing how being so famous can change the way everybody, and I mean absolutely everybody, behaves towards you.”

Someone once wrote that the curse of being Marlon Brando, I think it was, was that you'd never see people being themselves.

”Absolutely. And it is really hard to do, to be yourself in front of somebody famous.”

The waitress is beyond double-taking and is now staring. She's worked it out.

”I find it . . . f.u.c.k, you know, I don't want it to happen. But that's presuming we're even going to make another record that people like.”

Colin was saying last night that you'd found meeting a few people in your position helpful. What happens? Do you have those magnificent, unfathomable conversations that artists always want everyone else to believe that artists have, or do you just stand around gawping like a fan?

”No . . . it's more . . . you're there, and there's millions of things you can ask, but just the fact that you've met them becomes enough. I mean, even someone like Elvis Costello you can still judge on first impressions to some degree, and he was really nice, really trying to be nice. He can obviously be extremely sour, just like I can be, just like a lot of people under pressure can be, but he was really nice.”

I think the reputation he's got-rather like the reputation you've got-is more than anything to do with an inability to suffer fools gladly, or even at all. If you can't cope with imbeciles, and you work in the music business, you're going to upset people.

”You're right, and the music business is quite b.i.t.c.hy and compet.i.tive, but after all that, you meet people you really admire, and suddenly that whole compet.i.tive thing is just not important. I found that helpful. Just being able to say I've met him. That's enough.”

So you just talked shop, like everyone else.

”I b.l.o.o.d.y hope not. Although, to some degree, you do find yourself in the same boat, having gone through the same experiences, and they're quite a limited set of experiences, and they can turn you into quite a limited personality. So, I think, it's a shock when you discover that there other people who have gone through that, who are a few years ahead of you in the time machine, and have come back and said it's okay, you know, they're still alive.”

Since Radiohead's debut single, ”Creep,” went supernova in the States in 1994, the band as a whole, and Thom and particular, have reacted to the fame thrust upon them with the bewilderment and disgust of a Methodist who inherits a brothel. The common take on ”The Bends,” the t.i.tle track of the alb.u.m Radiohead made against the backdrop of that success, was that it was a vicious, splenetic rail against the fact that stardom is not the liberating force that people imagine. It's actually incredibly limiting, and ultimately, unless you can ignore it, rise above it or find a way to have fun with it, utterly cretinising. ”The Bends,” like The Byrds' ”So You Want Be A Rock'n'Roll Star,” Costello's ”Hand In Hand” and ”Pump It Up,” or Nirvana's ”Serve The Servants” and ”Pennyroyal Tea,” sounded like one of those records often made by newly successful bands-they've got what they always wanted, and discovered that they don't want it.

”Well, no. . . ,” says Thom, sounding almost apologetic for tearing down this hastily-constructed theory. ”That song was really just a collection of phrases going round in my head one day. The crazy thing about that song is that there was no calculation or thought involved-it was just whatever sounded good after the previous line. It was written way before we'd ever been to America, even, but yeah, it's always interpreted as this strong reaction against the place and everything that went with it for us.”

Understandable, though. The lyric is loaded with sleepy-eyed views from aeroplane windows, an alcohol drip-feed, the fear that the surface everyone sees is all you've got left.

”Oh, absolutely, but that hadn't started at all. I wrote it before we recorded the first alb.u.m. We hadn't been anywhere. Is that the time?”

I imagine so.

”s.h.i.+t, we're on in half an hour.”

I pay for the coffees while Thom waits outside, polis.h.i.+ng his sungla.s.ses on the hem of his baggy jumper.

”Is that the guy who sang 'Creep'?” asks the waitress.

STREWN AROUND THE Mercury after another typically incendiary show are record company flyers plugging The Bends The Bends. These trumpet excerpts of the blanket critical praise The Bends The Bends has attracted. Radiohead have predictable difficulty taking any of it seriously. has attracted. Radiohead have predictable difficulty taking any of it seriously.

”Radiohead toss and turn like the best Pearl Jam and U2 anthems,” recites Jonny, from one leaflet.

”With the emphasis on toss, presumably,” adds Ed.

”Thom Yorke's voice,” reads Thom Yorke's voice, ”is as enigmatic as Billy Corgan's.”

Thom blinks a few times.

”Thanks a f.u.c.king bunch,” he splutters, less than enigmatically.

Colin, meanwhile, is perturbed by the critical line taken by Rolling Stone Rolling Stone. ”It's four stars in quotation marks,” he grins. ”Does that mean they just swore at it?”

Outside on the pavement, a few dozen people have waited for Radiohead to emerge so they can tell them that they're, like, rilly rilly awesome. One woman apologises to Thom for her boyfriend, who'd been making a nuisance of himself down the front during the gig, and had come very close, at one point, to having Thom's guitar shoved down his throat. Sideways on, to judge by Thom's expression.

There's a record company meet-and-greet bunfight we're supposed to be at, though n.o.body is keen on the idea. Thom and I get in the last of the fleet of taxis that Caffy has flagged down.

”Right,” he says. ”Here's the plan. We hit the room, we charge around it as fast as possible, we shake hands with and smile at as many people as we can, whether we know them or not, and then we get out and go back to the hotel. I hate these things.”

Right.

”If it doesn't kill us,” says Thom, ”it makes us stronger.”

It turns out to be fairly low-key and relaxed, and everyone eventually stays for more than a few drinks. Even Thom could be mistaken for a man who's not having all that terrible a time. When we get back to our lodgings at the Paramount Hotel near Times Square, it's long past midnight, so we stage a chaotic photo shoot in Pat's tiny room-to allow all of Radiohead to get in front of the camera, I have to sit in the bath. Pat's efforts to encourage Radiohead to look like stern, seen-it-all road warriors are not aided by Jonny who, as Pat loads new film, reads choice t.i.tles from the catalogue of the hotel's in-house video library. ”I will give anyone in this room five dollars in cash,” he announces, ”if they will ring reception and ask for Honey, I Blew Everybody Honey, I Blew Everybody.”

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