Part of the Listen to This Audio Guide
Radiohead at Red Rocks, 2001.
Radiohead have a website to which a sporadically updated blog is attached. A memory hole preserves the band's previous Internet incarnations, many of them pointedly cryptic. Almost all of the band's latest album, In Rainbows, can be heard by way of YouTube videos that the band has uploaded. At Ease Web, a Dutch fan's site, assiduously collects Radiohead news and rumors.
When I interviewed Thom Yorke, he talked about his favorite songwriting trick — "pedals, banging away through everything." He meant the practice of letting one chord pivot into the next along a single held tone. "Airbag" (p. 87), the lead song on Radiohead's iconic 1997 album OK Computer, is an example. You'll hear the harmonic bare bones of the opening — F major and A major, the common note being A — followed by the first thirty seconds of the song itself:
A live performance of the entire song, from 1997:
"Everything in Its Right Place," the spellbinding lead song from Kid A, as revived in 2008:
The band's original hit was "Creep" (p. 94), seen here live in 1994:
The song "Just," from Radiohead's second album, The Bends, is built around an octatonic scale of alternating whole and half steps (p. 95). At the climax of the song the scale moves through four octaves:
Here's the entire song, live in 1994:
